Fanatical about race in the 1980s

JUST about everybody is obsessed with race these days, but perhaps not in the same way as some were back in the 1980s, certainly not when they were presented with evidence of the unremarkable genetic admixture that is common to us all. The report below reminds us – most of us – how far we have come since February 21, 1985.

A FURIOUS row has broken out between Conservative Party MPs and a coloured MP following allegations that some of their ancestors were coloured.

Speaking in the House of Representatives, Mr Jac Rabie, Labour Party MP for Reiger Park, said that some Conservative Party MPs and leaders should not be sitting in the white House of Assembly.

He quoted extracts from Groep Sonder Grense, a survey of the genealogy of South African families by Dr Hans Heese, a historian at the University of the Western Cape, in which the names Hoon, Snyman, Meyer and Treurnicht were traced back to their Cape origins, with Batavian, negroid and slave forefathers.

Mr Rabie also said that one of his uncles was chairman of a Transvaal branch of the CP.

Dr Andries Treurnicht, chairman of the CP, said today it was the first time he had come across suggestions that he had forebears from Bengal or Batavia, and he strongly denied it.

He regarded the allegation as “rubbish” until the contrary was proved.

Dr Treurnicht said Mr Rabie’s statement was nothing but part of a calculated attempt by liberalists and some coloureds to demolish white identity and to prepare the way for integration between white and coloured.

It was also a transparent attempt to make whites ashamed of the fact that they were white.