Tyla catapulted into global fame following the release of her viral single “Water,” which cracked the Billboard Hot 100 chart and earned her her first Grammy award for Best African Music Performance. Despite this, the South African pop star found herself in hot water over the way she chose to describe her racial identity.

In a resurfaced 2020 TikTok video, Tyla described herself as “a coloured South African.” A portion of the Black community in the U.S. took offense to her use of the term, which appeared to be a direct reference to language used in the Jim Crow era. In reality, Tyla used the word in an entirely different context—she is not American. In South Africa, the word “coloured” is a racial category in which some people of color (mainly of mixed heritage) were registered under during apartheid. The distinction is something Tyla has explained in the past but still, the controversy remained among some of her Black American fans.

“You know that even if you give the best explanation, people will still choose not to understand,” she told British Vogue. “But, I’m at a point where I know who I am. I know I’m a Black woman and I know I’m a coloured woman as well and you can be both. And the people that care to learn, they understand now. And that’s enough for me.”

 

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Tyla shared her own experience with racism, opening up about the bullying she faced while attending a predominantly white primary school.

“I went to a very white primary school,” she said. “I really hated myself. And then I went to high school, which was predominantly Black and cultured, and that’s where I actually grew to love myself and became really proud of who I am.”

Tyla shared how she felt a lack of control over the controversy surrounding her identity.

“I felt like I had no… no control. People took it and… It just went so far that I didn’t know what to do. The way people painted me… And I understand that word is a sensitive word to people, so I don’t blame people for being touched about it,” she said. “I just would have wanted an opportunity for people to actually truly listen and learn.”

During a June 2024 appearance on a radio interview on The Breakfast Club, host Charlamagne tha God, she refused to speak on the controversy and drew even more criticism from fans.

“Me choosing not to say anything, I’m happy that I didn’t. I didn’t want to explain my culture and something that is really important to me on a platform that is just going to be purposefully misconstrued,” she said. “I’ve explained it a lot of times before, but people took that and put words in my mouth. They said a whole bunch of things that I never said and ran with it.”

“If people really searched, they’ll see that in South Africa we had a lot of segregation. It was bad for a lot of us. They just classified us. And that just so happens to be the name that the white people called us. They chose to call people that were mixed ‘coloured’,” Tyla added. “And I’m not gonna lie, it was hard because all my life, obviously I knew ‘I’m Black’ but also knew that ‘I’m coloured’. So when I went to America and people were like, ‘You can’t say that!’ I was in a position where I was like, ‘Oh, so what do I do? What am I then?’”

Tyla