|
This Tuesday
Special Assignment
meets some of South
Africa’s new poor whites.
Disillusioned,
isolated and often ill-informed, they are struggling to
understand why they lost their privileges and trying to make
sense of the political changes that have swept the country.
Koos Mitton never
had it easy. As a child, he sometimes had to eat rotten meat and
mouldy bread from dust bins. As a poor white under the apartheid
government, Koos’s skin colour was supposed to get him benefits
like free education, protected jobs and council housing. The
system should, in fact, have propelled Koos from poverty to at
least middle class comfort.
It never did. Like
many others of a new generation of poor whites, Koos could never
escape the poverty cycle. And with the demise of the apartheid
government and all its support systems, more and more whites are
squatting or living in squalor, struggling to adapt to a
changing
South Africa. According to some estimates, one in four whites
now earns less than R1 500 per month and is regarded as poor.
Figures show that
wealthy white South Africans are getting richer by the day, but
that the gap between wealthy whites and poor whites is, in fact,
the fastest growing divide in the country
|
|
We visit the area
traditionally known as “Wessies” or “Pretoria West” in Tshwane.
This is where Koos shares a bed with his wife and five-year-old
son in a wooden shack. Koos’s mother and her latest lover sleep
barely a metre away in the same single- roomed structure. This
is also where state controlled industries like ISCOR used to
supply jobs to unskilled and semi-skilled whites – but they
closed down one by one and the area plummeted. Here, poverty and
its consequences are hidden away from the public eye in back
yards, garages and the wooden sheds widely referred to as
“Wendy’s”.
For many poor whites living
here, these shelters are only a few steps away from the Green
Dam… the place go to when you’ve lost everything and have no one
to turn to.
|
