Race/Sex Taboo in History and Theory

“The problem of the twentieth century,” Du Bois (Reference Du Bois1994) argued, was “the problem of the color line” (p. 9). This was certainly true in the United States and South Africa (Fanon Reference Fanon2008; Fredrickson Reference Fredrickson1981, Reference Fredrickson2002). These settler societies, separated by the Atlantic Ocean, were shaped by interconnected histories of racialized slavery and segregation, the “highest stage of white supremacy” (Cell Reference Cell1982). America’s first “racial” laws were enacted to regulate sex between free Europeans and enslaved Africans in Virginia during the 1660-1670s (Higginbotham and Kopytoff, Reference Higginbotham and Kopytoff1989; Moran Reference Moran2001; Pascoe Reference Pascoe2010). Contrary to English common law, Virginia’s laws decreed that children born from enslaved mothers would be slaves, irrespective of their paternity (Kopytoff and Higginbotham, Reference Higginbotham and Kopytoff1989). The first South African race/sex laws, introduced in Cape Town in the 1680s, also regulated slavery and determined slave status through matrilineal descent (Heese Reference Heese1971; Hendricks Reference Hendricks and Erasmus2001; Malherbe Reference Malherbe2006; Mason Reference Mason2003; van den Berghe Reference van den Berghe1960;). The rape and coerced concubinage of enslaved women by European men was common, generally tolerated, and economically incentivized, not least because it expanded the embodied capital of the enslaved population (Beinart Reference Beinart2001; van den Berghe Reference van den Berghe1960; Hendricks Reference Hendricks and Erasmus2001; Wells Reference Wells1998). However, even consensual sex between White women and Black men was socially forbidden (Graham Reference Graham2012; Hendricks Reference Hendricks and Erasmus2001; Myrdal Reference Myrdal1995; Posel Reference Posel2004; Stoler Reference Stoler2002).

Historian Evelyn Higginbotham (Reference Higginbotham1992) argued that “cross-cultural and historical studies of miscegenation law reveal shifting, arbitrary, and contradictory definitions of race” (p. 253; Du Bois Reference Du Bois2014). These shifting, contradictory meanings of “race” were always constructed in relation to gender, sexuality, and class (Bozzoli Reference Bozzoli, Beinart and Dubow1995; Clancy-Smith and Gouda, Reference Clancy-Smith and Gouda1998; Davis Reference Davis1981; Hall Reference Hall2017; Hendricks Reference Hendricks and Erasmus2001; Higginbotham Reference Higginbotham1992; Nagel Reference Nagel2003; Posel Reference Posel2004; Schields and Herzog, Reference Schields and Herzog2021; Stoler Reference Stoler2002). Stoler (Reference Stoler2002) writes that “the categories of colonizer and colonized were secured through notions of racial difference constructed in gender terms” (p. 75). Tim Keegan (Reference Keegan2001) posits that “gendered conceptions of sexual morality were central to definitions of racial respectability and belonging” (p. 460). “The white woman’s role,” Keegan (Reference Keegan2001) continues, “was to ensure that racial standards were maintained free of contaminating influences and biological defilement. Racial purity was her responsibility” (p. 464). South Africa’s White community never exceeded 22% of the total population (Beinart and Dubow, Reference Beinart and Dubow1995; Beinart Reference Beinart2001), and settler fears about being “swamped” by Black masses were commonly expressed and exploited through what Cheryl Hendricks (Reference Hendricks and Erasmus2001) and Lynn Thomas (Reference Thomas2003) call the “rule of uterine descent” and the “politics of the womb.”

Sexuality was fundamental to colonial politics (Furlong Reference Furlong1983, Reference Furlong1994; Hyslop Reference Hyslop1995; Jackson Reference Jackson, Jackson and Manktelow2015, Reference Jackson2020; Klausen Reference Klausen2015, Reference Klausen2022; Posel Reference Posel2004, Reference Posel2005; Ratele Reference Ratele2009a, Reference Ratele, Steyn and van Zyl2009b; Schields and Herzog, Reference Schields and Herzog2021; Stoler Reference Stoler2002; Voss and Casella, Reference Voss and Casella2011). Michel Foucault (Reference Foucault1990) argued that sexuality constitutes an “especially dense transfer point for relations of power” (p. 103). Historical sexual regulation schemes reveal how modern nation-states used various biopolitical techniques to discipline bodies, desires, and populations (Foucault Reference Foucault1990; Higginbotham Reference Higginbotham1992; Schields and Herzog, Reference Schields and Herzog2021; Stoler Reference Stoler2002). Queer scholars have written about “dissident sexualities” in southern Africa, detailing how queer people navigated the settler “heteropatriarchy” and the criminalization of homosexual intimacies (Elder Reference Elder2003; Epprecht Reference Epprecht2004; Hoad Reference Hoad2006). However, the overregulation of heterosexual, reproductive sexuality—as a primary mechanism of racial boundary-making and maintenance—had been largely overlooked in the apartheid historiography until recent decades (Furlong Reference Furlong1983, Reference Furlong1994; Hyslop Reference Hyslop1995; Klausen Reference Klausen, Schields and Herzog2021, Reference Klausen2022; Martens Reference Martens2007).

Indeed, prior to the 1980s, historians often refused to acknowledge race and racism: “On account of its divisiveness, the salience of race has at times almost been wished away” (Coetzee Reference Coetzee1991; Dubow Reference Dubow1995; p. 4; Klausen Reference Klausen, Schields and Herzog2021; Posel Reference Posel2001a). Marxist historians often minimized racism as epiphenomenal to class-conflict under conditions of the (White) capitalist ownership of cheap (Black) labor power (Hall Reference Hall1980; O’Meara Reference O’Meara1983; Posel Reference Posel, Beinart and Dubow1995, Reference Posel2001b; Wolpe Reference Wolpe, Beinart and Dubow1995). Marxist economic histories were indispensable to the study of colonial capitalism, “Grand Apartheid,” and the exploitative African migrant labor system which fueled South Africa’s industrializing economy (Beinart Reference Beinart2001; Bundy Reference Bundy1972; Wolpe Reference Wolpe, Beinart and Dubow1995). However, Stuart Hall (Reference Hall1980) rightly argued that economic perspectives failed to explain other social phenomena which were not reducible to economic relations, and which required a more sociological engagement. So-called “liberal” historians also avoided studying racial ideologies, deeming them “pseudo-scientific” and unworthy of serious scholarship (Dubow Reference Dubow1995, Reference Dubow2015; Klausen Reference Klausen, Schields and Herzog2021; Posel Reference Posel2001b). Historians of Afrikaner nationalism minimized the influence of eugenic theories on apartheid ideology, downplaying the influence of miscegenation taboo on Afrikanerdom’s overarching narrative of “political survival” (cf. Dubow Reference Dubow1995; Giliomee Reference Giliomee2009; Moodie Reference Moodie1975; Walters and van der Waal, Reference Walters and van der Waal2020).

