In Daily Maverick, columnist Dennis Cruywagen breathlessly reveals that DNA results prove that his main bloodline is grounded in the KhoeSan (another name for KhoiSan). He suggests that the Constitutional Court be approached “to define what an African is and to declare that the descendants of the indigenous people living in South Africa are indeed the first Africans that lived here”. How would the Constitutional Court define African? Will all of us have to submit DNA tests to see whether we are first? Would there be a Genetic Classification Board to assess our status? So much history here. So many questions.
In 1903, the great African-American writer WEB Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line”. This oft-quoted line was prophetic in many ways in the West. Race consciousness stubbornly pursues us right into the new millennium. It spawns separatist thinking both in those who consider themselves superior and those with a globalised sense of racial grievance. The Berlin Wall came tumbling down, but a multitude of apartheids remained.
What Du Bois did not contemplate in his prophecy of a Black and White binary was the form racialism would take. The pernicious colour bar has been replaced by dividing lines that even more minutely segregate people based on skin colour. The response to racial oppression moved from the political and economic realms to the psychological, as we fought to free ourselves from mental enslavement and microfloggings. The fight against racism morphed into the assertion of a pride based on racial essence.
The resilience of race-thought is noteworthy. Objectively speaking, people of different races intermingle more than they ever did before. As formal barriers to economic inclusion break down, old solidarities compete with new opportunities. Where their race hurt black communities, it can now help black individuals. Ethnological lines are, accordingly, drawn ever more finely.
And so it is only to be expected that race, delinked from membership of a culturally defined community, is put on and taken off like a dashiki or dhoti. Amazingly, in this postmodern world, you could be one race today and another one tomorrow. Witness Donald Trump questioning the racial transitioning of Kamala Harris. As he put it, she was Indian for most of her life. As political office beckoned, she transmogrified into an African-American. Ironically, at a time in world history when everything that is “holy is profaned, everything solid melts into air”, we see the need and desire to be defined. Democratic politics, after all, is beholden to the ballot every so often. And voters are most reliably approached as constituencies. Progressives seeking office appeal less and less to ideology or argument and more to emotions and vibes. The difference is that, in the past, somebody else defined a Kamala or an Obama. But now, they need to self-define; to be one thing today, and another thing tomorrow as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it.
But who is truly black, or brown or white? In the US, they had the one-drop rule. In South Africa, this was rejected. White segregationists expected that about 90% of the population had at least one drop of Black blood. And so they experimented with all kinds of methods to racially classify.
The litmus became not bloodline but “appearance and general acceptance and repute”. How does one define “appearance” and “general acceptance”, let alone “repute”? In the South African Law Journal of 1967, Brian Bamford held that the tribunal had to undertake a visual observation and assessment. In the case where there was no clear line between white and non-white, the tribunal had to rely on appearance. As Lewis Carroll so naughtily put it, this is no easy task:
“I shouldn’t know you again if we did meet,” Humpty Dumpty replied in a discontented tone, giving her one of his fingers to shake: “you’re so exactly like other people.”
“The face is what one goes by, generally,” Alice remarked in a thoughtful tone.
“That’s just what I complain of,” said Humpty Dumpty. “Your face is the same as everybody has — the two eyes, so —” (marking their places in the air with his thumb) “nose in the middle, mouth under. It’s always the same. Now if you had the eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance — or the mouth at the top — that would be some help.”
The Race Reclassification Board shouldered the mighty task of sifting, sorting and defining. There is a difference between evidence which has to be weighed and proof. A myriad “experts” were relied upon. From time to time, the South African Trichological Institute was called in to provide scientific testimony on the texture of hair. Meanwhile, a bureaucracy worthy of Kafka was spawned. Affidavits were drawn from priests, neighbours, doctors. Family members were rounded up and questioned. Side-on profiles were studied. The Sunday Times of 1955 reported that because the Board believed that Black people have softer ear lobes, coloured people’s lobes were fingered. If they were deemed soft, they were reclassified. In townships across South Africa, mothers massaged their babies’ earlobes.
But a “change” to the colour of your children could be fatal. A July 1970 Newsweek article highlighted the case of a “white” 15-year-old Jane-Anne Pepler. She had problems with her adrenal glands and they had to be removed. In the ultimate white supremacist horror of horrors, it made her skin fade into brown and her hair darkened. Her life was turned upside down. As her mother told Newsweek, “school friends ostracised her completely - just as though she were a real non-white”. It was particularly humiliating for the family because, as the mother swore without a hint of irony, “we are a purely Afrikaner family and strong Nationalists. We believe in white supremacy!”
