Poor White

For my father and brother

Author’s note

This book makes frequent use of racial categories such as ‘black’, ‘white’ and ‘coloured’. The use of inverted commas denotes the constructed nature of these terms and is meant to provide some distance from the offensive implications. In order to make it easier for the reader, however, the inverted commas have been done away with, but the labels should still be treated carefully. Racial categories have also been uncapitalised to indicate the many variations of each race, and to privilege none of them. Certain other historical terms such as ‘native’, ‘armblankevraagstuk’ or ‘poor white problem’ have been placed in inverted commas once a chapter, after which the punctuation is removed to ease reading. These terms are (very often unfortunate) products of their time. The punctuation again indicates distance and, even unpunctuated, the terms should still be read as such.

Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Afrikaans are mine.

Introduction

This is the story of the greatest magic trick ever performed.

Whereas the lesser magicians of history – the alchemists of the Middle Ages and their modern counterparts in Las Vegas – were content with trying to turn lead into gold or making an elephant vanish, the magicians of Africa created an entire people from nothing.

With the sea-swept, dust-brushed land of South Africa as their stage, they brought into being a hardy race – a leathery group of farmers and hunters – and gave them a culture. They furnished them with songs and language. Dressed them in hats and bonnets. Gave them a history, a home and a country to call their own. They gifted them with white skins and straight hair.

But this was only the first part of the trick. As the people stood bowing proudly on the stage, the curtain came down. A drum roll, a flash, bang and a puff of smoke. When the curtain came up again, many of those on stage had vanished. And here’s the impressive part: no one noticed.

It was only much later, after the magicians themselves had vanished, that people started noticing. Some of those who had vanished began to return and the people began to see that the others had never really disappeared at all. They had been there the whole time.

This is the story of how the magicians performed their trick. More importantly, it is the tale of why they decided to perform it. It is not the complete story. That would take many years and many books, but it is a story.

This particular tale ends, if it could be said to end, around 2010, when South Africa hosted the largest sporting event in the world and the eyes of the world turned once again to the young democracy.

More than 15 years after it held its first fully democratic elections, South Africa entered what some commentators called a ‘second honeymoon’ with the world. The attention resulted in something of a rediscovery of the country with the international press. The Reuters news service, for instance, was especially interested in the appearance of white poverty in South Africa.

In a country so defined by white privilege and the forceful upholding of white superiority, the appearance of acute white poverty was considered especially newsworthy. A Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer was commissioned to compose a photo essay on the ‘new’ white poor, which, after publication, was widely commented on both internationally and in South Africa. In an interview with The New York Times, the photographer, Finbarr O’Reilly, emphasised that white poverty in South Africa is ‘not a new phenomenon, but the numbers seem to be more apparent than they were in the past’.¹

It was not the first time The New York Times had reported on the issue. A decade earlier, the newspaper had run a similar story, in which it was noted that ‘being a white man in South Africa used to mean having a steady job, a house, a car, a certain respectability. For an overwhelming majority of white men, it still does. But for an increasing number of whites, there are startling new realities.’²

In the Reuters article accompanying O’Reilly’s photographs, it is noted that ‘under apartheid, introduced in 1948, whites enjoyed vast protection and sheltered employment. The weakest and least educated whites were protected by the civil service and state-owned industries operating as job-creation schemes, guaranteeing even the poorest whites a home and livelihood.’³

The South African reaction to O’Reilly’s photographs was mixed. The influential news website the Daily Maverick focused, for instance, on the problem of essentialising the poor along racial lines, but made no attempt to give historical context.⁴

This ‘new’ white poverty is taken for granted. Yet, in as much as these articles imply, or state outright, that white poverty in South Africa is a new phenomenon, or more acute now than ever, they are simply wrong. No mention is made of what happened before apartheid.

