Article What's in a name? Racial categorisations under apartheid and their afterlife Deborah Posel Among the many paradoxes of South Africa's transition from apartheid, one of the more obvious and prominent concerns the fate of race. We have been entrusted with a new democratic constitution that enshrines a thoroughgoing commitment to non-racialism, invoking the claim to our common humanity as the basis for the allocation of shared human rights and the eradication of discrimination. But this juridical assertion of human sameness cohabits with existential reiterations of racial difference and separation. An interesting survey conducted by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation1 gives some indication of the lingering power of racial reasoning in the everyday lives of South African citizens. Disturbing proportions of respondents make lifestyle choices and judgements about others that reiterate and entrench existing norms of racial separateness. While it might be unsurprising that 51 per cent of whites surveyed agreed that 'despite abuses, apartheid ideas were good ones', it is striking that 35.5 per cent of Africans, 34 per cent of Coloureds and 42 per cent of Indians thought likewise.2 According to the survey, several of the markers of a strong sense of racial distance are more prominent among Africans than whites. For example, 56 per cent of Africans, 33.4 per cent of whites, 26.6 per cent of Coloureds and 41.6 per cent of Indians perceived people of other races to be 'untrustworthy'.3 And 52.7 per cent of Africans found it 'hard to imagine ever being friends' with people of other races, along with 18.5 per cent of whites, 12.8 per cent of Coloureds and 19.2 per cent of Indians. 46.8 per cent of Africans said that they felt 'uncomfortable around people of other races', as did 34.7 per cent of whites, 24.3 per cent of Coloureds and 36.7 per cent of Indians.4 Clearly, the purchase of ideas of racial TRANSFORMATION 47 (2001) ISSN 0258-7696 50 What's in a name? difference and distance remains strong and spans the population at large, rather than being concentrated among the direct beneficiaries of apartheid. In the absence of comparable longitudinal data, the authors of the report simply assert that these measurements 'must' represent improvements on previous years - as though the abolition of apartheid has launched the country ineluctably on a slow but steady teleology of de-racialisation. As a citizen I'd love to believe this; as a scholar it seems an open question that warrants substantially more research. This paper holds but one lens to the question of the fate of race in post- apartheid South Africa - namely, the issue of racial categorisation.5 After decades of apartheid's racial reasoning, the idea that South African society comprises four distinct races - 'whites', 'Coloureds', 'Indians' and 'Africans' - has become a habit of thought and experience, a facet of popular 'common sense' still widely in evidence. So it remains the norm for the narratives we hear in public media or in conversation to designate unnamed social actors in terms of their race - as though this reduces their anonymity and renders their actions more intelligible. Nor is this simply an apartheid residue; there are ethical and political arguments - as in the Employment Equity Act, for example - for the renewed salience of racial identification in the project of 'transformation'. If apartheid's racial categories were previously the locus of racial privilege and discrimination, these very same racial designations are now the site of redress - for, how else can the damage be undone and equitable treatment established? Yet, what are the consequences of these reiterations? Can we continue to construct our social realities in racial terms - in particular, drawing on apartheid's very own catalogue of race - in ways that transcend the ideological burdens of the past? What are the grammars of racial categorisation post-1994? To what extent, and in what ways, might they be at odds with the project of non-racialism? My engagement with these issues is rooted in a discussion of racial classification under apartheid, which sets the terms for an assessment of its character and significance in the post-apartheid period. The historical analysis constitutes the bulk of the paper, which examines the modes of racial reasoning that attached to the practice of racial classification under apartheid, and the ways in which these were constituted as common- sensical, insinuated into habits of thought and reflexes of experiences as though 'facts' of life in this country. In more tentative and speculative ways, the paper concludes with a consideration of the current problem of 51 Deborah Posel racial classification and its implications for bigger questions about the various trajectories of racialisation and deracialisation in the country today. Apartheid's racial project Apartheid was underpinned by a hankering for order - an orderly society and an orderly state to tame the perceived dissolution and turbulence engendered during the 1940s. For many anxious whites, the fate of white supremacy had grown precarious, endangered by the spectre of die swart gevaar (the black danger) threatening to overwhelm the cities. With the ferment of migration and urbanisation triggered during the war years, black communities in once predominantly white cities had swollen to bursting point. The dominant features of black urbanisation had become tropes of menace: desperate poverty, the proliferation of shanty towns, rising levels of crime and 'juvenile delinquency', along with mounting political dissension. The once comforting bulwark of stable 'native family life' was also seriously under siege. White administrators expressed their alarm at the proliferation of 'unstable', 'informal unions', struck by itinerant 'undesirable women' who had strayed from the rigours of rural patriarchy. Racial borders too, had grown more porous, with racial mixing producing higher incidences of the dreaded miscegenation and its threats to racial 'purity'. The result was an overriding sense of social chaos and moral peril: Europeans and non-Europeans have been working up to a crisis with more and more trouble blowing up, clashes in the towns, crimes, the creation of all sorts of hamlets on the borders of the towns full of poverty and misery, clashes on the trains, assaults on women.6 Die apartheid-gedagte (the apartheid idea) offered the promise of heightened discipline, regulation and surveillance: boundaries were to be reasserted and spaces reorganised, the movements of people systematised and contained, races rescued from 'impurity', the notion of family rehabilitated and 'the savage discipline of tribal life' restored. At the core of this aspiration to order lay a vigorous and thoroughgoing reassertion of racial difference. Apartheid's principal imaginary was of a society in which every 'race' knew and observed its proper place - economically, politically and socially. Race was to be the critical and overriding faultline: the fundamental organising principle for the allocation of all resources and opportunities, the basis of all spatial demarcation, planning and development, the boundary for all social interaction, as well as the primary category in terms of which this social and moral order was described and defended. 