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For my father and brother
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.
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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.
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