On reading through some archival materials in preparation for a lecture on residential segregation it became immediately apparent that ‘group areas’ could not be understood in isolation of sex and marriage across the ‘colour line’ and that I was looking at a historical picture at the centre of which stood a government effort led by T.E. Dönges, apartheid’s first Minister of the Interior, to apply a programme of population engineering that built on and refined racial measures already enacted historically. What they tried to create was a breeding programme for human beings on a national scale.

To pursue their project, Dönges had to classify the South African population in law, which appeared in the form of the Population Registration Act of 1950. The legislation divided the population into four main groups along lines of appearance and social recognition: Europeans (meaning whites), Asian, ‘coloureds’ and ‘natives’ (meaning blacks). Of course, the designation European for the descendents of immigrants largely from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany and France was a wistful reclaiming of an identity lost in time and trouble; the use of Asian for the descendents of indentured workers who came from certain parts of India, a small part of the Asian sub-continent, an admission of ignorance or indifference to areas of origin; ‘coloured’ was a fictional assembly of individuals from a diverse set of backgrounds living in one place and at one time; ‘native’ later replaced by ‘Bantu’, disposing an already troubled and misleading term to the language of offence.

The effort at population nomenclature was based on appearance and social recognition: a person was white because he or she was ‘obviously’ white unless proven otherwise by the lack of social recognition by the neighbours one had and the friends you kept. Settled in law, then, the challenge to Dönges and his cronies was what to do with the classification of those who did not fit in anywhere in particular, what to do with those who wanted to alter their classification once made - beyond the some thousands of white-skinned coloured individuals who very quickly moved into white neighbourhoods and made white friends before the law was passed.

The task was left to the director of the apartheid government’s census, Mr Jan Raats.  He had to prepare a detailed system of racial classification in time for the 1951 census, the urgency for which was not simply the population count but the need for government departments to know to whom they ought to pay state pensions and at what rate.  Raats came up with the following definitions: (1) ‘Asiatic means a person of whose parents are or were members of a race or tribe whose national or ethnical home is Asia, and shall include a person partly of Asiatic origin living as an Asiatic family, but shall not include any Jew, Syrian or Cape Malay; (2) Bantu means a person both of whose parents are or were members of an aboriginal tribe of Africa, and shall include a person of mixed race living as a member of the Bantu community, tribe, kraal or location, but shall not include any Bushman, Griqua, Hottentot or Koranna; (3) Coloured means any person who is not a white person, Asiatic, Bantu or Cape Malay as defined, and shall include any Bushmen, Griqua, Hottentot or Koranna; and (4) a white person means a person both of whose parents are or were members of a race whose national or ethnical home is Europe, and shall include any Jew, Syrian or other person who is in appearance obviously a white person unless and until the contrary is proven.’  The Population Registration Act required of the Governor-General to provide definitions for the sub-division of coloured and ‘native’ people , which followed in time, with the meaning of it for ‘coloureds’ important in respect of identifying Cape Malays for exclusive residence in Schotsche Kloof, thanks to the paternalistic protection of the Commissioner of Coloured Affairs Dr I D du Plessis. For ‘native’ people the sub-categorisation had greater severity of consequence for herewith was laid the demographic basis for the ten homelands that were to come in time.

What to do though with the classification of marginal cases? Most of the cases - and there were many, close to 100 000 individuals - fell between the definition of whites and coloureds. Raats complained that in his attempt to develop a rasse-skeidslyn (a line of racial division), the marginal cases proved to be a geweldige en uiters moelike taak (a formidable and immensely difficult task). Raats cited the instance of Anthony Jooste, a coloured teacher at Krugersdorp, whose mother's death certificate indicated that she was coloured, but the father's race was unknown. Jooste's marriage certificate indicated both he and his wife as coloured, but her death certificate said white. Their three children were classified as white and attended white schools. 'They were therefore accepted as white despite the fact that their descent was coloured', Raats noted.  To deal with instances such as this, he wanted to know the political terms by which the classification device could be used to drive populations in given directions.

Raats offered his recommendations, some of which even his colleagues found a little too fanciful. Their little powerful club were agreed that a rigid racial line should be drawn around whites as the dominant group and that ‘blood-mixing’ with coloured people should not be allowed to further verydel (corrupt) the already impure white race. However, coloured people who looked like whites were a problem.  Many of them, in anticipation of the passage of the racial laws, rapidly disappeared into white life and met the legal criteria of both appearance and social recognition. Raats feared that if this group was not allowed into the ranks of the whites they might, given their high fertility rate, become a competing white group. It would be better, he noted, to classify all marginal cases where the individuals involved looked white, as white. This argument was accepted by Dönges and in the 1950s was used as rule of thumb. It swelled the ranks of whites overnight. Indeed, if one factors in those who slipped into the white community before apartheid with those who were made white by the stroke of Dönges’ pen, about 10 percent of the white population in the early 1950s consisted of coloured individuals. Dönges and his state officials planned it that way. 

