Notes
Dramatic and important events are unfurling in South Africa, but none more fascinating than the paper by Dr Hans Neese of the University of the Western Cape, 'Group without frontiers'. In it he discusses mixed marriages in the early days of Dutch settlement and the undoubted fact that the descendants of some of these unions were first officially regarded, and then, under the pedantic ,nicety of 'apartness', officially classified as, White' and others as 'Coloured'. Though undoubted, this fact touches an exposed Afrikaner nerve. Everyone knows that at the Cape in the 18th century there was a good deal of sexual va et vien. The 'Col- oureds' are descended in roughly equal parts of black African slaves, East Indian or Malay slaves bought from the further Part of the Dutch seaborne empire and the Dutch settlers themselves. Everyone knows too that official classifications are largely artificial. In Capetown one may meet one man, dark and brown-eyed, who is officially 'White', another, light and blue-eyed, who is 'Coloured'. One disting- uished Afrikaner family spells it name in two ways and it has long been a joke among those called Myburg that the 'h' in Myburgh' stands for tottentoe. (Equally there is said to be a dark brown family in Capetown called Heber-Percy.) Of Course, the joke is not equally funny for all. For the poorest Afrikaner, his white- ness is one of the few things he has to boast and it may not be a complete coinci- dence that an extreme and inveterate white supremacist like Mr Arrie Paulus of the (white) Mine Workers Union, a man who makes Dr Verwoerd look pink — political- IY, that is — should himself have such a s. warthy hue and crinkly hair. The joke isn't funny either except in terms of South African macabre, when a 'White' couple gives birth to an apparently 'Coloured' baby and are as a result reclassified. Is there a moral in this? Perhaps. Even those sym- pathetic to the Afrikaners in their plight may be inclined to regard the treatment of the 'Coloureds' (rather than of black Afri- cans) as the great racial crime of Afri- kanerdom. The two peoples are not in a lo. ose or sentimental sense but almost literally brothers; as is sometimes forgot- ten, Afrikaans is the language of two million 'Coloureds' as well as of the Afri- kaners themselves. Many strange things are happening in South Africa and may yet happen. We may, possibly, live to see at the Cape an Afrikaner civilisation founded on principles of culture and language rather than of race and which includes both
those groups, so cruelly divided but so close.
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