World: CROSSING THE COLOR LINE

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A South African Tragedy

AT a funeral in Cape Town recently, a young Colored woman ran up to her father's sister, whom she had not seen in several months. "Hello, auntie!" she cried. Tossing her head contemptuously, the older woman snapped: "Don't call me auntie. Call me missus."

By the letter of the law, the aunt acted irreproachably. Until this year, she and her husband had spent their entire lives in the murky social limbo to which South Africa relegates the Coloreds, its 1,500,000 people of mixed European and nonwhite descent. Then one day this year, Cape Province's Race Classification Board informed the light-skinned couple that they had been reclassified as whites. Henceforth, if they are seen associating with Coloreds, even close relatives, they will run the risk of being downgraded to Colored status again and forfeit the civil rights and economic advantages that accrue exclusively to the white man in apartheid-ruled South Africa.

Heartbreak at Home. Since 1950, when South Africa's Population Registration Act was passed to reinforce Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd's "granite" apartheid policy, faceless inquisitors have been methodically dividing the entire population into neatly labeled groups: black, white, Asian and Colored. Designed to prevent racial "contamination" of the nation's 3,000,000 whites, the law gave the government power to list names, ancestry and accepted skin color of South Africa's 16 million citizens. In the process of compiling these human pedigrees, pigmentation commissars have reclassified thousands of dark-skinned Coloreds as blacks, thus consigning them to the 11 million-strong majority of Unpersons who are denied even the tenuous rights and privileges accorded those of mixed blood. Ironically, however, it is at the other end of the scale that the process often works most cruelly.

In Cape Province, where 1,000,000 Coloreds are concentrated, more than 300 borderline families have been reclassified as whites since January. Not only have the racial "promotions" stirred resentment among many whites; they have also been bitterly attacked by the leaders of the Colored community. For virtually every case represents heartbreak and disruption.

Last week in Parliament, suave Interior Minister Johannes de Klerk blandly denied Colored leaders' charges that the government is deliberately siphoning off the light-skinned in order to increase South Africa's white population as a bulwark against the huge black majority. De Klerk explained that in issuing white identity cards to the 300 Cape families, his officials were only trying to "act humanely" and give borderline cases "the benefit of the doubt."