Rattling racial skeletons There is a well-worn jest in South Africa that the country's “colored
problem” actually began about nine months after the first Dutch
settlers landed at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. However, in the
strictly segregated society that has developed since, it is no laughing
matter to suggest that the Afrikaners, who make up the majority of the
4.5 million ruling whites, are anything but racially pure. Thus when a
South African academic raised the possibility again last week, he
rattled racial skeletons in every Afrikaner parlor and dining room. The rattles were caused by Professor Johan Leon Hattingh, director of
the Institute for Historical Research at the University of the Western
Cape and an Afrikaner himself. In an article published in his
institute's journal, he claimed that many of the original Dutch
settlers had dalliances with black women and that as a result, few
Afrikaners could claim to be of unmixed white descent. Rather than
charting white South Africa's family tree through the male line,
Hattingh chose five early 18th century native women and traced their
descendants. What he uncovered were some rather surprising branches.
Among the descendants of an African woman called Lijsbeth, for
instance, were the President of the Transvaal republic in the Boer War,
“Oom Paul” Kruger, and South Africa's first Prime
Minister, Louis Botha. In all, Hattingh counted 80 families of mixed
racial roots, a substantial slice of the white Afrikaner establishment. Reaction to Hattingh's genealogical bombshell ranged from outraged
denials to bemusement. Fumed Louis Stofberg, general secretary of the
right-wing Herstigte Nasionale Party: “I'd like to see the
bastard who can find a drop of colored blood in my family!” Albert
Tertius Myburgh, Afrikaner editor of the national Sunday Times, took a
positive view, describing the “swelling of African pride” he
felt at the racial revelation. Other white South Africans kept their tongues firmly in cheek. Satirist
Alexander de Kok of the Sunday Express wrote of a nationalist friend
who had called the finding “an Afrikaner master plan.” Said
Kok: “What better way to pass power peacefully into black hands
than to prove scientifically that those who hold it now are as black as
the rest.” Kok also wondered why Afrikaner historians had taken so
many years to make the discovery, unless “as many Afrikaners say,
people of mixed blood are slow thinkers.” When a black
Johannesburg gardener asked a white what he thought about the alleged
black blood in his background, the Afrikaner promptly replied,
“That's all right, as long as it was the best blood, Zulu
blood.” But Cape Colored Poet Adam Small offered the last word on
Hattingh's research: “It's nothing new. Colored, white or black,
all blood is red.”