52 What's in a name? Clearly then, the political project which ensued was inseparable from the imagining of race and racial difference, and the rationality implicated in it. The version of race and racial reasoning attached to apartheid as a mode of rule has not been the subject of much analytic scrutiny. In most instances it is simply assumed that the variant of racism produced by apartheid was spawned by biologically determinist notions of race, rooted in theories of scientific racism. Most popular understandings of apartheid depict it as the quintessential science of race. This misconception has been challenged by others who have argued that in the climate of strong international censure of biological racism produced in the aftermath of Nazism, apartheid ideologues cultivated a strategic ambiguity with respect to race. Strong inclinations towards scientific racism were masked with a veneer of culturalist thinking, to give respectability to otherwise more pernicious ways of representing racial difference.7 But this position does not fully capture the articulation of biology and culture that marked the formulation and enactment of race under apartheid. Leading architects of the apartheid system of racial classification eschewed a science of race, explicitly recognising race as a construct with cultural, social and economic dimensions. Race, in their view, was a judgement about 'social standing', made on the strength of prevailing social conventions about difference. This is not to say that biological myths about race were irrelevant. On the contrary, they were extremely potent - but in what Gilroy calls a 'bioculturalist'8 mix, which aligned readings of bodily difference closely with differences of class, lifestyle and general repute (loosely subsumed under the rubric of 'culture'). 'Race' had both cultural and biological markers, each providing tautological evidence for the other (as mutually both cause and effect of the character of the other). It was this hybrid conceptualisation of race that lay at the core of apartheid's racial project, and which enabled a practice of racial differentiation far more insidious and tenacious in its grip on everyday life than might otherwise have been the case. To demonstrate these effects, the paper examines how race was understood and enacted by the apartheid state. The principal focus of this discussion is the Population Registration Act of 1950, the legislative lynchpin of racial categorisation under apartheid - less by way of a detailed scrutiny of its content and mechanisms,' more for the purposes of exposing the underlying mode of racial reasoning and its consequences for the everyday racialisation of experience. 53 Deborah Posel Racial classification under apartheid: the terms of the Population Registration Act The first task confronting apartheid's social engineers was to produce a clear, immobile grid for the racial classification of the entire population - order, in the sphere of racial categorisation. During the preceding segregationist era, the governance of everyday life had grown increasingly racialised, as access to work, urban space, political office, public transport and leisure facilities became subject to racial surveillance. However, there was no single, binding statutory definition of racial categories. Different laws invoked racial categories in variable, often inconsistent, ways. A person could have been considered 'Coloured' in respect of one realm of experience (such as access to modes of work) and 'native' in another (eg in contracting a customary marriage through the payment of lobola). Life in segregationist South Africa was subject to powerful racial hierarchies; but in the absence of a fixed, officially authorised, racial categorisation, ambiguous and mobile identifications at the margins of different racial groups allowed some people to move up or down the racial ladder according to changes in circumstances. So, some fair-skinned offspring of Coloured parents 'passed for white' (and sometimes only in the sphere of work), while Coloureds who married into 'native' families may have come to have been accepted as 'native'. The idea of racial mobility had legal sanction too. The 1936 Natives Representation Act allowed that well-educated 'natives' who had achieved an appropriate station in life could petition for racial 'promotion' to 'Coloured'.10 Intent on eliminating all such ambiguities and fluidities, the apartheid government rapidly set out to assign every South African citizen a single racial classification, which would then become uniformly binding across all spheres of that person's experience. In terms of the Population Registration Act, passed in 1950, every citizen would be subject to one authorised act of racial classification, the result of which would be preserved in the form of an official identity document. All individual classifications were to be assembled in a centralised, national population register - a comprehensive database in which the racial identity of all citizens could be crosschecked against a battery of information about their access to work, social services, accommodation, taxation, marital status etc to ensure that all of these facets of everyday life were appropriately racially bounded and monitored." How then, were apartheid's racial categories defined? The 54 What's in a name? conceptualisation of race for the purposes of the Population Registration Act was not uncontroversial. Unsurprisingly, given the intellectual imprints of scientific racism within Afrikaner nationalist circles, some protagonists of apartheid were adamant that race was essentially and exclusively a biological category, to be determined on the basis of 'blood'. Any admixture of blood established a person as a 'Coloured', whereas racial purity was the hallmark of'whites' and 'natives'. From this point ofview, racial difference could be measured exactly and scientifically, with evidence drawn from genealogies of descent and observable features of appearance. Racial classification would be a matter of historical fact - objective and impersonal - in relation to which matters of lifestyle and social acceptance were utterly irrelevant. If we are going to make ... a clear demarcation as to who is going to be classified as European ... and who is going to be classified as Coloured, then we must definitely take blood into consideration. It is no use saying that we know these people are Coloured. We know these people are Coloured but, because by repute and common consent they are white, we are going to make them white. By so doing, we are going to allow Coloured blood into this race which we, some of us, wish to maintain so wonderfully pure.12 Significantly however, this was not the version of race that was authorised by the new law. Drawing on decades of bureaucratic experience in administering racial categories, apartheid ideologues designing the system of racial classification took the view that: it is almost impossible to determine with any certainty which people are natives and which people are Coloureds. ... It would be an uneconomical waste of time and money to try, throughout the country, to determine a person's race with precision.13 Instead, a deliberately more flexible, elastic approach to the definition of racial categories was adopted - one that gave official standing to long- established social readings of racial difference, which tied these judgements closely to hierarchies of social class. Race, said the Minister of the Interior, moving the Population Registration Bill, was a matter of social standing, and the authority to make that assessment rested with public opinion. The test of race, he insisted, was the judgement of society - conventions which had grown up during the hundreds of years we have been here.14 The intention of the legislature was... that the classification of a person should be made according to the views held by the members of that community." 