Bones and Bodies: How South African Scientists Studied Race, by Alan G. Morris

The biological variability and history of humankind are now being rewritten by molecular geneticists, with DNA studies providing nuanced or alternative stories to those told by a physical anthropology reliant on phenotype and skeleton. But in that older tradition, South Africa has played significant roles for more than a century. It is the location where significant fossil finds provided a basis for debates on hominin evolution and classification. Its past and present populations with a wide variety of physical characteristics provided a framework for scientific description, interpretation and debate. It has housed committed, energetic and sometimes highly idiosyncratic individuals (many from the medical profession) who contributed their studies. And it was also the country whose government took an opposite direction when western specialists were abandoning ‘scientific racism’. UNESCO’s 1950 Statement on Race declaring (not without subsequent controversy) that ‘race’ was a social myth—not a biological fact—appeared two years after the electoral victory of the National Party, whose rule from 1948 to 1994 put into law the extreme ‘racial’ classifications of the apartheid system.

Alan G. Morris has been in a strong position to explore these interrelated issues from his base in the human biology faculty at the University of Cape Town since 1981. The author’s invaluable range of personal interviews and access to local archives complement existing published sources in this accessible book. By giving sufficient background to the social context and the scientific framework of issues described, Morris’s measured approach in this book suits interdisciplinary and non-specialist readerships.

Morris’s sequence begins at the beginning of the twentieth century with Louis Péringuey, who developed broad interests while serving at the South African Museum. His was the world of scientists linked to Europe, especially Britain, sharing similar models of racial difference and interested in the past and present of South Africa’s different peoples. Péringuey co-operated by collecting skeletons (archaeological and recent) for others to study, assigning an ethnic identity to each skeleton based on context (Hottentot, Bushman, Negro, etc.); his collaborators reported on variations of skull and post-cranial form.

Fossil finds can readily stimulate false paths. Morris explores the story of ‘Boskop Man’, uncovered in 1913. This narrative introduces the medically trained Robert Broom, who classified the Boskop find as a new species, the first opportunity for the sub-continent to enter hominin evolutionary history and one reflecting the assumptions of local racial identity. The equally influential Raymond Dart saw Boskop as an earlier and separate race from the contemporary ‘Bushman’. But, by the late 1950s, the cranium was acknowledged as falling within the range of modern Khoesan peoples—though Morris reports that Boskop Man has been revived in the world of pseudoscience. The book is otherwise only tangentially concerned with palaeoanthropology.

While much of the text comprises strictly, though usefully detailed, biographical accounts of numerous individuals, a theme running through the book is that of the assumptions about classificatory models within which earlier scientists worked: Caucasoid, Negroid (Bantu), Hottentots and Bushmen (today’s Khoe and San), Strandlopers, Korana, Hamites, Mongolians, sometimes even ‘Coloured’ and more; archaeological terms were initially borrowed from European prehistory.

Morris sets the framework across two eras. The first, before the Second World War, was an ‘age of typology’, in which those working in South Africa were broadly in line with wider international perspectives on biological difference. These perceived discrete racial types with discrete characteristics, and in many such interpretations, prehistoric cultural change indicated different racial groups. Skeletal finds had to be classified into a known ‘pure’ race or were considered either an earlier distinct race or the result of miscegenation. In the changing world from the 1950s onwards which questioned discrete pure racial classifications, official South Africa moved in the opposite direction. Survey chapters consider these contrasting worlds. While many of the individuals discussed by Morris worked in one or the other period, the famous Raymond Dart spanned both and forms a particular case-study, where Morris’s analysis is somewhat more kindly than that of Saul Dubow or the present reviewer. Dart achieved world fame in 1925 as the identifier of the first australopithecine (the Taung cranium). For a further six decades, the charismatic Dart maintained and advanced already dated views about race and culture which were increasingly distant from those of conventional international science and which scientific contemporaries might choose to ignore. Though not personally racist, Dart’s writings served to reflect racist ideologies.

An irony noted by Morris is the respect given to Dart by his distinguished pupil Phillip Tobias. Tobias—an anti-apartheid activist and major figure in physical anthropology—nevertheless avoided taking issue directly with his father-figure Dart, although his writing took the opposite approach to biological race. Reinterpreting Tobias’s career forms an important part of this book.

Given the author’s ambitious topic, how well does the book tackle the relationship of science and the wider society through the prism of race? Morris is not a social scientist or professional historian, so such readers cannot expect an analysis within their theoretical frameworks. The account is largely empirical. He implies a naivety more than complicity of physical anthropologists in the most ‘race’-based politico-legal context of the later twentieth century, whose illogicalities and inconsistencies Morris maps out. Scientists were not brought in to advise or inform the Race Classification Board, but they could be involved in reclassification appeals.

In post-apartheid South Africa (or elsewhere), have modern scientific understandings of population variability and popular concepts of race come together? It seems not. The sophisticated newer methodologies of the first, well outlined here, take us a long way from Linnaean sub-categories. Post-apartheid South Africa has maintained older racial classifications as a proxy for disadvantage. ‘Race’ is still on the agenda.

While specialists may take differing views about the many individuals discussed in Morris’s book and the issues raised, readers in the history of science and the history of race relations have much to gain from his comprehensive survey.