HOUSING SCHEMES – A PERFECT SOLUTION

140-141; Dubow 1995: 281-283; O’Meara 1983: 172-173.)

The Afrikaners had developed a sense of belonging to the soil: they had taken it over, and it also belonged to them (Schutte 1989: 222). Dur-ing my fi eldwork I was often told that originally the country had been

‘empty’, and the Afrikaners had only settled on land that had been either

‘deserted by African tribes’, or had never been claimed by anyone.

But being white stretched further than those advantages enjoyed by the Afrikaners. In the colonial countries, land seemed as plentiful as it was scarce in Europe. Every man could be a peer of a realm by virtue of be-ing white. Terence Ranger points out how “almost everywhere in Africa white agriculturalists saw themselves not as peasants but as gentlemen farmers” (1983: 213). Thus, the ambiguities of urban life were perceived as dangerous and detrimental, whereas the countryside became sacred. A good example of this is the way in which the Karoo still lives as an ar-chetypal ‘pure’ space in the South African imagination and mythology.⁸⁶ Prior to the onset of apartheid, the Afrikaner nationalists, in a manner similar to the Nazis, had already created multiple national symbols by inventing traditions (Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983: 1-14). These invented traditions included the veneration of the fi rst Afrikaners to travel northe-ast (die Voortrekkers), revival of Afrikaans as the sacred language of the volk and the worship of Afrikaans woman as the volksmoeder, guardian of the moral order and racial purity of the Afrikaners (McClintock 1995:

368-369). These traditions were then put on a pedestal where they con-fi rmed and sealed the social order. They could be presented spatially as great shows of national unity, celebrations or memorial sites.

An example of a spatial presentation of the process whereby Afri-kanerdom reinvented itself was ‘the second trek’ (‘die Tweede Trek’ or

‘Eeufees’)⁸⁷ of 1938. It was a suitably modifi ed re-enactment and com-memoration of the original Voortrekkers’ Great Trek away from the Brit-ish infl uence in 1838. Pomp and circumstance surrounded this process.

The famous Ossewaens (ox-wagons) travelling slowly across the country was a concrete demonstration of the way in which the Afrikaners had taken over the space, and the relationship to the land had originally been formed. The wagons were greeted with big festivities in each town. The second trek was followed by a wave of enthusiasm, supporting the proc-ess of Afrikaners becoming a unifi ed nation.

86 For more on the meaning of wilderness in the colonial imagination, see e.g. Short 1991: 8-27.

87 Second trek or centenary.

Anne McClintock rightly points out that the Tweede Trek ”celebrated unity where none had existed before”. She also draws attention to the similarity of these celebrations and their symbolism to the Nazi dogma of Blut und Boden,⁸⁸ which she sees taking a new form in the Afrikaners’

celebrations. (1995: 370-371.)

In order to create unity, the nation-builders’ regime used different me-ans of negative ethnicity throughout the twentieth century. The English were the original archenemy, and at a later stage the perceived threats came from communists, blacks, Catholics and Jews. Invented traditions and modern bureaucracy were harnessed to create oneness, and the ideas of Afrikaner ethnicity (Afrikanerdom), ons eie,⁸⁹ and the promoted la-ger-mentality⁹⁰ created togetherness. The ideals of a good white were important concepts in these endeavours. Self-promotion combined with an acute sense of threat and danger had been characteristic of South Af-rican whiteness from the earliest times. The ideology and its symbolism of Afrikanerdom were anchored and refl ected in the use and design of the urban space.

Spatial Segregation

In South Africa, formal urban segregation already began in the nineteenth century, soon after the abolition of slavery in 1834. The regional practices of segregation varied greatly, although there was a prevailing consensus that ‘urban areas belonged to the white man’. In 1920, the Housing Act made central government funds available to local governments to build housing for the poor. These areas were to be racially segregated, and spatially separated from one another. The Natives (Urban Areas) Act was passed in 1923. It required the local authorities to establish separate locations for the Black population, and to control the infl ux of blacks into towns. The Slums Act of 1934 was introduced as ‘non-racial legislation’, but in practice it was used to exclude blacks from the inner cities. (Chris-topher 1994: 35-38.)

By 1948 townships were an integral part of the organisation of urban

88 A Nazi term for ‘blood and soil’, which means the holy union of the land and a volk and its genetic inheritance.

89 Lit. our own. An expression of something or someone typical and dear to the Afrikan-ers, e.g., “ons eie Hansie Cronje”.

90 A term used for the Afrikaners’ infamous in-group mentality that leaves little or no space for foreign ideas or people.

space, but there were still many urban areas where racial boundaries were not that strict. After the National Party had won the election in 1948, the apartheid regime gradually extended the spatial segregation to all areas of life. (Christopher 1994: 65.)

Segregation operated at the personal level, aim being to eliminate al-most all the personal contact between members of different population groups. Most importantly, Whites were to be separated from all Non-Whites. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the Immo-rality Act Amendment (1950) were designed to keep the Whites racially pure. Public spaces from beaches to post offi ces were segregated in the Separate Amenities Act of 1953. The segregation of personal, everyday life stretched all the way to the use of white domestic space, where black and coloured servants were to have separate premises and entrances.

(Christopher 1994: 141-143.)

