Race as Common Sense: Racial Classification in Twentieth-Century South Africa

Abstract

• This paper analyzes state practices regarding racial classification and its epistemological foundations in 20th-century South Africa.

• It demonstrates how apartheid racial categories, which heavily drew from segregationist state practices, were employed for surveillance and control.

• The state was driven by fantasies of omniscience and omnipotence.

• Apartheid's architects recognized that racial categories were constructs rather than descriptions of real essences.

• This understanding facilitated the bureaucratization of "common sense" notions of racial difference, contributing to the immense power wielded by racial classifiers.

• These constructs were powerfully rooted in everyday life's materiality.

• The state's racial designations were ubiquitous and aligned with lived hierarchies of class and status.

• This meant that apartheid's racial framework was strongly imprinted in the subjective experience of race.

Resume

• This article analyzes state practices of racial classification and their epistemological implications in 20th-century South Africa.

• It demonstrates how apartheid racial categories, largely inspired by those enacted by the segregationist state, were used as instruments of surveillance and control by a state driven by fantasies of omniscience and omnipotence.

• The architects of apartheid's racial classification policies explicitly recognized that racial categories were constructions rather than descriptions of a real nature.

• This version of race allowed for the bureaucratization of the basic notion of racial difference and directly contributed to the immense power exercised by racial classifiers.

• Even as constructs, these categories were powerfully rooted in the materiality of everyday life.

• The ubiquity of state racial designations and the extent to which these designations aligned with lived hierarchies of status and class meant that apartheid's racial grid was strongly imprinted in the subjective experience of race.

Apartheid Social Engineering

• Apartheid social engineering was full of contradictions, uncertainties, irrationalities, and lapses of control.

• Despite these issues, the system persisted for over four decades due to the repressive power of the apartheid state and the systematic bureaucratization and normalization of race.

• South Africa became one of the most thoroughly racialized social orders in the world with the advent of apartheid, building on earlier white supremacist foundations.

Literature on Apartheid

• The existing literature on apartheid has often overlooked the conception of race that underpinned this exercise.

• Many instances simply assumed that apartheid's planners were ardent exponents of the purported science of race.

• Recent work has identified contests surrounding the notion of race which informed the elaboration of Christian-national doctrine, showing the uneven impact of theories of scientific racism in the intellectual and ideological milieu of Afrikaner nationalism.

• However, this stops short of analyzing the imprints of these debates in the making of apartheid as a mode of rule.

• This article focuses on the notion of race shaping state policy and practice after 1948, facilitating the racialization of South African society.

• Apartheid's engineers deliberately drew on a conception of race as a socio-legal construct rather than a scientifically measurable biological essence.

• This decision was influenced by the recognition that mobilizing and defending scientific definitions of race would delay the rapid racial classification of the entire population.

• It also aimed to reinforce the association of race and social class, which was perceived to be under threat.

• Official categories of race were defined and enacted in ways that closely connected them to lifestyle and social standing.

Biological Essentialism

• Biologically essentialist versions of race were not impotent or irrelevant in the making of apartheid.

• In the experience of most white South Africans, race was socially constructed in ways that drew heavily on the myths of racial science.

• The idea of an objective biological basis for racial difference had popular currency as a self-evident truth, part of the racial "common sense" that permeated white South African society.

• The apartheid state's bureaucratization of race as a social construct allowed racial common sense to infiltrate the processes of racial classification.

Racial Classification Practices

• Practitioners of racial classification had considerable latitude in interpreting bureaucratic criteria, drawing on popular biological stereotypes without scientific rigor.

• This article reflects on the continuities and discontinuities in the politics and epistemology of racial classification before and after apartheid.

• There were striking continuities in the content of racial definitions but a significant rupture in their form.

• The apartheid system was distinctive due to its panoptic scope: every South African citizen was compelled to register as a member of an officially designated race, informing every aspect of that person's life.

• This was a consequence of a new vision about the powers and responsibilities of the state.

• Analyzing the construction and bureaucratization of race under apartheid requires understanding the reconfiguration of the state after 1948.

• The first section contextualizes the apartheid period by considering practices of racial classification pre-1948.

