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A baby sparks a race debate

The case was a textbook illustration of the absurdity of South Africa's rigid apartheid policy. In a field on the outskirts of Pretoria, a black worker came upon a two-week-old infant wrapped in a blanket, her head covered with a paper bag. The abandoned baby was taken to a nearby hospital, where nurses named her Lize.

What should have been a happy ending was only the beginning of a national controversy. By law, every South African citizen must be assigned to one of four racial categories: white, black, "colored" (mixed race), or Asian. According to the country's elaborate apartheid code, Lize should have been classified on the basis of her "appearance," along with "habits, education and speech in general." But while Lize's complexion was darkish, because she was an infant it was impossible to apply the standard criteria.

In a hasty attempt to resolve the issue, the police suggested last week that "scientific" tests on one strand of Lize's hair proved that she was of mixed race. But South Africa's leading expert on hair immediately denounced the tentative finding as "meaningless," arguing that hair samples of infants do not reveal racial characteristics. The government then repudiated the police, calling the test "inconclusive."

As police searched for the child's parents, outrage mounted over the classification policy. Racial typing, declared the Rand Daily Mail, was "the cause of more human agony than any other of the South African statutes." Dr. Marius Barnard, a member of the opposition Progressive Federal Party and brother of Heart Surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard, urged the government to classify Lize as white. Said he: "It is the innocent who suffer in these matters." At week's end no one had yet decided whether Lize would go through life enjoying the privileges of white society or be a second-class citizen. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.