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Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society – dark secrets and active forgetting

Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society – dark secrets and active forgetting
Neil Roos
By Neil Roos
18 Jul 2024
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There is no room for apologia when writing the histories of a racist society like apartheid South Africa. The histories I relate in ‘Ordinary Whites’ remind us of the self-absorption that shaped white everyday life and also the pervasive ways in which ordinary white people were policed and bound into apartheid society. It held whites captive through economic interests and privilege.

Several years ago, I was invited to deliver a talk on aspects of South African history to a group of white retirees in Bloemfontein. I thought that the social history of ordinary white people in South Africa in the 1950s to 1970s might be of interest to an audience who had lived and worked under apartheid, and witnessed the negotiated settlement in 1994, that this would present them with connection points to the past, and a historical commons for telling and sharing stories of their own.

How wrong I was. When I put my idea to the conveners of the talk, some showed signs of discomfort while others were openly hostile. The chairperson, a retired professor from the local university, asked if I could not instead speak of something “apolitical” like the history of the ANC.

I proposed a compromise where I would talk on the social history movement in South Africa. This allowed me to address some of the less well-known episodes in the history of working-class and other non-elite whites. I repeat some of these “apartheid secrets” in my book, Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society, drawing on my own roots in a poorer working class white family (in which my paternal grandfather was a toilet attendant, my father struggled to find secure work and my mother was the main breadwinner).

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Work colonies for white men were one such secret. They were penal settlements for white men who were chronic drunks, petty offenders, or deemed idle or miscreant by state social workers. First established in the 1920s, they fell into disuse prior to World War 2 but were revived and reorganised by the apartheid government in the late 1940s.

While scrolling through lists of men collected by the Durban Men’s Home for committal to a work colony in the early 1950s, I was shocked to come across the name of my father, Dick.

He and men like him had returned from World War 2 as heroes but had battled to reintegrate into post-war civilian society. Many were unable to find steady work and they drank too much and larked around with their comrades from the war. Had they served in other, later wars they would probably have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

But they were considered as “blanke tsotsis” (“white thugs”) deserving of internment at the Zonderwater work colony (on the site of a former POW camp near Cullinan). They never mentioned this experience and were not alone in keeping secret this episode of their lives. 

In my research, few of my informants volunteered any detail about the work colonies or even acknowledged knowing about them. Work colonies do not feature in any of the secondary literature on South Africa during the apartheid years.

Ancient history


When I approached one of the few surviving work colony superintendents in 2009 with a request for an interview, he awkwardly declined, saying that work colonies were “ancient history” and “a closed book”.

The “moederkunde” programme also faded into obscurity but provides an interesting insight into the concerns of Afrikaners as they moved out of poverty in the 1950s and became more affluent, largely through their employment in the public service.

More Afrikaner women were working outside of the home, arousing fears of the demise of the volksmoeder, whose historical role was to tend the hearth of family and volk. A “moederkunde” programme was introduced to provide a formal high school curriculum for girls who might have to start work earlier than usual and might not learn the crafts of motherhood outside of school.

At a Bloemfontein school, the curriculum even involved caring for a baby from the local orphanage and looking after it for several weeks, under the guidance of the moederkunde teacher, in a building attached to the school!

That there were streams of existential anxiety running through sections of white society at this time is suggested by the long-lasting popularity of “Die Wit Yogi” (the White Yogi, aka Victor Rabie from Langlaagte, Johannesburg). Rabie had a long running series of advertisements in The Public Servant in the 1940s and early 1950s, promising to reveal to his clients the psychic secrets of the East and to expel the “devil of drink” from afflicted individuals.   

He offered hypnosis, Prana, Raja and Hata, and treatment for illnesses such as dyspepsia, epilepsy, high blood pressure, rheumatic pain, and “women’s problems”.

While it is difficult to gauge why, or precisely how many, white public servants consulted Die Wit Yogi, the fact that he advertised in the magazine for such an extended period suggests cracks in the edifice of apartheid-era whiteness, which emphasised Christian Nationalism. This may have been caused in part by growing pressures related to lifestyles and/or debt — as well as a certain disillusionment with the churches and Western medicine.

