Interracial marriages among South Africans are increasing. Coloureds are the most likely to marry outside their group, while Africans, followed by whites, are the least likely. Africans are 7 332 times more likely to marry each other than outside their group.
The 1996 and 2001 census figures show that the vast majority of people are still married to someone of the same racial group. But there were slight annual increases between the two census years in interracial marriages, especially among the younger generation. This emerges from a Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) study that is part of a broader project looking at the social, economic, and demographic factors that affect family formation and dissolution patterns such as marriages, childbearing and divorce in South Africa.
The overall rate of women aged 35 or younger involved in interracial marriages increased from 0,9% in 1996 to 1,3% in 2001. Marriages between coloured men and African women increased by about 1%, a substantial change relative to the number of such marriages in 1996.
The number of marriages between Africans increased by about 17% percentage points, from 94 885 to 111 340 between 1996 and 2001, while the number of Asian/Asian and white/white marriages decreased by 14% and 25% respectively during the same period.
While there are small differences in the tendency to intermarry, none of the tendencies are large. For example, there are more marriages between African men and coloured women than between African women and coloured men. And the HSRC study found no major increase in marriage rates between African men and white women, coloured men and African or white women, or white men and African women.
Using age as an indicator of trends over time suggests that intermarriage rates are increasing by about 3% per year relative to the overall rate. As far as education goes, the study found that each additional year of education increases the chances that an African or coloured person of either sex will marry an Asian or white person.
Conversely, the lower the education, the greater the chances that non-African groups will marry Africans, or that whites will marry coloureds. Among whites, the most educated are least likely to marry out of their group.
There is also a tendency for interracial marriages to be informal, except in cases where African men marry Asians or white women, or coloured men marry Asian women.
Even though coloureds are the most likely to marry outside their group, they have the slowest rate of change. In fact, at their present rate of change, it will take another 116 years before coloured/coloured marriages would be eliminated, compared to 40 years and 80 years for white/white and African/African marriages respectively.
A more realistic prediction is that some white couples will leave South Africa, and intermarriage between whites and other groups will increase, but there will still be substantial white/white marriages in 40 years.
In this South Africa is not unique. Same-race marriage rates in South Africa are slightly higher than in the United States — a multi-ethnic society like South Africa. For instance, in 1990 the rate for white/white marriages in the US was 96,9% compared to 99,7% and 99,2% in 1996 and 2001 respectively for South Africa.
Professor Yaw Amoateng is the leader of the HSRC study described here. He is chief research specialist in the HSRC’s child, youth and family development research programme
Jungle fever hits SA
Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya
We should have paid proper attention to a popular traditional African wedding song, Tswang Tswang Tswang.
The song — commercialised and recorded by among others the likes of Kori Moraba — asks “le mobone ngwana o tshwana le le-coloured [Did you notice the child [bride] looks like she is coloured]?”
The Human Sciences Research Council report on interracial marriages, and particularly its finding that coloured people are more likely than any other race group to marry into a different racial group, really told us what township and rural black South Africans have known for years — coloureds make the best option to take down the aisle. Proof of this is that there is no other wedding song that specifically praises a bride for looking like a member of any other ethnic group.
After Mail & Guardian published a story highlighting the fact that Nelspruit mayor Jeri Ngomane was once married (albeit in a customary union) to a white woman, a relatively sophisticated Soweto man commented: “This guy is big: not only does he marry a white woman, but that woman’s surname is De Klerk.”
For him, Ngomane had, in marrying a woman with the same last name as the last apartheid president, finally pushed back the frontiers of racism. The last piece of evidence that apartheid was dead was displayed on a front page of the M&G showing De Klerk kissing one of Ngomane’s cheeks and a black woman kissing the other.
A couple of years before Ngomane’s cheek-to-cheek antics, a young Free State karateka, Jerry Tsie, angered the verkrampte community of that province when he eloped with the love of his life.
The black community accepted Tsie’s love warmly. She had been renamed Palesa (flower). If a coloured bride epitomised all that is beautiful, a white girl was a badge of distinction.
Interracial marriages have fascinated mankind for a long time. Think of Shakespeare’s Othello the Moor, who, misled by the jealous Iago (who was white), came to believe his white wife Desdemona was unfaithful. He strangles her and then takes his own life.
Hollywood too has exploited the genre of mixed marriages, with similarly mixed results. Sidney Poitier’s 1967 hit Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner stands in that crowd. Mississippi Masala is about an African-American man who falls in love with an Indian (from the land of Ghandi, not the native American variety), much to the chagrin of their respective communities. The movie was not as much a commercial success as another of the same genre, Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever.
Lee’s movie explored themes of whether black men associated being involved with a white woman as a sign of moving up in the world and whether an educated and viable black man would be accepted by a white family even if it outwardly appears to be liberal.
Then the classic line from Bulworth, about a white, washed-out politician Senator Jay Billington Bulworth (played by Warren Beatty) who flushes away all forms of political correctness, falls in love with a black woman (Halle Berry) and sagely suggests: “Let’s keep shagging until we are all from the same colour.”