- Archives

South Africa, once Africa's last bastion of white rule, has something you don't often see elsewhere on the continent: poor whites. A few years ago it was unimaginable to see whites begging at traffic lights or working as parking attendants. Now it is a common sight. Pottering around in her scantily furnished house with peeling wall paint, Elsie Smit holds back tears as she talks of her family's battle to survive. "We struggle a lot. My husband is unemployed. The only one who works in this house is my son. His money goes to paying for the house and for water and lights. So there isn't much that is left of his salary to feed us the whole month," she says. Several white families in the Vanderbijlpark industrial area, south of Johannesburg, are in a similar position and depend on food parcels. Guaranteed a quality education and good jobs by the apartheid regime, some whites -- particularly the Afrikaners who put apartheid in place -- have seen a reversal of fortunes under democracy. Estimates differ on the extent of the problem and opinion varies on the root causes of white poverty, but all agree that it is growing as unemployment remains a serious concern among all racial groups. According to a United Nations Development Program report last year, 6.9 percent of the country's white population lived on less than 354 rand ($58.57) per month -- the national poverty line in 2002 -- up from 1.5 percent in 1995. Statistics South Africa estimates there are about 4.2 million whites in the country and most of them still live in the top economic brackets, many with the same pools, maids and imported cars they enjoyed under apartheid. [more]