Interracial marriages in twentieth-century Cape Town: evidence from Anglican marriage records

Abstract

ABSTRACTOne of the most controversial laws promulgated by the National Party as part of South Africa’s mid-twentieth century apartheid policies was the 1949 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act. This Act stipulated that ‘a marriage between a European and non-European may not be solemnized, and any such marriage solemnized in contravention of the provisions of this section shall be void and of null effect’. We use more than 23,000 newly-transcribed Anglican marriage records of Cape Town for the period 1911 to 1964 to show that the Act had mostly followed, and not led, changing interracial marriage practices. In the years before the Act’s promulgation, interracial marriages were rare and on the decline, despite the fact that apartheid-era policies had not yet been institutionalized. Our results suggests that marriage behaviour in Cape Town, and probably in South Africa more generally, was shaped by racial stratification early in the twentieth century. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, although devastating to those affected, was a correlate to rather than the cause of changing marriage behaviour.