When pointing out how whites supported apartheid, tacitly or otherwise, and expressing cynicism about their pleas of innocence, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) opened up a Pandora’s box of questions related to accommodation and complicity, and how these were embedded in the everyday lives of white people.

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In societies marked by high levels of unfreedom, these conditions represent deep moral dilemmas, and recourse to history is one way to approach and perhaps understand them. The complex moral issues clustered around accommodation and complicity inevitably confront and taunt those historians of authoritarianism drawn to narrower and more precise historical and historiographic ones about ideology, participation (including knowledge and denial by perpetrators), coercion, agency, and its limits.

Indeed, for Sir Richard Evans, one of the luminaries of German history, these are the major questions of modern German history, especially for the Nazi period and the years leading up to it. These issues also feature in popular contemporary culture such the controversial, discomforting film ‘The Zone of Interest”, which portrays Nazi family life right next door to Auschwitz.

They are equally central when considering the history of whites in apartheid society, and they represent my most compelling reason for writing this book.

Meaningless


There are traces of indocility, defiance, and even histories across the colour line in Ordinary Whites, albeit that these were fragile and short lived. The ordinary whites who feature defy the particular form of the apartheid state, rendering particular versions of it meaningless.

However, they seldom confronted, opposed, or even acknowledged the order of racial supremacy of which apartheid was one ideological, bureaucratic, and disciplinary iteration. That is one of the reasons why so many whites were later able to claim that they never supported apartheid. It afforded whites a way they could simultaneously accommodate and oppose apartheid.

These histories also remind us that race, in this case apartheid-era whiteness, was made not only from the top, but also from the bottom.  

The tragic story of Derrick Smythe-Jones (not his real name) who killed himself in a company village on the South Coast of what was then Natal in 1971 is illustrative. Derrick, a “bachelor”, had fallen in love with a young black woman from a nearby location. This type of love, of course, was prohibited under Section 16 of the 1957 Immorality Act, which made it an offence to have sex across the colour line.

The story of the love affair emerged in shards and fragments over many decades as I spoke to family members and people who had lived in the company village. Derrick’s story was never quite told; only hinted at.

It was an apartheid secret that replicated one of the founding premises of white everyday life in apartheid society, that it was subject to a kind of moral inversion of the sort described by the German-American historian and philosopher, Hannah Arendt. She argued that in Nazi society, under the ideological conditions of the Reich, “normal” behaviour could only be expected of those able to muster the courage to act “abnormally”.

In Derrick’s case, here was a man, finding love in middle age, but instead of it being celebrated and honoured, it became shameful; a secret that led to the destruction of this love, and Derrick’s violent end.

Derrick died by walking on the railway tracks into a moving train in the small hours one morning. Colour bar legislation meant that the unsuspecting train driver would have been a white man, probably an Afrikaans speaker. Hitting and bloodily killing Derrick on that lonely stretch of railroad in the predawn hours was surely traumatic for this man and he would have had to carry the scars of this experience for life, probably unacknowledged.

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For working-class white people like the train driver and Derrick, there was little by way of escape from complicity or accommodation with apartheid society and its most fundamental ideologies. Their options and destinies were limited and circumscribed by their location within a racist society.

For Derrick, his own destruction was the only path out of the conundrum that apartheid and love had left him. And while Derrick’s death was an unheralded tragedy of apartheid society, another equally pertinent one was the fact that we know nothing about his love, her fate, or even her name.

His act of defiance would not have marked the train nor put a dent in the system that drove him to suicide. His story represents a parable for the ways in which we write histories of whites. If we are to avoid narrating the social histories of these people with what British historian EP Thompson described as “enormous condescension of posterity”, we must understand how they were policed, disciplined, and reformed.

But we also need to ask when, where and how they transgressed the interlocking ideological, legal, and moral codes of an increasingly authoritarian state and the limitations of such transgression. They were not heroic figures.