• The second section examines the Population Registration Act of 1950, the legislative centerpiece of the state's efforts to produce a nationally comprehensive and uniform system of racial classification.

• This legislation is widely recognized as a cornerstone of the apartheid edifice, yet it has not been subject to sustained analysis.

Racial Classification Pre-1948

• The racialization of governance in South Africa extends beyond the twentieth century.

• The colonies (Cape and Natal) and Boer republics (Transvaal and Orange Free State) merged in 1910, each having its own race-based legislation.

• These shared a commonality: only two racial categories were used, with "colored people" and "natives" subsumed into one category.

• The legislation was variable and imprecise on race, with racial categories lacking definition.

• Definitions produced were vague, and inconsistencies existed between statutes within one state and between their respective corpuses of legislation.

• In the Transvaal, "appearance and descent" were primary criteria for race, without further specification.

• In the Orange Free State, racial definitions drew loosely on "appearance, descent, general acceptance and repute, as well as mode of living," without elaboration.

• In Natal, "natives" were "all members of the aboriginal races or tribes of Africa south of the Equator," without specific criteria of membership.

Union in 1910

• The process of Union in 1910 did little to move beyond this chaotic legal pluralism on race.

• With the advance of segregation, the number of laws based on racial differentiation grew rapidly.

• Paradoxically, the more prolific the legislation, the greater the ambiguities and inconsistencies surrounding the definition of race, as each new law took its own stand on the subject.

• According to A. Suzman, differential legislation based on race in the Union of South Africa reveals the absence of any uniform or consistent basis of race classification, and presents a bewildering variety of statutory definitions of the various racial groups.

• The legislation abounds with anomalies, and the same person may fall into different racial categories under different statutes.

Statutory Definitions

• There was no general constitutional definition of racial categories, leading to each statute concerned with race producing its own rendition.

• The central difficulty was in defining the scope of the category "native," and how to specify the boundary between supposedly "pure" and "mixed" "non-white" races.

• The earliest controversy was sparked by the promulgation of the Native Labour Regulation Act in 1911, which defined "native" to include "colored people."

• This definition was challenged in the courts, and legislators began to recognize three races rather than two.

3 Racial Categories

• Producing three racial categories exacerbated the problem of specifying the conceptual boundaries between them.

• Particular laws defined categories in discrepant ways based on descent, appearance, general acceptance and repute, and mode of living.

• In cases invoking more than one criterion, the law gave no guidance on prioritization.

• The meaning of each criterion remained opaque without relevant evidence.

• Many laws defined a native as "a member of an aboriginal race or tribe of Africa" but did not specify how membership was determined.

• Courts had to decide whether it required one parent, two parents, or grandparents of the same "race or tribe," and whether appearance, repute, and mode of living were separate indices of race or evidence of "aboriginal" descent.

• There were geographical inconsistencies, with some laws invoking "Africa" as a whole and others referring to "Africa south of the Equator."

• Some laws included "American negroes" in the category of "native."

• The statute books created a dense conceptual fog on race, leaving bureaucrats and courts to navigate it.

Judicial Interpretation

• Magistrates and judges across the country took inconsistent positions in adjudicating legal definitions of race.

• The dominant interpretation privileged "descent" over other criteria for defining race.

• The case of Rex v. Radebe and Others (1945) ruled that membership of a race or tribe is membership by descent.

• Descent is the factum probandum, the ultimate matter to be proved.

• From this standpoint, race was understood as a matter of history, proved only in the same way as other historical facts not by evidence as to appearance and habits of life.

Bureaucratic Interpretation

• The Department of Native Affairs administered much of the legislation on race and posited that there was no single test for race, no one factum probandum.

• Racial classifications were discretionary judgments, drawing on multiple sources of evidence, based on the law or administrative regulation in question.

• This position was clear in how the Department of Native Affairs addressed administrative queries on racial classification.

• The Department of Native Affairs accepted that race was not a fixed, stable category but a legal and bureaucratic construct defined differently depending on the purpose of particular legislation.

• Conflicting decisions and judgments were accepted as inevitable.

• Over two decades, the office of the Secretary for Native Affairs attempted to clarify the meaning of "native."