A curious form of collective amnesia exists with regard to South Africa’s ‘poor whites’. This amnesia is deliberate and has been constructed over years with the unspoken agreement of South Africa’s ruling classes. Whites are specifically depicted as never having been poor, or certainly not poor in large numbers. In point of fact, however, during the first decades of the twentieth century, the ‘poor white problem’ assumed such proportions that it influenced the outcome of national elections. It was crucial when it came to standardising race relations in South Africa and in the eventual institution of apartheid. Far from being a new issue, the poor white problem was instrumental in the creation of an entire people and was crucial to their identity.

These people are the Afrikaners, those mostly Dutch descendants who formed the bulk of the poor whites a century ago and, it seems, form the bulk of the poor whites today. Between the 1880s and 1939, a series of natural disasters, wars and economic depressions plunged the Afrikaners into large-scale poverty. In 1916 the government estimated, for instance, that there were more than 121 000 poor whites.⁵ By 1924 at least a quarter fell into the poor white category and by 1930, as the Great Depression started to take its toll, about 300 000, one-third of all Afrikaners, were ‘absolutely indigent’.⁶ Their numbers were never certain, however, and some estimates put the number of ‘impoverished’ whites at more than half the Afrikaner population by 1932. That is an astounding number. Less than a century ago, the Afrikaners were not known for apartheid or white privilege, their comfortable suburban houses with swimming pools, security alarms and potato salads/Sunday drives. No – less than a century ago, the Afrikaners were known for their poverty, as failed farmers and backyard dwellers.

The poor whites were, initially, mostly rural inhabitants, but with the discovery of diamonds and gold, the increasing industrialisation of South Africa saw huge numbers of poor make their way to the cities. These urban poor were crucial to how the state and the various governments made sense of the problem. The rapid growth of multiracial slums, especially in the mining city of Johannesburg, proved problematic for colonial authorities intent on upholding white prestige.

The poor white population, 1908–1932

⁷

And even now their poverty haunts South Africa. The projects created and the political games played to win over poor whites played a large role in establishing the race relations and economic landscape of the modern country. The white poor of today are still glimpsed in the corners of society.

Men with old clothing leaning out of train windows, smoking and staring. Among stationary taxis hurling music at passers-by. In the bright glare of the sun. Glimpsed behind women proudly displaying the sheriff’s badge of the Zionist Christian Church. Coca-Cola signs. Shoprite. The sweet, nuzzling smell of frying meat and baked air. ‘Oom, could I watch your car, Oom?’ Doffing a cap, then sitting down again to stare at something far away. Rusting car frames in little yards. A dirty caravan. A small shack. A sparsely furnished white room. An embroidered sign reading ‘God is Liefde’.

In the evenings, neon glows above the street corners of the city. In the shadowy land beneath the Hotel 224 they hover, or talk, or smoke, or pray, or sleep in doorways. At a traffic intersection with a small, battered sign, poorly lettered. A poor black person in similar circumstances would elicit little, or cursory, sympathy. A poor white person in Rome or London would not be noticed. But in South Africa the sight causes a short, sharp pain in the chest. A mixture of directionless sadness and directed pity settles like a blanket over the observer. Why this reaction?

In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela ponders the same question:

While I was walking in the city one day, I noticed a white woman in the gutter gnawing on some fish bones. She was poor and apparently homeless, but she was young and not unattractive. I knew of course that there were poor whites, whites who were every bit as poor as Africans, but one rarely saw them. I was used to seeing black beggars on the street, and it startled me to see a white one. While I normally did not give to African beggars, I felt the urge to give this woman money. In that moment I realised the tricks that apartheid plays on one, for the everyday travails that afflict Africans are accepted as a matter of course, while my heart immediately went out to this bedraggled white woman. In South Africa, to be poor and black was normal, to be poor and white was a tragedy.⁸