Saul Dubow (Reference Dubow1995) mentioned that the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) “perhaps more than any other statute, symbolized the meaning of apartheid for supporters and opponents alike” (p. 182). More recently, Jeremy Martens (Reference Martens2007) and Susanne Klausen (Reference Klausen, Schields and Herzog2021) proposed that the Immorality Acts (1927, 1950) constituted legal “cornerstones,” the “legislative foundations of apartheid” (Martens Reference Martens2007, p. 225). However, the symbolic and psycho-affective dimensions of these laws have not been adequately examined (Coetzee Reference Coetzee1991; Furlong Reference Furlong1994; Hyslop Reference Hyslop1995; Klausen Reference Klausen, Schields and Herzog2021, Reference Klausen2022). “The apartheid state,” Achille Mbembe (Reference Mbembe, Enwezor and Bestor2013) argues, “was first and foremost a psychotic state” (p. 133). From a postcolonial psycho-analytic perspective, racisms unfurl as collective psychoses, resulting from the disavowal of desire for difference (Coetzee Reference Coetzee1991; Fanon Reference Fanon2008; Hall Reference Hall2017; Ratele Reference Ratele, Steyn and van Zyl2009b; Seshadri-Crooks Reference Seshadri-Crooks2000). American historian Winthrop Jordan (Reference Jordan1968) insisted that miscegenation fear emerged from the recognition of the “self” in the “other”: “[The] irreconcilable conflict between desire and aversion for interracial sexual union…rested on the bedrock fact that white men perceived Negroes as being alike and different from themselves” (p.137-138). Frantz Fanon (Reference Fanon2008 [1952]) argued: “In the phobic, affect has the priority which defies all rational thinking” (p. 133; McClintock Reference McClintock1995; Stoler Reference Stoler2022; Wolfe Reference Wolfe2016).

Fanon (Reference Fanon2008) continued: “[I]t is because the white man feels frustrated by the black man that he in turn seeks to frustrate the black man, hemming him in with taboos of all sorts” (p. 152). In the United States, White fears of Black men gave rise to widespread lynching practices (Davis Reference Davis1981; Du Bois Reference Du Bois and Sollors2000, Reference Du Bois2014; Wells Reference Wells2020). Fredrickson (Reference Fredrickson2002) proposed that South African laws prohibiting interracial marriage and sex “signified the same obsession with ‘race purity’ which characterized other racist regimes” (p. 3). Gunnar Myrdal (Reference Myrdal1995 [1944]) observed:

In South Africa, Julius Lewin (Reference Lewin1960) argued: “What Myrdal found in the southern part of the United States…is true in South Africa, if one looks beneath the surface of any argument—sex is the hidden principle…around which the whole structure of apartheid is organized” (p. 64). Zimitri Erasmus (Reference Erasmus2017) explains that miscegenation taboo emerged as the “reversal” of incest taboo. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969) also noted that: “incest proper…combines in some countries with its direct opposite, inter-racial sexual relations, an extreme form of exogamy, as the two most powerful inducements of horror and collective vengeance” (p. 9). Both were seen as morally repugnant because they threatened normative heteropatriarchal relations.

Comparative studies of racial caste are instructive for theorizing hierarchical power relations in settler societies (Weber Reference Weber1917; Wilkerson Reference Wilkerson2020). Max Gluckman (Reference Gluckman1940) wrote: “Black and white are two categories which must not mix, like castes in India” (p. 13). Decades earlier, Max Weber (Reference Weber1917) argued: “Rules of endogamy…always form the essential basis of caste…America acknowledges [caste] between whites and blacks … these barriers imply that marriage is absolutely and legally inadmissible” (pp. 399-406). He also considered the symbolic salience of women in race/caste societies, noting that upper-caste men often had extra-marital relationships with lower-caste women, but sexual liaisons between upper-caste women and lower-caste men were socially forbidden (p. 406). Mary Douglas (Reference Douglas1966) explained:

While caste and race are not selfsame categories, analogies between these systems of domination remain important to the analysis of racial endogamy customs, norms, and policies in colonial South Africa. Gareth Cornwell (Reference Cornwell1996) articulated this point well: “The iron rule of endogamy at the heart of the notion of caste helps explain why ‘miscegenation’ has been such an obsession among white South Africans” (p. 453).

‘Black Peril’ and White Womanhood: Race/Sex Symbolism in Settler Mythology

There were relatively few European women living in southern Africa during the early centuries of colonial settlement. In 1663, Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) records counted seventeen White women in the Cape Colony. By 1718, White men outnumbered White women 691 to 390 (Heese Reference Heese1971; van den Berghe Reference van den Berghe1960). However, in the late nineteenth century, South Africa attracted thousands of poor, unmarried women from Europe—especially sex workers. Prostitution was tolerated under British colonial rule (Hyam Reference Hyam1990; van Heyningen Reference van Heyningen1984). Most sex workers in the nineteenth century were women of color, and colonial authorities regarded prostitution as a necessary “safety-valve for public morality,” offering “some protection to the chastity and purity of our virgins and matrons” (see van Heyningen Reference van Heyningen1984, pp.173-174). Yet, by 1895, more than ten percent of White women in Johannesburg worked in the sex industry (van Onselen Reference van Onselen1982). The population of White prostitutes grew exponentially during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), when the mass mobilization of British soldiers increased demand for commoditized sex (Hyam Reference Hyam1990; van Heyningen Reference van Heyningen1984). Most of these women were recent immigrants from Europe and had not been conditioned by settler mores, and some did not discriminate against Black and Brown men (Hyam Reference Hyam1990; van Heyningen Reference van Heyningen1984).

