The Making of a Good White - E-thesis - Helsinki.fi

make it likely that some people did pass for white in Epping Garden Village
during the apartheid era.
The absence of conflicts regarding racial classification in the archival
material is more likely to be explained by the fact that the apartheid state
at this time offered bureaucratic channels to determine race. The power
to decide the race of people was shifted from the CHL to the Race Classification
Board.
This hypothesis is supported by correspondence found in the State Archives.
This is a discussion on whether the supposedly coloured children
of the Jacobs family have a right to education in EGV (CSA: C 32/605/
G). Although a senior CHL official was involved, this issue was not mentioned
in the minutes or reports of the CHL. The absence of this material
is an indication that the CHL had lost its sole mandate to decide on the
whiteness of the residents at the beginning of the apartheid era. This does
not mean that these decisions were no longer made. The CHL kept its
power where it could, for example when it was deciding who was White
enough to buy its houses.
“The question whether a buyer is white or not is solely dependent on
the decision of the Board of Directors of the CHL according to a majority
decision of those present at a properly convened meeting of the
Board of Directors and said decision is fi nal and binding for all parties.”
170 (CHL, SWR: 1955.)
As Graham Watson (1970) has shown, the new means of racial classification
were not necessarily more logical than the previous ones. The
different officials who were supposed to determine people’s ’race’ were
frequently inconsistent in their policies. Often when one institution acknowledged
a person’s whiteness, another institution would not do so.
In the archival material there were some families stuck in this bureaucratic
dead-end situation, since a member or members of the family were
defined as Coloured (CSA: C 32/605/G). In these situations, a family had
a limited choice. They could either keep on living in the area and, if the
children were labelled Coloured, try to place their children in another,
more tolerant school, or they could leave the area altogether. They could
170 The original text is in Afikaans: “Die vraag of ‘n koper ‘n blanke is al dan nie, hang
uitsluitlik af van die beslissing van die Direksie van die Stedelike Behuisingshbond-
Utiliteitsmaatskappy volgens ‘n meerderheidsbesluit van die aanwesiges op ‘n behoorlik
byeengroepte vergadering van die Direksie en sodanig beslissing is fi naal en bindend vir
alle partye.”
197