55 Deborah Posel Closely linked to this confidence in the authority of everyday experience as the site of racial judgement was the idea that racial differences were typically obvious and uncontroversial - manifest features of lived experience, readily accessible to ordinary people. Recognising and categorising a person's race was largely a matter of'common sense'. In the words of parliamentarians party to the debate about the Population Registration Bill, it is obvious to all: we know the native and if we see a white man, we know that he is a white man." We... have never experienced any difficulties in distinguishing between Europeans and non-Europeans.17 The fact that race 'could not be established with any precision', therefore, was no barrier to the elimination of ambiguity and mobility in the practice of racial classification. There was certitude in experience, subjective as it was - a certitude deriving from the intensity of the recognition of race, rather than the deductive rationality of positivistic reasoning about its criteria. And it was on this basis that definitive judgements about race were considered both possible and desirable. Popular common sense about race in South Africa had long acknowledged a close coupling of race and 'way of life', as the protagonists of the Population Registration Bill explained when debating it in parliament. A racial classification was a judgement about a person's 'social status', 18 as much as physical appearance - 'racial appearance and social habits, not birth certificates, must be the deciding factors'," said the Minister of the Interior. This popular epistemology of race was powerfully imprinted in the definitions of the country's three racial groups20 supplied in the Population Registration Act, particularly in respect of the category 'white': A white person is one who in appearance is, or who 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 [my emphasis] A native is a person who is in fact or is generally accepted as a member of any aboriginal race or tribe of Africa. A Coloured person is a person who is not a white person nor a native.2' Underscoring the close connectedness of physical and social signifiers of race, a further clause stipulated that in evaluating a person's appearance, 'his habits, education and speech, deportment and demeanour in general shall be taken into account'.22 56 What's in a name? Legal commentators have seized on the imprecision and vagueness of these racial categories, particularly in the residual definition of'Coloured'. From the perspective of the judiciary, occasionally called upon to adjudicate boundary disputes sparked by a contested racial classification, this was a rather unwieldy piece of legislation. But from the perspective of apartheid's governmentality, this reading of the law misses the point. The looseness with which the racial categories were defined was the key to their effectiveness as instruments of racialisation. The terms of the Population Registration Act exempted the enterprise of official racial classification from any pretence at evidentiary rigour, giving full juridical authority to the weight of social prejudice23 or 'common sense'. To some extent, the power of public opinion was allocated across the board to all racially- defined communities, for whom this law became a tool for policing their racial boundaries — a mechanism for the protection of racial 'purity' available for popular, not merely official, use. But in the main, the powers of racial judgement were wielded most forcefully by whites entrusted with the official business of racial classification, since the purported wisdom of common sense was itself subject to conventional hierarchies which privileged white versions over others. The practice of racial classification The Population Registration Act officially established race as a domain of knowledge independent of any particular training or expertise, based instead on the ordinary experience of racial difference, which ranked whiteness at its apex. It was perfectly consistent, therefore, with the logic of the law to entrust its implementation to 'quite ordinary and untrained persons' ... 'ordinary people subject to their prejudices and their particular political points of view'.24 So the first round of mass racial classification was tagged on to the 1951 national population census, permitting census- takers to become racial classifiers. With insufficient capacity available within the permanent public service, population censuses had traditionally created the opportunity for short- term employment for enumerators. For the newly elected National Party government this became a strategy, of political patronage, allocating the work to loyal white party supporters, particularly in constituencies where anxieties about racial 'impurity' ran high.25 Typically, otherwise unemployed and ill-educated - 'raw teams',26 in the more graphic parlance of state officialdom - census-takers were allocated the power to pass 57 Deborah Posel judgement on a person's race, a decision which would then become binding in respect of all spheres of experience from then on. All citizens, including whites, were required to furnish information about themselves and their families by way of the national census. A photograph was attached to each completed census form sent to the Director of Census for the purposes of making a racial classification. But, in practice, it was the racial verdict of the census enumerator accompanying the census form, which typically sealed the person's race.27 Millions of South Africans were racially classified by this means; but it did not complete the process. In 1953, the Director of Census delegated his powers of racial classification to all officials of the Department of Native Affairs (and then again in 1969 to all public servants). Teams of classifiers were then sent out to workplaces, stations and residential areas across the country to continue the task. How then did they make their decisions? We have seen that the law determined two sites of evidence for race: 'appearance' and 'general acceptance'. The content of each was unspecified, apart from the recognition that readings of appearance were informed by the semiotics of class and status. Their relationship too was unresolved, but for the prioritising of 'general acceptance' in the case of the boundary between whites and Coloureds. Judgements made in terms of these criteria were not subject to any bureaucratic scrutiny or surveillance, other than when contested in appeals to the Race Classification Appeal Board, which were remarkably few and far between. This means that there was no unified, centralised record of how racial classifications were made. The following discussion is an incomplete compilation from a variety of sources. There was no pretence at formal, scientific rationality in the classification process. Instead, when it came to the classification of 'appearance', the terms of the law gave free rein to the miscellany of biological myths about racial appearances that inhabited the realm of common sense. Multiple and discrepant bodily signifiers of race were invoked, producing mobile and at times inconsistent judgements of racial appearance. Evidence for race was found most familiarly in skin colour. But this was not necessarily the overriding or conclusive factor, particularly when confronted with the ambiguities of an individual whose way of life seemed at odds with his or her skin colour - as in the case of a man who considered himself 'Coloured' but who was classified 'native' despite having blue eyes and fair skin.28 Each classifier was at liberty to specify their pet criteria for race. For one 58 What's in a name? magistrate, the definitive test was not skin colour per se, but rather the patch of skin on the inside of the arm.29 Some officials read racial differences into the texture of a person's hair, the notorious pencil test being used to determine the boundary between 'white' and 'non-white'. Appeal boards adjudicating requests for reclassification sometimes called barbers to testify as to the texture of the person's hair.30 For others, it was a matter of the pallor of a person's skin - 'a shiny face being the emblem of continuity of race',31 or the feel of an ear lobe ('softer in natives than Coloureds'32), or the appearance of the cheekbones (high cheekbones being seen as the sign of a Coloured33). One official insisted that he could 'tell a Coloured with absolute certainty by the way he spits'. 