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If you're black and pretend you're Coloured, the police has the pencil test. |
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The pencil test? |
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Oh, yes, sir. They sticks a pencil in your hair and you has to bend down, and if your hair holds the pencil, that shows it's too woolly, too thick. You can't be Coloured with woolly hair like that. You got to stay black, you see. (Sowden 1968, 184) |
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Because of the ambiguous nature of both the notion of general appearance and of general acceptance, the burden of evidence fell on the person desiring to be reclassified. At the same time, the Population Board fostered the system of informers where someone trying to pass (typically as white or coloured) could be turned in to the classification board for reexamination. Horrell notes the case of Mr. A, who was turned in to the Population Registration Office by an informer and called before them to prove his whiteness. Questioners asked if he knew of any coloured blood in his family and noted their hair, eyes, and skin color. |
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Mr. A said, "It was a terrible shock to me, and more so to my sons. The whole future of my family now rests on a decision from Pretoria." The worst part, he added, was that the very act of trying to prove himself European suggested that there might be some suspicion in the matter" (Horrell 1958, 34). |
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They are both White and not White at the same time. They are in a White school and there they "must" be White: the law is witness to that. Yet "everybody" knows that they are not White, not really. They are something in between. But the law, which is an ass, knows no in-betweeness. It dichotomizes inflexibly, imposing a clumsy disjunction upon the subtly variegated flux of reality.
(Watson 1970, 114) |
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In the early preapartheid days, it was easier to change race category than it became later. Kahn notes that "between 1911 and 1921 . . . some fifty thousand individuals disappeared from the colored population rolls" (1966, 51). Many families living in the categorical borderlands went to great lengths to establish themselves as white, keeping photos (sometimes fabricated) of white ancestors (Boronstein 1988, 55). |
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Under apartheid, merely associating with someone of the wrong group could become evidence of membership and thus of race. Horrell |
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