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Daniel's Passage. His assurances were hardly enough. A Colored who becomes a card-carrying white must uproot himself and his family from home, job, friends and kin to enter a world in which he may never be fully accepted. In one recent case, Edward Raubenheimer, a relatively well-to-do Cape Town Colored school principal, learned that his older, less successful brother Daniel had been reclassified as white at age 67. White status was simultaneously conferred on Daniel's wife, who is the daughter of a Colored woman and a white salesman, and their four children, one of whom applied for reclassification in 1961 and was rejected at the time. One of Daniel's sons had to quit his Colored college. A daughter who is a teacher was forced to give up her post but will automatically earn up to 40% more in a white school if she can get a job. Her sister has a young daughter by a previous marriage who also "passed"; as a result, the child's Colored father may no longer ride in the same section of a bus as his daughter or take her to any of the Cape's rigidly segregated beaches.
Light-skinned Daniel Raubenheimer, a retired small-time tailor who drew a $14 monthly pension as a Colored man, is now entitled to $34.
"My kids are white, their friends are white, they lead a white man's life," he says. "As far as my brother is concerned, I'm dead. Well, that goes for him too." Sighed Edward: "These Colored people who pass over—they're more anti-Colored than anyone else."
Colored Historian Richard van der Ross says, only slightly in jest, that the Colored race "was born nine months after the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck," the Dutchman who founded Cape Colony in 1652. Since few white women ventured to join their menfolk, the Dutch encouraged racial mingling as a means of persuading the colonists to stay permanently in South Africa.
Dutch East India Company pioneers married Hottentots, imported female slaves from equatorial Africa, and spiced the melting pot by shipping native girls from such far-off breeding grounds as Dutch-ruled Java and Ceylon. In three centuries, an estimated 250,000 Coloreds have passed into South Africa's white population.
Who Is a White? Those who remain legally Colored are caught tragically between the two big layers of South Africa's population. They look with disdain on the blacks and are rejected by the whites. Though they share a common culture and tongue with the white man (90% of the Coloreds speak only Afrikaans), they are denied full representation in Parliament, and are segregated in Colored neighborhoods; they may not compete with whites for many jobs or even enter a post office by the same door. Split between conservatives and radicals, the Coloreds have never been as potent a political force as the blacks, whose African National Congress, headed by Nobel Prizewinner and former Zulu Chief Albert Luthuli, has been banned since 1960. Today, 21,000 borderline Coloreds have yet to be classified; the two-thirds of them who are at the dark end of the spectrum live in constant fear that their new identity cards will read "native."