34 Questions put to individuals subject to racial classification tests also sometimes included physical details about family members - for example, there was the case of a man who was asked 'why are you so short? Was your mother tall? What is your wife's complexion?'35 At other times, various 'stigmata' of race were invoked, as in the use of 'the eyelid test' or 'the nail test' ,36 or in the examination of genitalia (the degree of pigmentation of the penis or scrotum in the case of men and the pubic mound in the case of women).37 All in all, almost any aspect of a person's size or shape was potentially a signifier of race, in unpredictable and idiosyncratic ways. All these seemingly narrowly biological readings of racial appearance were shot through with judgements about 'social standing' and 'way of life' - as was authorised by the terms of the Population Registration Act. The likelihood of having to endure the 'nail test' and 'the pencil test', or being subjected to the humiliation of a genital examination, was itself a function of social position. For people considered 'obviously white' by whatever criteria, such physical scrutiny would have been considered unnecessary and inappropriate. In more ambiguous and contested cases, official sightings of race were clearly mediated by the prisms of class and culture - again on an individually idiosyncratic basis. For example, a magistrate pronounced as Coloured a fair-skinned woman who was widely accepted as white, insisting that 'her light complexion cannot sufficiently relieve her from her hereditary disability to lull a reasonable European into not suspecting a dusky admixture'.38 This tortuous re-reading of a familiar bodily signifier of whiteness was prompted, it seems, by the fact that this woman had recently converted to Islam. The second criterion for race - 'general acceptance' - became a loose catch-all, even more variable and multiple in its application than evaluations 59 Deborah Posel of 'appearance'. Historical evidence suggests that a wide gamut of factors came into play, which added up to composite judgements on race as a way of life, in terms of which any detail of experience or association could be deemed relevant, and in mobile, unpredictable ways. Again the justification for a racial verdict was simply the subjective conviction of the classifier, exempt from any external bureaucratic scrutiny or justification. No stable ranking of relevant criteria emerged, as different classifiers assigned priority to particular features of race in variable, sometimes mutually inconsistent, ways. Classifiers typically fired off a battery of questions to establish a spatial sense of people's race: where they were born, where they had gone to school, where they lived, where they had grown up, where their friends lived, where their children were schooled, where and with whom their children played. In a tautological denial of the desirability of racial mixing, classifiers tended to read off an individual's race from the dominant racial character of his or her residential area and community of associates. So, 'a man who looks white and is readily accepted by the community as being white', for example, could be refused registration as such if many years previously he attended a Coloured school or if a large proportion of his friends were Coloured." Similarly prominent were concerns about a person's type and place of work, as well as wages earned - again circularly reinforcing existing conventions, which tended to structure labour markets along racial lines. So, for example, in one case heard by a Cape Town Race Classification Appeal Board, the fact that the appellant appeared in a waiter's uniform was considered grounds for his classification as Coloured40 (this being a job in which Coloureds were seen to predominate). The perceptions of employers were often accorded particular salience by classifiers in drawing racial conclusions.41 Since workplaces were racially structured, it was assumed that employers were particularly reliable informants of a person's race, having established this identification as the ground for allocating particular types of work. Questions were also asked about people's levels of education and literacy, or their political affiliations, again deducing race as a symptom of existing hierarchies of opportunity and reward. Hence the assumption, for example, that 'it is naturally difficult for an illiterate non- European to prove that he is not a native';42 while having registered in the past as a European voter clinched the judgement of one official that a particular person was white.43 Race was also read off from a person's 60 What's in a name? religious affiliation, place of worship and church associations.44 Thus a fair-skinned woman's conversion to Islam became decisive grounds for classifying her as a Coloured. The type of marriage contracted was also deemed racially relevant, along with a host of questions about a person's spouse - wilfully enacting the 'common sense' preference for racially homogeneous families. So, having a native wife could be taken as grounds for classifying a man 'native', even if he laid strong claim to being Coloured This was the case, for example, with Willie Vickerman, who considered himself Coloured, having gone to Coloured schools, lived in Coloured areas, worked in Coloured jobs - but who was classified as a 'native' because he had a 'native' wife, and because he came from Bechuanaland (Botswana), a place that, in the mind of the classifier, was home to 'natives' only.45 Some classifiers set particular store by a person's surname46 - although, for others, it was considered less significant.47 If the classifier understood the name to have a particular racial origin, then that might have impressed itself forcefully in the classification process, irrespective of whether the individual concerned could produce a different explanation for the genealogy of the name. Dress and deportment were also racially coded, typically in the view that well-dressed individuals were placed higher on the racial ladder than those more shabbily clad; likewise for the type and standard of a person's furnishing, if this entered into the ambit of discussion about his or her race, as well as modes of leisure activity.48 The Cape Times revealed that according to 'methods reported in Johannesburg as being used by the Race Classification Board to determine whether a man was native or Coloured: a soccer player is a native, a rugby player is a Coloured. A high bed is Coloured, a low bed native'.49 The kinds of food eaten and alcohol drunk were also invested with racial significance. Consuming large amounts of what was then called 'kaffirbeer' became a sign of being 'native' and, obversely, having bought 'European liquor' could signify whiteness.50 In all of these instances of racial adjudication, the invitation from the legislature to treat race as a social construct as well as a biological condition had a crucial and decisive bearing on the process of racial classification. It allowed - indeed encouraged - classifiers spared of any pretence at scientific rigour, to read race as a symptom of prevailing hierarchies of privilege and opportunity, and thereby make racial classifications that perpetuated and justified these common sense 'conventions' of difference. And this was exactly in line with the primary 61 Deborah Posel purpose of the apartheid system of racial classification - namely, to buttress and stabilise the edifice of white supremacy. As the exercise of racial classification gained momentum, the issue of racial categorisation grew in social and political salience - particularly as the huge consequences ensuing from one classification rather than another became more apparent. A reassuring promise of a lifetime's worth of privilege for those classified' white', classification as ' Coloured' or' native' had the more unsettling finality of sealing a person's fate to a lower rung on the ladder of opportunity, reward and power from then on, and removing the prospect of mobility. Whereas the