How do you tell whether a light-skinned baby is black or coloured? You leave him on a table and see if he turns blue. No, this is not a bad joke it is just one of the barbaric methods used to classify South African citizens during the apartheid years. This, and other equally unpalatable facts, formed part of sociologist Yvonne Erasmus’s presentation last month at the “Beyond Race” conference in Somerset West, South Africa, on the “perverted sociology” practised here during that time.
Earlier at the conference, Professor Trefor Jenkins, formerly the head of the department of human genetics in the school of pathology at Wits University, spoke of how he, as one of the few geneticists in South Africa during that time, was approached to identify the race of babies so that they could be adopted.
Jenkins explained that the genetic tests that were available at the time were very basic. He said that it was difficult to genetically determine the race of South Africans, as they are so mixed. Previous research, done in the 1970s, showed that the genetic makeup of white South Africans contained 7% “black inheritance”.
Erasmus’s talk, based on interviews with people involved in racial classification and on the facts of court cases, highlighted how ambiguous a concept race truly is. Her research looked at the role of science and society in the way race was classified.
The legal definition of race, as contained in the Population Registration Act of 1950, used three criteria to classify race: descent, appearance and social acceptance. As the process of implementing the Act gained momentum, and more cases emerged where classification was neither obvious nor easy, acceptance by society played an increasingly important role.
Appearance was considered Odeceptive, and descent was difficult to apply in cases of mixed parentage. This difficulty is illustrated by one of the cases Erasmus described, in which a baby was returned by its adoptive parents after they saw that it didn’t fit into the race they were classified as belonging to.
>> Lynne Smit <<