SO WE think we understand poverty in South Africa? We see it is as a “black thing”, something that can be easily understood, a life below a certain “datum line”, a quantum associated with a rand value or basket of food.
Think again. Poverty is complex and always relative and subjective. And, increasingly, it is found in a place unthinkable – among whites.
To look at this phenomenon, let us take a step back in time.
In East London in the 1950s, there was full employment for whites. Many white youth skipped university and tertiary education because it was argued, at the time, that there was no need for it.
There was also no need for qualified professionals – it was also stated that the Eastern Cape had a surplus of well- trained teachers and doctors!
How different things look today? There are so few jobs in the city that post- school education has become a necessity. And, even then, it provides no guarantee of employment – as many people are now discovering.
What is also clear is that many whites now find themselves in conditions of real, objective poverty – and things are getting tougher for them.
The changing economic profile of the white population is striking. In the 1990s, unemployment levels among whites were relatively low, but the 2011 Census figures show growing white poverty and unemployment, as well as a growing chasm between those who are making it and those who are not.
About a third of the white community remains firmly entrenched in the middle and upper class, but nearly 40% of white households are struggling economically. Since 2001, for example, more than 1000 new white households claim they have no income at all and there are growing numbers who earn below R6200 a month. That is just not enough to get by in the historic home of whites – the suburbs.
The historic shift from full employment and privilege to a precarious existence on the fringes of the urban economy has challenged whites and their sense of identity and belonging in the city and society.
Yet whites are here to stay. In 1950, one in two East Londoners was white. It is more like one in 10 today. The demographic shift has been caused more by black influx in than white flight. The Census 2011 figures show that whites left East London in greater numbers in the 1990s than the 2000s, so the rate of white exodus has slowed.
But experiences of pain and displacement are increasingly visible. In a suburb like West Bank, whites have lost access to regular jobs after the closure of factories. Jobs are few and far between and living costs high. To rent a family house or outbuilding costs several thousand rand a month, while sending a child to the local English medium schools is R500 to R700 a month. On top of this, suburban services, food and transport make life expensive. The sum of R6200 does not go far.
Compare that to families living in a township, a RDP house or a village who pay little or no rent, minimal service costs and (appalling but) free schooling. These households can have the same income as poorer white households but feel much better off.
In the suburbs, families earning R6200 a month might be in poverty, while those in Duncan Village who are in the same income bracket could be part of an emerging black middle class.
Holding on in the suburbs, the historic habitat of whiteness in South Africa, is beyond the means of many now. And there is nowhere to go. Indeed, for the first time since the Anglo-Boer War and the Great Depression in the 1930s, poor whites are pouring back onto the streets. the street begging for change.
Their styles of begging seem different to those of black beggars and more like beggars in India, Egypt or elsewhere in the global south.
They seem to hide behind placards outlining their plight in writing and their love of God. They bear mute testimony to their predicament, seeking little contact, and stand still like soldiers of shame, the fallen heroes of South Africa’s white suburbs.
It is difficult not to sense their pain, their sense of indignity and desperation. Under apartheid, respectability, decency or ordentlik heid were prerequisites for whiteness. Hendrik Verwoerd devoted millions to train social workers, housing officials and bureaucrats to enforce white respectability and ensure that, as far as possible, whites would not become too impoverished, work shy and immoral.
The squeaky clean white suburb with trimmed lawns, tarred roads, ranch houses and nuclear families was the apartheid ideal of whiteness. Anything less was deemed a failure, or a moral disgrace. Such were the expectations of “good enough” whiteness.
Our measures of poverty in South Africa are blunt instruments, indeed, because they neither take account of the different living cost in different places (townships, shacks areas, suburbs, village), nor do they consider what poverty means to those who experience it.
A recent study of how people experience poverty has had some interesting results. There is a significant gap between the experience of people in the rural villages of the Eastern Cape, where families are objectively much poorer than they think they are, and that of the suburbs, where white poverty is measured against expectations and rising costs and feelings of inadequacy.
The reason is clear: “good enough” whiteness is beyond the means of many.
The pain and shame associated with white poverty should thus not be under- estimated. It is precisely because of their perceived moral disgrace that those afflicted by it find it necessary to explain themselves in long story boards of desperation. The fall from grace has, in many cases, been calamitous.
