The Classification of South Africa’s Mixed-Heritage Peoples 1910–2011: A Century of Conflation, Contradiction, Containment, and Contention

Abstract

Given that South Africa’s first contact with European settlers occurred more than 350 years ago, it is not surprising that the country has large and well-established communities of mixed-heritage peoples. Despite notorious anti-miscegenation legislation—promulgated both before (the Immorality Act No. 5 of 1927) and after (the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act No. 55 of 1949) the introduction of ‘formal’ apartheid—the treatment of mixed-heritage peoples was primarily one of containment involving the classification of all non-European and non-Native individuals into a single category (‘Coloured’), which conflated those of mixed heritage with ostensibly ‘non-mixed’ (sub)groups—such as those of Chinese, Malay, and Indian origin. However, the apartheid state also established mechanisms through which officials, members of the public, and individuals themselves could apply to alter ‘population group’ classifications, which resulted in several thousand ‘reclassifications’, both requested and imposed. Nonetheless, for the vast majority of South Africans, their ‘population group’ classification became an ingrained marker of quasi-racial identity that continues to this day, while the introduction of an ‘Other’ census category and legal disputes concerning the composition of the ‘Coloured’ category reveal that mixed-heritage individuals once again pose a substantive dilemma to census takers and policy makers, and also perhaps to their own sense of place in the ‘Rainbow Nation’.