The basis of the National Party‟s policy of separate development was the Population Registration Act - Act 30 of 1950, which classified the entire population according to racial groups. The Population Registration Act put all South Africans into three racial categories:67 Bantu (Black/African), White, and Coloured (mixed race). A fourth category: Asian (Indians and Pakistanis), was later added.Race became the determinate for all social interaction. The „racial category‟ was everything. Individual persons did not exist outside the group categorization.68 The group defined and determined where and with whom the individual person could live, work, own land, worship, socialize, attend school, obtain health services, play sport, enjoy entertainment, or marry.
When the Act was first passed in 1950, it defined racial groups relatively loosely. A Coloured person was defined as “a person who is not a [W]hite person nor generally accepted as a member of an aboriginal race or tribe of Africa”.69 However, the Act was revised six times to tighten loopholes. Amendments to the Act sub-divided Coloured
66 Sachs, A. Justice in South Africa. University of California Press, Berkeley. 1973. p 175.
67 The study will use the terms „African‟, „Indian‟ and „Coloured‟ as per apartheids racial classification system only to address concepts of race and racism defined by the apartheid system. The terms are inevitable when dealing with South Africa‟s racially defined apartheid society.
68 Horrell, M. Race Classification in South Africa: Its effects on human beings. (Fact Paper) The South African Institute of Race Relations. 1958.
69 Ibid.
South Africans into further categories such as Cape Coloured, Cape Malay, Griqua, Chinese and other Coloured.70
The first Race Classification Review Board was established in 1954. In January 1958, a Population Registration Office was opened. In September 1959, it was announced that the board of review was to be replaced by a special appeals board to be set up in the Transvaal, the Cape Province and possibly in Natal. At first, race classification was based largely on general appearance rather than any notion of racial purity. By 1960, the criteria had become acceptance.71
Informers could raise questions about a person‟s racial classification or acceptability as a member of a particular race group, at a cost of R20. This objection would lead to an investigation of the individual‟s background and social relationships.72 Even if a person was deemed to be White but spent too much time socially with people from other race groups, that person ran the risk of being re-classified into a „lesser‟ race group, according to apartheid‟s racial classification system. According to Muriel Horrell, researcher at the South African Institute of Race Relations, “this method served to prevent friendships across an arbitrarily determined colour line”.73
In February 1958, the Cape Times reported the Minister of the Interior as saying that the Population Registration Act served to assist people by removing all uncertainty, unease and the “cloud which hovered over them”. However, by the end of 1961, the newspaper reported that there were at least 20 000 people in the Cape Peninsular alone who were still uncertain of whether they were officially White or Coloured. Every year the official Government Gazette would register the number of people who had been re-classified on racial grounds. By 1984, there were still re-classifications.74
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid.
74 Valentine, S. “Beyond Identity: All human beings belong to the same race” Sunday Times Heritage Project. April 17th 2008.
In 1958, The Star reported the story of a man who was re-classified as Coloured even though his European lineage could be traced. He lost his job as an artisan at the railway station because only Europeans were allowed to be on the artisan pay schedule. When his European wife heard of his plight, she was deeply ashamed and filed for a divorce.
Having lost everything, the man tried to commit suicide by taking a bottle of aspirin. He was very ill and eventually recovered. His wife fell ill while attending their divorce case hearing and never recovered. She died three years later. The man was rejected by his family and friends and had to begin a new life as a Coloured person.75
In 1967, a Cape Town welterweight boxer, Ronnie van der Walt, received a letter from the Ministry of the Interior informing him that in terms of the Population Registration Act, he was classified as Coloured. Van der Walt had attended a Whites only school and boxed in a more lucrative Whites only circuit. The letter was also sent to the Boxing Board, and Van der Walt was taken off the bill. Even if Van der Walt was able to prove his White status, he ran the risk of exposing his wife‟s Coloured origins and being accused of contravening the Immorality Act. He left the country and moved to Britain, his boxing career in South Africa ruined.76
The racial hierarchy in South Africa during the apartheid era, which branded other race groups as inferior to Whites, has since the beginning of South African history caused a myriad of sufferings and difficulties for children born of inter-racial relationships. These children posed a challenge to the racial order. The ruling powers of the time therefore construed them as misfits who belonged to no racial group. The Population Registration Act served to place this group of people into a racial category of their own, thereby effectively dealing with the „problem‟ of mixed race children and safeguarding the
„purity‟ of the White race.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid.
Muriel Horrell argued that the intention of the Act was to prevent the „passing‟ from one group to another.77 According to Van de Berghe, the Act served to legally entrench the racial caste hierarchy of South African society.78 Reddy argued that the Nationalists needed to pass legislation on individual identity along racial and ethnic lines, so as to make legal that which appeared to pervade society socially. Firstly, the fear of miscegenation and secondly, since the state despotically imposed racial identities on its citizens, the Population Registration Act allowed the state to act as the final judge when these classifications were contested.79