Leslie Bank is professor and director of the Fort Hare Institute of Social and Economic Research. He is the author of Home Spaces, Street Styles (2011). His new book Inside African Anthropology (2013) has just been released by Cambridge University Press
Insight: The pain and shame of growing white poverty
Think again. Poverty is complex and always relative and subjective. And, increasingly, it is found in a place unthinkable – among whites.
To look at this phenomenon, let us take a step back in time.
In East London in the 1950s, there was full employment for whites. Many white youth skipped university and tertiary education because it was argued, at the time, that there was no need for it.
There was also no need for qualified professionals – it was also stated that the Eastern Cape had a surplus of well- trained teachers and doctors!
How different things look today? There are so few jobs in the city that post- school education has become a necessity. And, even then, it provides no guarantee of employment – as many people are now discovering.
What is also clear is that many whites now find themselves in conditions of real, objective poverty – and things are getting tougher for them.
The changing economic profile of the white population is striking. In the 1990s, unemployment levels among whites were relatively low, but the 2011 Census figures show growing white poverty and unemployment, as well as a growing chasm between those who are making it and those who are not.
About a third of the white community remains firmly entrenched in the middle and upper class, but nearly 40% of white households are struggling economically. Since 2001, for example, more than 1000 new white households claim they have no income at all and there are growing numbers who earn below R6200 a month. That is just not enough to get by in the historic home of whites – the suburbs.
The historic shift from full employment and privilege to a precarious existence on the fringes of the urban economy has challenged whites and their sense of identity and belonging in the city and society.
Yet whites are here to stay. In 1950, one in two East Londoners was white. It is more like one in 10 today. The demographic shift has been caused more by black influx in than white flight. The Census 2011 figures show that whites left East London in greater numbers in the 1990s than the 2000s, so the rate of white exodus has slowed.
But experiences of pain and displacement are increasingly visible. In a suburb like West Bank, whites have lost access to regular jobs after the closure of factories. Jobs are few and far between and living costs high. To rent a family house or outbuilding costs several thousand rand a month, while sending a child to the local English medium schools is R500 to R700 a month. On top of this, suburban services, food and transport make life expensive. The sum of R6200 does not go far.
Compare that to families living in a township, a RDP house or a village who pay little or no rent, minimal service costs and (appalling but) free schooling. These households can have the same income as poorer white households but feel much better off.
In the suburbs, families earning R6200 a month might be in poverty, while those in Duncan Village who are in the same income bracket could be part of an emerging black middle class.
Holding on in the suburbs, the historic habitat of whiteness in South Africa, is beyond the means of many now. And there is nowhere to go. Indeed, for the first time since the Anglo-Boer War and the Great Depression in the 1930s, poor whites are pouring back onto the streets. the street begging for change.
Their styles of begging seem different to those of black beggars and more like beggars in India, Egypt or elsewhere in the global south.
They seem to hide behind placards outlining their plight in writing and their love of God. They bear mute testimony to their predicament, seeking little contact, and stand still like soldiers of shame, the fallen heroes of South Africa’s white suburbs.
It is difficult not to sense their pain, their sense of indignity and desperation. Under apartheid, respectability, decency or ordentlik heid were prerequisites for whiteness. Hendrik Verwoerd devoted millions to train social workers, housing officials and bureaucrats to enforce white respectability and ensure that, as far as possible, whites would not become too impoverished, work shy and immoral.
The squeaky clean white suburb with trimmed lawns, tarred roads, ranch houses and nuclear families was the apartheid ideal of whiteness. Anything less was deemed a failure, or a moral disgrace. Such were the expectations of “good enough” whiteness.
Our measures of poverty in South Africa are blunt instruments, indeed, because they neither take account of the different living cost in different places (townships, shacks areas, suburbs, village), nor do they consider what poverty means to those who experience it.
A recent study of how people experience poverty has had some interesting results. There is a significant gap between the experience of people in the rural villages of the Eastern Cape, where families are objectively much poorer than they think they are, and that of the suburbs, where white poverty is measured against expectations and rising costs and feelings of inadequacy.
The reason is clear: “good enough” whiteness is beyond the means of many.
The pain and shame associated with white poverty should thus not be under- estimated. It is precisely because of their perceived moral disgrace that those afflicted by it find it necessary to explain themselves in long story boards of desperation. The fall from grace has, in many cases, been calamitous.
Leslie Bank is professor and director of the Fort Hare Institute of Social and Economic Research. He is the author of Home Spaces, Street Styles (2011). His new book Inside African Anthropology (2013) has just been released by Cambridge University Press
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