“Love across the Colour Bar”: Breaking the Heart of Apartheid Logic

Interracial love during apartheid meant crossing the legal prescriptions from moral to immoral, consorting outside the group area and racial population you were designated to, and, ultimately, breaking the heart of apartheid logic. This article recounts some experiences from men and women who crossed the “colour bar” to form “mixed race” relationships and sometimes children in the first decade and a half of apartheid, from 1948 to the early 1960s. This article focuses on relationships between Whites and Blacks that were formed during this period, as reported in the popular Drum magazine from its first publication in 1951. These types of relationships were quite frequently reported in Drum and other media, but there is a paucity of analysis of these relationships and the history of mixed-race love in South African academic literature. The article argues that apartheid was built on a flawed concept of love in which the purest love was not only White, but needed to be preserved by defending it against a mixed-race logic that it knew was its love’s antithesis. The article also shows that the global heritage that interracial unions have given to the world can be used to undress apartheid’s false legacies and logic about love and race that continue in the democratic dispensation.