They were also agreed that Cape Malays, descendents of Javanese slaves brought to the Cape by the Jakarta based Dutch East India Company in the 17th and 18th centuries, should be protected as a sub-group of coloured people partly at their request and because Dr I D du Plessis, the Commissioner of Coloured Affairs, was their benefactor.  Du Plessis had invested a great deal of his time developing his anthropological interests in the Cape Malays, wrote a great deal about them and went out of his way to put what he thought was their case.  Dönges had indeed come to an understanding with du Plessis that Cape Malays would get special and favoured treatment, which is why Schotsche Kloof, the second of six districts or District Two, situated on prime property on Signal Hill remained relatively unscathed by group areas removals. District Six did not as we know survive. As for coloured people who were neither Malay nor of sufficiently fair complexion, they were to be nurtured and protected so that a strong sense of ‘coloured’ national pride could emerge. In time they were to get their own university, the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and, hopefully, their own geographical homeland. The proposed city of Proteaville, built around the nucleus of what today is referred as Bellville-South, was considered to be a proto-capital of the coloured homeland, which is why the dummy-body Coloured Representative Council chambers were built there and why the proposed location of UWC was moved from Athlone, the initial planning idea, to Bellville.

Raats came into his own when discussing the Indian population. He found their cultural distinctiveness, apparent aloofness and endogamous marriage practices threatening. Indians, he observed, kept their ‘race pure’, but the men were promiscuous with coloured and African women, taking no responsibility for their mixed offspring, who were then absorbed into either the coloured or African communities. He recommended that the state should deliberately break down their cohesiveness, by classifying the mixed offspring as Indian and not as coloured or African as was typically the case. Raats suggested a process of what he called verkaffering  (‘to make kaffir’): ‘Many bastards are born of parents’ he said, ‘one of whom is Indian, and this bastard should go to the Indian community, be treated as one and live in the same neighbourhood, even though he might speak Zulu, Sotho or any other language. These bastards will be the medium of disintegration by which the solidarity of the Indian will be eroded, and will turn the Indian into a coloured group with a view of life more compatible with the conditions of our country.’  This grotesquely perverse man admired the extent to which dysfunctional coloured communities served white interests.

Raats' colleagues from the departments of justice, native affairs and the interior found this argument to be far-fetched, and failed to respond to it.  In reviewing his recommendations, they suggested that he be given greater investigative powers into the descent lines of marginal cases (descent was not normally a criterion for race in the legislation) that the various departments of state develop a consistency in the use of racial classification, and that the 30 000 or so fair-skinned coloured people be absorbed into the white group.  Here then emerged a picture of the racial future state officials premeditated - a society divided along racial lines with distinct cultural and colour characteristics (1) racial classification provided the definition of the races to which the officials wanted to move society towards (2) sex and intermarriage laws invoked criminal penalties against those individuals who broke the emergent rules of colour and race, and (3) group areas put an end to 'racial mixing, as the state officials saw it, by circumscribing the propinquity of sexually available populations and minimising points of social and interpersonal contact. Therefore, the guiding principle of social apartheid was endogamous reproduction that, if permitted to continue for some decades, may result in the emergence of racially distinct populations, or so they thought, wrecking the lives of many in the process. It was ‘racial hygiene’ and ‘population engineering’ practiced on a national scale.

References:

  Sekretaris van Volkswelsyn aan Sekretaris vir Binnelandsesake (31 January 1950, Cape Archives Depot) TE Donges papers A.1646 v.126.
  Typescript of bill to make provision for a national register and the issuing of identity cards (no date 1951?) Donges Papers v.125.
  Letter: Population Registrar to Secretary of the Interior (19 February 1957). Donges papers v.125.
  Verslag van Komitee insake woordomskrywing en klassiefikasie van nie-blankes- Bevolkingsregistrasiewet; 1950. ). Donges papers v.125.
  Memorandum from the Cape Malay Board of Deputies (Cape Archives Depot) GGR27/3.
  Among others, I D du Plessis, Die Bydrae van die Kaapse Maleier tot die Afrikaanse Volkslied (Cape Town, Nasionale Pers; 1935); The Cape Malays (Cape Town: Maskew Miller 1944); The Malay Quarter and its People with Carl Luckhoff (Cape Town: Balkema, 1953).
  Memorandum: J Raats, Director of Census to Secretary of the Department of Interior (26 September, 1952) p.2. Donges papers, A.1646 v.126.
  Population register report to 31 March 1954; Director of Census to Secretary of the Interior (March 1954); Verslag van Komitee insake woordomskrywing en klassiefikasie van nie-blankes -Bevolkingsregistrasiewet, 1950 (20 November 1954) p.14. Donges papers v.126.
  Verslag van Komitee insake woordomskrywing en klassiefikasie van nie-blankes -Bevolkingsregistrasiewet, 1950 (20 November 1954) p.14.

Further Reading: Alan Morris review of Skin - The Movie