Poor White. Edward-John Bottomley

      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, 1908–19327