Boundless sympathy


Further to this, as German historian Alf Lüdtke points out, we must avoid writing their history with boundless sympathy. There is no room for apologia when writing the histories of a racist society like apartheid South Africa.

The histories told in Ordinary Whites reminds us of the self-absorption that shaped white everyday life and also the pervasive ways in which ordinary white people were policed and bound into apartheid society. It held whites captive through economic interests and privilege, particular types of social scientific knowledge, and the sense that they were being watched – a fear almost certainly more imagined than real, as the state was never as efficient and well coordinated as it claimed. These permutations played out in different ways in ordinary people’s lives.

Although the historical scales are vastly different, the historian of ordinary and subaltern whites is thus faced with a similar kind of dilemma to the social historians of Nazi Germany. Strong ties bound people to apartheid society, but we cannot write their history in ways that eliminate these people’s agency and deflect moral blame to convenient scapegoats like powerful politicians, important bureaucrats, or murderous policemen.

To return to the Bloemfontein invitation, I was puzzled by the disaffection that my proposed topic – the social history of ordinary white people – invoked among the organising committee. Also, that they considered a history that included them to be “political” and therefore not an appropriate topic for polite conversation, while the history of the ANC was “apolitical”.

Could it be, I speculated, that opening a window to their past left them feeling uneasily close to apartheid’s history? And that once they acknowledged being part of white apartheid society, this left them aligned, in their own minds at least, with a racist state, apartheid’s ideologies and the worst of its excesses?

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The ANC’s history, on the other hand, was plausibly more distant and safer. By the second decade of the millennium this history had largely settled into a recitation of a canon of nation-building, where the cadence and directness of its telling avoids difficult questions of complicity, participation, and moral ambiguity.

If this is indeed the case, then the committee’s resistance to my suggestion might be characterised as something akin to active forgetting. Among whites in contemporary South Africa, active forgetting (often bustled along with declaimers that “what I did isn’t interesting or historical” or “that is all in the past now, let’s leave it”) must take its place alongside whitewashing (“we were opposed to apartheid all along”) or apologia (“it wasn’t all bad”).

All of these strategies may be discerned in various permutations among white South Africans – those who came of age under apartheid, as well as younger ones – and they serve to create some distance from apartheid and the racialised privilege it bequeathed to a post-apartheid generation of young white people. It is far easier, historically, and morally, to divert responsibility to apartheid’s ideologues, politicians and security forces.  

Connected to apartheid society


Yet it is precisely these questions of how whites were connected to apartheid society that my book seeks to address. It is not meant to categorise people as good whites or bad, those on the right side of history and those on the wrong.

Rather, it seeks to tease out the complex ties that bound whites into apartheid society, the contestations which these provoked and the implications of these struggles which varied in scale, intensity, and geography, for the shape of the apartheid social order as a whole.

In this book, autobiography, family history and ethnography are woven into the fabric of more conventional historical scholarship. An earlier book that I wrote, Ordinary Springboks, centred on the social history of white men who served in South Africa’s Union Defence Force during World War 2. That book was inspired by my father’s history during and after the war in which he enlisted as a 17-year-old volunteer. That history was, in effect, a generation removed from my own experience.

Ordinary Whites, on the other hand, is set in the world I grew up in, with people I knew over a long period. My roots in a poorer white working-class family did guide me as I combed the sources for white society’s routines, codes, aspirations and modes of indocility and transgression, as well as the limits to these.

This is an ethnographic position of both advantage and privilege, but the closeness that allowed me to peer into some of the unspoken, hidden, obscured and taken-for-granted reaches of white life also prompted questions and doubts.

I make no great claims to the personal importance of these people for the apartheid project, and none occupied powerful or influential positions in apartheid society.

Their significance lies in what their life histories tell us about that society. DM

Neil Roos is Professor of History at the University of Fort Hare. He is the author of ‘Ordinary Springboks: White Servicemen and Social Justice in South Africa, 1939–1961’. ‘Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society’ is published by Wits University Press.

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