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.
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