The covenant - James A. Michener [551]
But even honest intentions sometimes create problems which the promulgator of a law could not have foreseen; apartheid became so pervasive that it dominated the lives of ordinary people from birth to death to resurrection.
AT BIRTH
The Afrikaner was never afraid to fly against the winds of history, and usually with success. Other nations had learned to utilize, and sometimes condone, the mixture of their races, with enviable results. No more beautiful people exist in the world than the languorous, able Chinese-Polynesians of the South Seas. The black-white mixture in Brazil produces offspring of extraordinary quality, while the Japanese-white children of Hawaii are exceptional in both talent and appearance. The Indian-Spanish mix in Mexico is a good one, and so is the Indian-black in Trinidad.
The Afrikaner saw the hand of God in the creation of his small nation, and was determined to isolate it from admixtures that would dilute its purity. Indeed, it was difficult to find a more homogeneous, handsome and dedicated body of people than those Afrikaners nurtured on the veld and in the valleys of the continent's southern tip. Of course, the pure Dutch strain had been infused with contributions from the gifted Huguenots who filtered in, never many in number, and with heavier contributions from the Germans, who at times actually outnumbered the Dutch. But these were peoples of roughly the same physical and mental inheritance. Additions from the English were inescapable; they came to form a large part of the white community. And it would have been impossible for the Afrikaner not to draw, too, from the Hottentot, the black and the Coloured. In pioneer days he acknowledged this, but his descendants were determined to prevent any further penetration of their white laager.
His jealous guarding of blood purity did exact a social cost, for the Coloured peoples that had arisen, here as elsewhere in the world, had to be savagely excluded from national life. Not only were they forbidden to intermingle with whites socially; they were also cut off economically, professionally, creatively, until the loss to the nation was incalculable. How much poorer the United States would have been without the contributions of persons whose light skins would cause them to be classified as Coloured in South Africa: Frederick Douglass, Ralph Bunche, Martin Luther King, O. J. Simpson, Harry Belafonte, Lena Home, Diahann Carroll, Senator Brooke and Congressman Powell. Or how the world's creative pool would have been diminished without the work of Coloureds such as the poet Pushkin, the painter Pissaro, and the flamboyant storyteller Dumas.
South Africa silenced in the cradle all such potential contributions from its Malay-Hottentot-black-Afrikaner-English-Coloureds, and its loss was never greater than when it rejected young Heather Botha, twenty-three years old and of such a mixture. She was exotic, like a palm tree bending beside a lagoon, or a tawny pearl held in a Balinese hand. She combined the most attractive features of all the wanderers who had figured in her background: the fiery-tempered Malay slave woman who had fought her Compagnie master for nine years, then slept with his son for eleven; the Dutch sea captain who had fought storms in too many seas to give a damn about what Compagnie officials said regarding fraternization with girls of mixed breed; the Hottentot herdsman who had protected with a gun the forty-seven cattle he owned, plus the fifty-seven stolen from Compagnie herds; the black warrior who had defended himself against both Zulu and white man; the fair-faced English officer, India-bound, whispering love to a young Coloured maiden beside a brook on the