Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.Foreign News: SOUTH AFRICA'S TRAGEDY IN COLORS
"We May Make a Few Mistakes"
AFRICA was in the midst of a cruel process called Population Registration. In informal courts a group of nameless bureaucrats pressed a nationwide inquisition that would, when completed, give every one of South Africa's 12.6 million people a racial label: black, white or Colored.
Most whites seemed not to mind: they would simply be asked to carry an identity card which the police would not ask them for anyway. Not many of the blacks cared either, for the bulk of them already are numbed from years of carrying...
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