Notices

Digital Humanities: Book of Life

As South Africans begin to apply for yet another generation of identity books, it is an appropriate time to look back to the original Book of Life. Between 1967 and 1983, the Book of Life was an internationally precocious project, managed by IBM to build a centralised population register, housed in the forbidding tower called Civitas in Pretoria. Where Africans were subject to the bureaucratic ordeals of the Dompas and the Bewysburo, everyone else was allocated to one of the basic Verwoerdian racial categories by the Book of Life. Much of this racial classification was done at birth (and invisibly) in the 1970s, based on the answers that the individual's parents had given to the 1951 census. For two decades Verwoerd was told by liberal critics that allocating all South Africans to one of his four basic races was impossible. But the Book of Life gave his races reality, and the contemporary power of these arbitrary and thoroughly unscientific categories dates from the project. It was designed as a surveillance scheme, to equip the state with controls over every individual, especially over gun and driver's licensing. But it was an administrative disaster, one which failed (wrecking the licensing of drivers, apparently permanently). The racial classifications have endured, however, in ways that might astonished and delight Verwoerd.

Yet public memory and documentation of the Book of Life project are practically non-existent. There are very few examples of these documents available in museums and the official archive in Pretoria is silent on the project.

WISER, working with the Apartheid Archive and the Wits Historical Papers, would like to gather examples of Books of Life. They will be scanned and carefully stripped of privacy endangering details. We would like to use the documents to prompt individuals to remember and to explain the processes involved in securing them. We hope that this effort will have important effects on South Africans' understanding of the ongoing place and power of bureaucratically determined racial classifications.

If you, or someone you know, has an old Book of Life and you would be prepared to allow us to scan it for preservation please contact Keith Breckenridge by by clicking here.

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