Poor Whites in South Africa (Italia Caritas magazine, April 2013)

They wait at the traffic lights and in the parking areas in front of the large malls. Living in the black townships or in the miserable squatter camps. Poor Whites in the South Africa who created Apartheid. A rising phenomenon but no statistics available: the country prefers to look the other way.

(text and pictures: Lorella Beretta)

Their white skins have been shrivelled by the harsh and unrelenting South African sun. The dark shade have been accentuated by their blonde hair and the blue eyes transparent like the ocean in the distance. Their hands, wrinkled as their faces, clutching a crude handwritten sign begging for help - sometimes only in Afrikaans.

Although the available statistics do not accurately reflect the current extreme   conditions of poverty in which they live which is rapidly escalating in White South africans, it is evident today, even in the most unlikely unexpected places, as recent as two or three years ago: traffic lights and parking lots of the big malls, open spaces along the main roads. They beg for money or desparately try to sell anything, sometimes to try to stop the decline, sometimes at least to be able to pay the dormitory, something to eat, even get drunk or take drugs.

Some of them are so tanned, you may confuse them with the others, the Blacks or the Coloureds. The difference is in the number of hours per day they spend on the street. The common figures, however, are the toothless smiles and the certainty that very few will look after you. Indeed, for Whites this is even worse. Solidarity inside the White community is a rarity, they say to all those who are in dire need.

Pieter Koen is a 46 year old man and started  looking after cars in the parking lot only a few months ago in front of large shopping centers. Wearing smart trousers with pleats, he talks as a river-in-flood. He speaks 9 languages,  was a marketing consultant operating even in Europe directing prospective business candidates; he also worked in the townships, assisting in the empowering of poor black communities projects. “Five years ago - he extends his arms - I was declared insolvent: banks did it. From one to the other I slid down in a difficult financial situation, my wife left me together with our two children”.

Employment based on skin colour

Pieter sleeps in the back of a warehouse where some people have allowed him to stay, where he can continue to maintain a reasonable appearance in the hope of being elevated one day. But without any help from the authorities or support from the family, it will not be easy “for a white man to find work today, even if you are qualified and it is also very difficult to have incentives to start a new independent business”, sums while taking yet another tip by a hand sticking out of a car.

Accused number one in the BEE, Black Economic Empowerment, the law providing shares of employment on the basis of skin colour, introduced to recover Blacks and Coloreds from decades of isolation. Many argue that the legislation is discriminated: positive, but still discrimination. Especially ove 19 years after the end of Apartheid. For supporters, the BEE is an affirmative action necessary to address the inequalities of racial issues accumulated over forty years and beyond.

Tones were rekindled several months ago followed by a complaint from a reader, a local newspaper discovered that the South African Airways systematically refuse to assume non-white pilots. As in any form to any South African practice even on the SAA website, the “race” was sought: just tick “white” compilation was blocked. The company explained candidly that White pilots are and will continue to be employed “when vacancies are not filled by other candidates of other races”. The spokesman added “Only 15% of the pilots are Black, Coloured or Indian”.

One month later, during September, Woolworths published an advertisement for recruitment of Blacks, Coloreds and Indians in some departments “where there is a predominance of Whites to balance” was explained by appealing to fairness in Employment Law.

“The poor Whites are regarded by middle and upper class with shame, suspicion, discomfort and guilt” Edward John Bottomley, a South African journalist, wrote in his book: “Poor White”. Moreso a historical overview than a photography of today, as a matter of delicacy “Here in South Africa, you would have been asked why deal with this marginal phenomenon, why not write the most boundless poverty Blacks, Coloureds and Indians. It’s the same reason why you cannot find statistics: the first objection would be that public money would be wasted. Instead, it is important to understand the ever-widening gap between rich and poor in this country”.

It is not easy to find accurate data and social research as in any other country. For now, the only figures – undisputed  – are those of Solidarity, the big Union Afrikaner, considered old-fashioned, but only interlocutor for the government: 600,000 White South Africans out of a total of 6 million, live below the poverty line. The other 150 000 would be totally destitute. The total is the 12% of 10% of the total population of the Rainbow Nation. Within that figure there are those whose legacy is poverty since Apartheid – the poor Whites existed then – and those who knew the end of the system of “separation” and with the advent of “Black” governments.

They live in poor neighbourhoods or also in shacks in squatter camps: according to Helping Hand, the charitable association linked to Solidarity, there are more than 400 around the country. But White residents are beginning to be seen even in the townships, satellite towns hitherto inhabited only by Black and Coloureds.

The Three Musketeers

“We are the insivible” he says with a compliant shrug, devoid of hatred or malice. Alex, 45 years marked by the road, where he spends every blessed day before returning to the shelter in the evening to grab one of the few available beds .

