All in the Family

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 (Uncle) 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."

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