In 1901, the Cape Colony’s officials address this problem. Attorney-General T. L. Graham claimed that there was “a considerable traffic being carried on in Cape Town between aboriginal natives and white European women” (see Heyningen Reference van Heyningen1984, p. 192). Graham concluded that this problem was “of the greatest importance, for once the barriers were broken down between Europeans and native races in this country” there would be “no limit to the terrible dangers to which women would be submitted” (see van Heyningen Reference van Heyningen1984, p. 192). In 1902, the Assembly passed the Brothels Suppression Act. Under section “Brothels and Immorality,” this law decreed that it was “unlawful for any white woman to voluntarily have illicit sexual intercourse for the purposes of gain with any aboriginal native.” Neighboring settler colonies passed similar ordinances the following year (Keegan Reference Keegan2001; Mushonga Reference Mushonga2013).

The aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War saw significant social upheaval. British victors were keen on reintegrating the vanquished “Boers” into a new nation: “White South Africa.” The success of the Union of 1910 depended on renewed solidarity between former enemies, centered around gendered notions of White supremacy, honor, and purity (Hyslop Reference Hyslop1995; Keegan Reference Keegan2001; van Onselen Reference van Onselen1982). From the 1860s to the 1920s, settler communities in South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, and Kenya experienced recurring “Black peril” panics (Anderson Reference Anderson2010; Etherington Reference Etherington1988; Graham Reference Graham2012; Huigen Reference Huigen1993; Kennedy Reference Kennedy1987; Martens Reference Martens2002; McCulloch Reference McCulloch2000; Pape Reference Pape1990; Seekings Reference Seekings2007). These panics reflected colonial fears of “native” insurrection and Black male rapists (Etherington Reference Etherington1988; Martens Reference Martens2002; van Onselen Reference van Onselen1982). These panics explicitly concerned White women, whose bodies were “mythologized by a frontier society as the last and most intimate frontier of all” (Cornwell Reference Cornwell1996, p. 441). In the settler imaginary, White women’s wombs symbolized the “fountainheads of racial strength”—the organs from which the White bodies reproduced themselves along the colonial frontier (Kennedy Reference Kennedy1987; Klausen Reference Klausen2015; Stoler Reference Stoler2002, p. 76). However, “Black peril” panics revealed how the source of “racial strength” also symbolized its vulnerability.

Newspapers routinely ran headlines like, “Another Black Peril Case,” “Outrageous Attack on a White Lady,” describing alleged perpetrators as “black monsters” and “black devils” (see Plaatje Reference Plaatje1976, p. 91). One newspaper warned middle-class Whites: “Beware of your ‘houseboy,’ for under the innocent front may be lurking and lying latent the passions of a panther, and worse!” (van Onselen Reference van Onselen1982, p. 261). Despite the ubiquity of “Black peril” anxiety, there was no proportionate correlation between public panics and actual instances of rape (Anderson Reference Anderson2010; Graham Reference Graham2012; Keegan Reference Keegan2001; Stoler Reference Stoler2002). Charles van Onselen (Reference van Onselen1982) argued that “Black peril” panics often flared up during periods of economic unrest, such as the 1911-1914 recession and the 1913-1914 miners’ strikes. However, fluctuating economic conditions only explain outbreaks of “Black peril” hysteria, not the undercurrents of racialized fear behind these outbursts (Anderson Reference Anderson2010). White men’s economic anxieties about competing with cheaper African laborers easily morphed into sexual fears about competing over women (Cornwell Reference Cornwell1996).

Since the government refused to act, a newspaper organized a petition, collecting 51,925 signatures. This petition led to the government’s official Assaults on Women Commission of 1913. The commission’s investigation concluded that poor, “debased whites” lacked the prestige and respectability associated with Whiteness. These lower-class Europeans diminished Black men’s “respect for the white race,” emboldening them to pursue White women (Assaults 1913, pp. 16-23; van Onselen Reference van Onselen1982, p. 263). However, the commission also found that many rape charges were either fabricated or wildly exaggerated. In 1912, a court condemned an African “houseboy” to whip-lashes and four-months’ imprisonment for “assault” because he had taken his mistress’ hand, confessing that he “liked her very much” (see van Onselen Reference van Onselen1982, p. 261).

Affluent White families often took young Black men into their homes as domestic workers, signaling status and prosperity. In 1912, there were some 35,000 “houseboys” working in Johannesburg households (Keegan Reference Keegan2001; Martens Reference Martens2002). White employers often cheated their servants, even contriving false rape accusations to “defraud their ‘houseboys’ of their wages” (van Onselen Reference van Onselen1982, p. 265). African intellectual Sol Plaatje (Reference Plaatje1976 [1921) noted that these “Black peril” scares served to “justify” the Native Land Act of 1913, which stripped millions of Africans of property rights, and forced them to live in impoverished ethnic reserves. Plaatje noted that most cases of interracial rape involved White men and women of color, emphasizing that this “White peril” posed a far greater threat to the purity myth (Graham Reference Graham2012; Ray Reference Ray2014).

In 1926, Justice Minister Tielman Roos introduced an “immorality” law which prohibited “illicit carnal intercourse between Europeans and natives” (Immorality Act 1927; Martens Reference Martens2007). The bill was contested in the legislature but passed the following year. The Immorality Act of 1927 aimed to promote Briton-Boer solidarity, and it reflected the prevailing eugenics theories of the day (Martens Reference Martens2007). Eugenics “scientists” were obsessed with the “problem” of miscegenation (Coetzee Reference Coetzee1980; Dubow Reference Dubow1995; Rich Reference Rich1990). Preeminent race scientists like Robert Knox and Francis Galton established their reputations by studying different “racial types” in southern Africa (Dubow Reference Dubow1995; Stocking Reference Stocking1987). German anthropologist Eugen Fischer (Reference Fischer1913) applied eugenic theories to his study the Rehoboth Basters, the mixed-race descendants of Dutch/Afrikaner men and indigenous Khoena women in South-West Africa. Fischer examined the physiological effects and defects of “hybridity” and “bastardization.” His research influenced Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws of 1935 (Dubow Reference Dubow1995; Walters and van der Waal, Reference Walters and van der Waal2020).

In the 1920s and 1930s, South Africa’s scientific and medical discourse was dominated by eugenics (Dubow Reference Dubow1989; Klausen Reference Klausen1997; Rich Reference Rich1990; Walters and van der Waal, Reference Walters and van der Waal2020). White support for segregation centered around pseudo-scientific theories of racial difference, hygiene, and degeneration. South Africa’s colonial medical establishment obsessed over issues of “feeblemindedness” among working-class White women (W. Jackson Reference Jackson, Miles, Osbourne, Tzialli and Captain2020; Klausen Reference Klausen1997). Eugenicists believed that the White-minority population needed protection from “undesirable impurities,” and that poor women required special moral education as the “mothers of the future race” (Hyslop Reference Hyslop1995; W. Jackson Reference Jackson, Miles, Osbourne, Tzialli and Captain2020; Klausen Reference Klausen1997, McClintock Reference McClintock1995; Stoler Reference Stoler2002). South African eugenic discourse was strongly influenced by the zoologist H. B. Fantham (Dubow Reference Dubow1995). Fantham (Reference Fantham1927) claimed that mixed-race people were “degenerates” and that the White community’s repulsion for “blood-mixing” was congruent with the laws of society and nature.