At the national level, the country was divided into Bantu Homelands and white areas under the Native Affairs Minister, H.F. Verwoerd, who had been appointed in 1950. Segregation in the urban areas was also tightened. The Population Registration Act⁹¹ and the Group Areas Act of 1950 were two major pieces of legislation designed to this end. The Group Areas Act was to bring about total urban segregation once people had been racially classifi ed. Towns and cities were to be divided into group areas for the exclusive ownership and occupation of a designated group. Anybody who was not a member of that group would have to leave and resettle in his or her ‘own’ area. This all would result in a total segregation – apartheid. (Christopher 1994: 65, 103-105.) Black and coloured areas redefi ned as white were demolished or redistributed. The

‘gentrifi cation programme’ ensured that whites received the best houses in the nicest areas and at low prices. (Christopher 1994: 140.)

Perhaps the most well-known and emotionally charged example of the creation of White urban spaces was the establishment of the suburb of Triomf in the place of the African freehold township of Sophiatown in Johannesburg. This area, known for its vibrant intellectual life and art-ists, was razed at the end of the 1950s to build an area for working class whites. In Cape Town, the symbolically vital coloured area of District Six was erased from central Cape Town in the early 1970s. However, the area

91 The Population Registration Act meant the classifi cation of the whole population into different groups. The three basic categories were Black, White and Coloured, the latter later being split into several subcategories such as Cape Malay, Griqua, Indian, Chinese and Cape Coloured (Christopher 1994: 103). In practice, everybody had to carry an iden-tity document, the hated Dompas, to prove his or her ‘race’.

was never rebuilt, leaving a huge empty space, politically too sensitive to touch in the heart of the city. (Western 1997: 75, 150-158.)

The ‘Cosmic Effect’ of the Poor White Embodiment

Since the seventeenth century, social engineering in any society in the Western world and in colonial countries preoccupied with the idea of race had created a set of concrete geographical locations or places and more abstract social spaces. Colonialism and nationalism produced a larger framework of order in South Africa, where class, race and gender defi ned individuals’ social and physical places.

In this framework, the standing of those seen as poor whites was am-biguous. They were landless and fortuneless wrecks that had fallen out of the grace of whiteness. Most of them were urban, which meant that they had lost touch with the soil as well. In the twentieth century, their posi-tion was further blurred by fashionable eugenic thinking, which declared people’s spiritual values and intellectual abilities as biologically inher-ited, or in particular as environmentally curable (see chapter two). Either way, those unable to fi t in their right places in this framework needed treatment.

The cure would take place in the urban space in which people lived.

For this purpose, the concept of poor white suburbs was developed and communities were imagined and created. In these suburbs, every house-hold was to be a unit that produced people who were supposed to fi t in with the larger framework, and thus perpetuate it. Ideally, an ideal fam-ily lived in the house according to certain, gendered rules and standards, consisting of human bodies. Thus also the small space of the human body had to be accommodated to fi t the social order.

Data I gathered during fi eldwork produced knowledge of the ideolo-gies and practices of suburb, house and body. They were present in the ways people represented themselves, in their narratives and ideals, and in the ways the elite wanted them to become.

Most importantly, all these ideologies and practices were underlain by the principle of social organism. The ideas of the biological superiority of the white races, and the idea of a nation-state as an organic unity was at-tached to the urban space and even the home, which was also conceptual-ised as an organism. Underlying this all was the most important organism and strongest metaphor of all, the human body, a biological and social or-ganism. Mary Douglas argued that the human body is the natural symbol

(1970: 17). Therefore the treatment of the human body refl ected the social construction of good whites, and simultaneously the social construction of good whites consciously employed bodily metaphors.

Douglas extended the manifestation of social boundaries and concerns to the spatial level. Uses of space and social body are interrelated, while social concepts are mapped out in space and imprinted in the human bod-ies – often simultaneously. Douglas perceived the uses of public and do-mestic spaces as anchored to fragmentary symbols of social order, which she called ’cosmic effects’ (1990: 395). Maya temples or the pyramids would be the most obvious examples of the anchoring of these cosmic effects to the universal reference, the movement of the stars, and simulta-neously symbolising the social hierarchies.

In Douglas’ thinking a cosmic effect does not have to be as grand as this. A more familiar example that she gives is that of Irish farmhouses where the west room was reserved for the retired parents when their son took over the farm. They would literally be spending their last years in the setting sun. (Douglas 1990: 396.)

Neither do these cosmic effects occur in the same frequency in every culture. Douglas connects the occurrence of these effects in their deep-est and fulldeep-est forms with a community that values the dominance of a whole over a part. In these communities, ”rich cosmic effects make use of the closure of body’s limits to symbolise the closure of a community”.

(Douglas 1990: 395-398.)

The closed white spaces of apartheid were the cosmic effect or equiva-lent of the white race as a closed social category. The fears in respect of the poor whites refl ected the fears in respect of the vulnerable boundaries of whiteness. The willingness to discipline the white social body, to close access to it, and quite concretely, to keep the Other away from it by con-demning any miscegenation were attempts to control this category. After 1948, as the category White became more strictly defi ned, the control of the social body grew stronger. During apartheid the poor whites became a minority, and no longer fi tted the category of a good white. Consequently, they – together with their areas – were reclassifi ed as anomalies, or dirt – die slegmense.⁹²

92 Lit. rubbish people or rotten people, people who have deteriorated.