Citation

Jackson W. Past Present 2018; 238(1): 165-195.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Past and Present Society, Publisher Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/pastj/gtx035

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article uses the extensive case records of South Africa's first child welfare society - the Society for the Protection of Child Life (SPCL) - as the means to rethink how race has been constituted within families and communities in colonial contexts. It uses the idea of an 'unmistakable trace of colour' as a way to considering the importance of doubt in the Society's case records. In a context with a long history of racial mixing, judging race from physical appearance was especially difficult: in Cape Town, there was no readily obvious difference between 'European' and 'Coloured'. The idea of colour, however, stood as a signifier for various other, apparently non-racial, markers of difference. While ideas about the family, derived to a considerable extent from the international child welfare movement, saw race as irrelevant, colour nevertheless worked as the organising thread that gave narrative and moral structure to individual case records. The story of many of these case files, therefore, is of the construction of race through languages of morality, character and respectability. The great limitation of the case file is that it was premised on the individual being made knowable as an individual, detached from its social context. Because the child was understood in the setting of the family, a social institution that was always porous, it was impossible to isolate the child from its social context. Removing children from their homes and placing them in institutional or other forms of care achieved this in practice. The case files record the complex history behind that process.

Language: en