Author explains the ‘lens’ used for white poverty
JOURNALIST Edward-John Bottomley talks to Janet Smith about his history of the white experience in SA. The very premise of your book rests on racial descriptions, something journalism and many South Africans avoid in their conversations. How difficult was it to overcome this mindset? South Africa has always been defined by its conversation about race. I tried to think of myself as “reporting from the past” and chronicling the frank conversations I found there.
The trick is not in avoiding the mention of race – in a book such as mine it is essential – but to make sure that you balance the conversation.
I wrote a lot about the illusion of race, of how it is very much an artificial construct. That was my position, but I would have been a poor journalist not to give other opinions, as unappealing as they may be.
QAThe book has a fascinating amount of political history in it, even though you state in the endnotes that the broad strokes of the poor white story necessitate glossing over the minutiae of political dealings. As an historian, how did you manage the wealth of information and how did you decide what to use and what not to use? In the first part of my book I mention the “lenses” I used to look at South Africa – certain historical theories or perspectives, such as post-colonialism, that heavily influenced how I would be writing the history.
From there it’s simply a matter of building your argument and finding the evidence to support it. It was hard going. South Africa’s history is fascinating and there are incredible stories just waiting to be told.
It’s easy to get lost in the details, but at a certain point you have to step back and look at the story from a distance.
QAHow did you accumulate the human stories that give character to your book? Most of them are culled from academic sources. I simply applied a different perspective by treating them as stories and not evidence for an argument. I also travelled extensively to poor white settlements in South Africa. Usually I’d just pull up and start talking to people. Most were happy to tell me their stories, but some were understandably suspicious of a nosy journalist. Sometimes it took me months to build up a relationship. Did you find your empathy growing as you wrote the book? It was a balance. I started the book with a certain level of empathy, and perhaps it came through when I was talking to people. But, as an academic, you learn very quickly that empathy or bias isn’t going to make for good research, and I wanted my book to be
Q AQ Awhite poverty is a tragedy. My book tries to understand why this is and you find that white poverty is a sort of golden thread that runs through South Africa’s history – it was crucial to our politics in the 19th and 20th centuries and efforts to solve it by privileging the white poor (such as the colour bar) necessarily disadvantaged other races. Do you hope that some of your readers will develop a different sensibility towards poor whites? I’d hope that they gain appreciation for just how complex everything is and how the things we take for granted – the colour of our skins, our language – are very often quite recent inventions. Please explain the importance and vitality of language in terms of the history of whites in your book. The development of Afrikaans went hand in hand with the development of Afrikaner nationalism. Afrikaans was only recognised
Q AQAas an official language in the 1920s, and before that, was almost seen as the language of sailors and slaves, associated with the Cape Coloureds more than white Afrikaans.
Dutch or English were the preferred “civilised” languages. The early nationalist governments worked hard to make Afrikaans more “white”. Geography plays a critical role in developing our understanding of how people moved, why they moved and where they moved. Why is this so important when it comes to your subject? The poor whites didn’t live, or don’t live, in certain areas accidentally. Someone decided to move there, or someone decided to put them there. That decision fascinates me. There’s always a story behind where things are in cities and the people who live there. How long did it take you to write the book, and what made you decide to do it?
QAQI had very little time actually! Luckily I had my M-thesis as a base, but I had about two and a half months to write the book and to do a lot of new research. I’d come home after work and just sit down again in front of my laptop. Please tell us more about your father, and the contribution he made to the book. You have warmly credited him in your book. I inherited my interest in the history of poverty from my father. I actually avoided studying history at university in order not to follow in his footsteps, but I ended up fascinated by the exact same questions from the perspective of a geographer, rather than an historian. There’s a lesson there somewhere, but I’m not sure what it is. He spent most of his life writing his magnum opus on white poverty, but he passed away just as I started working on the book and his own was never finished. I hope my work is a small reflection of his.
AQA