During the Great Depression, there were some 300,000 to 400,000 impoverished Whites living in South Africa (Iliffe Reference Iliffe1987). The problem of White poverty became a central issue for Afrikaners and Britons who supported segregation and White-preference capitalism. The Carnegie Corporation of New York commissioned a five-volume, multi-year study of rural White poverty in South Africa, employing teams of American and South African researchers. The Carnegie Corporation endeavored to “preserve the racial purity of American society,” and “believed that white South Africans should learn from American Southern whites how to handle their Negro problem” (see Magubane Reference Magubane2008, p. 693; Willoughby-Herard Reference Willoughby-Herard2015). The Carnegie Commission reported that 17.5% of White families lived in “great poverty,” often among Black and Brown people (Iliffe Reference Iliffe1987, p.117). Poor Whites who slept with racialized “others” were seen as “internal enemies”—with no regard for morals or “interior frontiers”—believed to “sap the fiber of white civilization at its most vulnerable point” (Dubow Reference Dubow1995, p. 56; Stoler Reference Stoler2022). The politics of “poor Whiteism” were deeply gendered (Hyslop Reference Hyslop1995; W. Jackson Reference Jackson, Miles, Osbourne, Tzialli and Captain2020; Magubane Reference Magubane2008; Stoler Reference Stoler2006). Thousands of rural White girls and women migrated to Johannesburg in search of work and freedom, often living alongside African migrant laborers in slums (Steyn and van Zyl, Reference Steyn and van Zyl2009; Stoler Reference Stoler2006). The Carnegie Commission urged the colonial government to establish segregated boardinghouses for indigent White women, providing them with a “proper” Protestant education in feminine etiquettes and domestic work (Stoler Reference Stoler2006).

In Cape Town, Coloured children had been banned from public schools since the 1860s (Adhikari Reference Adhikari2005; Jackson Reference Jackson, Jackson and Manktelow2015; Thompson Reference Thompson1990). School segregation was necessary because, as one principal explained, it was “very undesirable that white children, especially the girls, should be brought into close relations with the ordinary type of coloured street boy” (see Watson Reference Watson1970, p. 32). In 1937, Supreme Court Judge J. A. Tindall implored legislators to follow Transvaal’s example by segregating Whites from Coloureds:

Anxieties about working-class White women in South Africa peaked during the 1938 election (Cronjé Reference Cronjé1945; Hyslop Reference Hyslop1995; Sofer Reference Sofer1949). The Afrikaner “Purified” National Party (NP), led by D. F. Malan, circulated a propaganda poster portraying White womanhood in a state of depravity, signaling a horrific outcome of United Party-rule. The poster’s central illustration depicted a motherly White woman, gazing solemnly into the future (Figure 1)Footnote ². Bold captions relayed her message: “The hope of South Africa speaks to you and says: vote for the National Party and protect my nation and my posterity against mixed marriages, which the United Party will not prohibit by law.” A second, smaller illustration represented four White men in business suits. These men—labeled “capitalist,” “communist,” “imperialist,” and “Jew.” The third image depicted a young White woman sitting beside a Black man in front of the shack in which they lived. Their two children, playing in the doorstep, completed this White supremacist horror-scape. The Malanites used the campaign poster to attack moral legitimacy of UP-rule and urged voters to embrace the NP’s “purified” vision for apartheid (Hyslop Reference Hyslop1995). The NP-propaganda poster was extremely controversial. The UP capitalized on it, claiming that the Malanites had “slandered” White women’s honor by making the “foulest allegations and insinuations” that they would willingly marry Black men, and required “legislation to keep [their] blood pure.” Malan’s campaign failed, for the UP won the election (Hyslop Reference Hyslop1995, p. 77).

However, the public controversy occasioned another government commission. The Commission on Mixed Marriages (1938-1939), led by Charles de Villiers Reference de Villiers1939, investigated, and reported on “the question of mixed marriages” between “Europeans and non-Europeans.” It sought to determine whether such unions were “sufficiently numerous to be seriously detrimental to the welfare of the Union and the future composition of the population,” and whether the government needed to “take further steps to discourage such marriages” (de Villiers Reference de Villiers1939, pp. 1-2). This commission hired teams of social scientists to study census data and marriage records, and collect witness testimonies from agreeable clerics, bureaucrats, and ethnic organizations. The commission also contacted South Africa’s chief diplomat in Washington D.C., directing him and “practically the whole research staff” to study American anti-miscegenation laws at the Library of Congress (p. 3). They learned that thirty of America’s forty-eight states enforced anti-miscegenation laws, and they proposed that South African lawmakers could learn from these models (p. 30).

The de Villiers commission reported that “there can be no doubt that public opinion is, on the whole, against mixed marriages” (de Villiers Reference de Villiers1939, p. 15). Most of the invited “witnesses” agreed. The DRC representative condemned intermarriage as a “social evil.” A Methodist minister from Natal insisted that he “would refuse to celebrate a marriage between a Coloured and a European person, and definitely so between any Native and European” (de Villiers Reference de Villiers1939, p. 16). A Salvation Army officer reported: “From what I have seen in this country, as well as in Jamaica and British India, mixed marriages are injurious to the persons concerned and to their offspring” (de Villiers Reference de Villiers1939, p. 16). Another White Methodist, tending to an African congregation in the Transkei, assured the commissioners that most Africans were also opposed to intermarriage: “Mixed marriages are just as repugnant to Native public opinion as to European public opinion” (de Villiers Reference de Villiers1939, p. 16).

