The Making of a Good White - E-thesis - Helsinki.fi

HOUSING POOR WHITES IN CAPE TOWN
“Shame, Cape Town, shame! It is time we awoke, or else great tragedies
will overtake us.” (Zerilda Steyn in Cape Argus on the housing
situation 18.7.1929.)
In the first decades of the twentieth century the life of lower class whites
in Cape Town was different from that in Johannesburg, which has been
understood as the traditional heartland of ‘poor white problem’. There
were several reasons for these differences.
The social status of poor whites in Cape Town and Johannesburg differed.
The working class whites were poorer in Johannesburg, most of
them Afrikaans-speaking bywoners. They had gathered on the Witwatersrand
from all over the country, tempted by the various opportunities
that had developed around the booming mining industry (van Onselen
1982b: 111-114). In Cape Town many lower class whites spoke English
as their first language, and the structure of livelihood was largely based
on agriculture and manufacture. In comparison with the Transvaal, Afrikaner
national identity in Cape Town was a moderate one (Bickford-
Smith et al. 1990: 80). Race relations were more relaxed, urban space was
less segregated, and the Cape Province allowed her people of colour more
political rights. (Christopher 1994: 30-49).
While Johannesburg was at first dominated by whites and Africans,
and then during apartheid became increasingly African, Cape Town was
predominantly coloured, and Africans were a minority until very recently.
Also the membership of category White was a very vague issue in the
Western Cape. Many people in and around Cape Town were walking the
thin line between White and Coloured (Western 1997: 36). Some racially
‘grey’ areas such as Observatory and Woodstock were in fact never really
properly segregated.
The Men and the Woman behind the Housing Schemes
In 1997, people involved in the Cape Town housing schemes, either
as officials or as tenants, described them to me as ‘typically Afrikaner
projects’. Initially, this was not correct. In Cape Town, English-speaking
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