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The new face of poverty
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| October 15 2009 at 07:04AM |
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By Omeshnie Naidoo Johnson's own marriage ended in separation. He doesn't know where his four children are; he only points to the street corner where his estranged wife, like him, begs from strangers most days. Johnson occasionally finds work, but they are just "odds and ends", he says, although years ago he worked as a railway yard official in Germiston where he lived in a railway house. Like him, Johnson's friend, 54-year-old Dave Campbell, worked for Eskom and lived in a government house. Campbell used to drive buses and trucks and was a soccer player in his heyday. Now he begs on street corners to survive every day. Also begging on the streets of Berea, but far less talkative is 59-year-old John Bell, who used to be a customs officer at Durban Harbour before he was medically boarded. He says his mother and sister live in a flat on the Berea, but won't tolerate his smoking. There's no room for him anyway, he adds. How did these men, all who had held down jobs and had roofs over their heads at some stage in the lives, end up on the streets? How did they miss out on the job creation and house reservation programmes to deal with the "poor white" problem which was implemented well before apartheid became official. The ability to find employment and the availability of jobs was then, and remains now, at the core of the dilemma. "How do I find a job," asks 24-year-old Pretoria-born Lyle Volker. "I don't even smell like someone who should be waiting on people and serving them food." Costa Kaidatzis, who regularly brings food to Volker and the others begging on the Berea, says finding employment is difficult but more so in these tough economic times. Together with the help of Durban's St Olav Church in Musgrave, Kaidatzis helps reunite the homeless with their families and find employment. Kaidatzis, whose dream is to create a facility where the homeless can have showers, receive medical attention and have access to sheltered employment and accommodation, says there are about 10 000 homeless people between Berea and the beachfront. Dr David Hemson, at the Human Sciences Research Council in Durban, says the government should also take responsibility through expanded public works, similar to what occurred in the US in the 1930s when poverty was alleviated through President Franklin Rooseveldt's New Deal which created jobs through various projects, from dams to road developments. "You cannot look at today's circumstances without contextualising it within the current economic climate. The recession and economic crisis play a significant role," he says. "While some people may have had advantages in the past it is clear we are all affected by the recession and changed socio-political circumstances - no one is immune." On the streets it's not about whether you were advantaged or whether you're black or white, says Volker. If anything, he says he feels alienated from the white community who don't want to see poor whites like him. "For those with money it is to an extent about not wanting to 'see'," he says. Drum magazine writer Bloke Modisane, in his autobiography Blame Me on History, dwells on an encounter with a white "hobo", commenting on the poverty they share and therefore the common humanity they are locked into. The white hobo, he writes, represents a "crack in the myth of white supremacy". A similar story is covered in a novel recently published by Kwela Books, Small Moving Parts. The author, Sally-Ann Murray, explains that the narrative deals with a white working-class Durban family, and tries to show the fractures that existed even during apartheid's era of white privilege. "As South Africans we're understandably prone to see life in black and white since our history has made us incredibly conscious of race," Murray says. "But even whiteness is never homogeneous. We forget, given the Big Story of white privilege, that there are always complexities; that perhaps not all whites were wealthy," she says. The idea of false dichotomy or black-and-white-thinking that she refers to is the same lenses through which Banks's joke was made. "It makes it easier for us to assume we've heard the red-faced woman at the robot's story before so we can turn a deaf ear, or blind ourselves to her hidden story," says Murray. What apartheid did to black people, according to Modisane, was to savage human beings, to dehumanise them before exterminating them. Have we as a society simply transposed that thinking to the poor of today; black and white? Rise and fall of poor whites According to The History of Southern Africa by JD Omer-Cooper, the 1920s marked the pauperisation of the white Afrikaans community. At this time the mining industry had opened up increased opportunities for commercial farming so landlords seeking to make more profitable use of their land evicted their white tenants. Capitalised farming and fixed boundaries also prevented the acquisition of land. This affected the lifestyles of the Boer farmers who, despite being landless, continued to have large families. They trekked to the towns; however, the majority of these poor whites lacked the skills necessary for mining and as Afrikaans-speakers found themselves further handicapped in urban environments dominated by English-speakers. Their experiences led to the 1924 alliance election win between the Labour Party, which represented mainly white workers, and Hertzog's National Party, which largely represented the Afrikaner farmers. This government established the Iron and Steel Corporation (Iscor) in 1928 as well as a range of secondary industries, increasing employment opportunities for whites, and introduced a programme of racial segregation. In state controlled enterprises, particularly the railways, black workers were simply displaced to provide jobs for whites. Private industry was persuaded to employ a high portion of whites, since tariff protection was dependent on the industry following satisfactory labour policies. To legalise the reservation of skilled jobs for whites on the mines, a Mines and Works Amendment Act was passed in 1926 which specifically prohibited the employment of Africans and Asians in skilled work. From this point it looked as though the poor white problem had been adequately dealt with. According to this book, the problem resurfaced in the 1990s when, after years of apartheid, segregation and its laws were removed. The government repealed The Separate Amenities Act, Group Areas Act and Registration Act which was essentially the removal of racial privilege. During this time it was reported that 20 000 whites were being fed by hunger relief agencies.
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If you had to rely on government to make it easy for you to get by and make a living, and cannot do that without the suppression of a people on your side, then you have only yourself to blame for your failures.
I also understand the lack of commaraderie amongst white people, i.e. the rich whites not giving to the poor whites. Life isn't about begging and receiving. No one is responsible for your well-being but you. Stop asking for a hand out and do something to make your life better!
My point is, before we all go shooting our mouths off about a view of history that is subjective, let me rid the New South Africa of its "poor white problem" for you: just give me an area of South Africa with the same carying capacity as Zululand or the Transkei in the '60s and I will take every "white squatter and beggar" off your hands and house them in said area where, just as wih the "Homelands" of the Apartheid Period, ALL LAND, ALL JOBS, AND ALL LOCAL GOVERNMENT POSTS WILL BE RESERVED FOR THOSE LIVING THERE!
Fair is fair!
They won't get jobs by standing around all day begging. Let them take a tip from the black entrepeneurs who share their pitch and at least buy something to sell.