Chinese recognised as 'black' community

JOHANNESBURG // It has to be one of the more surreal court decisions. In South Africa's high court, Justice Pretorius recently ruled: "It is declared that South African Chinese people fall within the ambit of the definition of 'black people'."

In terms of human skin tones, east Asians are about as far removed from Africans as it is possible to be without being Caucasian. But in modern South Africa "black" is a relative concept. South Africa's naturalised Chinese community - as opposed to more recent arrivals as part of the Asian global diaspora - are largely the descendants of traders and small businessmen who immigrated in the first 40 years of the 20th century, in the wake of the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand.

Most of the indentured labourers who were brought in to work in mining and construction were sent home at the end of their contracts, but a few stayed on, and their children and grandchildren are Chinese South Africans too. Some Taiwanese investors, who arrived in the 1980s after trade agreements were signed between Taipei and Johannesburg, were effectively treated as "honorary whites", but under apartheid, Chinese South Africans were included within the "coloured" designation, along with those of mixed race and all who did not fit into the convenient categories of "white" or "black". As such, they were subject to discrimination, educated in "coloured" schools, not allowed to live in "white" districts under the Group Areas Act, and barred from marrying whites, with sexual relations between the races illegal under the Immorality Act.

After the advent of democracy in 1994, when South Africa's new ANC-led government instituted a series of measures designed to redress historical wrongs, known as Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE), South African Chinese thought that they too would benefit. Instead, the legislation defined "black" as Africans, coloured people, Indians, disabled people and women. Chinese, who now number between 6,000 and 10,000 people, were reclassified as "white".

"We assumed because we had been coloured under apartheid legislation, we presumed it would be fine. I thought that we were included," said Patrick Chong, chairman of the Chinese Association of South Africa. "But when people applied for jobs and bursaries, they were told, 'You don't qualify. You're white'. It doesn't make any sense." Until two years ago, he pointed out, the University of Pretoria's application forms contained a racial designation box of "White: Chinese".

"In the old days, it used to be white and non-white. In the new South Africa, it's black or non-black." Mr Chong, 57, who is a chartered accountant in Cape Town, sued the government over the issue, and after eight and a half years, the courts in June finally ruled in his favour. "To me it was about my ancestors and my late parents and those who were of that era, the fact that they suffered humiliation under apartheid," he said.

"My uncle cried [after hearing the ruling]," he said. "He had to walk in the gutter when white people walked on the pavement. You can't understand that feeling. Now we have been recognised. "It's not about empowerment. That's just by the way. Sure, there are certain benefits with so-called entitlement. The fact is, we as a community suffered. That's really the whole motive." BBBEE is a key factor in the rise of South Africa's black middle class and new elite, and the decision was not welcomed by all South Africans, some of whom saw it as threatening their interests.

Membathisi Mdladlana, the minister of labour, said that now Chinese South Africans had been classed as "coloured" they had no excuse to mistreat workers or not to speak South African languages. Some black groups said they would appeal against the decision, and Sandile Zungu, the chairman of Zungu Investments Company, was quoted as saying: "We as blacks need to jealously guard that we were historically disadvantaged and suffered under apartheid."

Last week, Peter Delmar, a commentator in South Africa's Times newspaper, compared the ruling to Sylvester McMonkey McBean's "very peculiar machine" in a Dr Seuss children's book. "Representatives of the Chinese community popped into their own peculiar machine - the high court - and popped out black," he wrote. "Only in South Africa, I suppose." Mr Chong said empowerment should not be about creating new privileges. After the ruling, he addressed a meeting of the Black Management Forum, a business grouping, and told them that "with all due respect to everyone in this room", Chinese were already educated, skilled and empowered.

"We don't need it," he said. "If we continue down this road of expectation or sense of entitlement, then empowerment will fail. If, because we were previously disadvantaged, that gives us a right of entitlement, then something is very wrong in the system. I could say that because technically I'm black. If I was white, everybody would jump up and say, 'you are jealous'." It is a situation that echoes and draws from the definitions of apartheid, and while there is nothing like the organised mass discrimination of the racist system, Marius Roodt, a researcher at the South African Institute of Race Relations, said there were some "surreal" similarities.

"The ridiculousness of it is a Nigerian or Mozambican who became a citizen after April 27 1994, under the employment equity laws, he isn't black. A coloured mix is black compared to a Nigerian. It shows the South African government has created two classes, people who are black and people who are not black even though they are." Race would be an issue in South Africa, he said, "forever, or until we get to a mythical time when everybody is mixed race.

"Race is still an issue in the US and UK. South Africa, with our history and the animosity we had, race is going to be an issue indefinitely, especially if the government carries with race in the forefront of the national consciousness. We should be moving away from that but I don't think we are." @email:sberger@thenational.ae