9th March 2010

Anthropologist, Paleontologist and University Professor Nina Jablonski will discuss “Why human skin comes in colors”

Venue: Wallenberg Centrel, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study ( STIAS) Marais Street, Stellenbosch

Time: 6pm
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021 557 0246

Skin colour is about ancestry.  Our skin is the largest and most adaptable organ in the body and evidence from science tells us that the structure of the outer layer (the epidermis) and the inner layer (the dermis) of our skin can change rapidly.  Our skin thickens and alters its texture in months, tans in hours and burns in minutes.  But the basic colour of our skins is something that is much older and comes down to us from our long dead ancestors.

Why do humans from different parts of the world have skin colours that are so different?

On reading through some archival materials in preparation for a lecture on residential segregation it became immediately apparent that ‘group areas’ could not be understood in isolation of sex and marriage across the ‘colour line’ and that I was looking at a historical picture at the centre of which stood a government effort led by T.E. Dönges, apartheid’s first Minister of the Interior, to apply a programme of population engineering that built on and refined racial measures already enacted historically. What they tried to create was a breeding programme for human beings on a national scale.

To pursue their project, Dönges had to classify the South African population in law, which appeared in the form of the Population Registration Act of 1950. The legislation divided the population into four main groups along lines of appearance and social recognition: Europeans (meaning whites), Asian, ‘coloureds’ and ‘natives’ (meaning blacks). Of course, the designation European for the descendents of immigrants largely from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany and France was a wistful reclaiming of an identity lost in time and trouble; the use of Asian for the descendents of indentured workers who came from certain parts of India, a small part of the Asian sub-continent, an admission of ignorance or indifference to areas of origin; ‘coloured’ was a fictional assembly of individuals from a diverse set of backgrounds living in one place and at one time; ‘native’ later replaced by ‘Bantu’, disposing an already troubled and misleading term to the language of offence.