Alex is one of the hundreds of thousands of armblankes, the Afrikaans term used for the homeless. He owns a wrecked cellphone expecting any calls for cheap labour and has an email which he checks every morning through one of the computers at the public library. He does everything calmly as the day drags on. Then he usually reads the newspapers to keep himself informed, a book and writes down sentences for his handmade bookmark that he and his friend, Janine, sells to tourists: aphorisms classic and modern, next to the useful numbers, the police, the first aid etc. Janine has one green eye and the other is azur, a lively intelligence, a quick open mind but also years of a difficult life behind her. No hope, but not hopeless. She is beautiful but the wrinkles declare the exact age and she complains, among other deprivations, the impossibility to buy some good cream to protect her milky skin from the sun. She and Alex and John form the “Three Musketeers”, at least for now. John tells of promised jobs and punches received living on the road just to take anything away: telling this and other personal stories, he walks with his sack and a plastic bag in which accumulates unidentified objects just to resell and make a little money. He sleeps on the street “because the shelter is racketed: we have to pay seven rand per night and they don’t give us breakfast. People donate food to the shelter which would otherwise be thrown away but if you want something you have to pay for it. And then you have to go to war with others to gain a bed”.

Wilhelmina trapped in

“South Africa is a mixed nation” blows timidly with her low voice Wilhelmina, 74 years old, waiting for the bus in Koeberg Road, Brooklyn, ten minutes from Cape Town.

Sociologists would call the suburb the result of a “social mix” but in reality it has been transformed  by an accident of the history from a White-low-class-district to an expanse of cheap houses for the Black-low-class. Wilhelmina is one of the elderly people discarded from society to live here, in houses built early during the last century around the South African Air Force base. Now it is one of the no-man’s lands between the higway and the coastal sea along which we begin to smell the odour of extreme marginalization, drugs, prostitution, gangs filling the pages of local newspapers daily.

Many Whites fled even just a few kilometers away. Wilhelmina and others like her, however, continue to live in those derelict buildings of hollow bricks among strangers. How are you coping? Are you afraid? She opens her blue eyes, trying to answer. Her pension amount to R1,200 per month, approximately 120 Euros. Those who are trapped here, like hundreds of other districts in modern South Africa, cannot imagine to live in another place. Not even a elderly hospice when they won’t be able to fend for themselves. But here at least some social workers occasionally check on them and a bit of solidarity helps in the darkest moments.  And then there’s the bus that brings comfort elsewhere, including the nearby Milnerton, where every Saturday and Sunday at the flea market the stalls are mainly run by Whites wearing patched sweaters and with matted hair, and yet always ready to share a joke.

 

Andres living with five others in the caravan

Andres, 70 years old, lives in a caravan. He has to contend with five people: the daugher in law is a smart red head who manufatures candles in the shape of cupcakes to sell to people; his son cannot find work and remains in the camper to care for three children. So he, the elder, walks for kilometeres to find a place in the parking area in front of the Court, all day long: wearing a yellow reflective jacket, he looks after the cars in exchange for some coins. He remains optimistic and grateful, as do the others: “There are people who generously give me money more, than I expected” he says waving the paper notes. Someone with the desire to have a clean conscience.

At the end of the day Andres, and thousands like him, go back to the squatter camp where there is no electricity and running water and where promiscuity makes life even worse than hell. The other White South Africans do not even come close, either with the car or with the thought. "It's easier for them to volounteer in the townships to help Blacks and Coloureds: we are like them and they are afraid of becoming like us," says Andres, shiny and cold as a surgeon.

He was a member of the middle class, which ended in disaster: a warning for Whites who still wealthy. The squatter camps, on the other hand, are camps where people live in extreme conditions, where poverty is not just an economic, but an educational and social disaster. Villages of poor houses, without connections or a Christian who is present to help, if not some photographic journalist drawn to asymmetrical faces, sullen and lifeless gazes, like abysses, knuckles equally between men and women.

With pity and rejection, these people are told as the result of crossings at intersections, which result in mental and structural delays. Some of them receive food a couple of times per week as well as help from certain associations, usually linked to a church. For the rest, they live their lives until sunset in gated communities: in the shadow of big cities like Johannesburg, squeezed between motorways and Cape Town airport, hidden in the beautiful forests of Knysna. There are children, the child of someone, running up and down with tin games, or laying motionless, clinging to the mother while she smokes, smiling through her gums.

There are elderly forgotten on uncomfortable beds, clothed in faded blankets, leaning against the bare walls of a single room/kitchen. There are young people dressed up as bullies in the Eighties’ and girls would be beautiful if it were not for the poor diet, which makes them too fat or too thin, without a trace of health.

Nothing has changed

Table Mountain is also vigilant of their lives, to the very last. The rules that apply here, under the spectacular elevation, are those of a battle for survival, where sometimes there is place for mutual solidarity, but most of the time it's a perpetual war: physical or conflict of words in order to dominate and survive.

The world discovered this piece of South Africa, unknown even to the South Africans, in 2008, when Jacob Zuma, as President of the ANC, went to visit one of these settlements during the election campaign for the presidency: the gesture was sensational news and it became even moreso when, with his tone slow and rhythmic, Zuma said, "surprised and shocked" and promised to engage in support of the lower classes. He then became president of South Africa and todate nothing has changed, either by the poor Whites or for those Blacks. In fact, all complain about gross neglect and lack of interest.

Thus, in 2010, during the year of the World Cup, baptized by an elderly Nelson Mandela – still the biggest hope of the country - international journalists couldn’t omit to tell the lives downloaded from indiscreet eyes, any longer. Coronation Park became the most known poor White squatter camp in the entire world . One of the thousands of informal settlements where poor South Africans live, irrespective of race, while new luxurious cars pass through with inside rich and powerful of the Rainbow Nation, who are comprised of all races: because the rich are rich, regardless of the colour of the skin.