In South Africa, apartheid was a divisive political system anchored by a white minority that viewed other ethnic groups as inferior, creating townships on the outskirts of cities to house the black population and legislation to control their movements. Many academic studies have focused on black life under apartheid, but little on white life – and even less on the role of the white working class in the system. A new book, Ordinary Whites in Apartheid South Africa: Social Histories of Accommodation, does just that. We asked historian Neil Roos about his research.
What is the premise of the book?
Apartheid was a state system of racial oppression in South Africa that was initiated when the National Party came to power in 1948. It lasted formally until 1994. While we know much about the nature of black life under apartheid, we know virtually nothing about white life. It is impossible to fully understand the complexities of an oppressive society from the perspective of the victim and not also the perpetrators.
Apartheid was notorious for its energetic approach to social engineering, using “scientific” data to develop policies and mechanisms to govern society. This is typically viewed in terms of how it affected black people. Yet the history of “ordinary” whites shows that from their first months in power, the state honed its social engineering methods first on whites it deemed “problematic.” Drunks; chronically lazy and itinerant men; people who worked in jobs that were on the same level as blacks.
An example of this was the apartheid state’s investigation into alcohol consumption among whites, which led to the establishment of alcohol retreats (for women) and penal colonies called work colonies (for men). Removing white drunks from society effectively cleansed the white population by creating an image of the population without drunks. In another example, the state modeled new neighborhoods for a growing new class of white officials. Standardized houses were built that were considered suitable for respectable whites. These were sold cheaply to civil servants. Their residents were then closely monitored by social workers.
At its core, Ordinary Whites is a book about complicity. Some white people may not have approved of the apartheid state; they may have resented its social engineering, its forms of discipline, and its military conscription. But few actually rejected the racial privilege that apartheid offered. This allowed them to claim later that they “did not support apartheid.”
Who are the white working class people in your research?
The ordinary white people in the book were a diverse mix. Working class people, whites who were finding their way into the middle class, the destitute, and those who felt alienated from the mainstream of the orderly (respectable) white society. They were both Afrikaans speakers (who formed a substantial part of the National Party constituency) and speakers of other languages.
Although they were subordinated in the white section of society, they, like all whites, were privileged in the apartheid society as a whole. They had access to good education and health care, subsidized housing, and reserved jobs. This limited their resistance to the regimes imposed by the apartheid society. The characters I write about do not represent particularly progressive movements in South African history. Although there were a small number of whites who were anti-racist, most were not.
You focus on a man named Geoffrey Cronjé. Why?
Geoffrey Cronjé (1907-1992) was a professor of sociology and one of the intellectual architects of apartheid. He was able to move comfortably between the halls of academia and the state apparatus. This gave him considerable power to shape aspects of the government’s social policy towards whites from the late 1940s to the late 1950s.
Of this generation of apartheid intellectuals, Cronjé was one of those most invested in whites. His career is of particular value for understanding the state’s ambitions to socially engineer white society, as well as its limitations. He was interested in ‘deviance’ (alcoholism, sex work and incest caused him great anxiety) and how it was most often seen in particular classes of white society. These interests were shaped not only by sociological data, however questionable, but also by something more personal: his abiding distrust of whites, of the working class, the unemployed, those who survived on apartheid’s social subsidies – the ‘ordinary whites’ of my book.
At a time when white working-class families began to employ black women as domestic workers, Cronjé feared sex across the color line, a taboo of apartheid, that would take place in these households. He encouraged the social workers he trained to be especially vigilant for signs of immorality. By describing and acting on multiple conditions of “deviance” among whites, he defined what it meant to be a “normal,” “respectable,” and “decent” white person.
You also focus on your own family.
Two points shaped my approach. First, in the few historical or literary accounts of white people in apartheid society, I failed to identify people like me, my family, or those I grew up with. Second, I was unsettled by the tones of nostalgia and apologia that I saw in some genres of “white” writing about apartheid, especially memoirs. For a young South African growing up in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, apartheid was everywhere but nowhere. Its basic premises of racial supremacy and segregation were taken for granted but rarely explicitly discussed by white people.
The people whose stories feature most prominently in this book were family and people I grew up with. None of them held influential positions in apartheid society. For me, their significance lies in what their history tells us about that society. In particular, how whites could simultaneously ‘resist’ apartheid and support the larger project of racial supremacy. The many ways in which whites were tied to apartheid society and how they helped to perpetuate it.
What do you want the reader to take away?
Just like anyone else, white people from apartheid deserve to have their history told.
For me, however, a history of white South Africans is not meant to be a feel-good, human-face-to-apartheid project. It must be an uncompromisingly anti-racist history that challenges the idea of stable racial categories, of race as something natural.
In addressing questions of complicity, if we do not want to condescend to recount the social history of these whites, we must understand how they were controlled and disciplined. And what tied them to the apartheid society: economic interests and privileges, an overconfident state willing to crack down on “criminal” whites, and the feeling that they were being watched – a fear that is almost certainly more imagined than real.
Read more: The myth of white purity and stories that fueled racism in South Africa
But we cannot write their history in a way that eliminates these people’s agency and shifts moral blame onto easy scapegoats like powerful politicians, important bureaucrats, or murderous police officers.
Although ordinary whites were often chronically distrusted by the political, bureaucratic and clerical elite, their participation in apartheid society through the racial privileges they received, the racist beliefs they took for granted and their work in implementing apartheid made them deeply complicit in it.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization providing facts and trusted analysis to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: Neil Roos, University of Fort Hare
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Neil Roos does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
