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

The First Residents: 1938–1948
While Epping Garden Village was established to prevent and stop the
slide of the respectable white poor into the abyss of degeneration, the suburb
simultaneously offered a physical locus for it. It marked this part of
the white population as a separate category of possible degenerates who
might, under circumstances of urban decay, endanger all the whites. The
symbolic significance of the category poor white grew, both when the
first official boundaries were drawn and when the state secured them.
Since whites were seen as genetically superior and only in need of
a chance at life in a good environment to succeed, it was regarded as
possible to upgrade them all to good whites. And, indeed, this optimism
seemed correct at first when the Citizens’ Housing League were allowed
to choose the residents they wanted to uplift.
At the time, the residents were carefully handpicked – a process which
included strict selection procedures in which respectability and upward
mobility were emphasized. An example of this selection could be ‘Mrs.
Mulder’s’ story. Mrs. Helen Mulder is not an actual person. She, like all
the other people who have authentic-sounding names in this thesis, is a
combination of several real life histories gathered during the fieldwork.
These life histories, or their fragments, have been used here as apt illustrations
of the historical facts, phases, or events. The following story
represents the residents of the first generation.
In March 1947 young Mrs. Mulder had just discovered that she was
pregnant. She was still wondering where she would place the baby’s crib
in their tiny one-roomed home, when her aunt Augusta told her that the
Citizens’ Housing League (hereafter CHL or the Company) gave ‘nice
and cheap’ houses for young, white families who had a permanent income
of more than £10 but less than £20 per month. Her husband Charles
earned £14 a month, and she was a housewife, so they could at least try.
The next day, she fetched the application forms from the headquarters of
the CHL in the SANLAM 49 building in Wale Street.
Soon afterwards their home in Woodstock was visited by a social
worker who wanted to make sure that they were who they had claimed to
be: honourable, proper white people whom the CHL wanted as tenants.
The visit also served to discover if the Mulders had any social problems
such as alcoholism or marital troubles. The social worker looked pleased
49
A large South African insurance company that was an essential part of Afrikaner nation
building.
47