segregationist system had permitted a degree of latitude and flexibility in how people categorised themselves racially, the advance of apartheid turned the exercise of racial naming into an altogether more stressful, fraught encounter with officialdom. Still, in the large majority of cases, official racial classifications were not contested- symptomatic of either an acceptance of the appropriateness of the classification (as one which resonated with the racial categorisations people gave of themselves) or an inability or unwillingness to lodge an appeal.51 The transcripts of some of the appeals demonstrate the wider purchase of a similarly bioculturalist reading of race as pertained in the official practice of racial classification. For example, grounds cited by the appellants and their associates as evidence of the appellant being Coloured rather than native included: • close readings of the hair on a person's head (sy hare is lank en my nasie se hare is nie lank nie; ... sy hare staan los, sy hare rol nie; hulle staan reguit;52 my hare is kroeserig;" my hare is beter as hulle hare.54) • features of other bodily hair (ek kan dadelik sien, as ek na 'n man se arm kyk, die verskil tussen 'n kleurling se hare en die van 'n naturel. Ek het omtrent geen hare op my arme nie. Daar is baie naturelle what hare op hulle arme het.55) • shades of skin colour (ek sou se hy is ligter as 'n naturel normaalweg56 my kleur is tussen donker en lig-bruin.51) • facial features (sy gesig isfyner as naturel ?%) • home language (ons taal is net Afrikaans59) and more particularly, the ways in which Afrikaans was spoken (speaking Afrikaans soos 'n Kleurling.60) • neighbourhoods, friends and associates (naturelle besoek my nie;61 ek het nie gesien dat ... die appellant met naturelle omgaan nief2 sy 62 What's in a name? behoort aan 'n Kleurlingsgroep Scouts, waargeen naturelle aan behoort nie.6i) • kinds of work done (ek werk as petrol boy.64) • social standing and class - for some the crucial determinant of race (ek ken nie die verskil van die gesigstrekke tussen 'n naturel en 'n kleurling nie. Ek weet net hoe ons lewe;65 ons maniere is sekerlik die wat gevind word by kleurlinge;66 naturelle het nie al die geriewe soos ons nie;67 ons strewe na 'n goeie peil van lewe;6* ek het nog nooit ... naturelle gesien wat soon ons lewe nie,69 my family and I live as Coloured persons and ... maintain the standard of living consonant with that status in life.70) • food and drink (Ek drink nie sommer kafferbier nie;1' middae eet ons vleis, rys en groente, unlike natives.72) Arguably, the many millions of individual acts of racial classification enacted during apartheid drew upon, reinforced and amplified modes of racial reasoning that were widely normalised and naturalised in the experiences of apartheid subjects. This is not to presuppose any one homogeneous or wholly monolithic way of thinking about race, but rather to identify modalities of thought and social practice, which were powerfully implicated in everyday life across a broad spectrum of the population. The following section extracts and summarises the principal features of these modes of racial reasoning, and then considers their effects in producing apartheid's microphysic of racialised power. Apartheid's racial reasoning: 1. Race and racial difference as self-evident facts' of experience: We have seen that the basic epistemological premise of the apartheid system of racial classification was the idea that the existence of 'race' and racial difference was a self-evident, common-sensical and therefore utterly uncontroversial 'fact' of life in South Africa. At no stage in the parliamentary debate about the Population Registration Act or in the (rather muted) broader political contestations surrounding it, was the existence of races questioned, other than in their narrowly scientific rendition.73 From the start the apartheid exercise built on a widespread social consensus that South Africa comprised a series of 'races' and that these differed in fundamental ways - even if there were ideological and political contestations around the appropriate conclusions to be drawn from this social 'fact'. In terms of the logic of the classification process, the assumed facticity extended further, to the recognition and categorisation of racial difference 63 Deborah Posel itself. The mass classification enterprise kicked off with no expectation of carefully reasoned evidence - be it to prove the existence of races, the fact of three distinct racial groups74 in the country or in respect of any one act of individual racial classification. The only relevant evidence was 'the judgement of society', as the Minister of the Interior had put it, 'conventions which had grown up during hundreds of years'. And it was assumed that any one white racial classifier, as an 'ordinary untrained person' party to these conventions, was just as well-positioned as any other to apply them in the process of classification. 2. The ontology of race: a mix of biology, class and culture: The modus operandi of the classification system depended upon a 'bioculturalist' version of race, drawing upon readings of socio-cultural and bodily differences. Bodies became signifiers of status, power and worth in a hierarchy that privileged whiteness (as both a biological and social condition) at its apex. This second feature of apartheid's racial reasoning was closely related to the first. There was no science of race; race was as it was lived, ordinarily and uncontroversially in everyday life, and this experience had both social and biological modalities. The reasoning here was comfortingly circular: superior socio-economic standing and privilege-the products of a more 'civilised' 'way of life' -were considered to be markers/evidence of biological superiority, at the same time as biological superiority was deemed grounds for such elevated social status. Racial differences ratified and legitimised social and cultural hierarchies, which, in turn, were held up as evidence of racial differences. A racial classification, therefore, was a wide-ranging judgement about a way of life, in its entirety, rather than a narrower issue concerned merely with particular bodily features (such as skulls, brains or skin colour). 3. Race as ubiquitous: If race was not narrowly a matter of specific biological differences but a more wide-ranging conceptualisation combining social and bodily factors, then it was but a small step to regarding race as an attribute of all experience. We have seen that the second principle of racial reasoning (above) was applied by classifiers in ways that permitted any and every facet of a person's life to become a potential signifier of his or her race. Anything and everything could be read as a sign of race, from a person's preferred hairdresser and her children's choice of friends, through to the texture of her ear lobe and the definition of her cheek bones. The tacit rules 64 What's in a name? of racial classification did not provide a pre-determined list of racial characteristics, nor was there any justification required for novel additions to more familiar litanies. This, in turn, had powerful consequences: if anything and everything could be read as a sign of race, then race was in everything - a ubiquitous dimension of everyday life, the inevitable adverb and adjective of all experience. So, types of food and alcohol could be considered as 'European' or 'native'. Soccer could become a 'native' sport, while waiters' dress was described as 'Coloured'. Styles of furniture and ways of interacting with neighbours could be described in racial terms. By elasticating the official definition of race beyond merely biological factors, the apartheid state created a mechanism for investing all facets of existence with racial significance. Everything could be treated as evidence of race; therefore race was an inherent and overriding feature of all facets of life in the society. 