The history of South African whites began from the moment the Dutch East India Company landed on the shores of Table Bay in April 1652.
They established a small colony and a garden in order to provide passing ships with supplies for the long voyages to the East. They occasionally traded with the neighbouring Khoisan23 people, but otherwise kept to themselves, as the Company policy dictated.
For a while the colony remained just a stopover for passing ships, but gradually the Cape’s free burghers24 were allowed to establish their own farms. They imported slaves to satisfy the need for labourers, and began to move towards the interior. The colony expanded further, the process being hastened by new immigrants from Europe. Nevertheless, the popu-lation of whites did not exceed 2.000 until 1717 (Christopher 1994: 13).
By that time, a small number of burghers had left the Company area.
2. THE POOR WHITE CATEGORY
23 A compound term used for the surrounding Khoikhoi people (“Hottentots”) and the San hunter-gatherers also known as the “Bushmen” (Elphick and Giliomee 1989: 4).
24 Free burghers of the Cape: Dutch-born citizens released from their contracts with the Company and set up as independent farmers (Elphick and Giliomee 1989: 11 and 457).
They drifted into Africa, and became known as trekboere.25 They were independent and completely isolated from the intellectual developments that occurred in Europe in the eighteenth century.
As the colony expanded, a collision with the Khoisan people was una-voidable. With their superior weapons, the Europeans soon decimated the Khoisan. The survivors were left with no option but to work for Europe-ans who used them for labour and sex. In and around Cape Town, they were also inter-mixed with the slaves from Indonesia and Eastern Africa.
The offspring of these unions formed the basis of today’s coloured popu-lation. (Elphick and Shell 1989: 194-214.)
In 1795, the British invaded the Cape Colony. They found a colony of approximately 25.000 slaves, 20.000 white colonists, 15.000 Khoisan and 350 ‘free blacks’ (freed slaves) (Elphick and Shell 1989: 208-220).
Power was restricted to a white elite in Cape Town, and differentiation on the basis of colour was deeply entrenched. The British infl uence grew, and more British immigrants arrived, many of them soon becoming ur-ban dwellers. They began to dominate politics, trade, fi nance, mining and manufacturing, while the Afrikaners, or the Boers, remained in the coun-tryside. The whites were now split into two competing language groups, and into two different cultures. (De Klerk 1975: 22-32.)
Although the property accumulated in the hands of whites, race and class were not identical in Cape Town in the eighteenth century. There were black property owners, and white poverty was present from the very beginning. The East Indian Trade Company authorities and particularly the church diaconate helped the impoverished white burghers who could no longer return to Europe. The allocation of the resources was racially divided from the start: the white burghers were allocated 5 rix-dollars a month, while blacks were only allocated 2 rix-dollars. (Worden, van Heyningen & Bickford-Smith 1998: 67-69.)
In the nineteenth century Cape Town, a white working-class was al-ready established: white women were mainly in domestic service, while men had a wider range of occupations with these varying from dock labourers to skilled artisans. White labourers and artisans commanded higher salaries than coloured workers in equivalent occupations. (Worden et al. 1998: 178-179.)
25 Lit. a travelling farmer. Independent, self-suffi cient and isolated settlers became an archetype Afrikaner. They were semi-nomadic pastoralists, and apparently not so far re-moved from the Khoisan. Reputedly courageous and fi ercely independent, they relied on their rifl e and the Bible.
Poverty became more visible in the early nineteenth century Cape Town. The migration of impoverished families from Britain and the rural Cape hinterlands added to the group of often homeless and unemployed people. This visibility of white poverty was greatly enhanced against the background of the emerging new middle-class elite. The 1820s saw the fi rst ‘moral panic’ about the uncontrollability of the lower classes.
(Worden et al. 1998: 120-121, 136, 248.)
