After the Second World War the most important task of the South African nation builders was to ensure that the position of the poor whites would be uplifted. The existence of the poor whites represented a racial weak-ness and an illweak-ness of the social body.
Solutions to the poor white problem were offered from three different directions – the economic elite, churches and universities - all of which had a particular ideological emphasis and a different set of methods. The people who promoted these ideas originated from the newly established Afrikaner middle class, but also partly from the English-speaking South Africans.
Firstly, there was the infl uence of the economic nation-building project that was supposed to raise the Afrikaner’s standard of living by centralis-ing Afrikaner capital to promote Afrikaner businesses. The elite saw the possibility of the lower-class whites developing class-consciousness and even allying with the Africans as detrimental to the developing Afrikaner capitalism. From the point of embodiment, it is apparent that the capital-ist system was interested in making healthy and well-maintained bodies for labour purposes (Turner 1984: 76). A potentially harmful working class would become more manageable if integrated with the white middle class, and turned into a productive labour force.
Secondly, there was the infl uence of the Christian-national ideology developed and applied by the Dutch Reformed Church and its related Christian organisations. The Dutch Reformed Church played a major role in attempts to solve the poor white problem. The church promoted a system of values with nationality seen as God-given and racial mixing as unnatural and detrimental to the white race.
Thirdly, these clerical ideas were on a par with the contemporary popu-lar social scientifi c discourse, offering its eugenically-biased methods and ideas for the upliftment of the poor whites. In the beginning of the twenti-eth century the eugenic ideas were embraced all over the Western world.
Eugenic ideas from the US and Europe formed the foundation of South African attempts to uplift the poor whites. The biological, hereditary at-tributes of the white race were not perceived as important as cultural and environmental infl uences. This environmentalist tendency within eugen-ics meant that in order to guide the human evolution properly, human (white) potential could only be realised fully under optimal social and economic conditions. These conditions were to be available in social housing projects, such as Epping Garden Village.
It is diffi cult to estimate how much each separate train of thought af-fected the practical methods, or the success of the upliftment of the poor whites. Often the ideas of these various trains of thought were so entan-gled and their dogmas amalgamated to such an extent that, while it is possible to identify the initial main ideas of each approach, they became inseparable in practice. This is one of the most formidable features of the poor white project: the united thoughts behind it made it powerful and all pervasive. This all-inclusive quality was transferred to and refl ected in the everyday life of the residents of Epping Garden Village.
In the fi rst decades of the twentieth century this amalgamated set of ideas became the social norm, and a framework for the social engineer-ing. It also created a framework for the rehabilitation of the white poor, which were guided towards the ideals of the category a good white. The present strong and consistent stigmatisation of the South African poor whites shows that there is still an ideal of a good white. There have indeed been many ideals of proper White behaviour, while the content of the category poor white and discourses of whiteness have varied.
A person could be branded as a poor white by mere association, such as residing in a suburb like Epping Garden Village. The term poor white thus largely referred to a perceived category. In this thesis the term is used rather eclectically, and applied to those who were labelled as such.
Studying the practices of upliftment in Epping Garden Village shows how and on what terms the category White was constructed in the twen-tieth century. In the 1930s and 1940s the residents were chosen for their potential to become good whites. The emphasis was on fi nding low-in-come residents who were respectable and socially ascending. But while Epping Garden Village was established in order to prevent and stop the degeneration of the respectable poor, it simultaneously offered a physical locus for it. Steadily, the suburb became ever more stigmatised.
The gradual abolition of the strict selection process can be seen in the people who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s, when EGV became largely institutionalised. The residents grew increasingly marginalised, and be-came more stigmatised. Currently they represent the downside of white-ness in the South African imagination. Although there were ‘losers’ in the fi rst generation and ‘winners’ even in the era of institutionalisation, it can be said that there were particular embodied ideals, whiteness or a White identity that the uplifters attempted to impose on the residents of the suburb.
Afrikaner nation-building has come a long way from uniting the intel-lectuals behind the common cause of building a nation for the benefi t
of ‘racially superior’ whites to today’s harsh reality where there is no respectable White poverty, and those known as poor whites are an em-barrassment to the middle-class whites. The identity of a good white is maintained not only in opposition to people of colour, but also in opposi-tion to poor whites.
At present there are no longer uplifters who are interested in construct-ing good whites in the suburb, although the residents are still concerned about fi tting into the framework of a good white. The recent social and political changes in South Africa have deprived them of their previously
’privileged’ position, and they are seeking ways to adapt, or at least sur-vive.