White, Poor and Angry

White Working Class Families in Johannesburg

Lis Lange

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351750769
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios étnicos

This title was first published in 2003. A fascinating insight into the economic, social and political processes that shaped the lives of white workers in Johannesburg between the beginning of deep level mining (c. 1890) and the 1922 Rand Revolt miners' strike. The book examines four related topics: the formation of working class families, working class accommodation, the constitution of social networks in the working class neighbourhoods and the political and ideological aspects of white workers' unemployment. The main argument presented here is that the class experience of white workers in Johannesburg had a very important role in fostering a sense of community between English and Afrikaner workers and their families. It is this sense of community that plays an important part in understanding the solidarity that emerged between English and Afrikaner workers during the 1922 Rand Revolt.

Chapter 1

Class Experience, Class Consciousness and White Working Class Identity in South African Historiography

The Anglo-Boer War, latterly referred to as the South African War, like all nationalistic and colonial wars was a fundamental episode in the construction of the identity of the people at war. In the years leading to the war, during it and immediately afterwards, British and Afrikaner cultures, experiences and traditions as well as political interests and ideologies were at work to define the identity and behaviour of the enemy, and therefore the nature and limits of the political and social interactions between the warring factions.

The book’s historical narrative starts on the eve of the South African War with the questions raised by a story of the baptism of two children. In 1898, a year before the outbreak of the South African War, William Kirby, a selfemployed cab owner who lived in Fordsburg with his wife, Elizabeth, and two children, asked his colleague, Stefanus van Niekerk, to be godparent to his third child, a boy, who was to be baptized in the Anglican Church of the neighbourhood, the Church of Christ. Stefanus, who also lived in Fordsburg, accepted the honour and a few years later, in 1903, he and his wife Phoebe had their own child baptized in the same church.

Here was an English working class family, the Kirbys, sealing a relationship with an Afrikaner family, the van Niekerks, through the baptism of one of their children. At the same time, there was an Afrikaner family stepping outside that which history and common sense tell about Afrikaner folk and religion to have their child baptized in the Anglican Church. Why did the Kirbys choose Stefanus van Niekerk as godparent to their child instead of choosing an Englishman? Was this exceptional? Why did Stefanus accept? Why, finally, did the van Niekerks have their own child baptized in the Anglican Church instead of in the Dutch Reformed Church? In historiographical terms this book takes the example of these two families to raise questions about the interactions between the two distinct national elements that constituted the South African white working class; about the role of the churches in developing a sense of belonging and identity among immigrant people in the city, whether they came from abroad or from the countryside; about the elements of day-to-day life that made possible social interaction that seemingly went beyond and indeed defied, at least in part, nationalistic politics.

This book looks into different aspects of the history of the white working class in Johannesburg between 1890 and 1922 to try to answer these questions in the light of the events of the 1922 Rand Revolt, a major mining strike during which working class solidarity transcended the divisions between workers of Afrikaner and British descent, and workers’ actions spilled beyond the borders of the workplace into the working class neighbourhoods in the west of the city, eliciting support from some non-mining workers.

These questions suggest a series of theoretical, analytical and methodological issues for reflection. At the theoretical level the definition, nature, and explicative value of concepts such as class, class consciousness, identity and experience become a fundamental historiographic problem. At the analytical level the competing, contested and hard-to-reconcile strands of thought, such as, crassly put, Marxism and Postmodernism, seem to highlight the complexity of a topic that was thought fairly straightforward 20 or 30 years ago. Finally, at the methodological level, and in whichever way the concepts of class and identity, and their theoretical derivations, intersect with different analytical frameworks, there is the issue of the value of the historical sources and of the narrative that enacts the historical “findings” for the reader.

