With her husband, Frederika Spangenberg drove all the way from Kimberley to personally collect her DNA results. Through her mother’s line of descent she turned out to be L0d. Himla Soodyall wrote that L0d is thought to be the oldest of the L0 groups and common among the Khoesan populations of southern Africa.

I thought of Jan Raats, the director of the apartheid government’s census, who designed racial classification in the early 1950s. He had come 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;
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.’

Spangenberg was born in 1957, in Barkley East, after the Population Registration Act was passed. She is the daughter of Maria van Heerden, born in Dordrecht in 1927 and Jan Pretorius, born in Barkley East in 1924. They were true blue Afrikaners and, by Raats’ definition, someone who was obviously white.

Spangenberg and her husband were taken aback by the results. I asked them whether they were shocked or appalled by it and they said no, they welcomed it. She also suspected that there was a Khoisan in her closet. Now the Khoisan was on her stoep and, looking at her with the new knowledge, I clearly saw the raised cheekbones.

In fact, for that part of her face she looked a lot like Nelson Mandela, whose female ancestral line is also Khoisan as determined by a DNA test, though I do not if it is from the same L0 group. This true blue Afrikaner white woman has more in common with Nelson Mandela than I do!

There is not a trace of Khoisan ancestral DNA in me, sad to say. My maternal line is from the group called M and share a genetic signature with people currently living in southern Pakistan and northern India. On my father’s side, I am a descendent of the first peoples who populated the Iberian Peninsula, present day Spain or Portugal.

By the stroke of the chief census’ pen, I became coloured and Spangenberg white. In the world of apartheid it determined our lives and altered it forever. Before DNA ancestry tests came along, we both lived as many others still do in blissful ignorance of our real origins. Spangenberg is more African than I am.

The story of apartheid’s chief census Jan Raats should still be told. When it is, the biographer will have a lot to say about his relationship with Eben Donges, apartheid’s first home affairs’ minister. The biographer will also tell the story of the practical problems he faced in classifying such an unusually mixed people.

Before racial classification became law, many coloured individuals had crossed into white society, ‘passing for white’ as it was put. There was really nothing to be done about it, Raats said. However, what was he to do with the 100,000 or so marginal cases the classification of whom would fall between the definition of white and coloured?

Their answer was to declare most of the 100,000 or so marginal cases, those whose physical appearance conformed to apartheid anthropology, overnight as white. In addition, other marginal cases were dealt with in the annual ritual of racial reclassification. The perversion is recorded in Hansard parliamentary debates of the time.

Where does this leave Frederika Cornelia Spangenberg? I am not sure. Perhaps with the new knowledge of her origins she thinks and walks differently, claiming the dignity of her shared ancestry with humanity’s oldest surviving peoples.