For the first time in 40 years, South African babies will not have their
race marked on their birth certificates. In February this year, President
F. W. de Klerk suspended race classification for new babies, in preparation
for a repeal of the Population Registration Act of 1950. This innocuous-sounding
piece of legislation underpins the whole edifice of apartheid and has probably
caused more misery than any other race law. The act compelled every South
African to be classified into one of four racial categories: white, black,
coloured (mixed race) or Indian.
In South Africa race is destiny. Every aspect of people’s lives, from
where they can live and go to school, what bus they can catch and what job
they can take, to the level of their old age pensions, is dictated by the
racial category in which they are placed. Until last summer, race dictated
where a person could swim, walk the dog and even urinate. In short, to be
anything but ‘white’ has meant to be limited, restricted and vulnerable
to harassment at every turn.
For 40 years race classification has been applied with religious zeal
by a contingent of civil servants with no qualifications in physical anthropology
or human genetics. Those whose job it was to juggle with the destinies of
their fellow South Africans had no special training for their task.
On this most taboo subject with its echoes of Nazi Germany, few will
speak out today. But some former ‘race detectives’ have emerged from the
woodwork to tell how they hated the job and took tranquillisers to cope
with it, or applied for transfers out of the department.
Advertisement
They have told, too, how some of their colleagues relished the work,
and how these people would creep around townships prying into people’s private
lives and compiling fat files to put before the visiting race classification
board for final judgment.
The tests the board used to determine race in the myriad ‘borderline’
cases would be worthy of a Monty Python farce if the consequences were not
so tragic. They included shoving a pencil into curly hair and making the
subject shake his or her head. If the pencil stuck, the person was pronounced
‘black’; if it dislodged, the person was considered ‘coloured’ on the assumption
that coloured hair is less tightly crimped than black hair.
The shapes of buttocks and jaw lines were inspected, and people were
pinched to see if they exclaimed in Afrikaans-the language of the white
and coloured rather than the black person-or said ‘ouch!’ in an African
tongue.
Unmarried mothers who could not produce the identity card of a child’s
father when they registered its birth were often made to undress the child
so that the ‘race inspector’ could look for the telltale ‘Mongolian blue
spot’-dark patches over the sacrum which supposedly indicated coloured blood
and earned babies the nickname ‘blue bums’.
From time to time police forensic laboratories have been involved in
classification. The most notorious case was that of Lise Venter, a three-week-old
baby found abandoned in 1983 on waste ground in Pretoria. Anxious to place
the baby for adoption and with few clues as to her background, the authorities
sent a single hair for forensic tests. The verdict that Lise was coloured,
that is, condemned to second-class citizenship for life, raised worldwide
protest and earned deep scorn from the scientific community which pronounced
the flimsy tests invalid.
No one ever found Lise Venter’s parents, and the theory was that they
were probably white people who had abandoned their darker-skinned baby rather
than face the humiliation and heartbreak of having her classified later
as a different race from themselves. This was the fate of Basil E, a little
boy whose parents, brothers and sisters were classified ‘white’, but whose
berry-brown skin brought complaints from other parents at the white school
he attended in Cape Town and eventually earned him reclassification as a
‘coloured’.
Basil was removed from the school and from his home, because it was
now illegal for him to live in the same area as his white family. The Social
Welfare (sic) Department recommended that he never see his family again
and be put up for adoption. In fact he spent his young life in a children’s
home and his father, a disabled pensioner, and his mother, a nursing orderly,
spent money they could ill afford to visit their son in the distant Transvaal
twice a year.
South Africans read such stories in their newspapers every month, said
Philip Tobias, the world-renowned palaeontologist and geneticist. Together
with his colleague Trefor Jenkins, professor of genetics at Wit-watersrand
University in South Transvaal, they have staunchly opposed race classification
practices in South Africa as ‘perverted sociology’. They told me that the
people there have intermingled for so many generations that it’s impossible
to identify water-tight racial categories.
The architects of the Population Registration Act obviously discovered
this for themselves. Teams of ‘experts’ (which included no one with relevant
scientific qualifications) grappled with the problem for more than a year
before deciding that appearance and social acceptance should be the yardsticks,
and coming up with definitions that are masterpieces of the art of inexactitude.
Thus a ‘white’ is defined under the law as ‘any person who in appearance
obviously is, or is generally accepted as, a white person, but does not
include a person who, although in appearance obviously a white person, is
generally accepted as a coloured person’.
So confusing are the definitions that officials frequently get egg all
over their faces trying to justify their actions. In 1989, for example,
local newspapers had a field day with the story of a Chinese restaurant
in the mining town of Boksburg in which the new Chinese owner’s own children
could not eat because it was in a ‘white’ part of town. Put on the defensive,
the Conservative Party town council retorted that the story was nonsense;
everybody knew the Chinese were ‘honorary whites’.
Not in nightclubs
In fact the Chinese weren’t officially honorary whites. But foreign
black businessmen were, and this allowed them temporary run of the ‘white’
world, but on one condition: that they didn’t dance at nightclubs.
The element of farce is underlined by the publication every year by
the Minister of Home Affairs of a list of people who have changed their
classification, and thus many of the trappings of their lives.
In 1988, for example, 240 people who had been ‘blacks’ became ‘whites’
and two became ‘Indians’, while 52 ‘Indians’ became ‘coloureds’, and 63
‘coloureds’ became ‘Indians’. Yet others shifted within the subcategories
of ‘coloured’ so that 25 ‘Malays’ suddenly became ‘coloureds’.
A Namibian friend of mine, Andreas Shipanga, loves to tell the tale
of his encounter with the race classification board in 1960, when he was
a young guerrilla fighting against South African rule. He shakes with mirth
as he describes how he baffled the judges with his perfect Afrikaans-a language
few South African blacks spoke so well-and his imaginary family. He left
the court classified as a ‘coloured’ because the judges reckoned he must
be some kind of Bushman.
All this will be history by the end of the year, when the Population
Registration Act is repealed. However, the act underpins the present constitution,
and without it Parliament has no legal foundation. President de Klerk must,
therefore, replace parts of it with interim legislation until a new constitution
for South Africa has been negotiated; this could take some time.
But though de Klerk has tried to draw the poison of the Population Registration
Act in advance of its full repeal by suspending race classification for
new babies, it may not be enough, in the long run, to make amends. There
are whispered demands in some circles for Nuremberg-type trials to purge
the New South Africa of its past. But if the demands ever come to anything,
it will be the law makers of apartheid who will be put in the dock. The
thousands who merely enforced the laws on the ground have been assured of
other jobs in the civil service, and are unlikely ever to have to answer
for their actions.
Sue Armstrong is a journalist based in Johannesburg.
