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their category. The sleuths had "pounded on the door and then pushed past her and seated themselves in the living room without invitation. They had demanded identity cards, birth certificates, and a marriage license and had asked whether her husband was white. Mrs. Botha told them to wait for her husband's return, but they persisted in the interrogation" (Bigart 1960, 14). |
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The men questioned neighbors and the couple's four-year old son, focusing on a visitor to the house on the two previous Sundays. A coloured man had been seen on their doorstep. Botha, a scrap-metal dealer, was interested in purchasing a used car from him. Neighbors had concluded that he was a relative, and thus that the Bothas were passing for white and hiding their "coloured blood." The network of suspicion, spying, and the search for purity implied here affected every aspect of South African life for those in all racial categories. |
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The actual reclassification hearings were usually done in camera. The procedure was kept highly secret by those at the Population Registration Office. "No observer is in any circumstances allowed to attend. Legal representation is permitted; but as an inquiry by the Board is not analogous to a law suit, the ordinary rules of court do not apply. The officials may ask any question they wish" (Horrell 1958, 31). |
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Like the tuberculosis patients discussed in the previous chapter, people's biographical trajectories were severely disrupted by the reclassification process. Many lived for years in limbo; it could take months or years for the appeal to be heard and the person to be reclassified. It was, as one of Roth's respondents in the previous chapter declared the case to be with waiting and negotiating for a tuberculosis classification: "an ungraded classroom." A time out of time: |
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Even if appeals succeed, the people concerned have often suffered much anxiety and hardship before their cases are settled. In 1961 a family in Cape Town was classified Coloured. The eldest daughter had to postpone her marriage to a white man, while the second daughter had to leave a white school. For eight years she studied by correspondence: her parents did not want to prejudice their case by sending her to a Coloured school. The son's job was threatened. They all agreed to commit suicide if they could not get the classification altered. On reading their story in a newspaper, someone in Johannesburg made them an anonymous loan of R500 to cover the expense of an appeal, and this proved successful. (Horrell 1969, 27) |
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Once heard, the process was an open degradation ceremony (Goffman 1959). The process stripped people of identity, of uniqueness, and |
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