The border wars with the Xhosa and the Sotho-Tswana commenced at the end of the eighteenth century. After the arrival of the British, these wars became more brutal and fi erce. The fi rst half of the nineteenth cen-tury saw the rise and fall of Shaka’s militarist Zulu state,26 and the most mythical occurrence in the Afrikaner history, the Great Trek (die Groot Trek) of the Boers. Called Voortrekkers (fore-trekkers), these waves of Afrikaners strove to get away from the English-dominated towns. More wars followed from this migration. (De Klerk 1975: 32-49.)
Boer republics were formed, but only two of them, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, proved more lasting. However, when diamonds were discovered in Kimberley in 1869 and gold in Transvaal around the same time, the British decided to annexe them.
The 1877 annexation of Transvaal caused a rebellion. The fi rst Anglo-Boer War, known to Afrikaners as the First War of Independence, broke out in 1881. The Afrikaners won it rapidly, and established the Zuid-Afri-kaansche Republiek (ZAR, South African Republic). In 1886, a huge reef of gold was discovered in the Witwatersrand (the area around Johannes-burg). This stimulated the growth of Johannesburg into a vast city. It also caused the British to attack the ZAR. The Second Anglo-Boer War began in 1899. (De Klerk 1975: 65-68, 81.)
In the fi rst phase of the war, the vastly superior numbers of the British army defeated the military force of the Afrikaners. In the second phase, the Afrikaners began a successful guerrilla war against the British. In the urban areas the British ruled, but in the countryside the situation was reversed. This taxed the strength of the British, who decided to put a stop to the guerrilla war with a scorched earth policy. They systematically destroyed farms, slaughtered cattle and detained women and children in concentration camps. By the end of the war 26.000 people, mainly children, had died of disease and neglect in the camps. This fi nally broke
26 Much has been written on those wars, and much on the history of other than white South Africans, which I was regrettably not able to include in this thesis.
the backbone of the Afrikaners, and they surrendered in 1902. (De Klerk 1975: 82-89.)
Despite the promises of the British, the Africans were given no power in the new post-war state. Voter franchise was only given to whites. Later, in order to secure the rebuilding of the country, the British actively sought partnership with the Afrikaners. However, the position of Afrikaners was dire after the war. When the Union of South Africa was established on 31 May 1910, most of its poor white people were rural Afrikaners. (De Klerk 1975: 92-97.)
The Afrikaners, scattered, impoverished and traumatised by the war, had no common historical purpose or identity to begin with. Their iden-tity building was undertaken by many areas of society, notably so by the
‘language movement’ of the early twentieth century. Afrikaans, scorned formerly as a kombuistaal (kitchen language), is a mixture of High Dutch, local dialects and languages spoken by Indonesian and African slaves.
Through the language movement it was purifi ed and re-invented as the primordial mother tongue of the Afrikaners, and given the legal status of a language in 1918 (McClintock 1995: 368-369). Another central driving force in the identity building was the Dutch Reformed Church, which, while drawing its inspiration from a form of racialised Calvinism, pro-moted the idea of Afrikaners as God’s chosen people.
In addition to the problems caused by the war, drought and the struc-tural shift to a larger world capitalist system had made smallholdings unviable. After the war many impoverished Afrikaner farmers and espe-cially share-croppers, called bywoners, had to leave their farms and look for their fortunes in cities, where they often shared quarters with Africans and coloured people with whom they competed for manual employ-ment. (Kinghorn 1997: 139.) The lowest class of whites were perceived as losing their ‘civilisation’, degenerating racially and also threatening the ruling elite as a class – especially in the urban areas where the social hierarchy and racial separateness of the countryside were loosened.
At the levels of the social body and urban space these concerns began to manifest themselves in the ideas of social pathologies that seeped into the mainstream of the society from the gutters of the urban ghettos.
In these fears, the images of deteriorating space and a decaying social body were combined. At the end of the nineteenth century these anxi-eties found their racial expression in the concept of ’poor whiteism’, a term which became everyday language and a grave social concern for the South African elite.