{"id":22977,"date":"2012-05-08T01:20:47","date_gmt":"2012-05-08T01:20:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=22977"},"modified":"2012-05-08T01:21:41","modified_gmt":"2012-05-08T01:21:41","slug":"the-ambivalence-of-authority-and-secret-lives-of-tears-transracial-child-placements-and-the-historical-development-of-south-african-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=22977","title":{"rendered":"The ambivalence of authority and secret lives of tears: transracial child placements and the historical development of South African Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

The ambivalence of authority and secret lives of tears: transracial child placements and the historical development of South African Law<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Journal of Southern African Studies<\/a>
\nVolume 18, Issue 2<\/a>, (June 1992)
\npages 372-404
\nDOI: 10.1080\/03057079208708319<\/a><\/p>\n

Frederick Noel Zaal<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Law
\nUniversity of Kwazulu-Natal<\/em><\/p>\n

The negative attitudes towards racially mixed familial groups which underlay many mid\u2010twentieth century South African statutes had deep historical roots.<\/strong> Early in the seventeenth century it became fashionable for Dutch travellers to write memoirs in which they routinely condemned the effects of transracial sexual relationships which they had witnessed in the colonies of other nations and in which they ascribed witch-like powers to women of colour who consorted with Europeans. The pessimistic mythology about miscegenation<\/a> that was thus begun affected policy makers when the Dutch East India Company<\/a> subsequently began to establish the first Dutch colonies in the East Indies. Both in the Indies and at the small Dutch colony in South Africa, uncomfortable tensions resulted because of the fears and racial prejudice engendered by this mythology in the face of a contrary need to assimilate the offspring of miscegenation. In South Africa the legal mechanisms which the Dutch East India Company had developed to cater for this need were forgotten by the late nineteenth century. However, the mythology about the undesirability of racially mixed familial groups lived on into the twentieth century. As the century progressed, it resulted in an erosion of the legal status and rights of children whose parents were given different population group classifications by a government which steadily increased the number of such groups.<\/strong> During the period 1960\u20131990 there was a series of governmental attempts to prevent the artificial creation of mixed familial groups by prohibiting transracial adoptions. The legislation which was designed for this purpose remained ambiguously worded because modern Western notions about the rights and vulnerability of children compelled a covert approach. In the early 1990s, as the white minority fears for its future, there has been an unwitting return to the kind of selectively acquisitive child placement strategies once utilized by the Dutch East India Company.<\/p>\n

Read or purchase the article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The ambivalence of authority and secret lives of tears: transracial child placements and the historical development of South African Law Journal of Southern African Studies Volume 18, Issue 2, (June 1992) pages 372-404 DOI: 10.1080\/03057079208708319 Frederick Noel Zaal, Professor of Law University of Kwazulu-Natal The negative attitudes towards racially mixed familial groups which underlay many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1295,459,1467,8,520],"tags":[10670,10669,10671,2646],"class_list":["post-22977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-south-africa","tag-frederick-n-zaal","tag-frederick-noel-zaal","tag-frederick-zaal","tag-journal-of-southern-african-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22977\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}