Do white people have a future in South Africa?
May 20, 2013 2:02 PM   Subscribe

"In the past inequality in South Africa was largely defined along race lines. It has become increasingly defined by inequality within population groups as the gap between rich and poor within each group has increased substantially." Is this what's led the BBC to report a growing sense of insecurity among poor (chiefly Afrikaans-speaking) whites? Or are they just blatantly misreading the statistics?

The Australian Protectionist Party last year went so far as to call for the ree-stablishment of sanctions against the South African government for the "increasing disadvantage and persecution" of Afrikaans speakers and other white minorities, not only for the color of their skin but for their language - and the perceived persecution of Afrikaans culture and language has been the cause of past violence.
posted by theweasel (21 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
And can I just say, googling around with this topic leads to some truly horrendous conspiracy theory sites, if that's your cup of tea...
posted by theweasel at 2:08 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


The Australian Projectionist Party is also very concerned about the imposition of Sharia Law on Australia. Just, y'know, for some context.
posted by Tomorrowful at 2:20 PM on May 20, 2013 [10 favorites]


God, what a hornet's nest of a topic.

South Africa does appear to be getting progressively worse since independence, and the cronyism that runs the ANC is a really big part of it.

Add that to fact that violence in South Africa is insanely high. A survey for the period 1998–2000 compiled by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime ranked South Africa second for assault and murder per capita and first for rapes per capita in a data set of 60 countries.

And so, black and white, educated people who can leave are getting the heck out.

The craziest part is that Botswana provides this great example of how to do things right, and it's right across the border!
posted by leotrotsky at 2:24 PM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]


I know very little about South Africa, but that article did stick out like a sore thumb when I was reading BBC today. Of course whites are having problems in South Africa -- everyone in the country is having problems. The article starts with a baseline expectation that whites should continue to float above all the poverty and misery in their country indefinitely, while I don't see any particular reason that should be the case. The suffering of one white family is no more or less important than the suffering of one black family.
posted by miyabo at 2:34 PM on May 20, 2013 [10 favorites]


White South African here. Life is pretty good. I have no plans on leaving.
posted by PenDevil at 3:09 PM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]


PenDevil: "White South African here. Life is pretty good. I have no plans on leaving."

I'd love to hear some context of where you live, the crime, employment and such.
posted by wcfields at 3:18 PM on May 20, 2013


I don't know a lot about South Africa. I do know it has extremely high levels of violent crime. I also know that the homicide rate has dropped by half in the last 20 years or so, mirroring the decline in many countries over the same period.
posted by feckless at 3:27 PM on May 20, 2013


The problem with correctly understanding the situation of white South Africans is that there's a lot of concern trolling literature out there by white nationalist and other racialist outlets. It's what happens when something that might be a perfectly good cause gets hijacked by fringe groups.
posted by Apocryphon at 3:35 PM on May 20, 2013


I live in Cape Town on the Atlantic Seaboard. I'm a software developer. I've been a victim of property crime (1 car stolen, a few burglaries in the lower middle class area where I grew up, in the much more affluent area where I've lived for the past 6 years, 2 months ago my sis-in-laws car was stolen from down the road) but no personal violent crime has ever affected me.
posted by PenDevil at 3:51 PM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]


The problem with correctly understanding the situation of white South Africans is that there's a lot of concern trolling literature out there by white nationalist and other racialist outlets.

I'm a little confused as to how "concern trolling" is being used in this context. "White rights" groups would be genuinely concerned about poor, white, Afrikaans-speaking South Africans. When the concern is sincere, then it cannot be concern trolling. These groups may be making inaccurate or exaggerated claims about the extent of the allegedly disproportionate disenfranchisement, but that has nothing to do with concern trolling.
posted by Sticherbeast at 3:53 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


White poverty in South Africa is undoubtedly a real problem, but the South African government's duty is to the nation as a whole. For the government to pay extra attention to poverty experienced by a particular racial group would be the very worst sort of public policy; and any group advocating this is either severely deluded or, yes, concern trolling.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:41 PM on May 20, 2013


There is an account of violence against white farmers in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, which I thought was very chilling.
posted by springload at 4:42 PM on May 20, 2013


If we're recommending novels, Marlene van Niekerk's Triomf is a pretty widely read novel from the Afrikans about lower-middle-class white life in SA before and just after the end of apartheid.
posted by escabeche at 5:32 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


White poverty in South Africa is undoubtedly a real problem, but the South African government's duty is to the nation as a whole. For the government to pay extra attention to poverty experienced by a particular racial group would be the very worst sort of public policy; and any group advocating this is either severely deluded or, yes, concern trolling.

But that's not what concern trolling is! "White rights" groups would want Afrikaans-speaking whites to receive more assistance. It would be concern trolling if and only if "white rights" groups did not actually want Afrikaans-speaking whites to receive more assistance.

