'Time for South Africa to ditch apartheid's founding racial categories' - Post

For the past 30 years South African legislation has operated on the very basis of the apartheid institutions which democracy sought to demolish, and it’s time that changed. Every remaining racial statute that is reinforced by the government in legislation, regulation and rhetoric is no more than the state running cover for the bigoted apartheid-created entities of the past.

This is why the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) has written to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) to question the continued reliance on apartheid’s cornerstone racial categories long after apartheid ended and even longer after the statute establishing their enforcement was repealed.

The substance of our approach to the SAHRC is simply this: what does it mean to be a “black person” or a “white person”? This question is pertinent to determining the role these symbols carry in a non-racial South Africa that is attempting to move away from racial prejudice and bigotry while making amends for its historical consequences.

Surveying the history of racial classification and of present systemic racialisation is sobering.

It has been 33 years since the repeal of the law establishing racial classification, the Population Registration Act of 1950, and the law determining where, by race, South Africans were permitted to live, Group Areas Act of 1950. These laws entrenched and perpetrated systemic racial divisions in society and while these principles are abjured by constitutional non-racialism in the present day, race remains a key element of many Acts of Parliament today. The IRR demonstrates this in its Index of Race Laws − a database of all legislation that relies on or incorporates racial classification, from the Union in 1910 to the present day.

The Index, which was last updated in October 2023, recounts the 313 racial Acts that were adopted between 1910 and 2023. Many of these were repealed leading up to and immediately after the fall of apartheid in 1994, and, by 1996, there were as few as 52 race laws on our books. However, this number has nearly tripled since then, with 141 racialised pieces of legislation becoming enacted either as operative or active law.

Without definitions of race identifying the groups to whom these statutes apply, all 141 and counting lack any rational basis. The Employment Equity Act (EEA) fails miserably at providing the definitions and spectacularly at upholding them. Neither should it. After all, how does one define races without relying on apartheid caricatures and demeaning examinations such as the ‘pencil test’? The EEA defines the category of ‘black people’ with the catch-all phrase, "which means Africans, Coloureds and Indians”, yet orders different treatment of these ‘black people’ in the Employment Equity targets, suggesting that ‘black’ is in fact not a coalescing term of all these groups at all.

This obfuscation existed under the Group Areas Act, which used ‘coloured’ as a generic term to include members of the white race who were cohabiting or married to people of races other than the white race. The insidious and inherent racial hierarchical permeations illustrate that these categories exist for the sole purpose of valuing groups differently and legislating different treatment of people at the expense of racial equality and harmony.

Regrettably, the SAHRC has been a no-show on this issue. As a Section 9 institution, the SAHRC is uniquely and constitutionally mandated to adjudicate on such matters. Its silence on whether these artificially drawn divisions have a place in democracy has been dragging for years.

The SAHRC was commissioned by Parliament in 2021 to preside over racial categories when Glen Snyman, a teacher from Oudtshoorn and long-time detractor of racial classification, was charged with fraud for classifying himself as ‘African’ rather than ‘coloured’ on an employment application. Racial reclassification was a similarly punishable crime under apartheid and while opposing it then would have you counted among the courageous and defiant rebels against apartheid, today it earns you castigation, as if you are guilty of protecting white dominance and threatening racial justice.

The SAHRC’s Second National Conference on Racism: Towards Social Cohesion, Non-racialism, and the Eradication of Racial Polarisation and Tension in 2021 purported to address “the issue racial classification”. It is not clear whether this was achieved. The report alludes to the adverse psychological impact of ‘racial denialism’. A few ideas can be deduced from these comments, but it would be preferable for the SAHRC to provide clarity and advise the country of its stance on the continued dependence on racial classification in legislation, despite the constitutional commitment to non-racialism.

While the SAHRC evidently finds it difficult to bring itself to engage with the issue, Mr Snyman’s case attracted support across ideological camps, uniting the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), the Democratic Alliance (DA), and some members of the African National Congress (ANC) in denouncing racial categorisation and arguing for it be jettisoned. The EFF’s provincial chairperson, Melikhaya Xego, chastised the Western Cape education department for what he suggested was an attempt to undermine Mr Snyman's dignity, and drew attention to the “negative psychological ramifications of apartheid classifications on people’s lives today”.

When it was brought to the attention of then education MEC Debbie Schäfer in the DA’s Western Cape administration, she expressed horror at the department’s reinforcing what she described as “one of the many evils of apartheid’s…classification of people by their so-called race”. The matter made its way to Parliament, where the now returning Minister of Home Affairs, Aaron Motsoaledi, agreed with the EFF and the DA and condemned racial classification as a tool of population control, saying that his department would refer to nationality rather than race.

The sayings ‘words create worlds’ and ‘language creates reality’ are true of apartheid’s mental institutions. Words have the ability to heighten or erase consciousness and as South Africa moves away from apartheid, it must be freed from its persisting mental prisons. It is time that, with the help of the SAHRC, the country’s democratic government, which pays lip service to non-racialism yet has doubled-down on racialisation at every turn, finally abandoned apartheid’s founding racial categories.

Makone Maja is the campaign manager at the Institute of Race Relations (IRR)