Employment equity commission must explain continued use of apartheid-era race classification – IRR

15 August 2024

The Commission of Employment Equity (CEE) must account for its racial classification rules. This is the message today from the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), which has written to the CEE to find out why it still uses apartheid-era racial classification.

Prominent among apartheid’s many horrors was its bedrock law of racial classification, the Population Registration Act of 1950, which underpinned many subsequent laws, including the Group Areas Act of 1950 and the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951. All these and many other laws sought to use the notion of ‘race’ as a means of fostering the oppression of ‘non-white’ groups.

Despite this history, South Africa’s post-apartheid government, through various Acts of Parliament, such as the Employment Equity Act, and institutions such as the CEE, still requires people to be registered according to the four racial categories created by apartheid ideologues more than seventy years ago.

This is why the IRR has written to the CEE this week to question its continued use of these outdated and unwanted racial divisions. The CEE not only mandates the observation of these apartheid rules but punishes groups and individuals who are found to be defaulting.

Says IRR researcher Chris Patterson in the Institute’s letter to the Commission: “While many labour-related statutes, including the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act and the Employment Equity Act (EEA), are predicated on race, the definitions of these racial groups have not been forthcoming and when they are, as with the EEA’s definition of ‘black people’, they are rather confusing and muddled up.

“As a result, the Institute would like to know the following: 1. Can the Commission provide specific and detailed definitions of the a) African, b) Indian and c) coloured groups contained within the broader definition of ‘black people’ referred to in the EEA and its Annual Reports?; and 2. How can the EEA define ‘black people’ as encompassing all ‘non-white’ population groups, yet divide them up and evaluate them on different demographic criteria?”

To define these groups, the Commission can only rely on the contents of the apartheid manual of racial discrimination and restore racist measures such as the ‘pencil test’ to enforce them. To not define supposed racial divisions is to expose these categories to uncertainty and imprecision, depriving them of any rational basis, and thus undermine all the racialised laws on the statute books − of which there were 141 in South Africa at the end of 2023, according to the IRR’s Index of Race Law.

The Commission should, in fact, condemn racial classification and the persisting racialisation that is pervasive in much of the country’s legislation. However, if it is not willing to do so it must explain the salience these categories still enjoy today and what definitions it uses to define South Africans by race.

Issued by IRR, 15 August 2024