An African minister from Transvaal stated: “The black race must be proud to remain purely black…We must be brothers-in-Christ and not brothers-in-law…To allow mixture is to tamper with Nature’s good originality” (de Villiers Reference de Villiers1939, p. 19). The South African Indian Association proclaimed: “The Indian community is opposed to mixed marriages as strongly as any other community in South Africa” (de Villiers Reference de Villiers1939, p. 21). Representatives of the Cape Peninsula’s Coloured Welfare Association stated that it opposed mixed marriages because White men of “low type or class” often pursued Coloured girls when they failed to find a “decent wife” among the White community. “[W]hen one of two sisters marries a European and the other a coloured man,” The CPCWA declared, “the children of the former look down on the children of the latter and, indeed, on all other members of the family who are not as light-skinned as they are. Sometimes such a child disdains even its own mother” (de Villiers Reference de Villiers1939, pp. 21-22). White supremacist theories of “purity,” enshrined over centuries of colonial domination, also shaped the racial subjectivities of Black and Brown people.

Although the de Villiers Commission found that “mixed marriages” were rare, they nevertheless recommended a comprehensive prohibition of interracial marriages and nonmarital sex, to prevent such “undesirable” intimacies from becoming more common. The commissioners referred to the efficacy of American and Australian anti-miscegenation laws and asserted that Transvaal’s endogamy laws (1871-1897) were “wisely conceived and simply planned” (de Villiers Reference de Villiers1939, p. 35). Finally, they recommended that the “infiltration of non-European blood into the European population” could be prevented through residential segregation, and by expanding economic uplift programs for impoverished Whites (de Villiers Reference de Villiers1939, p. 34; Fourie and Inwood, Reference Fourie and Inwood2019; Sofer Reference Sofer1949). The commission’s report was well-received by the UP government, but further actions on anti-miscegenation legislation were suspended during World War II (Furlong Reference Furlong1983; Lewin Reference Lewin1960).

Miscegenation Madness and the Making of Apartheid

During the war, “miscegenation” was vigorously debated in White churches, universities, newspapers, and households. Patrick Furlong (Reference Furlong1983, Reference Furlong1994) argued that the creation of stricter anti-miscegenation laws became the priority for the powerful Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), the “spiritual arm” of the National Party. J. D. Strijdom, a prominent Afrikaner nationalist and Calvinist minister, warned his compatriots that “only carrying out the policy of apartheid in the light of God’s Word and with God’s blessing would provide deliverance from the dark danger of colour-mixing and bastardization” (see Ritner Reference Ritner1967, p. 24). This animosity towards mixing was not new, for the DRC had officially opposed mixed marriages since 1817 (Fourie and Inwood, Reference Fourie and Inwood2019; Furlong Reference Furlong1994; Ritner Reference Ritner1967). By 1943, the DRC-leadership implored the UP government to take harsher measures against “bloedvermenging.” The DRC declared that it was “unalterably opposed to miscegenation and all that might further miscegenation,” and that it was the “sacred conviction of the Afrikaner people and Church” to establish “rasse-apartheid”—the “only salvation of the people’s existence” (see Ritner Reference Ritner1967, p. 24).

The Second World War created labor shortages in urban industries, as over 100,000 White men were shipped off to fight Nazis overseas (Wessels Reference Wessels1999). These shortages were “temporarily” filled by African migrant workers. By then, Africans comprised nearly two-thirds of the industrial workforce in Johannesburg, and the growing predominance of Black men in the streets reinforced White fears of being “swamped” (Klausen Reference Klausen, Schields and Herzog2021; Posel Reference Posel, Ross, Mager and Nasson2011). Anxieties surrounding African urbanization and the future of the White minority population were exacerbated by White women’s increased use of birth control (Furlong Reference Furlong1994; Klausen Reference Klausen2015). At bottom, the White dream of apartheid was “underpinned by a hankering for order,” a return to a colonial situation in which Whites dominated Blacks in all matters (Posel Reference Posel2001a, p. 52).

Rampant miscegenation fear was exploited by race scientists like Gerrie Eloff and Geoffrey Cronjé (Coetzee Reference Coetzee1991; Dubow Reference Dubow1995). Cronjé, a University of Pretoria sociology professor, was highly regarded by the NP-elite. His racist theories provided “scientific” justification for the NP’s apartheid policy (Boersema Reference Boersema2022; Coetzee Reference Coetzee1991; Dubow Reference Dubow1995; Hook Reference Hook2023; Moutinho Reference Moutinho2023; Posel Reference Posel, Beinart and Dubow1995; Dubow Reference Dubow2014; Walters and van der Waal, Reference Walters and van der Waal2020). His book A Home for Posterity (1945) became a manifesto for Afrikaner nationalists (Coetzee Reference Coetzee1991). Cronjé dedicated this book to his wife and “all other Afrikaner-mothers…the protectors of the blood-purity of the Boer-nation” (Reference Cronjé1945, p. 2). Cronjé’s main concern was the so-called “Coloured question.” “With regard to blood-mixing,” Cronjé (Reference Cronjé1945) wrote, “the coloured presents the utmost danger to the European race in South Africa” (p. 39; see Walters and van der Waal, Reference Walters and van der Waal2020). He cited eugenics research, including texts by Fischer and Fantham, and declared that there was “convincing evidence” to conclude that mixture defiled divine creation and produced an “impoverish[ed] humanity…biologically inferior human material” (Cronjé Reference Cronjé1945, p. 71).

Cronjé (Reference Cronjé1945) claimed: “political equality between non-whites and whites, which encourages miscegenation, constitutes one of the most dangerous situations ever to exist in this land, because its consequences will unavoidably result in the complete bastardization of the European race in South Africa” (p. 49). Cronjé feared that “mixed areas” would become the “death-places [sterfplekke] of white South Africa” (Reference Cronjé1945, p. 66; Coetzee Reference Coetzee1991). He beseeched the legislature to enact stricter “ontugwette” (immorality laws) because: “only through racial-apartheid can racial differences be maintained…blood-mixing must be labeled a crime in this country because it is an extremely serious transgression against the white race and undermines its survival” (p. 47). He rebuked British imperialists for their cowardly indifference, urging them to unite with Afrikaners around the: “perpetuation of the blood-purity of the white-race in the southern land …together with the Boers they must provide—A HOME FOR POSTERITY!” (Cronjé Reference Cronjé1945, p. 19).

