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your grandfather couldn’t keep his hands off the chocolate, eh? But it’s not your fault you’re
colored, so keep trying. Because if you work hard enough you can erase this taint from your
bloodline. Keep on marrying lighter and whiter and don’t touch the chocolate and maybe,
maybe, someday, if you’re lucky, you can become white.”
Which seems ridiculous, but it would happen. Every year under apartheid, some colored
people would get promoted to white. It wasn’t a myth; it was real. People could submit
applications to the government. Your hair might become straight enough, your skin might
become light enough, your accent might become polished enough—and you’d be reclassified
as white. All you had to do was denounce your people, denounce your history, and leave your
darker-skinned friends and family behind.
The legal definition of a white person under apartheid was “one who in appearance is
obviously a white person who is generally not accepted as a coloured person; or is generally
accepted as a white person and is not in appearance obviously a white person.” It was
completely arbitrary, in other words. That’s where the government came up with things like
the pencil test. If you were applying to be white, the pencil went into your hair. If it fell out,
you were white. If it stayed in, you were colored. You were what the government said you
were. Sometimes that came down to a lone clerk eyeballing your face and making a snap
decision. Depending on how high your cheekbones were or how broad your nose was, he
could tick whatever box made sense to him, thereby deciding where you could live, whom you
could marry, what jobs and rights and privileges you were allowed.
And colored people didn’t just get promoted to white. Sometimes colored people became
Indian. Sometimes Indian people became colored. Sometimes blacks were promoted to
colored, and sometimes coloreds were demoted to black. And of course whites could be
demoted to colored as well. That was key. Those mixed bloodlines were always lurking,
waiting to peek out, and fear of losing their status kept white people in line. If two white
parents had a child and the government decided that child was too dark, even if both parents
produced documentation proving they were white, the child could be classified as colored,
and the family had to make a decision. Do they give up their white status to go and live as
colored people in a colored area? Or would they split up, the mother taking the colored child
to live in the ghetto while the father stayed white to make a living to support them?
Many colored people lived in this limbo, a true purgatory, always yearning for the white
fathers who disowned them, and they could be horribly racist to one another as a result. The
most common colored slur was boesman. “Bushman.” “Bushie.” Because it called out their
blackness, their primitiveness. The worst way to insult a colored person was to infer that they
were in some way black. One of the most sinister things about apartheid was that it taught
colored people that it was black people who were holding them back. Apartheid said that the
only reason colored people couldn’t have first-class status was because black people might
use coloredness to sneak past the gates to enjoy the benefits of whiteness.
That’s what apartheid did: It convinced every group that it was because of the other race
that they didn’t get into the club. It’s basically the bouncer at the door telling you, “We can’t
let you in because of your friend Darren and his ugly shoes.” So you look at Darren and say,
“Screw you, Black Darren. You’re holding me back.” Then when Darren goes up, the bouncer
says, “No, it’s actually your friend Sizwe and his weird hair.” So Darren says, “Screw you,
Sizwe,” and now everyone hates everyone. But the truth is that none of you were ever getting