One poignant point my friend pointed out was how divisive this system was on families. Like in the USA before the victory of the civil rights movement, whites and other 'races' were almost totally segregated. They had different schools, different public facilities, different train carriages, different everything. And here's the thing: from what she told me I have the impression that racial classifications were really very arbitrary. My friend's dad, who is darker than her mom, was classified as 'white', whilst her mom (like herself) was classified as 'non-white'. And if you were Chinese, you would be 'non-white', but if you were Japanese, you would be 'white'. Whu-whu-whaaat??? Weird. So this must have led to really strange and divisive implications. Because of the nature of genetic inheritance, children born to mixed-race parents can turn out to look different from each other. My friend, for example, has fairer skin than her sister and used to have red hair, so she often could pass as a white in South Africa. For her sister, I would imagine, that would be much harder to do. So the members of the same family might have had to ride in different carriages when taking a train journey. And that's only physical separation; there's also social separation. The advantage of being classified as a 'white' means that fairer members of a family might be tempted to disassociate themselves from their darker kins for the sake of social mobility. My friend didn't tell me whether that kind of thing has actually happened, but I know it did happen in at least one German Jewish family in Nazi Germany, so the possibility of it having taken place in Apartheid South Africa is not out of the question.

So I concluded from our very interesting conversation (which made me felt a bit like being in an Anthropology class discussion - except for the very comfy la-z-boy), that there were two somewhat paradoxical social structures existing side by side. On the one hand, South Africa's very heterogenous mixture of people from various parts of the world - some having settled there voluntarily, others having brought there by force, while most having been there since the beginning of time - must have made the country such a multiracial (or in todays' terms, multiethnic) society indeed. And the intermarriages between the people of these widely different communities would have produced children like my friend, whose ethnic background is so rich and amazingly diverse. But on the other hand, there was also an official policy of segregation that separated these same people into racial groupings. The reason these groupings seems now so arbitrary was probably because they couldn't cope with the diversity the way they were intended to.

I thought about my friend's experience as a 'non-white' of mixed backgrounds growing up in South Africa in the light of my research on student identity. And I wondered what it was like for people like her to grow up in such a society, especially when they were trying to shape their identities as adolescents. And I wondered what how that must have affected their sense of self and identity, their social relationships with their families and friends and so on.

I'm still thinking about it now. Apartheid was a system that destroyed people. It turned otherwise fine people into inhumane oppressors. It dehumanised people and turned them into labels ('whites', 'non-whites', 'Africans'). It was especially destructive on the black communities, the original settlers of the country, as it kept those communities underdeveloped and turned it against itself. And in the light of what I'm studying now (both academically and in life), it probably caused great grief to the huge numbers of 'non-whites' whose sense of self and identity might have been badly injured by having such a vague and socially demobilising label imposed on them.