Leon Schreiber turns Home Affairs off, and on again

Leon Schreiber

As far back as one cares to look, rulers have been trying to keep tabs on their people. Writing itself was invented for recordkeeping, but pre-modern states were essentially blind, knew little about their citizens, how much they owned, and where they were actually living. The problem was one of legibility, says US anthropologist James Scott, and modern states make their societies legible by ensuring that surnames are permanent, there’s a population register, and an official language, among other measures.

Good recordkeeping makes a state more able, but whether it’s beneficial depends on how the data is used. The Third Reich, Rwanda and a number of colonial administrations all used their population data to categorise their populations, but South Africa paid fanatical attention to this, passing the Population Registration Act in 1950, which saw every person racially classified, often arbitrarily, as either Coloured, White, and Bantu (Black African). Indian and Asian people fell under the Coloured category, but Proclamation 46 in 1959 cleared this up with further categories of Indian, Chinese and “Other Asiatic” people.