In 1948, Malan’s (Reunited) National Party finally defeated the United Party in the landmark election which formally established apartheid rule (Klausen Reference Klausen, Schields and Herzog2021; Posel Reference Posel, Ross, Mager and Nasson2011). The principal aim of the NP’s comprehensive apartheid policy was the preservation of a White purity through the “complete elimination of miscegenation” (Sauer Reference Sauer1947, pp. 2-3). In May 1949, the newly appointed Minister of Home Affairs, T. E. Dönges, introduced such a bill in the Assembly (Volksraad). “The aim of this legislation,” Dönges explained, was “to prevent as much blood-mixing as possible, and to preserve race-purity as much as possible” (Debatte 1949, p. 6302). Dönges read from the De Villiers Commission’s report, emphasizing its recommendation for prohibition. “[T]here can be no doubt”, he read, “that public opinion is generally opposed to mixed marriages” (Debatte 1949, p. 6303). He claimed to be motivated by its “the innocent victims”—“the children”—claiming that mixed children were doomed to live as “outcasts” without “family traditions.” However, the UP-MPs tried to use Dönges’ logic against him. Abraham Jonker insisted that such children would be “bastardized under this law.” Dönges replied: “would it not be better if they were never born?” (Debatte 1949, p. 6303). Jonker agreed.

“Mr. Speaker,” UP-leader J. C. Smuts interjected, “if there is one thing all South Africans can agree upon, it is that race-blood-mixing is an evil” (Debatte 1949, p. 6311). Despite his disdain for “bloedvermenging,” Smuts argued against the NP bill. He stated that it would be an impossible task to discern tan-skinned Whites from light-skinned Coloureds, citing U.S.-based studies of American mixed families in which some children were pale, while their siblings were dark. Smuts concluded that South Africa had too many “border-cases,” and that prohibition would create more problems than solutions (p. 6317). The Nationalists were not swayed by Smuts’ remarks, retorting that the Immorality Act of 1927 had been necessary and practical, but lacked enforcement. As in 1938, the National Party and United Party agreed that miscegenation was socially “undesirable,” but disagreed on whether it should be outlawed. Only Sam Kahn, a Jewish communist MP from Cape Town, rejected the premises of the debate itself. He compared his colleagues to the Nazis who wrote Germany’s Nuremburg Laws (1935), which forbade “Aryans” from marrying Jews. Kahn denounced Dönges as South Africa’s “foremost misanthrope,” rejected his “biological fantasies about racial purity,” and condemned his ideology as an “unlawful union between racial superstition and biological pseudo-science” (Debatte 1949, p. 6558; Furlong Reference Furlong1983; Klausen Reference Klausen, Schields and Herzog2021). The NP was unmoved by Kahn’s cogent critique.

The NP-MP, M. Visser, endorsed Dönges’ bill and pointed to American Jim Crow segregation: “It would be my pleasure to notify you that apartheid is already enforced in the southern states of America.” He quoted Booker T. Washington’s 1895 “Atlanta Comprise” speech in which he claimed that Whites and Blacks should be “separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things, essential to mutual progress” (Debatte 1949, p. 6567). Dönges concluded:

Malan and Dönges’ NP ultimately overruled Smuts’ UP. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriage Act (1949) passed by a thin margin, becoming the first major legislation of the apartheid regime (Furlong Reference Furlong1994; Hyslop Reference Hyslop1995; Martens Reference Martens2007). It decreed that marriage between any “European” and a “non-European” was “void and of no effect,” and “any children born or conceived of such marriages… shall be deemed to be illegitimate” (PMMA 1949). NP legislators also ratified the Immorality Amendment Act (1950), which criminalized non-marital sex between any “European” and “non-European” (Beinart Reference Beinart2001; IAA 1950; Klausen Reference Klausen, Schields and Herzog2021; La Guma Reference La Guma1970).

Additionally, any South African living with someone of another “ethnic” (racial) group faced criminal charges. The government ratified the Population Registration Act of 1950, which assigned South Africans to one of four hierarchically arranged categories based on physical appearances and family reputations (Ratele Reference Ratele, Steyn and van Zyl2009b, p.166; Watson Reference Watson1970). People were classified and registered as “European” (White), “coloured” (Mixed), “Indian,” or “native” (Black/Bantu). This law defined a “Coloured person” as “a person who is not a white person or a native” (Adhikari Reference Adhikari2005, Reference Adhikari2008; Erasmus Reference Erasmus2001; PRA 1950). The NP government also implemented a monumental political economic project of “grand apartheid.” The Group Areas Act (1950) forced people to inhabit separate residential areas. It also forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of African and Coloured people to vacate “White areas” and live in desolate “ethnic homelands.” In the 1950s and 1960s, all Africans, Coloureds, and Indians were debarred from voting, and consigned to low-paying jobs (Beinart Reference Beinart2001; Posel Reference Posel, Ross, Mager and Nasson2011; Welsh Reference Welsh2010; Dubow Reference Dubow2014).

In 1948, Seretse Khama—the king-in-waiting of the Bangwato of Bechuanaland—married Ruth Williams, a White English woman. The union of Seretse and Ruth was opposed by multitudes in Britain and Bechuanaland. Ruth’s parents refused to attend the wedding. Seretse’s regent uncle, Tshekedi Khama, used the controversy to stay in power. However, the backlash against the marriage was most fiercely opposed in South Africa. The NP could not stomach the thought of Seretse and Ruth living as king and queen in Bechuanaland, situated between South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. The Johannesburg Star called the marriage “distasteful and disturbing,” and the Natal Witness declared it struck at “the root of white supremacy” (see Hyam Reference Hyam1986, p. 921).

The Khama marriage resulted in a diplomatic crisis between Britain and the Union of South Africa. The NP demanded that Seretse and Ruth be exiled to England. South Africa’s strong-arm diplomacy was quite effective. Commonwealth Secretary Gordon Walker convinced the British government to prohibit Seretse from becoming Bechuanaland’s monarch. Gordon feared that South Africa’s virulent racism would drive them—and their vast mineral wealth—out of the Commonwealth. Perhaps South Africa’s military would even consider invading British protectorates in Bechuanaland and Basutoland (Hyam Reference Hyam1986). In June 1950, Gordon wrote to Parliament:

Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s Labour government temporarily exiled the Khamas from Bechuanaland. In 1952, Winston Churchill’s Torie government rendered their exile permanent. Seretse, Ruth, and their children were finally permitted to return to Bechuanaland as private citizens in 1956 (Williams Reference Williams and Kaul2006).

