'Before, we were too black to be white. Now, we're too white to be black.' Hadija, one of South Africa's 3.5m Coloured (mixed race) people, sells lace curtains at a street market in a bleak township outside Cape Town. In 1966 she and her family were driven out of District Six, in central Cape Town, by an apartheid government that wanted the area for whites. Most of the old houses and shops were bulldozed but a Methodist church, escaping demolition, has been turned into a little museum, with and old street plan stretched across the floor. On it, families have identified their old houses, writing names and memories in bright felt-tip pen. 'We can forgive, but not forget,' says one. Up to a point. In the old days, trampled on by whites, they were made to accept a second-class life of scant privileges as a grim reward for being lighter-skinned than the third-class blacks. Today, they feel trampled on by the black majority. The white-led National Party which still governs the Western Cape, the province where some 80% of Coloureds live, plays on this fear to good electoral effect. With no apparent irony, the party also appeals to the Coloured sense of common culture with fellow Afrikaans-speaking whites, a link the Nats have spent decades denying. This curious courtship is again in full swing. A municipal election is to be held in the province on May 29th and the Nats need the Coloured vote if they are to win many local councils. By most measures, Coloureds are still better-off than blacks. Their jobless rate is high, 21% according to the most recent figures available. But the black rate is 38%. Their average yearly income is still more than twice that of blacks. But politics turns on fears and aspirations. Most Coloureds fret that affirmative action, the promotion of non-whites into government-related jobs, is leaving them behind. Affirmative action is supposed to help Coloureds (and Indians) too. It often does not. They may get left off a shortlist because, for instance, a job requires the applicant to speak a black African language, such as Xhosa. Some Coloureds think that the only way they will improve their lot is to launch their own, ethnically based, political parties, last year a group formed the Kleurling Weerstandsbeweging, or Coloured Resistance Movement. But in-fighting caused this to crumble: some members wanted it to promote Goloured interests and culture others to press for an exclusive 'homeland'. In fact, the coloureds' sense of collective identity is undefined, largely imposed by apartheid's twisted logic. They are descended from a mix of races, including the Khoi and San (two indigenous African peoples), Malay slaves imported by the Dutch, and white European settlers. And though they do indeed share much with Afrikaners-many belong to the Dutch Reformed Church and many speak Afrikaans-others speak English or are Muslim or worship spirits. Under apartheid, being Coloured became something to try to escape from. Many tried to pass as white some succeeded in getting 'reclassified'. Aspiring to whiteness and fearful of blackness, their identity is hesitant, even defensive. Many Coloureds feel most sure about what they are not: they vigorously resist any attempt to use the term 'black' to embrace all nonwhite people. 'My people are terrible racists, but not by choice,' says Joe Marks, a Coloured member of the Western Cape parliament. 'The blacks today have the political power, the whites have economic power. We just have anger.' The apartheid government ______.