The Coloureds of South Africa

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32977, 25 July 1972, Page 4

The Coloureds of South Africa

A 50-minute documentary on the Coloureds in South Africa screens from CHTV3 next Monday evening.

To be classified Coloured in South Africa means being officially labelled a person of mixed race. For nearly 25 years the Nationalist Government’s policy on apartheid has legally enforced the separation of the country’s racial groups. This regrouping and separation is clearly designed to produce the ultimate dream of most Afrikaners—a sort of federation of racial areas designed to ensure the survival of central white political leadership.

In the social hierarchy of South Africa the white man is at the top, the coloured in the middle and the African at the bottom. Advocates of apartheid claim their philosophy will eventually remove any injustices the system now carries. Ultimately it is envisaged that Africans will rule themselves in their own areas. But even South Africa’s Prime Minister can see no solution for the Coloured peoples. This is a problem, he said, to be solved by their children or their children’s children. This is the third film made by Hugh Burnett in South Africa. “The Colour Line” is about the paradoxes produced by a society which insists on classifying people by race, only to discover that, one groups does not fit into the political philosophy of apartheid, because more is at stake than purity of race. Some white people, if their genealogy is studied, are not racially pure at all. Not long ago legal action was threatened by a descendant of Paul Kruger when suggestions were made that there was black blood in the family. More recently a white woman was reclassified as Coloured in order that she could marry the Chinese father of her three children. Marriage across the colour line is forbidden by law. And even if no actual reclassification takes place, Coloureds sometimes manage to pass

for white, at a heavy price in loss of family relationships and friends. This programme takes a close look at what it is like to be Coloured in South Africa today and, among other things, visits a blood bank where the blood, by law, is labelled with the race of the donor.