years, and they can also be found in large numbers in Malawi, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and of course South Africa. They're likeable people... until you tackle the subject of race. Then things can get hairy.

The rather surprising truth is that, while the coloureds of Africa may be as pleased as anyone to find Barack Obama in the world's top job, it won't be because of his mixed blood or his African father. They won't claim him as one of their own.

For reasons of both history and culture, and unlike their counterparts in America and elsewhere, the African coloureds regard their cherished white blood as emanating from the male line. To them, a coloured is the descendant of a European man, who came to a land where no civilised chap would take a white woman, and who, for convenience, pleasure, and biological pressure,

'married' a local African girl.

Coloured women marry coloured men (or if they’re lucky, some unwary white)Visit the coloureds in their dusty farms and their decaying suburbs, scattered across the impoverished countryside of Zambia, and there on the mantelpiece you will see faded pictures of the Great White Father, the whiskery white man from whom they take their family name. Pictures, mementoes, even mentions of their black grandmothers are so rare as to be non-existent.

Today the coloured community in Africa, weakening by the year and surrounded by burgeoning numbers of full-blooded Africans, sits in its enclaves and guards its status jealously.

Coloureds are fiercely loyal to each other. Coloured women marry coloured men (or if they're lucky, some unwary white). Coloureds employ coloureds. The most useless coloured person will get a job with a coloured employer, ahead of the most qualified and competent African.

What most unites coloureds is their hatred and fear of black AfricansWhat - and this is the distressing part - what most unites the coloureds is their hatred and fear of, and contempt for, the Africans. In Zambia, carefully avoiding more obvious words of abuse, and thus avoiding trouble, coloureds have their own term for their black neighbours. They call them 'pops'. Why, no-one seems to know, but you'd be amazed how insulting that word can sound. 'Man, these pops, they're useless!'

Yet perversely the coloureds are African. They are born under the African sun, and most will die under it. They're fluent in African languages. They eat African food - mealie porridge, consumed via the fingers in vast amounts. The mothers carry their babies on their backs. They get darker by the generation, and most are probably more dusky than Obama.

But there remain those among them who trenchantly maintain that it is their male white blood line that makes them special. Ask them if they identify with Barack and you'll get a direct answer: 'Hell no. The man's a pop!'