The story of the poor white problem is the story of their evolution from poor white to ‘pure white’ to ‘white trash’ and it begins in 1885 with the founding of Johannesburg and the long lines of poor stretching towards the city and its mines. It was not an Afrikaner problem – it was initially dealt with by the colonial British government overseeing South Africa. The poor whites created slums much like the overwhelmingly black townships of today and it was in these slums that they were defined and discovered by the state, which commissioned studies by various ‘experts’ to explain the new phenomenon. Later the poor white problem was deployed in the interests of racial superiority through tools such as segregation. The Afrikaner nationalists⁹ were keenly interested in the poor whites and co-opted them into the ethnic imagining of the ‘new’ Afrikaner volk. After World War II, the state succeeded in solving the poor white problem, although to the enormous detriment of the other races, and the poor whites vanished from sight, hidden in enclaves of poverty where they were taught how to act as ‘proper’ whites. It is only recently, after the democratic elections of 1994, that the poor whites have again been noticed. But the world has moved on and the ‘poor whites’ have become ‘white trash’ – beggars, thieves and confidence men. Low-class, inbred, violent and drunk. Unworthy of charity and wasting any goodwill to come their way.

It is their story that is being told, but one should always be mindful that black poverty in South Africa was always, and is, much more serious. Any attempt to improve the situation of the poor whites necessarily disadvantaged black South Africans, culminating in their brutal repression under apartheid. A focus on the poor whites in no sense detracts from the injustices of a regime that was racialised from its colonial origins all the way through to the nationalist era. On the contrary, it is impossible to understand the historical subordination of black, Indian and coloured South Africans without hearing the story of their poor white counterparts and the construction of a white society in which non-white poverty was typically overlooked. Yet, the poor whites and the poor white problem were part of the materials used to build South Africa, as much as gold and bricks, diamonds and coal, and their tale – the story of that great magic trick – deserves to be told.

Discovering the poor

They found Alfred Francis¹⁰ with some black women in a house at the lower end of town.

He worked as a teacher, of a sort, on a farm in the Cape Colony. Francis had been so poor when he sought employment as a schoolmaster that the farmer, Du Plessis, had to buy clothes for him. After a spell teaching the children to read and write, Francis stole a horse and headed for town, where the local police found him.

There were many like Francis in the Cape before the twentieth century. Men who had been sailors, perhaps, or had deserted from some army. They roamed the wide country between the mountains, looking for work as meesters on farms where the owners were unwilling or unable to send their children to the local school. The meesters were viewed as little more than beggars, stopping for a while to mend their shoes before the next rains came. If they were lucky, they found a farmer willing to employ them. Perhaps they stayed and taught the children what little they knew of letters and writing, and helped out with the farm work. They could sit on the steps of the little schoolhouse or church and stare out at the line of trees where the wind chased its tail. Perhaps the breeze shifted, and the rains came too early and they would steal a horse, or some bread, and make for the roads.

In those years there were reports of the ‘lowest specimens of humanity’ wandering the hills, eating roots, nearly naked. There had been depressions, when their numbers swelled, and the good times, when there were fewer of them walking beyond the towns. If they came begging to the outskirts of cities, or the little dorps, they would invariably abuse the charity shown them, people said, and in the morning be found drunk in disreputable streets.

Before the poor white problem, before the modern slumyards, there were the meesters. The poor, it is written, have always been with us.

Let us talk of empire – of the age of British expansion into the wild countries beyond their island fortress, when red masses were seen marching in the hills of Natal and the backstreets of Delhi. When great ships took to the waves, bearing the message of civilisation to the corners of the world. Where they docked the air trembled to the sound of thousands of polished boots marching in a murderous quickstep.

There the half-blood child of an English official and a Xhosa woman – symbol of conquest and of shame, abandoned by both parents, scrabbling in the hidden parts of the city. There the bodies of Indian protesters in Amritsar lying quietly as the wind brushes the sound of bullets from the air.

There the brothels glowing in the night. A discarded coat on a salon chair, stripes indicating high rank. The scent of perfume in the heavy evening air.

There the empire.

To take a closer look at history, to analyse our assumptions and reflect critically on what we find requires relying on a set of concepts – the lenses we use to spy on the past. One of these lenses is postcolonialism. In recent years, academics have been re-evaluating what is meant by the term ‘empire’. Far from being an unstoppable monolithic force, the spread of empire is now conceived of as being far more haphazard, riven by internal contradictions, rivalries and conflicting agendas.

Much of this revisionist work has focused