• The term "native" as used in South African statutes is artificial and arbitrary but primarily refers to any unit of the negroid races of Africa.

• Cross breeds do not belong to either of the races from which they spring, but are included with natives under specific laws.

• The legislature has defined "native" in various ways in different enactments and each case is treated regarding the particular Act.

Racial Classification

• For bureaucrats, racial classification was a situational judgment drawing on multiple sources of evidence, varying from case to case.

• Given the diversity of legal definitions and judicial decisions, the Department of Native Affairs considered race reliant on multiple considerations, with no hierarchy.

• Factors included:

  • Is he by general repute or appearance a Native?

  • Does he generally associate with Natives under Native conditions?

  • Does he use one or other Native language as the customary and natural mode of expression?

  • What is his district of domicile?

  • Does he live in a Native location?

  • Does he pay the Native General Tax (if over 18 years of age)

  • Is he married? If so, is his wife a Native and was the marriage by Christian rites or according to Native law and custom?

  • Was any lobolo paid?

Department of Native Affairs

• Having paid "Native taxes" or lobolo could be grounds for classifying someone a "native."

• American "Negroes" could be natives for the purposes of the 1928 Liquor Act, but not otherwise.

• "Persons known as Griquas, Hottentots and Bushmen" would be considered "natives" if they lived in "rural locations under the same conditions as Natives", but not otherwise.

• The Department of Native Affairs' rules of thumb for racial classification made no reference to descent, emphasizing how race was lived.

• This was consistent with the political imperatives of segregation.

• Legislation proliferated, racializing daily lives, especially for non-Whites.

• "Natives" found their mobility subject to state surveillance and restriction; finding a (legal) job in urban areas became the business of designated local officials.

• Securing employment for "natives" and "coloreds" was subject to different taxes and levies, defined by race.

• Rights of land ownership were restricted according to racial type.

• Transport on state-owned railways was structured by race with different races paying different fares and sitting in different coaches.

• Thousands of racial classifications were decided routinely every day by state officials, from native commissioners in rural areas to urban administrators and railway clerks.

• This necessitated rapid judgments about a person's racial type, drawing on accessible facts.

• Elaborate investigations into racial lineage would have been at odds with the political imperative of regulating social and economic life in racially differentiated ways.

Social Meaning of Race

• Testing for race based on descent (the American "one drop of blood" notion) was out of kilter with the social meanings of race.

• Popular discourses of race were shot through with notions of "blood"-"pure" races being "full-blooded"-but the daily lived experience of race derived from immediate experience of how people looked and lived.

• Full-bloodedness was a metaphor for racial purity rather than a literal statement of its preconditions.

• With many supposedly "white" South African families having histories of intermarriage, descent was often a discomforting issue and not the basis to defend white privilege.

• The 1938 Commission on Mixed Marriages suggested relegating the "blood" test to a secondary place in South Africa, due to its relatively small white population where affairs are often known locally.

• While understood as a biological phenomenon, "race" was also a judgment about social standing.

• Constructions of a person's race were based as much on "mode of living" as on physical appearance.

• Readings of bodily differences were tied to judgments about socioeconomic status and culture, assuming biological differences were associated with different ways of living.

• The Mixed Marriages Commission stated different races have differences in intellectual development and degree of civilization, with different habits and standards.

Racial Cataloging

• Racial cataloging was hierarchical.

• Whites were distinguished by their "high" levels of civilization, manifest in education, skill, and affluence.

• Natives were at the bottom due to their alleged lack of civilization, education, and skill; coloreds occupied the middle rank due to their more permanent contacts with civilization and superior skill.

• Shaped by the effects of race, these social hierarchies had the sanction of nature.

• Popular myths about white racial superiority were rooted in circular reasoning about race, with superior socioeconomic standing considered evidence of biological superiority and vice versa.

• Racial hierarchies ratified and legitimized social and economic inequalities.

• Embedded in this thinking was the view that a person's race was obvious and largely uncontroversial.

• The Mixed Marriages Commission stated the designation "European" or "white person" is sufficiently well understood for the purpose of distinguishing in most cases between a European and a non-European.

• In 1950, a Member of Parliament declared they had never experienced difficulties in distinguishing between Europeans and Non-Europeans.

