Four Families in South Africa : Colored Family Finds Color Still Matters : * ‘I’m probably not as oppressed as my domestic worker, but I still feel oppressed,’ says Rhoda Desai. ‘They’re still using us.’

ATHLONE, South Africa —  In a nation notorious for enforcing racial barriers, Anver and Rhoda Desai’s family tree, blooming with multiple colors and nationalities, has proved a test for even the most skilled government bureaucrat.

Years ago, the white authorities decided that Anver’s grandmother was a “Cape Colored,” the probable offspring of a German settler and a “Cape Malay,” or descendant of immigrants from the Spice Islands. But then his grandmother married a man from India. And they had a daughter, Anver’s mother, who married a man classified “Cape Malay.”

The result: Anver is registered as a Cape Malay.

Rhoda’s fair-skinned grandmother and mother were part Dutch, the same stock that produced the architects of apartheid as well as President Frederik W. de Klerk. But her darker-skinned father bore the label Cape Malay.

So the government, somewhat arbitrarily, made Rhoda, who has cocoa-colored skin, a Cape Malay.

The Desais laugh when they tell their stories. “I don’t even know where Malaysia is,” Rhoda said.

Welcome to the strange world of the 3 million mixed-race inhabitants of South Africa--the people the government calls “Colored.”

As a group, the Colored people have vast physical, biological and cultural differences. There are Muslims and Christians, skilled urban artisans and illiterate farm workers. Their ancestors include the early white settlers as well as Indians, Chinese, Malaysians, Indonesians, mixed-race Griquas and Khoikhoi, the yellow-skinned people who were here when whites arrived. And yet, until recently, the white rulers of South Africa had given them all one label--Colored--and forced them into their own towns, church congregations, schools and even cemeteries.

On apartheid’s scale of privilege, Coloreds rank third, behind whites and Indians but ahead of blacks, in living conditions, education and income.

Rhoda and Anver Desai and their three sons--ages 8, 7 and 3--own a new, $40,000, three-bedroom brick home in the middle of Athlone, a Colored township on the outskirts of Cape Town.

Athlone is a crowded but tidy township of middle-class homes, four-lane boulevards and plentiful shopping. It stands in stark contrast to Guguletu and Crossroads, its low-income, high-crime black neighbors to the east, and the expensive homes and shopping malls of Cape Town and the other white towns to the west.

Rhoda, an outspoken 31-year-old, teaches English to Colored and black students at Salt River High School. Anver, a genial man of 32 with a close-cropped black beard and tortoise-shell glasses, teaches at a Muslim primary school attended by Coloreds, Indians and some blacks.

Although Colored people have been treated slightly better than blacks by South Africa’s white rulers, the Desais consider themselves part of the oppressed black majority.

“I’m probably not as oppressed as my domestic worker, but I still feel oppressed,” Rhoda said. “Changes have been taking place in the country, but I don’t see anything genuine from this government. There’s no sincerity. They’re still using us.”

The Desais’ comfortably spacious home is tastefully decorated, with modern kitchen appliances. And they have a 9-year-old Toyota parked in their carport.

Their combined income of about $30,000 is enough to make the mortgage payments and employ a part-time housekeeper, Felicia, who is black, at a salary of about $100 a month. But it’s still not enough to move into a white neighborhood, where even the cheapest homes are beyond their reach.

Sketching their racial ancestry for a visitor in their living room recently, Anver and Rhoda found themselves greatly amused by the pointlessness of apartheid.

Diligent apartheid bureaucrats once scrutinized faces and hair, took photographs and sent thick reports back to government headquarters in Pretoria on each of the hundreds of blacks who applied annually to be reclassified as Colored--and the many more Coloreds who applied to become whites.

“The only people who called us Colored were people who weren’t Colored,” Rhoda said. “We’ve been fighting all our lives to get rid of that label.”

Technically, the label is gone, now a part of the history that De Klerk is trying to rewrite.

One of the final pillars of apartheid to go was the Population Registration Act, the backbone of racial separation. Its repeal a year ago ended 40 years of classifying each newborn as either white, Indian, Colored or black.

In practice, though, the labels still are a force in everyday life.

De Klerk’s son created headlines last year when he announced plans to marry a Colored college classmate. But he broke off the engagement a few weeks ago, reportedly under pressure from his mother.

