Benjamin Pogrund
COLOUR, CONFUSION AND CONCESSIONS: The History of the Chinese in South Africa by Melanie Yap and Dianne Leong Man (Hong Kong University Press)
THE Nationalists never quite worked out what to do with South Africa’s Chinese people. Early in the 1950s, with the start of apartheid, there were fewer than 5 000 Chinese men, women and children, descendants of traders who had come to the country as far back as the 1870s and were overwhelmingly dependent for their livelihood on running small shops in city suburbs.
Even with the government’s worst intentions, the Group Areas Act simply could not be applied to them. Despite years-long threats and uncertainty only one group area, in Kabega, Port Elizabeth, was ever actually proclaimed for Chinese.
In the rest of the country, although Chinese people were subject to eviction from their shops and homes they were eventually permitted to live in relative peace – provided they obtained an official permit if they wanted to buy a property in a suburb zoned for whites.
While this lasted it required the humiliating ritual of going to the adjoining neighbours and those across the street to ask if they had any objection to their moving in.
This apart, the Chinese lived in a racial no-man’s-land, hovering somewhere between the classifications of whites and coloureds, never quite sure what the law allowed and, even more, what other people allowed them to do. If they went to the box office of a ”white” cinema they might or might not be admitted; they could board a municipal bus and they might or might not be roughly ordered to sit upstairs.
Children went either to coloured schools or small numbers were admitted to private schools, especially those run by the Catholic Church, which refused to yield to the prejudices of white parents. The community also increasingly started its own schools.
Education became a prized goal with university studies the key for children to escape from working behind shop counters. For many years, however, Chinese students were denied admission to some faculties, such as physiotherapy, which required treating white patients in hospitals.
By the 1970s the Nationalists were lining up with Taiwan as fellow pariahs in a hostile world and one consequence was an easing in the decades-long ban on Chinese immigration. Hostility towards Chinese has run deep in South African history: early this century there was huge conflict over the temporary importation by goldmine owners of some 63 000 (need it be said?) poorly paid Chinese labourers.
This book, which took nine years to research and write, tells the Chinese story in monumental detail right up to the new South Africa, by which time the community’s numbers exceeded 20 000.
But the no-man’s-land syndrome remains and the book concludes: ”Although they have been given the franchise, the outstanding question remains whether or not the Chinese, so long perceived as ‘foreigners’ in the land of their birth, will finally be accepted as equal citizens.”
Colour, Confusion and Concessions is obtainable from the South African Chinese History Project, PO Box 33312, Jeppestown 2043, or phone Melanie Yap at (011) 614- 8624