Michael Schmidt
3 August 2003
Johannesburg — Mixed couples as unusual as they were under apartheid
MARRIAGE in South Africa is far from colour-blind. A study of interracial marriages has discovered that marrying across the old "colour line" is as rare today as it was a generation ago during apartheid.
The study, conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council, found that only four out of every 100 couples surveyed were interracial. The findings were based on a sample of 368 000 married couples.
The study found that in the small group of mixed marriages:
Generally, lighter-skinned men married darker-skinned women ;
The highest incidence of "out-marriages" - 2.4% of the sample - was between coloured women and African men and the lowest, 0% of the sample, was between African men and white women. White men who married African women comprised only 0.1% of the sample;
A superior cosmopolitan education does not increase the likelihood that people will marry outside their racial groups;
Women are far more likely to marry outside their linguistic groups, with the lowest rates of out-marriage found among speakers of Sotho and Tswana, and the highest among Xhosa, Pedi and Tsonga speakers;
People with darker skin, usually of lower socioeconomic status, improve their upward mobility by "'marrying light"; and
Despite the advantages to black people of affirmative action, people who marry lighter-skinned spouses also aim to improve the mobility of their latt©-skinned children.
However, the study also found that things are slowly changing, with young South Africans increasingly marrying out of their groups. But it could not determine whether this was a long-term trend.
Interracial marriage was outlawed until 1985 when the Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and the Immorality Amendment Act of 1957 were repealed .
Professor Yaw Amoateng, a sociologist who conducted the research with two Americans, said the results were to be expected, given the rigidity of apartheid, yet it was "surprising" that mixed marriages were still quite so rare since the laws forbidding them had been repealed a generation ago.
Amoateng said studies in other multiracial societies, such as the US, found that black people generally married white people to improve their social status.
But in South Africa, white men were marrying darker women, which was "intriguing [because] the paler your children are, the more socioeconomic advantages accrue to them".
In the sample, 171 white men had married coloured women and 66 had married Asian women - but only 59 coloured men had married white women and only 39 Asian men had done so.
Jody Kollapen of the Human Rights Commission said that , unlike in the US, black South Africans did not need to marry whites to advance themselves because other mechanisms were available.
Still, he thought that "notwithstanding that those laws were scrapped a long time ago, the [geographic] differences remain quite clear along racial lines".
He said other factors like common religions also played a homogenising role.
"In private matters, this pattern is likely to continue," he said.
But another sociologist, Rhoda Kadalie, who was forced to travel to Namibia to escape South Africa's race laws and marry her German former husband in 1983, said she thought the findings of the survey were "normal for anywhere in the world", with people tending to marry those who moved in the same circles and shared interests and culture.
She agreed that cross-race relationships increased social mobility - in both directions - but she thought the sample was too "conservative" because it focused on married couples, while many young interracial couples today were not interested in marriage.
Kadalie said her 16-year-old daughter Julia's generation was "completely nonracial" in their spectrum of romantic partners.
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