The apartheid state engineered categories for groups that had no prior bounded identity.

Evidence

On the quadrilateral’s Native side, however, South African authorities actually found not neat boxes but a kaleidoscope. Thousands of categories designated and divided different sets of the African population. Many of them fell into broadly similar linguistic groupings such as Xhosa, Zulu, and Sotho without their occupants’ being much aware of the similarities. Some of those similarities harked back to kingdoms that had dominated different parts of the region before Dutch and British hegemony, but by the twentieth century few of them designated sharply bounded populations having long histories of geographic and social segregation. … Those presumably distinct nations came to include major segments of the African population. In a remarkable series of direct interventions, the South African state set out to create racial categories that would serve as the basis of unequal rights and rewards. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 557

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to regime-capacity test: here the state manufactures categoric inequality top-down, forging the very identities it then administers — key to whether Tilly’s framework assumes categories pre-exist institutions. — connects to: Apartheid intensified preexisting state-created categories rather than inventing new ones — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 566; Apartheid intensified inherited colonial categories rather than inventing them anew.; Traditionally stateless African societies were egalitarian yet individually mobile — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2289 (+8 more)
• QUESTION: Does Tilly anywhere distinguish categories the state invents from categories the state merely formalizes? The capacity to invent wholesale is a regime power his repertoires model doesn’t clearly accommodate.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 557

Broader Connections

• Apartheid intensified preexisting state-created categories rather than inventing new ones #contradicts (0.92) — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 566
• Apartheid intensified inherited colonial categories rather than inventing them anew. #contradicts (0.90)
• Colonial ethnography supplied the classificatory categories apartheid segregation built upon. #contradicts (0.88) — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 567
• Racial categories were administratively imposed rather than biologically fixed #corroborates (0.87) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 216
• Colonial classifications imposed race categories that subjects never recognized as their own #corroborates (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 650
• Divide-and-rule ethnoracial fragmentation long predated formal apartheid #complicates (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1481
• Pre-national social identity was relational, not categorical. #corroborates (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 38
• Traditionally stateless African societies were egalitarian yet individually mobile #qualifies (0.78) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2289
• Early Cape racial hierarchy existed without a race-based governing rationality #complicates (0.73)
• Apartheid’s ideology rested on God-ordained separate-but-equal racial development #qualifies (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1507