Outlawed under apartheid, adoptions like Joshua and Reuel’s suddenly aren’t uncommon. The law against “transracial” adoption was struck down in 1991. And since the nation’s first democratic elections three years ago, the number of black babies available for adoption-both abandoned and voluntarily given up-has risen dramatically. One reason: the country’s political transformation has made women feel more comfortable about giving their babies to the state. And new freedoms allowing greater movement within the country have broken up extended families, which traditionally have taken in unwanted children. At Baragwanath Hospital, “we used to get three babies abandoned a year,” says social worker Lea Smith. “Now it’s 10 a week.”
As part of its official policy of nonracialism, the government doesn’t track how many whites are adopting black babies. But as in America, where The Association of Black Social Workers calls transracial adoption “culturalgenocide,” the issue is inflammatory. Some social workers claim the babies are better off as wards of the state. “These are loving parents who adopt with the best intentions,” says Tshepo Mosikatsana, a law professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. “But those good intentions have been the breeding ground for a lot of despair and misery for black children.”
Whites who would have trouble finding a white baby can easily get a black one. It can take as long as five years to get a white child, but Lesley Perkes, an arts promoter, and her partner, Michael Kier, a contractor, were given 8-month-old Chilli, a puffy-cheeked mixed-race boy, only seven months after being approved. Kier was too old to qualify for a white child, and the couple was not married. And while gay and lesbian couples have adopted black children under rights guaranteed in the new constitution, social workers don’t know of a white child adopted by gays. That angers some blacks. “Gays need help getting over their own problems,” says a black social worker. “They should not have our children.”
White parents who adopt black children are among South Africa’s most committed liberals. “If black families are not going to adopt these babies, someone has to,” says Ellen Papciak, 30, an American artist married to a South African architect. “They can’t grow up in institutions.” Papciak and husband Jeremy adopted 11-month-old Maya (named for Maya Angelou) last year. They could have had their own baby, but they wanted to take in a needy child. “We love our daughter, and she loves us,” says Papciak. “She is so completely my daughter.”
White parents bristle at the idea that their black children will grow up confused. In the United States, some studies have found that blacks raised by whites feel inferior. But in South Africa the situation is fundamentally different, the parents argue, because of the country’s black majority. “There’s no way Nicki can miss black culture,” says Maurice Smithers, a white ANC member and father of 3-year-old Nicole. Their children, say such pioneers, may turn out to have been the vanguard of a truly new South Africa.
