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

orities and class character had to be redefined. The labouring classes had
to be integrated into the volk, and mobilised for the economic struggle,
since any resistance from the white working class would threaten the petit
bourgeoisie and the developing economic movement. (O’Meara 1983:
107-116.)
Poor whites were to have their own role in the process of building
the great nation, and the ideology of teaching the poor to save and reeducating
them was central to these attempts (1934 Conference Report).
Harmonising class relations was seen as important for the unity of the
Afrikaner volk. The virtues of hard labour and saving were emphasised,
and working-class Afrikaners were controlled by a Christian-nationalist
dogma. (O’Meara 1983: 158-164.)
In the 1930s and 1940s the Broederbond blamed the vulnerable position
of unskilled Afrikaner workers on the English, Jewish or communist
enemies of the volk. The white working class was taught that economic
prizes were achievable by emphasising the racial rather than the class barrier.
(O’Meara 1983: 82, 89.)
In his account of the invention of tradition in colonial Africa, Terence
Ranger notes how the white workers in South Africa used invented rituals
of European craft unionism to exclude Africans from participating
the unions, and to claim craft status. Importing European traditions into
Africa also made it easier to rule the Africans as an underclass. However,
this increased the demands on the whites, since they had to become an
organised and respectable racial elite. (Ranger 1983: 215-220.)
Peter Worsley has noted the position of working-class whites in South
Africa as a ”labour aristocracy”, and how they were well aware of the
meaning of institutionalised inequality in respect of their own prosperity.
They were willing to defend it with racism of a ”more atavistic order,
rooted in fear, on the part of those at the lowest levels of class hierarchy,
that their social status will now be reduced to that of Blacks”. (Worsley
1984: 240-242.) However, it was the white South African elite who had
carefully planted seeds of this ’atavistic’ racism.
Christian-national Ideology and the Poor White Problem
The Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) lead the actions against white poverty
from the very start. It had extended its influence in the middle years of
the nineteenth century, and in the 1880s it took a new interest in the poor
40