The Mixed Marriage Act of 1949 is regarded as the first law of South Africa’s apartheid regime. Although the apartheid system was internationally known, via its public face, as creating segregation between whites and blacks, I claim that vigilance and control of intimacy and domestic space, based on gender and sexuality, were part and parcel of the management of race and racism. This criminalised interracial marriages, regulating intimacy under the amended Immorality Act (1950) with the aim of organising the public sphere and preventing miscegenation. I have been working on the cases involving interracial couples and alleged lovers in South Africa. In this paper I will reflect on the ethnography of the archives. The legal material I analyse is the result of a survey conducted in the archives of Cape Town, Pretoria and Bloemfontein of cases prosecuted under the Mixed Marriage Act and the Immorality Act, as recorded in the Law Reports from 1948 (the year apartheid began) to 1985 (when both laws were struck down). It is interesting to reflect on a taxonomic classification and on the way in which intimacy was materialized through bureaucracy. What do the archives say about the way in which intimacy and law are articulated under the aegis of the State? I analyse both the way the archives were organized and the logic of shadow and silence imposed. While criminalizing the interracial couples, it tried to protect white people following the archive's racial taxonomic. Besides the rigid strategies and tactics used by the State, it is possible to observe the daily dilemmas that the accused faced following the way this is exposed in the cases.