In the 1960s and 1970s South African historiography of the white working class showed little interest in the theoretical engagement with the conceptual instruments of the métier. For most historians, whether on the left or not, class was both a social reality and a useful and necessary analytical tool that need not to be interrogated. The origins of the South African white working class were explained through the process of dispossession of rural labourers and the arrival of members of a fully fledged working class from overseas whose modes of organization and political responses were consistent with their experiences of working class organization in Britain.¹ And while the role of race in both the organization of the colonial society and in defining the social and political behaviour of the working class was duly noted, no theoretical elaboration was offered to explain how the sense of belonging to a class overlapped and/or interacted with that of belonging to a racial group. The preoccupation with the organizations of the working class as well as with its leaders rather than with the workers themselves was based on the assumption that workers’ lives were shaped largely by their conditions of employment.²

The universe of workers’ lives was even further removed from the 1970s Marxist-structuralist writings on the white working class, which, however, did much to explain the class position of the South African white working class in relation to its place in society and its relative access to the state in a racially organized society.³

In the same way that South African historians’ and social scientists’ understanding of the state was influenced by the explicative and political power of the writings of Althusser, Poulantzas and other theorists of the state, social history as proposed by Williams, Hobsbawm, Hill, and Thompson, to name only British historians, had an enormous appeal for a generation of South African historians, who found in the ‘history from below’ a way to write a more comprehensive and nuanced history of the white working class and, at the same time, to illuminate the South African political present in the 1980s. It has been said aptly that social history writing in South Africa, and not just in relation to the white working class, took two narrative forms, the one based on culturalist notions of class and the other located within the politics of nationalism.⁴ These strands produced some remarkable research. Indeed, social history contributed greatly in broadening the subject of history and in connecting the material with the ideological and the cultural with the political as layers of meaning or rather causality that needed to be brought together in a textured narrative capable of “reconstructing” the past for the reader. Outstanding in this regard are the chapters on white working class culture in van Onselen’s studies on the Witwatersrand.⁵

A fundamental element in the understanding of working class culture as described by social historians was the differentiation between class experience and class consciousness proposed by Thompson in his Making of the English Working Class. While class experience derives from workers’ position in the relations of production and helps them to articulate an identity of interests as different from those of other social classes, class consciousness is the cultural expression of this class experience through values, institutions, traditions, etc.⁶ This proposition solved, at least in part, the issue of what to look for at the methodological level when trying to establish the process of the making of a working class while it simultaneously purged a good deal of historical writing on the left from a teleological and simplistic view of the working class.

However, as grand historical narratives were contested in their theoretical and methodological validity, class became too broad and undetermined a concept to deal with the reality of subaltern groups’ lives and their cultural or political expressions. Social historians turn to ‘community’ as a more manageable and somewhat more “real” term to deal with the complex and more subtle problems of identity formation and the ways in which it relates to different forms of class consciousness. One of the most substantive theorizations of the usage of community as a historical or sociological analytical category comes from Bozzoli’s Class, Community and Conflict.⁷ Whether communities were invented as part of bourgeoisie’s projects as Anderson proposed⁸ or became manifest social entities, as Stedman Jones saw it in the case of the English working class,⁹ the investigation of the process of identity formation in specific communities, and of the manner in which concrete communities interact with class, have produced interesting interpretations of the South African past.¹⁰ Bozzoli’s recommendation to combine into one approach the understanding of communities as produced with that of communities as real and interacting with classes, enabling a more nuanced and complex explanation of social processes, seems to have echoed with those interested in gendered history.¹¹

At the general methodological level social historians not only rescued the voices of the subaltern groups through skilful readings of written sources, they also incorporated their actual voices through the use of oral testimony. Oral history became a tool that connected past and present politically at the same time that it established the link between the individual and the collective.¹²

A different form of investigation of the individual and the collective memory was attempted by historians and social scientists who were concerned about the nature, value and practical force of ideology and intellectual discourse. Saul Dubow, with his work on the intellectual history and ideological underpinnings of racism, and Adam Ashford, with his book on the role of commissions of enquiry in discourse formation, made valuable contributions to the broadening of historical enquiry to the realm of words, discourse and ideology.¹³

As Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guatari, Homi Bhaba and many others helped in effecting the linguistic and postcolonial turn in the production of social sciences (and humanities) in South Africa, grand historical narratives were replaced by the stories of the local and of the individual; the history of class and community were replaced by the stories of the inbetweeness and the otherness. Aided by the political moment, the question for identity – racial, cultural, political, sexual, literary – gained currency among social scientists with very different results in terms of academic output.¹⁴

In the context of postcolonial writing race ceased to be defined simply in terms of the constitutive elements of colonial discourse and was given all the force of a product of a ‘race science’. Writings on race start by asserting that there is no such a thing as Black ‘race’. This revisiting of the theorizations of race and its implications at the societal and individual level is far from being limited to the oppressed groups in colonial situations. A revision of whiteness from a radical political perspective has been under way for a while, especially in the US.¹⁵ This revision, which hinges on the critique of the assumption that white is not a race, makes two important contributions to the study of the white working class in racially organized societies. Firstly, it suggests that ignoring white as a race is to naturalize its hegemony. Second, it proposes that in analyzing working class behaviour historians and sociologist have to do away with the idea that workers “view the world objectively through their class experience in one part of their brain, and subjectively through the distorting filter of race in another”.¹⁶ Race among the American white working class, as much as among its South African counterpart, was/is a constitutive element of workers’ experience of themselves and of the others and in this sense is as indispensable in understanding workers’ politics and lives as class itself. In recent elaborations on the issue of race and its political effect, it has been argued that race can be seen as “common sense made juridical” and therefore translated in a series of apparatus and technologies that govern peoples’ lives.¹⁷ Despite the historical distance between apartheid South Africa and the Union of South Africa, race in the 1910s was certainly about governability, but, interestingly, not so much of the Black ‘race’ as of the white. As will be argued in this book, this made sense in the specific historical context of early twentieth century South Africa.

The impact of different strands of post-structuralism on historical writing has been felt particularly at the methodological level. The displacement of the subject has questioned fundamentally the value of narrative and has brought about a salutary scrutiny of the supposedly unproblematic relation between individual and collective memory, between memory and truth, between narrative and the historian/writer, all of which has highlighted the tensions that exist between conversational narrative and dramatic monologue, especially in the terrain of oral history.¹⁸

When this is translated to the terrain of a history based on written sources, and, in the case of working class history, of sources that only reflect the voices of the subjects indirectly, the issue of the tension between conversational narrative and dramatic monologue becomes even more daunting. Who does the narrative represent: the workers themselves; that which the middle classes, the government, the church thought of the workers; or the historical imagination of the writer?

Moreover, the contemporary trend of inspecting individual lives so as to make sense of historicized (racial) subjectivities, which proceeds with an almost psychoanalytical perspective to interpret its subject, poses a methodological conundrum in the case of collective subjects.¹⁹

This book sits slightly uncomfortably in the midst of these trends because most of its interpretative framework is based on the reality of social classes whose existence is largely conditioned by the material circumstances in which they live, and on the notion that while individuals have personal experiences of those circumstances which are, contradictorily, expressed in both cultural and political terms, most individuals make sense of their experiences in a social community of meaning. But neither community nor identity are ahistorical or mere processe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 Class Experience, Class Consciousness and White Working Class Identity in South African Historiography
• 2 The Emergence of the South African White Working Class in Johannesburg, 1890–1906
• 3 The Political Economy of White Working Class Housing in Johannesburg, 1890–1906
• 4 White Working Class Housing and the Emergence of the Urban Problem in Johannesburg, 1907–1922
• 5 White Workers’ Daily Life in Johannesburg, 1890–1922
• 6 The Ideological Construction of the Poor White Problem, 1890–1922
• 7 The Making of the White Working Class in Johannesburg, 1890–1922
• Bibliography
• Index