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Reclassification and Borderlands |
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In one family, one twin was classified as coloured and the other as African.
(Horrell 1958, 70) |
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The ground zero of race categories appeared in the case of an infant of indeterminate appearance who was abandoned on the steps of a hospital in Johannesburg. Because of the requirement of general acceptance and repute as determining one's race classification, it was ludicrous to try to use those criteria to decide the race of Lize Venter, named after the nurse who found her. An article in the Rand Daily Mail (7/10/83, 10) in 1983 announced, "Lize? A flat nose and wavy hair could decide her fate." It noted that "the law makes no provision for abandoned, newborn babies." Lize, more than any other person, represented the moment when the gaps created by the enforced mingling of prototype and Aristotelian category are laid bare, and the absurdities of apartheid law made clear. |
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The case of David Wong displays a more strategic exposure of the laws' internal contradictions. Wong was born in China of Chinese parents, and lived in a white neighborhood of Durban (a city with a large ethnically Asian population). His neighbors, taking advantage of the general acceptance clause of the Population Registration Act, swore a series of affidavits stating that he was White. This was no doubt as well an antiapartheid gesture, read over all. Wong received a white registration card on the basis of the affidavits. Brought to the attention of the press and government, it prompted an outraged reaction by M.P. deKlerk, who thundered: |
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It now appears, however, that there are certain White persons in this country who, again for reasons of their own, are prepared by means of affidavit to assist a person who admits that he is a full-blooded Chinese by descent, that he looks like a Chinese and who in appearance is obviously a Chinese, to be accepted as a White person by declaring an oath that he is accepted as a White person. This happened in spite of the indisputable fact that that was not the opinion of the community, and I challenge any honorable member on the other side to take this Chinese, David Wong, out of the environment in Durban where he is living and to placing in any other environment in Cape Town or Pretoria or Johannesburg and to get the verdict of public opinion as to whether he is a white person. (DeKlerk 1962, 10) |
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An amendment to the Population Registration Act was thereby passed, where anyone who claimed to be of a certain racial descent would be so categorized by the Board. The nested absurdities of the search for |
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