In 1957, South African prime minister J. G. Strijdom’s government intensified apartheid. Strijdom claimed that “God” had created “separate nations, colours and languages,” and condemned any “mongrelization between white and black” (see Elder Reference Elder, Nast and Pile1998, pp. 29-30). Strijdom’s government introduced another Immorality Act amendment (1957) which criminalized “any immoral and indecent acts” across racialized boundaries, including cuddling and kissing. This amendment sought to remove “certain anomalies” in which well-resourced White men were exonerated, while their Black mistresses were found guilty by confession. Klausen (Reference Klausen2022) argues that the 1957 amendment specifically targeted these White men. In 1968, homosexual relations, which were previously outlawed under so-called “sodomy laws,” were also criminalized under the Immorality Act after 350 men were arrested during a massive police raid on an interracial “homosexual party” in Johannesburg (Gevisser Reference Gevisser, Gevisser and Cameron1995). The opposition parties in the Assembly consistently argued that the Immorality Acts were ineffective, succeeding only in turning neighbors into “spies and snoopers” (Horrell Reference Horrell1957, p. 232). The police’s “Immorality Squad” used unscrupulous surveillance techniques, such as spying through windows and analyzing bedsheets. Policemen often used African women as “traps,” luring errant White men to their downfall (La Guma Reference La Guma1970).

Helen Suzman, the Jewish MP of the Progressive Party, cited legal records and newspaper articles in Assembly debates, claiming: “Thousands of people have been publicly humiliated, have had their careers ruined and their family lives wrecked…for a crime which is only a crime where colour is involved” (Horrell Reference Horrell1963, p. 75). However, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd (Reference Verwoerd1962) defended sexual apartheid: “I say it unequivocally that the people of South Africa cannot accept the consequence of a multi-racial state unless the whites, the coloureds, and the Indians are prepared to commit race-suicide.” Ironically, it was apartheid’s Immorality Acts that drove many to commit suicide (Cape Argus 1962; Klausen Reference Klausen2022; La Guma Reference La Guma1970; Rand Daily Mail 1970). One retired policeman from Boksburg disclosed that he endured an “indescribable hell” after being charged: “there is always a stigma that remains after a person…is found not guilty” (Horrell Reference Horrell1969, p. 36).

A school principal from Johannesburg was accused of “immorality” by his wife but was later acquitted. He too described his ordeal: “There is a terrible stigma attached to anything concerning the Immorality Act and it is dreadful to have your name dragged through the mud when you know you are innocent. People treat you as though you had leprosy….” (La Guma Reference La Guma1970, p. 7). Mr. Botha, a thirty-five-year-old father of four, hanged himself in a prison cell to spare his wife and children from any further humiliation. “To avoid the malevolent stigma left by the Act,” one newspaper reported, “many people…a large number of them fathers of families—have hanged, drowned or shot themselves after being charged. One man poured petrol over himself and set himself aflame” (Rand Daily Mail 1970).

The NP sought to re-educate people’s erotic desires before any forbidden fornication could occur. In 1954, the government formed a commission of inquiry into to the problem of “undesirable publications.” The government appointed Geoffrey Cronjé—apartheid’s ideological godfather—to lead the commission. They spent years scrutinizing novels, films, magazines, and theatrical performances for “undesirable” elements. Cronjé’s commission presented its findings to the Assembly in 1957, but their censorship policy was not implemented until 1963 (Coetzee Reference Coetzee1996). The 1963 Publications and Entertainments Act created a Board of Censors—mostly White supremacist academics—who were authorized to ban any texts and images deemed “undesirable.” This law became the cornerstone of apartheid’s censorship regime for decades to come (Coetzee Reference Coetzee1996). Thousands of books, magazines, films, and television shows were banned from public view (Gordimer Reference Gordimer1972; Hachten and Giffard, Reference Hachten and Giffard1984). The Apartheid regime feared that foreign images would corrupt South Africa’s segregated “public morals.”

In 1959, Communications Minister Albert Hertzog warned his compatriots that “the effect of the wrong pictures on children, the less developed and other races can be destructive.” “As far as I am concerned,” Hertzog continued, “we will never have television” (Nixon Reference Nixon1994, p. 266). In a subsequent speech in the Assembly, Hertzog explained why he abhorred television, describing a hypothetical “Black peril” scenario:

Television was banned until 1976. Ron Krabill (Reference Krabill2010) writes: “the fear of miscegenation was linked to television…television became the great racial and cultural miscegenator” (p. 38). In 1976, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) began producing television programs for segregated audiences. Leonard Thompson (Reference Thompson1985) wrote that these programs adhered to NP policy: “[SABC] avoids featuring black and white people in egalitarian situations—especially anything that hints at interracial sex” (p. 48). Many foreign films were banned. For example, the American comedy/drama Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) was banned because it normalized “taboo” relationships between White women and Black men (Hachten and Giffard, Reference Hachten and Giffard1984, p. 160).

In 1970, the Free State town of Excelsior made international news when five White men and fourteen Black women were charged under the Immorality Act (Chicago Tribune 1970; Mda Reference Mda2002). It had been a “public secret” that these men, including prominent nationalists, indulged in sex with African women. However, the sex ring was discovered by the police. Initially, seven men were arrested, but one was acquitted. Another—a local councilman—fatally shot himself after being charged. Eventually, all charges against the “Excelsior 19” were dropped because the prosecution’s witnesses refused to testify. However, the women—and their babies—spent months in jail before the trial’s conclusion (New York Times 1971). The Excelsior 19 case was a colossal embarrassment for the NP regime. Excelsior, once regarded as the shining epitome of Afrikanerdom, subsequently became known as the town “where the people screw the maids” (City Press 2016). Scandals such as these revealed apartheid’s madness. Despite its cruel prohibition and penalties, the apartheid state failed to eliminate “mixing.” Theirs was a self-defeating policy. The more forceful the prohibition became, the more it encouraged transgression (Bataille Reference Bataille1986; Fanon Reference Fanon2008; Stallybrass and White, Reference Stallybrass and White1986).

The opposition hoped that these scandals would bring an end to the Immorality Laws. In 1974, MP Suzman declared: “We must get rid of this appalling, rotten bit of legislation” (Horrell Reference Horrell1975, p. 55). In a 1977 address, Suzman cited crime records to show that over 10,000 people had been convicted of “immorality” since 1950 (Horrell Reference Horrell1979). Between 1974 and 1982, 1916 people were convicted of breaking apartheid’s ultimate taboo (Reports of the Select Committee 1984). To the NP’s horror, most convicted men were Afrikaners. One anonymous critic, “Candidus” (1965), discussed this psychosexual “tragedy” of the Afrikaners: “many of these lads were brought up from infancy by African ‘nannies’ some of whom they knew more intimately than their own mothers” (p. 22). These boys were raised by Black mother-surrogates. However, they were forced to sever these intimate bonds when they entered adulthood: “the real love of the African mother-substitute may thus be turned to guilt-ridden hate and fear” (Candidus 1965; Nkosi Reference Nkosi1975, pp. 22-23). These boys entered the symbolic realm of colonial culture through patriarchal law: “the Afrikaner has been fed from infancy with stories of black treachery and violence—stories handed down from father to son and dating from Dingane, the Frontier Wars and Voortrekker days when a handful of whites survived among the hordes of ‘black savages’” (Candidus 1965, p. 221). The emotional trauma inflicted on White boys through this racist rite-of-passage fundamentally shaped their identities and subjectivities as men. This pseudo-oedipal “love-hate attitude” helped explain why so many White men violated the Immorality Acts, for they had “not outgrown their childish love of a black woman” (Candidus 1965, p. 222).

