The mixed-race Zaaiman line produced apartheid’s most powerful figures

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). — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1318

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: A mixed genealogy threading through Kruger, Smuts, and de Klerk — apartheid’s architects descended from the very mixing they legislated against — is a powerful narrative spine.
• CANDY: Apartheid’s leaders descended from a mixed-race founding couple is a striking conversational fact.