All was not lost. This attempt to classify people did allow for some fluidity. I remember my father, a teacher, was determined to become a school inspector. Light of hue, he began wearing safari suits with long bobby socks finished off with a black comb that peeped over a perfect fold. We even bought a Chevrolet, but forewent the braai as soya boerewors was yet to be invented. He went from headmaster to inspector when at the age of 46 he passed the Voorbereiden examination (Standard 6). Having a photographic memory, he learnt about 30 opstels (compositions) by heart. For a moment he was flummoxed when the opstel asked for 2,000 words on “Beeste”. He thought this could mean cattle, but could it also be bees. He wrote an essay on cattle that had wings and passed with distinction, the examiner praising the imagination of someone not yet in High School! How we fought my father and I as he went with the Boers and me with Biko.
The Race Reclassification Board held that: “general acceptance does not preclude a person’s movement from one classification to another by virtue of changing association. The acceptance need not be absolute or without exception.” Everywhere people were “passing”, some informally, others with more intent. In 1984, at least 518 people said goodbye to coloured IDs and said hello to white ones. Clearly they thought apartheid would be around forever. Two whites became Chinese, one became Indian and Coloured numbers were boosted by the influx of 89 Black Africans and five Coloureds became African.
Now it seems to me that Mr Cruywagen would have no problem if we all opted for DNA tests. Not to upend the idea of race, but to introduce a scientific basis to determine and uphold it. And this takes us back to Kamala. While the race of white people in Western countries has historically bestowed upon them immense personal privileges, this is no longer their exclusive preserve. The US has a two-party system in which the votes of Black and Brown people play a swing role in determining who becomes president. A person of colour is thus an asset on many political tickets. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies in companies mean that recruiters will pay a premium for workers from marginalised groups. Until recently, US universities still applied preferential treatment in scoring candidates’ entrance exams to elite universities. As is well known, South Africa energetically applies these same policies. An individual’s race can thus be beneficial even if they are from a marginalised group. And, if this is the case, why limit oneself to only one racial identity? If Mr Cruywagen has his way, many ex-Coloured people in South Africa will access the category, “indigenous people”. While Mr Cruwagen is genuinely motivated by the need for recognition, as a subset of the category African, there are gains from an affirmative action point of view. Who knows what other benefits it brings in terms of international protocols and treaties, and general cultural cache. Would Xhosa people, who intermingled with Khoi-khoi, communities that they either neighboured or conquered in the 1700s and 1800s, also have a claim to “indigenous person” status, which a person from former Venda would not? How would these claims be proven, if they are made?
DNA testing might soon be a growth industry in South Africa. The problem with DNA testing, though, as Trina Jones and Jessica Roberts point out in the Columbia Law Review, is that there are companies such as AncestryDNA, 23andMe and FamilyTreeDNA which rely on their own databases, and so you can get different results from different outfits. And as the databases grow, so your DNA can change. The testing does point out how easily one can shed one identity for another.
As a black person, what does one make of European genetic material if it shows up in your blood? If an ancestor was a Trek-Boer, then he may well have been raiding African tribes of their cattle or killing San people. Do we set a maximum amount of Caucasian blood you can have before falling foul of indigenous person status? But, what if, despite a high white blood count, so to speak, you live in a Black community and are generally taken to be Coloured or Khoi. Can that save you? Can you dilute your Boer gene by intermarrying? Do you retain your indigenous status by in-breeding?
Oh dear, we are back to general repute? Verwoerd smiles at us from (the Whites Only section of) heaven.
It is fascinating to see how race is leveraged as a life strategy in the 21st century, especially in political terms. South African is just waiting for its first biracial politician in the mould of Obama or Harris, someone recently minted from parents of different races. Will they be allowed to adopt the race that suits them best, or even flit between the two?
Francis Fukuyama proposed that it “was the slave’s continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master”. What he perhaps did not envisage is the way the children of slaves would propel themselves into the ranks of history’s masters by a politics revelling in identity. DM
The lingering politics of racial identity - how race is leveraged as a life strategy in the 21st century
South African is just waiting for its first biracial politician in the mould of Obama or Harris, someone recently minted from parents of different races. Will they be allowed to adopt the race that suits them best, or even flit between the two?
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