4. Race as essential rather than accidental or contingent: Another of the tacit and unquestioned assumptions that undergirded apartheid racial reasoning was the idea of race as an essential combination of elements, rather than one which was contingent, mutable and individually mobile. Categorising one person 'Coloured' entailed the presumption that this person had certain defining characteristics in common with all others similarly designated as 'Coloureds'. Without recourse to this idea, the social engineering enacted on the basis of the racial classification exercise would have lacked plausibility. The ideological logic of apartheid depended upon thinking about all blacks as essentially different from all whites and Coloureds, and, correlatively, all blacks as sharing essential features that united them into one race. Hence the claim that races should be separated, and the defence of racial 'purity' as a desideratum. 5. Race as the primary determinant of all experience: If race was a description of a shared essence that made people what they were, then its ubiquity was not simply a descriptive feature of experience, but also its primary cause. Within this mode of reasoning about race, race was 'in' everything essentially rather than accidentally. Racial differences were considered the primary determinants of other differences, the very raison d 'etre for difference across the plethora of interaction and experience. 65 Deborah Posel 6. Race as the site of white fear: The impulse towards a racially ordered society, with rigid barriers demarcating the racialised boundaries of experience and interaction, was rooted in widespread anxieties about racial mixing. The vigour with which racial barricades were built was an indication of the intensity of white discomfort at the prospect of racial proximity. A full exploration of the psychic dimensions of the preference for 'jackal-proof fencing'75 between races, is beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say here that these formed the recurring accompaniment to more technocratic, instrumental facets of the racial classification exercise and the strands of racial reasoning attached to it. Rigid, inflexible racial definitions, which promised to eradicate the prospect of racial mixing, allegedly kept white women safe from the threat of black male sexuality, and protected the racial purity of innocent white children (recurring themes in apartheid propaganda). Conferring the verdict of whiteness on a person, once and for all, was also a protection against the shameful indignity of being alleged or discovered to have had racially mixed descent. The point was made many times during debates about the Population Registration Bill that few South African whites could justifiably deny 'any admixture of blood' in their families' pasts, so that people acknowledged and accepted as white needed assurances that accusations of racial' impurity' could not gainsay their claims to continued privilege. The hierarchies of privilege and reward attached to the racial classification exercise extended the anxieties of race more widely, particularly within Coloured communities. Many of the appeals from people who considered themselves Coloured but were classified as 'native' speak of the 'deep sense of shame'76 felt by those who found themselves officially downgraded a rung on the country's racial ladder. The exercise of mass racial classification was a critical launch-pad for many apartheid initiatives in racial discrimination and segregation - beginning with forced residential segregation (through the Group Areas Act of 1950), the imposition of racial barriers on marriage and sex (Immorality Act of 1949), racially segregated access to public facilities (Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, 1953), through to racially differentiated schooling (Bantu Education Act, 1953), access to urban space (Natives (Urban Areas) Amendment Act, 1952), and any number of additional and subsequent policies and pieces of legislation which presupposed the state's capacity to differentiate one race clearly and 66 What's in a name? unambiguously from another. All of these facets of the apartheid system were resisted, in organised formal ways as well as more informally and individually. Yet, even so, the discourse of race identified above that undergirded all these policies insinuated itself into the practice of everyday life in ways which made it difficult to transcend, defining the very terrain of resistance itself. The description of reality in racially differentiated terms became naturalised, through the routinised repetition and ubiquity of the state's recourse to it. In Ian Hacking's terms, official racial categorisations were 'interactive constructs' by way of their 'looping effect',77 whether an individual endorsed the principles of apartheid or not, whether he or she consented to the racial category imposed by the state, the fact that his or her access to housing, transport, work, schooling, public facilities, marriage, sex, community life was moulded by this official categorisation meant that it impacted profoundly on his or her experience and consciousness. Apartheid created different worlds of experience, along predominantly racial lines. The greater the extent to which races did not mix, the greater the extent to which the subjects of these racialised experiences grew distant and strange, the more pervasive and persuasive the seeming 'fact' of racial difference. Yet, what was lived as a seemingly descriptive characterisation of 'facts' of experience carried with it a normative load, also enacted by sheer repetition. For those who had little option but to live within the framework of these categories,78 the habit of reading the symptoms of race was naturalised widely, even if not monolithically, across the gamut of everyday life. The aftermath: What then of the fate of race? And how is the issue of racial classification implicated in it? Since 1994, with the formal demise of apartheid, the idea of race, racial identities and racial reasoning have become newly politicised as important sites of interrogation and contestation. The urgency of 'transformation' has accorded a new significance and politics to the idea and practice of racial differentiation. If ideas of race and racial difference are indeed as deeply embedded in the social fabric as this paper suggests, then it will require deliberate and strategic interventions from the state to refashion social relations and dismantle prevailing economic hierarchies. 'Race' has understandably been the site of that intervention. 67 Deborah Posel Previously the locus of privilege, race has now become the site of redress. And it has taken a form that gives renewed significance to the catalogue of race established under apartheid. For example, one of the principal instruments designed to undo apartheid's inequities - the Employment Equity Act - defines three 'designated groups' in respect of whom preferential employment is authorised: blacks, women and the disabled. The category 'black' is not defined directly but is intended to encompass all those previously classified as 'African', 'Coloured' or 'Indian'. Its logic is to link the terms of redress directly to a history of racialised disadvantage in terms of which the distinction between 'African' and 'Coloured', for example, bears directly on entitlements to preferential treatment. Similar arguments have been mounted in defence of continuing apartheid traditions of social measurement using the four racial categories as the units of description and analysis - again on the grounds that evaluating the extent to which apartheid's damage has been undone requires keeping the independent variables constant so as to produce reliable measures of longitudinal trends.79 This variant of 'transformation', and the ways in which it has reinvigorated apartheid's racial differentiations, have been contested in many quarters. But these debates are not directly