ABSTRACT
Ronald Segal, a white South African and an ardent opponent of the system, spells out the position of the whites when he writes: ‘White children in South Africa seem to accept the implications of race as they grow to distinguish shapes and smells and sounds, so that, almost as they begin to speak, they tighten their voices to colour.’ In contrast to adult South African short-story writers, there is the Flemish authoress, Mireille Cottenje, who wrote of the plight of a child who was classified as ‘coloured’ while the rest of her family remained white. Cottenje traces some of the legal, psychological and sociological implications of such an act for the family and the little girl. The crudity of the South African situation, cast in fictionalized form, can sometimes appear even cruder and Cottenje does not avoid this danger towards the end.
