The architects of apartheid descended from the very racial mixing they later repressed.

Evidence

Close working relationships notwithstanding – or perhaps enabled by imbalanced power and status relations – no doubt turned into intimacies of another sort. A larger list of offspring followed, leading to the Zaaiman family line that later included significant characters in apartheid’s political history such as Paul Kruger (Boer leader and president of the rebel South African or Transvaal Republic from 1880 till its defeat in the Anglo-Boer War in 1900) and Jan Smuts (twice prime minister, most notably as an Allied Force member during World War II). But it included more recently also F. W. de Klerk (the last president of the apartheid republic and the man credited, with Nelson Mandela, for handing power over peacefully to genuine majority rule; it signals deeply significant change that today Mandela rather than De Klerk is far more readily and properly remembered as both symbolic of and critical contributor to apartheid’s demise). … Under Dutch company rule, lasting until the end of the eighteenth century when the Company went bankrupt, mixed marriages were permissible in the colonies, though restricted from returning to the Netherlands for fear of unsettling the political order of the metropole. Across the period, there were something like 1,300 legally recorded unions between European men and local women of color at the Cape, no doubt considerably more unrecorded if not thoroughly unacknowledged. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1318

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The genealogical irony — apartheid’s architects descended from mixed unions they later suppressed — parallels the author’s earlier point about threatened-privilege mobilization built on suppressed origins.
• STORYSTEM: A family saga where an Afrikaner dynasty’s secrecy about its own mixed ancestry mirrors the state’s erasure of mixture from its self-portrait.
• XREF: connects to: Architects of apartheid themselves descended from the mixed-race unions they suppressed — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1321; Apartheid’s architects descended from early Dutch-Khoi mixed marriages; Apartheid’s land was thoroughly culturally mixed from colonization’s start — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1334

Broader Connections

• Architects of apartheid themselves descended from the mixed-race unions they suppressed #corroborates (0.92) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1321
• Apartheid’s architects descended from early Dutch-Khoi mixed marriages #expands (0.85)
• Apartheid’s land was thoroughly culturally mixed from colonization’s start #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1334