of interest here. More pertinent to this paper is the fact that there are now legal requirements, as well as social and political pressures, to restate old racial categories. This produces questions which thus far seem to have remained in the shadows of political debates about change. How, in a post-apartheid era, do we determine who is 'African', 'Coloured', 'white' and 'Indian'?80 What are the criteria for racial classifications? With whom is the authority of categorising race vested? On what basis will claims to knowledge about race be issued and defended? What are the processes of racial recognition that accompany the new uses of old racial categories? And what are the consequences of these exercises for the pursuit of non-racialism? Further research is needed into the epistemologies and ontologies of racial naming in a range of contemporary settings in this country. But the historical analysis developed in this paper suggests some speculative pointers. The significance of reiterating apartheid's racial grid will be embedded in broader trajectories of lingering racialisation, deracialisation and re-racialisation post-1994. In many respects, apartheid's racial legacies remain powerful, and their residues in the norms of everyday thought and experience loom large - as was evidenced, for example, in the IJR survey 68 What's in a name? cited above. Having endured more than four decades of apartheid rule, along with the intensity and ubiquity of racialisation that it produced, it is to be expected that it will take time for these effects to diminish. Arguably, in some spheres and communities, the continued recourse to apartheid's litany of race will renew its bioculturalist categorisations of race and their effects. The paper has shown that the Population Registration Act produced techniques of thoroughgoing racialisation. Constructs of race which imagined its imprints in an elastic matrix of biological and social factors, were insinuated ubiquitously into the everyday lives of apartheid subjects, in ways that were enabled and reinforced by the materialities of apartheid' s social geography and economic structure. Large chunks of this order remain in place, with the large majority of the black population still impoverished, economically excluded and consigned to geographically separate and under-resourced residential areas. The majority of whites too are still confined within apartheid borders of thought and experience. To this extent bioculturalist conceptions of race may retain their purchase in ways that continue to reinforce apartheid modes of racial reasoning, in the lived experience of thoroughgoing difference and separateness. Yet significant changes to the country's racial order have occurred. With the eradication of formal discriminatory structures and laws, greater degrees of racial mixing and mobility have been among the more striking features of the post-1994 period. Residential integration, the elimination of racial barriers in the workplace along with new avenues of economic advancement for blacks and the integration of schools and public facilities, have loosened the fixity and closure of apartheid-defined worlds of experience. The effect of these changes is to begin to destabilise the lynchpin of old bioculturalist conceptions of race. Apartheid's close coupling of race and class is being dislodged, with the emergence of new black elites along with increasingly poor whites. These class shifts within once more homogeneous groupings have also articulated with greater degrees of cultural pluralism - eg, as more consumerist 'yuppie' ways of life straddle middle- and upper-class communities of different races. These reconfigurations of old alignments of race, class and culture — while on the one hand party to processes of deracialisation - are also powerfully implicated in modalities of re-racialisation. New strategies of 'transformation' foreground and re-prioritise questions of race as instruments for redressing the inequities and injustices of the past. As 69 Deborah Posel suggested earlier, it is in the context of the legal requirements of racial redress that questions about the continued use of apartheid's racial catalogue are particularly pertinent. Implementing the Employment Equity Act, along with other more informal strategies of redress informed by the same racial logic, presupposes the capacity to distinguish, once again, between 'Africans', 'Indians', 'Coloureds' and 'whites'. Consider the different possible ways by means of which these racial classifications could, in principle, occur. Either races could be categorised according to a set of criteria externally prescribed (however loosely and flexibly), which means that the authority to make the classification rests with a classifier rather than the individual concerned (even if the individual's views are taken into account). Alternatively, the authority to define race could be vested with the individuals concerned, allowing them subjectively to specify what race they belong to, according to whatever criteria they deem to be most relevant. The second possibility resonates with philosophical critiques of racial essentialism, familiar in many post- modernist and post-colonial writings. However, it is unlikely that this option would function effectively for the purposes of legally authorised, monitored and regulated racial 'redress'. If opportunities, powers and resources now attach to blackness, then presumably the objective of strategies of redress is to exclude those previously advantaged from the option of redefining themselves 'African' or 'Coloured' or 'Asian' for expedient reasons. If a previously white person ought not to be at liberty to re-invent herself as 'Coloured', for example, then by implication there must be stable, externally specifiable criteria for determining a person's racial type. So we remain locked into the view that defining race is the prerogative and responsibility of the state, and that its desideratum is a stable, immobile grid of racial categories. If, therefore, the process of 'transformation' is seen to restate the need for a consistent, stable catalogue of racial difference, then it seems impossible - at least in this respect - to avoid the pitfalls of essentialist reasoning about race. How then, might the referents of these categories be determined? Changing patterns of class and status formation must surely affect contemporary readings of race and the efforts at stable classification for legal or official purposes. Arguably, as the description and recognition of race is increasingly de-linked from issues of class and status, the likelihood of more narrowly bodily readings of racial difference is also likely to grow. 70 What's in a name1? It may then be one of the more disturbing ironies of post-apartheid 'transformation' that it gives new salience to biological versions of race - a reinvestment in the significance of the body as a site of differentiation. Notes 1. Gibson, J andH Macdonald(2001) Truth- Yes, Reconciliation -Maybe: South Africans Judge the Truth and Reconciliation Process. Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. 2. The survey was conducted using a nationally representative sample of 3 727 South Africans over the age of 18. This data is compiled in table 6 of te study. 3. Ibid table 8. 4. Ibid table 8. 5. It's worth clarifying at the outset that the issue under discussion is racial identification, which is not coterminous with that of racial identity-formation. There is arguably a relationship between the two, but one which is highly mediated and conjunctural. 6. HF Verwoerd, quoted in Union of SA, Senate Debates, 1948, col 227. 7. Eg S Dubow (1995) Illicit Union: Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa. Johannesburg: WUP; E Boonzaier and J Sharp (1988) (eds) South African Keywords: the uses and abuses of political Concepts. Cape Town. David Philip. 8. P Gilroy (2000). Between the Camps, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p 22. 