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described to show the absurdities that may arise. Mr. T. is in appearance obviously Coloured, and his sons and daughter are near-White: his sons, in fact, served as Europeans in the army. Both of them now live as Coloured men and were so classified. But Mr.T. trades in an African location and wants to continue doing so. It is said that he asked the official to classify him as an African: certainly this was done" (1958, 53). |
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In one infamous example a jazz musician, Vic Wilkinson of Cape Town, was born to a coloured man and a white woman, and originally he was classified as white. After apartheid he was reclassified as coloured and then twice more reclassified as he married women of different races and moved to different neighborhoods. (Note that the remarriages took place outside of South Africa for legal reasons.) Finally, both he and his Asian wife Farina were reclassified as coloured, allowing them and their children to live together. At the age of fifty, Vic received a new birth certificate and crossed the race lines for the fifth time (see figure 6.2, Sunday Times 1984). |
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The barriers to movement to a less privileged class were of course more permeable that those to passing "up." The language originally used to encode the classifications was itself inconsistent as well. Officials entering vital statistics in the preapartheid era frequently used the term "mixed." In many cases, this caused later confusion. "It was mentioned earlier that some White people, on sending for the first time for their birth certificate find that their racial group has been entered as ''mixed,'' but that, on further investigation, this may be found to imply nothing more than that one parent was, for example, an immigrant from Sweden, while the other was an Afrikaans-speaking White woman" (Horrell 1958, 73). Again, we see here the conflation of prototypical ("mixed") categories with the attempted Aristotelian definition (the precise, exclusive categories aspired to by Nationalists). In this example, the formal-informal mixture itself produces organizational conditions that favored both structural and face-to-face ad hoc discrimination, the one reinforcing the other. Star (1989a) describes a similar case with scientific anomalies, where anomalies arising in one sector of research may be answered by nonanomalous research drawn from another, thus obscuring the original difficulty. In this case, as with the conflation of prototypical and Aristotelian categories, biases become deeply embedded in both practice and infrastructure. The conflation gives a terrible power of ownership of both the formal and the informal to those in power. The use of both simultaneously is |
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