A Colored house of Parliament, the House of Representatives, sits alongside an Indian chamber and a white chamber, which remains the most powerful of the three. (Blacks have never been allowed to elect representatives to Parliament.)

The birth of that three-chamber Parliament gave Coloreds their first opportunity to vote in 1984. But the elections have been widely boycotted by Coloreds, like the Desais, who saw them as an attempt to co-opt Colored leaders and further entrench racial separation.

“We haven’t struggled to better ourselves as Colored people--but to better all oppressed people,” Rhoda said. And the lavish, government-funded lifestyles adopted by those Colored politicians have cost them their credibility as anti-apartheid leaders.

De Klerk’s 2-year-old reform program has removed most legal barriers to integration, but social segregation remains the norm. The Desais have to drive out of the township to visit a white or black friend, and, largely as a result, they don’t have many friendships with whites or blacks.

Anver remembers, as a boy, watching from outside the fence as whites dived into a large segregated pool in the white suburb of Seapoint. The pool has been open to Coloreds for two years now. But he hasn’t taken his boys there. “I guess you just get used to the idea of not going,” he said with a shrug.

The faculty at the Desais’ schools is predominantly Colored, and Rhoda has never been inside a white school. “But when I’m passing them, I can see their clean classrooms, the trees, the gardens and the swimming pools,” she said.

In fact, the government spends nearly twice as much money to educate the average white as it does the average Colored student. (Coloreds still receive more than double the amount spent on blacks.)

The other day a student in Rhoda’s English class asked to borrow a dictionary overnight. She looked around the classroom, with holes in the walls and half its light bulbs burned out, and asked: “Who has a dictionary to share? Anybody?”

No one raised his hand. “How can you improve your language without a dictionary?” she asked as the bell rang to end the class.

“It’s terribly frustrating,” she said later. “A dictionary costs 25 rand ($9), and that’s too much for their parents. But these kids still have to be taught.”

The government has opened some white schools, which were in danger of closing for lack of students, to pupils from severely overcrowded black schools.

But for teachers, the system remains strictly segregated. Only white teachers are allowed to work in all schools in South Africa. Colored teachers are restricted to Colored schools, and that has left hundreds of Colored instructors out of work--and unable to help ease the serious teacher shortage in black schools.

Anver feels especially bitter when he escorts his pupils to sports matches against white schools. “They figure I’m good enough to referee their matches but not good enough to teach their children,” he said.

Coloreds have been anti-apartheid activists for years. The Rev. Allan Boesak, now an African National Congress leader, was an outspoken critic of the government. And many Colored soldiers in the ANC’s army fought and died in the 30-year guerrilla war.

But many other Coloreds have enjoyed the privileges granted them by white leaders. And they feel closely linked to whites by Afrikaans, the South African-born language they share.

A few weeks ago, De Klerk drew several thousand supporters to a rally for his National Party in Mitchell’s Plain, a Colored township on the Cape flats. Many of those who cheered for De Klerk that day were the same people who had been forcibly removed from vibrant neighborhoods in Cape Town by the president’s National Party predecessors.

The large turnout showed that many Coloreds prefer a benevolent white government to a black one.

“Most of the so-called Colored people would go for the National Party because of their inherent fear of the black man,” Anver said. “They don’t understand the black man. Coloreds have been taught that he’s the uneducated one who steals without asking.”

The Desais were once strong ANC supporters, but while they still have great respect for ANC President Nelson Mandela, they’ve become disillusioned with his organization.

“Five years ago, when the ANC was still banned, we definitely were on their side,” Anver said. “But now they’re just negotiating for their own power.”

That doesn’t mean, though, that they would support De Klerk. Far from it. In fact, they welcome a black government. “Blacks have suffered long enough,” Rhoda said. “The ball is in the other court now.”

BACKGROUND

South Africa’s 3 million mixed-race inhabitants are labeled “Colored” by the government. Their ancestors include early white settlers as well as Indians, Chinese, Malaysians, Indonesians, mixed-race Griquas and Khoikhoi, the yellow-skinned people who were there when whites arrived. Under apartheid, Coloreds have ranked third-- behind whites and Indians but ahead of blacks.