Racial Epistemology

• This popular epistemology of race, as a matter of common sense, seeped into discretionary spaces created by loose bureaucratic guidelines.

• The Department of Native Affairs provided no instructions on measuring appearance, repute, or modes of association, leaving officials to decide.

• Some officials complained about the ambiguity.

• The Secretary for Native Affairs was sometimes asked to manage tensions between criteria in cases of people who looked coloured but lived in native locations or vice versa.

• Correspondence in the Department of Native Affairs archives contains several calls for guidance in managing discrepancies between statutes, magistrates' rulings, and official regulations.

• The volume of queries was minuscule compared to racial judgments produced.

• Despite legal anomalies, bureaucratic practice was relatively uncontroversial, indicating confidence that judgments were based on obvious manifestations of race.

Social and Individual Prejudices

• The idea of racial classification as naming the obvious turned everyone into an expert, drawing on experience rather than expertise.

• What was obvious to one person did not square with another, and there was seldom the need to account for a decision unless contested in court.

• Racial classification gave free reign to social and individual prejudices on what was racially self-evident.

• Some drew conclusions from affluence and education-"it is naturally difficult for an illiterate non-European to prove that he is not a native."

• Others dipped into eugenicist myths and the residue of scientific racism.

• Some claimed to distinguish coloreds by their high cheekbones; another insisted they could "tell a colored with absolute certainty by the way he spits."

• Others referred to "obvious stigmata."

• Parliament was told of a magistrate who recognized colored people by "a certain dullness on the face" or "a shiny face."

• People claimed to have found evidence through "the nail test," "the hair test," and "the eyelid test."

• Medical personnel conducted intimate medical examinations based on genitalia.

• In women, decisions were based on pigmentation in the parting of the hair and anatomy.

• In men, decisions were based on pigmentation of the scrotum and penis and the presence of the Mongolian spot.

• Even in cases of biological criteria, the process was infused with social judgments about status and lifestyle.

• The likelihood of medical examinations or tests was a function of social class, with well-to-do individuals more likely to be spared the humiliation.

Social and Economic Mobility

• The association of racial and class hierarchies, coupled with the state's acceptance that racial classifications were fluid, meant that social and economic mobility could enable a change of race.

• This "unobtrusive back door" was a sore point among right-wing white communities.

• Some individuals born to colored parents who attended colored schools could "pass" for white as adults if they attained education and affluence.

• For "natives," the Representation of Natives Act of 1936 allowed a "native" to petition to be declared a "non-native" if "of repute," proficient in English or Afrikaans, and demonstrating "intellectual or other attainments" and conforming to European standards.

• So the instability of racial definition was temporal as well as spatial and racial identity could be classified differently and change over time.

Racial Classification Paradoxes

• Prior to 1948, racial classification was the site of many paradoxes.

• As the state's segregationist ambitions advanced, the corpus of law grew increasingly messy.

• The task fell to magistrates and judges adjudicating legal anomalies and to officials implementing racially differential laws.

• Approaches were opposed: descent made judicial sense, but had little place in the routine judgments of officials pouring common sense into segregationist institutions.

• Decisions about race were inseparable from perceptions of class and status and no one made much of a fuss.

• In 1921, Patrick Duncan proposed a national population register to allocate a fixed racial identity, but was rejected as impracticable.

• In 1935, a Parliamentary Select Committee reconsidered but remained unenthusiastic.

• The National Party, elected in 1948, rose to this challenge, perceiving it to be central to the production of more effective racial surveillance mechanisms.

The 1950 Population Registration Act

• The National Party acted swiftly to create a new legal and bureaucratic machinery for racial classification.

• The Population Registration Act, passed in 1950, attempted to produce fixed, stable, and uniform criteria for racial classifications binding across all spheres of a person's life.

• Every citizen was to be issued an identity document recording his or her race, as either "a white person, a colored person or a Native", assessed according to the Act's specifications.

• These racial classifications would be recorded in a new national population register, alongside information about the citizens listed.

Ideological Point of View

• From an ideological point of view, the 1950 Population Registration Act demonstrated the National Party's commitment to the preservation of "racial purity."

