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By Root 1005 0

to metamorphose. Interviews would be conducted and in the trickier cases petitioners would appear before the ladies and gentlemen of the all-white board. The board members would ask the race changees to walk up and down before them, allowing them to peruse their postures and buttock shapes. In the event that the matter remained unresolved, the pencil test was the most scientifically reliable dispeller of doubt. A pencil would be poked inside a person’s hair: the tighter the hair’s natural grip, the darker the classification. The Ministry of Home Affairs’s figures for 1989 show that 573 Coloured people applied to become White, of whom 519 were successful, and that 369 Black people applied to become Coloured, of whom 327 made it. In these cases the impulse was clearly the improvement of one’s material circumstances. But the record also shows that fourteen Whites applied to become Coloured, of whom twelve succeeded; that three Whites applied to become Indian and two to become Chinese, all five succeeding. Such miracles were evidently not wrought by cold reason, but by the Race Classification Board’s sympathy for the petitioners’ admirably self-sacrificial romantic impulses.

The Group Areas Act was the law by which black and white people were legally prohibited from living in the same parts of town, that made physical apartness between white town and black township compulsory. But in the eyes of apartheid’s ideologues it was, in fact, more than that. It was divinely ordained. The God-fearing volk would never have set about anything as far-reaching as a system that condemned the vast majority of the inhabitants of their country to fourth-class citizenship had they not been quite certain that they had a biblical justification for what they were doing. Like other fundamentalists before and after them, they dug deep into the Old Testament and came up with theological arguments in support of casting black people into outer darkness. According to a book titled Biblical Aspects of Apartheid, published in 1958 by an eminent theologian of the Dutch Reformed Church, Group Areas legislation applied in the afterlife too. The book offered comfort to those white South Africans who might have feared they would have to mix with black people in heaven. Not to worry. Biblical Aspects of Apartheid assured them that the Good Book said that there were “many mansions” in “our Father’s house.”

Constand Viljoen dedicated his life to defending these laws against the forces led by his enemy-in-chief, Nelson Mandela. Braam Viljoen, who from early on regarded the apartheid laws as an abomination, became one of Mandela’s unofficial foot soldiers.

If Constand’s problem was that he thought too little, Braam’s was that he thought too much. A little bit of reassurance from the pulpit that the apartheid laws were all God’s work and Constand cheerfully threw in his lot with the defense of the fatherland. Braam, an astoundingly independent-minded teenager for an Afrikaner raised on a farm 150 miles from the nearest city, heard the same words as his brother from the local Dutch Reformed Church dominee and found them deeply troubling. On going to university in Pretoria to study theology, with a view to becoming a dominee himself, he became intrigued by the work of a subversive little group of theologians who were questioning the reigning orthodoxies. This prompted him in turn to take an interest in the ANC. He read their Freedom Charter (“South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white”) with keen attention when it came out in 1955, the year his brother completed university and became an officer in the army.

While Constand eased up the ranks, impressing his superior officers, Braam was impressed by the Christian seriousness of Mandela’s predecessor as head of the ANC, Albert Luthuli. In the early sixties, by which time he had made the grade as a professor of theology, Braam signed a declaration stating that it was heresy to identify apartheid with the will of God. The wording of the declaration was solemn and respectful. In private, Braam seethed.