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.
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