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

egulation. The means to this end were legislation, social and spatial
control.
According to eugenics, being a member of a ’race’ meant a racial duty
attached to certain norms of bodily behaviour. Those who did not follow
these norms revealed themselves as racially unworthy. An individual had
to prove his or her racial worthiness continuously. The most important
duty for a member of a race was to practice racial purity, since bastardisation
was believed to cause the decay of a race (Röhr 1996: 97). Ideally, a
white person and the white race were not only superior to any other race,
but pure and intact.
In South Africa these eugenic thoughts emerged in both English and
Afrikaner academics’ work, which were laden with racial essentialism
(Crapanzano 1986: 20). Their thinking deeply influenced the ideological
fathers of apartheid (Ribeiro 1995: 9).
“The mixing of blood between the white and black races produces
inferior human material in biological terms (physically and mentally).
Miscegenation between whites and non-whites is therefore shown by
biological research to be detrimental.” (Cronjé 1946: 74.)
An ability to abstain sexually and to control the direction of sexual desires
was therefore a sign of a pure race. Since the Africans were seen as childlike,
they were not expected to be capable of managing their instincts,
whereas white men had to fight the temptation, and not spread their seed
among the lower races. 79 This was presumably easy for a racially worthy
man, but for an already weak specimen, such as a poor white, this task
might prove impossible. Cronjé, a vital philosopher behind apartheid,
was forever afraid of bloedvermenging (mixing of blood) between whites
and people of colour (Ribeiro 1995: 25).
The African was seen as racially polluting, physically dirty, and
equipped with sexually inferior habits and properties. He threatened the
cleanliness and health of a society. In South Africa (as everywhere else)
racism is combined with the images of sexuality and dirt. Africans were
made to live in the midst of physical dirt under conditions that also reflect
their sexual denouncement (Dworkin 1987: 205-207).
79 White women were scarce in the colonial hinterlands. This fact provides a new viewpoint
of the shibboleths of the ‘white man’s burden’. The existence of a large ‘mulato’ or
‘mestizo’ or ‘coloured’ population in all the former colonial countries proves that these
ideals of racial exclusivity in sexual behaviour were never attained.
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