This morning, I dipped into a book that Emma is reading, Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show. Noah was born during the apartheid era in South Africa to a black mother and a white father. Producing him was at that time a crime under the country's Immorality Act, a 1927 law that forbade "illicit carnal intercourse" between a "European" (or white) and a "native" (or black). In 1950, this anti-miscegenation law was expanded to outlaw sex between "Europeans" and all "non-Europeans". Because Noah was the result of a then-forbidden union, his mother had to hide him during his early childhood. If his parentage had become known, his mother could have been sent to prison and he could have been placed in an orphanage.
When I lived there, South Africa was a very bizarre place. During apartheid, it was deemed that there were four races: European, African (sometimes known as Bantu), Colored (mixed race), and Indian (people of South Asian descent). Each race had to live in designated areas, and "non-Europeans" required a "pass" (a legal document) in order to travel into the white areas, where most of them worked.
Some confusion arose as to what to do with the few people of Southeast Asian descent who were living in the country. Eventually it was decided that they would be classified as "Honorary Whites", meaning that they could live in white areas. However, the "Immorality Act" still applied. My brother, Robin, is married to a wonderful lady, Jackie, who is of Asian descent and whom he met in South Africa. Fortunately, by the time he met her, Mandela had been released from prison and some of the old laws had died away. However, during the apartheid era, Jackie's uncle, an "honorary white" living in Johannesburg, married a "real white" in the Catholic church. By law, they were denied a civil marriage and were prohibited from consummating their union.
After their church wedding, Jackie's uncle and his wife moved into an apartment in Hillbrow, which the local police repeatedly raided in the middle of the night in the hope of finding the couple violating the "Immorality Act". Fortunately, a sympathetic security guard would call up to their apartment every time the police arrived, which gave them time to jump out of bed and get dressed. If they had been caught in their pajamas, it would have meant that the law had been violated. If they were dressed when the police arrived, they could claim to be visiting, rather than to be living together.
Under certain circumstances, a person's race could be reclassified. In 1966, 10-year-old Sandra Laing was expelled from her all-white school and escorted home by two police officers after her schoolmates' parents complained that she was unacceptably dark-skinned. Sandra was born in 1955 to white parents, Abraham and Sannie Lang, in the small farming town of Piet Retief near the Swaziland border. Although her parents were considered (and looked) white, Sandra looked "colored". She was hauled into court, where the judge complained that he did not see a white child, only a child with a "flat nose and frizzy hair". A "pencil test" was performed, which required a pencil to be inserted into her hair. If it fell out, she was white; if it stayed in place, she was colored. Her hair was curly, and it stayed in place. Sandra was classified colored. Not long thereafter, rudimentary tests indicated that she was indeed the child of Abraham and Sannie, and she was reclassified white, but several schools for white children refused to take her. Eventually she was sent to a boarding school for colored children and became immersed in black culture. At 16, she eloped to Swaziland with a black man. As a result, her family cut contact with her. Because her children were of mixed race, she had to get herself classified "colored" once again in order for them to be allowed to stay with her. She had a difficult life. She eventually reconnected with her mother, Sannie, who by then was in a nursing home, and they reconciled prior to her mother's death in 2001. However, her father, who died in 2009, never spoke to her again, and her brothers, Leon and Adriaan, want nothing to do with her. I just ordered a copy of her biography, When She Was White, by Judith Stone. A movie, Skin, which is based on the book, is available on DVD.
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