9. This is done in more detail in D Posel, D, 'Race and common sense: racial classification in twentieth century South Africa', African Studies Review, October 2001. 10. For a fuller discussion of racial classification prior to 1948, see Posel, op cit. 11. In fact, the intention to create a single set of racial categorisations applied with consistent effect took some time to put into place. For several years, other laws, such as the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1956, continued to produce different racial definitions from those in the Population Registration Act. Further regulations were required to enable the latter set of definitions to trump all others. [See SAB NTS 1764 53/276, Secretary for Native Affairs, Woordomskrywing van 'Naturel', March 2, 1956]. 12. Union of South Africa, Senate Debates, 1/6/50, col 4002. 13. SAB NTS 1764 vol 2, 53/276, SNA to Secretary, Murraysburg Boere en Wolwerks Vereniging, May 3, 1951, re 'Invordering van Agterstallige Naturellebelasting'. 14. Union of South Africa, House of Assembly Debates, 17/3/67, col 3172. 15. Ibid col 3172. 71 Deborah Posel 16. Union of South Africa, House of Assembly Debates, 13/3/50, col 2823. 17. Ibid col 2782. 18. Union of SA, House of Assembly Debates, 8/3/50, col 2520. 19. Cited in The Star, December 29, 1949. 20. A fourth racial group-'Indian' or'Asian'-was differentiated in a subsequent amendment to the Population Registration Act at a later stage (having originally been subsumed as s sub-category of 'Coloured' in the 1950 Act). Since the main focus of this paper is on the 1950 legislation, its focus is restricted to the three-way racial grid. 21. Population Registration Act, no. 30 of 1950, section 1 (xv), (x) and (iii). 22. Ibid, Section 1(2). 23. The only redress was through an appeal lodged to one of several Race Classification Appeal Boards created for this purpose. In practice, a remarkably small proportion of classifications was contested. See Posel, op. cit. 24 Union of SA, House of Assembly Debates, 8/3/50, col 2527. 25. Union of SA, House of Assembly Debates, 13/3/50, col 2861. 26. SAB NTS 1764 vol 2, 53/276, C Cronje, Senior Administrative Official, Department of Native Affairs, to the Undersecretary, re Woordomskrywingvan •Nature!', 19/3/56. 27. South African Institute for Race Relations (SAIRR)/* Survey of Race Relations 1967:27; also 1969:18. 28. Sunday Times, August 14, 1955, 'Coloured all their Lives, now Natives'. 29. The Star, April 28, 1950, 'Woman shows Colour of her Skin' 30. SAIRR, A Survey of Race Relations 1967:20. 31. Union of SA, House of Assembly Debates, 23/5/49, col 6350. 32. Evening Post. August 23, 1955, 'SA Race Tests Laughable but Tragic'. 33. The Star, April 28, 1950, 'Woman shows Colour of her Skin'. 34. Quoted in Union of SA, Senate Debates, 1/6/50, col 4004. 35. Sunday Times, August 14, 1955, 'Coloured all their Lives, now Natives'. 36. Union of SA, House of Assembly Debates, 23/5/49, col 6438. 37. Union of SA, House of Assembly Debates, 23/5/49, col 6439. 38. Eastern Province Herald, May 30, 1951, 'White Moslem Loses Case'. 39. SAIRR, A Survey of Race Relations, 1967:22. 40. Union of SA, House of Assembly Debates, 17/3/67, col 3173. 41. TAB TPD 886/1956, 'Objection: Henry Abel Makue':8. 42. Central Archives Depot (SAB), NTS 1763 vol. 53/276, General Manager, 72 What's in a name? South African Railways and Harbours to Secretary for Native Affairs, 23 6 45, re 'Non-European Staff: Proof of Race'. 43. The Star, August 11, 1950,'Priest's Conviction set aside'. 44. UWL, AD 1715. 24.4, SA1RR, 'Points Raised by Deputations of Coloured People', 16/8/55. 45. UWL, AD 1715 24.4, 'Statement by Willie Vickerman', 1955. 46. TAB TPD 886/1958, 'Objection: Henry Abel Makue':9. 47. See eg Sunday Times, August 14, 1955, 'Coloured all their Lives'. This article tells of a person accepted as Coloured, with a Coloured surname, but classified as native by a classifier who dismissed the surname as racial evidence. 48. TAB TPD 886/1956, 'Objection: Henry Abel Makue'. 49. Cape Times, July 21, 1956. 50. The Star, September 11, 1950, 'Immorality Act Charge Withdrawn". 51. See Posel 'Race and Common Sense ... ', op cit. 52. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of John Leach Lambert, evidence from Johannes Maseko: 1. 53. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of Henry Abel Makue, evidence from Makue: 12 54. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of Jacob Goliath, evidence from Martha Goliath. 55. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of John Leach Lambert, evidence from Johannes Maseko: 1. 56. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of John Leach Lambert; evidence from Johannes Marti Mante: 12. 57. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of Henry Abel Makue, evidence from Martin James Damons: 1. 57. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of John Leach Lambert; evidence from Johannes Marti Mante: 12. 59. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of Henry Abel Makue, evidence from Martin James Damons:2. 60. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of Henry Abel Makue, evidence from Martin James Damons: 1. 61. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of Henry Abel Makue, evidence from Martin James Damons:2. 62. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of Henry Abel Makue, evidence from Charles Patrick:2. 63. TAB TPD 886/1956, case of Stephen Goliath, evidence from Stephen Goliath 64. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of Henry Abel Makue, evidence from Makue: 2 65. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of Jacob Goliath, evidence from Martha Goliath 73 Deborah Posel 66. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of Jacob Goliath, annexure A, J Goliath to Director of Census, 19/11/55. 67. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of Jacob Goliath, evidence from Martha Goliath. 68. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of Jacob Goliath, evidence from Martha Goliath. 69. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of Jacob Goliath, evidence from Martha Goliath. 70. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of Stephen Goliath, Appellant's Affidavits. 71. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of Henry Abel Makue, evidence from Makue: 11. 72. TAB TPD 886/1956, the case of Jacob Goliath, evidence from Martha Goliath. 73. The little opposition that the legislation generated focused on the inappropriateness of carrying identity documents, the particular mechanisms of classification proposed, and a resistance to the idea of the state arrogating to itself the right and power to make and fix the definition of an individual's race. 74. The idea of Indians comprising a fourth, distinct race was introduced later, as an amendment to the 1950 Population Registration Act. 75. Union of SA, Senate Debates, 30/5/50. Col 3687. 76. University of Witwatersrand Library (UWL), Historical Papers, AD 1715 24.4, SAIRR, 'Some Points raised by the Deputation of Coloured People Interviewed by the Action Committee, on Tuesday August 16, 1955'. 77. I Hacking (2001) The Social Construction of What? Harvard: 103-4. 78. I don't wish to suggest an overly deterministic reading of the impact of the Population Registration Act. Particularly in more mobile, affluent and politicised groupings of the population, its impact was much more muted, with counter- discourses of race providing alternative frameworks of experience and organisation. 79. Aspects of this debate are surveyed in G Ellison and T de Wet, 'Towards rational debate of "race", population group, ethnicity and culture in South African health research', in 'Multicultural Citizenship in the new South Africa', proceedings of conference at IDASA, December, 15 to 17, 1997. 80. Only in the case of adults old enough to have been classified by the apartheid state would these questions not arise. 74