are descendants of Khoisan women and Afrikaner Trekboers. Despite these major differences, as both groups have ancestry from more than one naturalised racial group, they are classified as coloured in the South African context. Such mixed-race people did not necessarily self-identify this way; some preferred to call themselves black or Khoisan or just South African. The Griqua were subjected to an ambiguity of other creole people within Southern African social order. According to Nurse and Jenkins (1975), the leader of this “mixed” group, Adam Kok I, was a former slave of the Dutch governor who was manumitted and provided land outside Cape Town in the eighteenth century. With territories beyond the Dutch East India Company’s administration, Kok provided refuge to deserting soldiers, runaway slaves, and remaining members of various Khoikhoi tribes. In South Africa and many neighbouring countries, the white minority governments historically segregated Africans from Europeans after settlement had progressed, and inreasingly classified all mixed race people together into a third group, despite their numerous ethnic and national differences in ancestry. The imperial and apartheid governments categorized them as Coloured. In addition, other distinctly homogeneous ethnic groups also traditionally viewed the mixed-race populations as a separate group, and a growing number of mixed-race people also embraced a shared identity. During the apartheid era in South Africa of the second half of the 20th century, the government used the term "Coloured" to describe one of the four main racial groups it defined by law (the fourth was "Asian," later "Indian"). This was an effort to impose white supremacy and maintain racial divisions. Individuals were classified as White South Africans (formally classified as "European"), Black South Africans (formally classified as "Native", "Bantu" or simply "African" and comprising the majority of the population), Coloureds (mixed-race) and Indians (formally classified as "Asian"). Although the apartheid government recognised various coloured subgroups, the coloured population, was for many purposes treated as a single group, despite varying ancestries and cultures. Also during apartheid, many Griqua began to self-identify as Coloureds during the apartheid era, because of the benefits of such classification. For example, Coloureds did not have to carry a dompas (a pass, an identity document designed to limit the movements of the black population), while the Griqua, who were seen as an indigenous African group, did. In the 21st century, Coloured people constitute a plurality of the population in the provinces of Western Cape (48.8%),