A "white rights" group which was actually concern trolling in South Africa would, say, call for public, onerous internal investigations of ANC corruption, allegedly in order to fix it, but when their real goal actually is to embarrass, divide, and discredit the ANC.

That is what concern trolling is. Concern trolling isn't just any bad or ideologically inconsistent idea. It's when you use the ruse of a concern to hurt or divide a group.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:03 PM on May 20, 2013 [3 favorites]


In more on-topic news, I'm trying to find reliable, neutral data on poor whites in South Africa. I see this interesting Big Picture article, which does show them living in crushing poverty.

The up and down of it is that, even if we were to agree for sake of argument that poor whites in South Africa are being disproportionately disenfranchised by their government, the same is true of just about every other group, except for relatively wealthy South Africans. It would also seem that wealth inequality is not as pronounced among whites as it is among non-whites.

None of that makes poor whites' concerns invalid. However, it does say funny things about how much we're paying attention to the poor whites, as opposed to the poor non-whites. After English and Afrikaans, how many average Westerners could name even two more of the 11 official languages of South Africa? Are these stories highlighted because they're seen as a "man bites dog" story by our media, the idea of having a poor white underclass in South Africa?

Let us also agree for sake of argument that there are serious problems with the government in South Africa as it stands. What would you do if you were suddenly in charge? It seems like a very complicated place with a lot of moving parts, with a number of no-win situations.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:30 PM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


I had always assumed that white South Africans were still the wealthiest demographic in SA.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:00 PM on May 20, 2013


A lot of the problems in South Africa ARE "no-win" but a huge number are simply caused by incompetence/mismanagement/corruption/lack of accountability, etc -- like, say, Limpopo's textbooks getting thrown into a river instead of delivered -- and the winning solutions are pretty obvious. They just require government workers be capable of doing their jobs and held accountable when they aren't... Unfortuntely, the education system, which needs to be producing a new generation of skilled workers and leaders, is an absolute disaster.

I'm white but I live in a black South African community and most people here are pretty outraged at the government, too, but no one feels like they have much power to create change. Poor whites aren't the only ones who feel like they don't have a future in SA. I think a difference might be that poor blacks don't have a community of ex-pats in Australia lobbying for them.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 10:52 PM on May 20, 2013 [6 favorites]


I had always assumed that white South Africans were still the wealthiest demographic in SA.

Still are by a long shot.

Sure there are a bunch of massively wealthy nouveau rich black South Africans and a growing black middle class, especially up in Johannesburg (Soweto is quite impressive these days according to a friend who went to one of it's new massive malls) but the white population still controls the majority of the financial wealth.

I agree with Solon and Thanks about education. It's been 19 years since the ANC took over and around now I would expect we'd begin seeing the payoff for all the extra money they have been pumping into education, except that in cases like the Eastern Cape, one of SA's poorer provinces and the 'home' of the ANC, even the head of the Education Dept now admits that nothing works.
posted by PenDevil at 12:18 AM on May 21, 2013


The BBC's job is really to cover the UK, and sometimes even supposedly international stories are really about covering the UK. The linked BBC piece is concern trolling, in the sense that you all mean: the subtle-as-an-anvil parallel being drawn between SA and Britian is the real point here, rather than concern about poor whites in SA.

Parts of this read as if they were actually lifted from classic working-class-whites-after-empire stories:

"Everyone here, regardless of colour, tells you that white people are still riding high. They run the economy. They have a disproportionate amount of influence in politics and the media. They still have the best houses and most of the best jobs. All of this is true but it is not the only picture. Look below the surface and you will find poverty and a sense of growing vulnerability."

"It seems to me that only certain parts of the white community really have a genuine future here: the better-off, more adaptable parts. Working-class white people, [most of them Afrikaans-speakers], are going through an intense crisis. But you will not read about it in the newspapers or see it reported on television because their plight seems to be something arising out of [South Africa's] bad old past - a past which everyone, black and white, would like to forget."
posted by Wylla at 12:34 AM on May 21, 2013


I'm not surprised that there is white poverty in SA today, because there was white poverty in SA under Apartheid as well.
posted by PenDevil at 12:53 AM on May 21, 2013


South Africa is one of the BRICS countries, treated at times in the press as a bloc that may economically challenge the west at some point. What Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa have in common, other than not being NAFTA or the European Union or NATO, does not seem to be much.
As to the whites, the Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch settlers and, to a lesser degree, Hottentots, have as much right as Zulus, Xhosas, and Sothos to live in the country. The Hottentots from which many Afrikaners descend lived in South Africa well before the Bantu Zulu and Xhosa arrived in South Africa.
posted by millardsarpy at 3:24 AM on May 21, 2013


« Older Can I eat this?   |   Old photographs of Greece, taken between 1903 and... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments