SHAFAQNA – Nabeelah Khan used to think of her skin colour as a disability.
At age 11 she discovered that she was different when her family moved from Ladysmith in KwaZulu-Natal to Johannesburg. She stood out as the only person with an obviously mixed lineage in her new school in Lenasia‚ a largely Indian community in the south of Johannesburg.
Khan’s mother has both Zulu and Indian parentage and her father is Indian.
But Khan is not comfortable being called Indian because that label has caused “a lot pain and difficulty”. That inner conflict started when she was young.
At primary school a fellow pupil told her that her hijab (a head scarf worn by Muslim women) won’t hide the fact that she is a witch.
“Everyone laughed. But me‚ I died inside‚” the 22-year-old said.
“Switch on the lights‚ we can’t see Nabeelah! My mother could use your steel wool hair to clean the pots. Is that your skin or just dirt?” some pupils would say.
Khan told TimesLIVE that her urge to bleach her skin lasted until her grade seven teacher convinced her otherwise.
“I am brown. I have curly hair‚” she said proudly.
Nelisiwe Msomi has faced similar prejudice.
Msomi recently took to social media to reflect on the racism black Muslims face on a daily basis.
The 24-year-old journalist aired her views after her religion was questioned by a shopkeeper in the Johannesburg CBD.
“As I put my change into my purse‚ the shopkeeper asks me if I’m Muslim. Clearly‚ my hijab doesn’t give it away‚ so I respond positively. He asks ‘Are you South African?’” Msomi wrote on her blog.