Criticism of apartheid’s Immorality Acts peaked in the 1980s. As P. W. Botha’s government edged closer toward repealing the Acts, many Afrikaner voters abandoned the NP for its more conservative splinter-parties (New York Times 1985). Former DRC-minister Andries Treurnicht established the Conservative Party in 1982 to counteract the creeping “verligting” (enlightenment) within the NP ranks (Beinart Reference Beinart2001). The Reconstituted National Party (HNP), which split from the NP in 1969, also attempted to reconsolidate Afrikaner nationalists’ support for petty apartheid. Ahead of the 1983 Constitutional Reform Referendum—which would grant Coloureds and Indians some political representation in the legislature—HNP politicians tried to arouse White fears by circulating propaganda posters depicting a White girl in need of protection. The captions read: “For her sake, preserve White South Africa: Vote HNP” (Figure 2)Footnote ³.

In 1983, the DRC finally admitted that the Immorality Acts could not be justified on scriptural grounds (Furlong Reference Furlong1994). In response, the NP established a new commission (1984) to enquire into the “desirability” of the laws. In their memorandum to the 1984 commission, the Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) argued: “South Africa can no longer justify this law on the grounds that the United States has similar laws” (Reports of the Select Committee 1984, p. 33). These progressive lawyers included Chief Justice Warren’s majority opinion from Loving v. Virginia (1967), which declared Jim Crow anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. In the LHR memorandum, legal scholar Christopher Dugard predicted that South Africans would learn to tolerate interracial marriages: “as the United States evolved over the years…so too South African society has evolved since 1949 and, at this point in time, South African society is prepared to tolerate marriages of this kind” (Reports of the Select Committee 1984, p. 11). A memorandum by the Black Sash, a White women’s anti-apartheid organization, declared that the Acts were “corruptive of the very concept of morality” because the “bonds of attraction and affection, are matters of free personal choice” (Reports of the Select Committee 1984, p. 94). Finally, the 1984 commission concluded that the Acts “[could] not be justified on scriptural or other grounds,” and recommended their annulment (Report of the Joint-Committee 1985, p. 2). The commissioners insisted that segregation in housing, education, and employment was sufficient to perpetuate apartheid (Report of the Joint-Committee 1985, p. 6).

In 1984, historian Hans Heese published a book in which he claimed that thousands of prominent Afrikaner families, including those of distinguished politicians, had mixed-race ancestors. Heese argued that the Immorality Acts could not be justified on historical grounds “because there is no racial purity anyway” (Los Angeles Times 1985). In response, sixteen HNP-legislators sued Heese for libel. Jaap Marais, the HNP-leader, insisted that: “[t]here has been a process of racial purification over the generations as whites married other whites and shunned those with black genes…It is obvious just by looking at people that the Afrikaner nation today is white” (Los Angeles Times 1985). A Pretoria councilman, Piet Rudolph, punched his colleague Ernie Jacobs in the face, after Jacobs referenced Heese’s book to question Rudolph’s genealogy. Afterwards, Rudolph exclaimed: “It makes by blood boil, all these lies about us…I just could not control myself any longer, but I have no regrets…the ancestry of the Afrikaner cannot be questioned!” (Los Angeles Times 1985).

On June 19-22, 1985, Botha’s NP government finally repealed the Mixed Marriages and Immorality Acts. However, the Group Areas Act and Separate Amenities Act remained enforced, making it nearly impossible for mixed couples to live together unless one person applied for racial reclassification (Los Angeles Times 1986; Sherman and Steyn, Reference Sherman, Steyn, Steyn and van Zyl2009). Initially, the repeal was heavily criticized. A 1984 survey found that eighty percent of Afrikaners opposed the repeal of the Immorality Acts (BBC 1984; Furlong Reference Furlong1994). On the other side, the African National Congress (ANC) leadership accused the NP of “window dressing,” and denounced the repeal as “purely cosmetic” (Klausen Reference Klausen, Schields and Herzog2021, p. 225; Sunday Times 1985). ANC freedom fighters maintained that they fought to secure the Black vote, for only true democracy could end apartheid. They were not risking their lives merely to “have girlfriends across the color line” (BBC 1985). Even Bishop Desmond Tutu remarked that the repeal was “peripheral” to the “total problem of apartheid” (Klausen Reference Klausen, Schields and Herzog2021, p. 225). Indeed, the repeal of the Immorality Acts was part of Botha’s “total strategy,” designed to “win hearts and minds,” while his regime imposing a brutal counter-insurgency war against apartheid’s many enemies (Beinart Reference Beinart2001, p. 245; Welsh Reference Welsh2010). However, many others rejoiced that the race/sex laws were no more.

On June 23, 1985, Protas Madlala and Suzanne Leclerc became the first mixed couple to legally marry in post-prohibition South Africa (AP 1985; BBC 2015). Madlala, a Black South African man, and Leclerc, a White woman from the United States, met in Washington D.C. After considering an easier life in the States, they moved to Durban, South Africa to confront apartheid directly (BBC 2015; Marhanas Reference Marhanas2016). When interviewed by the British press, enquiring if their marriage marked the “end of the road” for apartheid, Suzanne answered:

Protas agreed: “Yeah, that’s shocking, especially because South Africa is…claiming to be part of the first world” (AP 1985). The Group Areas Act forced Protas to live in an impoverished Black township, and Suzanne had to be reclassified as “honorary Black” to live together as family (Los Angeles Times 1986; Marhanas Reference Marhanas2016). After their first children were born, the government sought to classify them as “Coloured,” but Protas and Suzanne resisted this designation. When prompted to register their second child, they wrote: “human” (Marhanas Reference Marhanas2016).