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OF THE WHITE GROUP. And, of course, people were forever being prosecuted for disobeying one or other of these instructions. (Hope 1980, 20) |
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For apartheid to function at this level of detail, people had to be unambiguously categorizable by race. Despite the legal requirement for certainty in race identification, however, this task was not to prove so easy. Many people did not conform to the typologies constructed under the law: especially people whose appearance differed from their assigned category, or who lived with those of another race, spoke a different language from the assigned group, or had some other historical deviation from the pure type. New laws and amendments were constantly being debated and passed (see, for example, Rand Daily Mail 1966). By 1985, the corpus of racial law in South Africa exceeded 3,000 pages (Lelyveld 1985, 82). |
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Both the scientific theories about race and the street sense of terms were confused. Prototypical and Aristotelian senses of categorization were used simultaneously, as with the example of the ICD shown in chapter 3. The original official sorting by race after the 1950 Population Registration Act derived from the categories checked on the 1951 census returns. An identity number was given to each individual at that time (Horrell 1958, 19). The census director was in charge of deciding everyone's racial classification, on the basis of the census data, and, where necessary, other records of vital statistics. Horrell notes, "But this classification is by no means formal. Section Five(3) of the Population Registration Act provides that if at any time it appears to the Director that the classification of a person is incorrect, after giving notice to the person concerned, specifying in which respect the classification is incorrect, and affording him or her an opportunity of being heard, he may alter the classification in the register" (1958, 4). So in the case of apartheid, we see the scientistic belief in race difference on the everyday level and an elaborate formal legal apparatus enforcing separation. At the same time, a much less formal, more prototypical approach uses an amalgam of appearance and acceptanceand the on-the-spot visual judgments of everyone from police and tram drivers to judgesto perform the sorting process on the street. |
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The conflation of Aristotelian and prototypical categories for race classification has deep historical roots in South Africa and elsewhere. The concept of racial types took firm hold in the nineteenth century across a range of natural and social sciences, and it was embraced by the architects of apartheid. At the same time, the pure types existed |
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