Written Pieces Competition Winners Announced
On 18 April 2026, the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO) announced the top 5 winners of the 2025 Written Pieces Competition: Essays, Stories, Personal Reflections, and Poems at the Wits Chris Seabrooke Music Hall. It also launched the publication of the written pieces titled Awe! The “Coloured” Community in Post-Apartheid Gauteng.
The publication brings together the top 25 written pieces, selected from 101 submissions, that capture diverse experiences. The collection includes poems, essays, short stories, and personal reflections. These highlight themes of resilience, socio-economic conditions, place, culture and identity, stereotypes, history, colourism, texturism, and politics.
Written Pieces competition Top 25
The top five winners of the competition were Tamrin Crisp, Patrick Jacobs, Tamia Bianca Botes, Caelyn Fisher and Ladene Ramsamy, who wrote passionately about identity, belonging and the lived realities of the Coloured community in Gauteng.
Tamrin Crisp, the overall winner, wrote “Through all of this, I have realised that being Coloured is not about having the ‘right’ hair texture, the ‘correct’ way of speaking, or even a clear family history. It is about resilience, complexity and pride.”
The launch featured Tessa Dooms, the guest speaker, who is an activist, author, and broadcaster. She offered a deeply reflective engagement with “Colouredness”. Drawing on her personal experiences, she spoke about her connection to the community in which she was raised and framed Coloured culture as something creatively made and remade by Coloured people.
Ms Dooms highlighted the need to confront intra-black racism to build meaningful solidarity that addresses shared structural challenges, such as employment and access to services. While acknowledging that Coloured identity has origins in historical violence, she emphasised that, in the present, it is shaped by culture, community, and family, an understanding that resonates with younger generations. She also underscored the importance of empathy in how individuals relate to and express their identity, noting that these engagements are deeply personal and shaped by varied political and social experiences.
Approximately 70 people attended the event, where they actively participated in a lively open mic discussion reflecting on Coloured identity and the importance of collective action. Attendees expressed appreciation for the work being done through the project, while emphasising the importance of civil society to come together to ensure that Coloured people are not left behind in broader social and economic development.
Awe! The “Coloured” Community in Post-Apartheid Gauteng: Winners of the 2025 Written Pieces Competition serve as both a celebration and a preservation of the Gauteng Coloured communities' experiences.