• This was a central issue during the 1948 election, fanned by the white electorate's fears of the black menace.

• Parliamentary debates contained assertions of white supremacy.

• The Minister of the Interior introduced the bill as showing "the fierce determination of the majority of South Africa to leave no stone unturned to ensure the preservation of a white South Africa."

Legal Consequences

• The Population Registration Act created the legal and administrative equivalents of erecting barriers between races referred to as "jackal-proof fencing."

• The idea was to "demarcate very sharply and very definitely now and for all time"; to "reach the stage where the lines of demarcation are clearly laid down and where everybody knows where he belongs."

• The intention was to designate racial identities in rigid and binding ways, rather than subject to negotiation.

• The Population Registration Act was a tool in remaking the state and an instrument in preserving "racial purity."

"Modernizing" the State

• Union in 1910 established a nationally unified state but incorporated a strong tendency for the decentralization of power to provincial and local authorities.

• Prior to the 1940s, there was little emphasis on regional uniformity or consistency across legislation.

• Each department was responsible for its own legislation without consulting others.

• By the late 1930s, this form of state was questioned causing a need for a centralized, systematic, and multipronged approach to problems of governance, especially for black people.

• A consensus emerged within the white polity on the need for a bigger, more powerful central state, for restoring social order and buttressing white supremacy.

• The National Party saw this as a modernizing project, enabling a more expert, well-planned, and systematic strategy for racial domination.

• The apartheid version of the modern state was sufficiently large, powerful, knowledgeable and well-coordinated to keep each race in its proper place economically, politically, and socially.

Integral Role

• The idea of a national population register was seen as having an integral role to play, promising a single, centralized, and all-encompassing system of racial classification linked to a comprehensive data base.

• For the first time, white people, too, were subjected to copious information-gathering, being required to carry official identity documents as the fulcrum of integrated biographical data.

• This generated the most controversy as one MP put it, "this is extraordinary legislation" leading to everyone being "docketed, ticketed."

• The Bill authorized panoptic surveillance of racial boundaries, allowing police to see a person's identity document, with its racial label, at any time.

Defining "Race"

• The version of race written into the Population Registration Act was shaped by its role in "modernizing" racial domination, although this conceptualization was not without controversy.

• "Pure" races were "full-blooded", racial mixture was an evil thing and brought biological, moral, and social pollution.

• Some protagonists argued the law should define race according to strictly biological criteria.

"Anxiety of Biologic factors"

• Similar reasoning inspired Prime Minister D. F. Malan to propose in 1950 that race should be defined on the basis of "one-sixth of ancestry."

• The prospect of basing racial type on descent among white communities, exposed raw nerves.

• One MP asked, "which of the honourable members… is prepared to say that he knows of no white person in South Africa who has no tinge of non-European blood somewhere?"

• Basing judgements about race wholly on "blood", which needing documented evidence of descent, was at odds with the logic of the national population register, needed a for mass racial classification, to be undertaken efficiently.

• The architects of apartheid race policy recognized that introducing an expectation of scientific precision would scupper the project from the start.

• Eisenlein, the Secretary for Native Affairs, said "it is almost impossible to determine with any certainty which people are natives and which people are coloreds" therefore "it would be an uneconomical waste of time and money to try, throughout the country, to determine a person's race with precision".

• Verwoerd took the view that there were no purely biological determinants of race, and as a sociologist he had taken the view that differences between blacks and whites should be seen in a social rather than a biological context.

Judgement Based On Appearance and Lifestyle

• The Minister of the Interior was resolute that "there is no question of descent or blood" in motivating the Population Registration Bill, preferring to stick to the notion of race based on appearance and lifestyle, as it had come to dominate administrative practice.

• Already, the Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 instructed all marriage officers that "racial appearance and social habits, not birth certificates, must be deciding factors" in pronouncing on racial type, and to highlight the dimensions of race in its provision.

Social Classification

• In debating the Population Registration Bill, the Minister of the Interior argued that a racial classification was a judgment of a person's "social status", made in accordance with the views of their social peers.

• The test of race was "the judgment of society, the conventions which had grown up during the hundreds of years we have been here" where a person's appearance or social associations. i.e.

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