Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Winter 2004
Seen through a 21st century lens, the term “poor white” seems laden with the race-conscious implication that Europeans were expected to have a higher standard of living than the native or “coloured” populations. For several decades, beginning in the late 1880s, Afrikaner politicians had watched with growing alarm as a segment of the white population, despite artificially imposed racial advantages, slid, generation after generation, into unmitigated poverty.
Fully a third of the Afrikaner population, mostly rural landless farmers, much like the black population, had been untouched by the economic expansion of the previous decades.
Because the study was designed to become a model for future such inquiries, two American sociologists, Dr. Kenyon L. Butterfield and Dr. C.W. Coulter, were retained as consultants. The Poor White commission was made up of white South African academics, members of the clergy and political and welfare activists who were dedicated to the uplift of the nearly 300,000 Afrikaners mired in a level of poverty that threatened the future of white political solidarity.
The urban, educated men and women who made up the commission journeyed to remote Cape farming areas across the open veld, the country’s expansive, hundreds-miles-long grassy plain and into the bushveld, dry flat country covered mostly with scrub. Traveling 30,000 miles during the year of field work, the commissioners interviewed itinerant farmers, hunters and sharecroppers and their families living in dilapidated dwellings or existing shelterless on open stretches of land. The commissioners broke bread with their informants and on occasion were pressed to stay overnight in their meager homes.
These poverty-stricken men and women were Afrikaans-speaking descendants of the voortrekker (pioneer) Boers who, beginning in the 1830s, migrated into the interior of the country to escape British colonial law and the native population. They considered themselves a white nation in black Africa. And their religion convinced them that they were God’s chosen people. The commissioners were Afrikaner nationalists as well, separated by class from their informants but deeply committed to their uplift as a way of strengthening white political power.
The study gathered statistics and facts. It also captured the voices and personal stories of impoverished Afrikaners. But the plight of the native population was ever present and shadowed the intent and implementa-tion of this massive project, even leading commissioner E.G. Malherbe, a prominent educator, to observe in one of the many articles he wrote assessing the process and findings of the study, that “What we have on our hands today is the poor black problem, a problem of greater magnitude and complexity than ever the Poor White Problem was.”
The resulting five-volume report, issued in 1932, was met with widespread praise, publicity and public discussion in newspapers, journals and among scholars, private citizens and government officials. The news paper Die Burger editorialized in favor of a national conference to mobilize support for the commission’s recommendations, which emphasized the importance of keeping poor whites from falling behind other whites. The report also argued for the development of a State Bureau of Social Welfare to coordinate education, vocational, and health programs. With unprecedented swiftness the Poor White Study spawned a movement uniting the destinies of privileged and downtrodden whites.
At national conferences in 1934 and 1936, Afrikaner political and social activists used the Poor White Study as a guide for creating blueprints to solidify Afrikaner economic and political dominance. A National Bureau of Education and Social Research was established within the South African Department of Education. The Poor White Study and the response to it was widely recognized as an important factor leading to the rise of the National Party, whose slogan in the 1948 general elections it won was, “The white man must remain master.”