by Zine Magubane
Introduction
In 1932, the Carnegie Corporation of New York published a five-volume study about White poverty in South Africa. The Report of the Carnegie Commission of Investigation on the Poor White Question in South Africa consisted of five volumes. The first volume, Rural Impoverishment and Rural Exodus (Grosskopf 1932), dealt exclusively with how the growth of capitalist agriculture was leading to the impoverishment of large numbers of Afrikaans-speaking White South Africans.1 "The poor economic position of the landless rural European is the crux of the problem," the summary findings of the Commission concluded (Albertyn 1932: xxi). "Hired men on farms" were the poorest (Albertyn 1932: v). The time when "farming could afford subsistence without hard and regular work" had passed (Albertyn 1932: x). Even though conditions were dire, the farmers and former farmers held fast to the land.
If is often observed that people continue to cling to farm life, and this results in overcrowded land that cannot support all. This is a clear symptom of a type of mentality that is marked by narrowness of outlook, by lack of enterprise and by dread of the strange world outside the farm (Albertyn 1932: x)
A group of activist clergymen from the Dutch Reformed Church, the foremost religious institution in South Africa, approached Fred Keppel, the president of the Carnegie Corporation, to fund a study of poverty amongst the Afrikaans speaking farmers in 1927. The aim of the study was to diagnose the problem and then solve it. The task was urgent. Afrikaner farmers held a unique place in the South African imaginary. They were descendants of the first group of Dutch settlers who arrived courtesy of Jan Van Riebeeck and the Dutch East India Company in the 17th century. In 1838, in what came to be known as the "Great Trek," these farmers left the original site of Dutch settlement in the Cape Colony and "trekked" to the interior where they fought a series of bloody battles with the Africans who, for centuries, had made these lands their home. For many White South Africans, the "trekboer" (literal translation: "traveling farmer") embodied the battle between the forces of "civilization" and "savagery." Rian Malan, whose ancestors were among this first band of trekkers, described the violence and nostalgia that surrounds the image of the trekboer in his autobiography, My Traitor's Heart:
So, we remember Jacob Jacobus Malan and still honor his solemn covenant. We also remember his sons, Jacobus and Hercules, who survived the Zulu wars, dragged their covered wagons over the mountains, and smashed the black tribes on the high plain. There, on conquered land, they established Boer republics, where white men were free to rule Blacks in accord with their stern Jehovistic covenant (1990: 6).
The image of the Afrikaner was, however, Janus faced. The pride they held in themselves was a wounded one. As Malan put it, his trekboer ancestors were "a backward peasantry, despised by our British bosses and betters" (1990: 6). Their traditional farming methods had persisted for a century but by the early 1900s were no match for the forces of capitalist agriculture. To see those farmers sinking into squalor and degradation in the 1930s was, for the members of the Dutch Reformed Church, a bitter pill to swallow. The Dutch Reformed Church had, for much of South Africa's history, been "in intimate touch with the people" and sensitive to their plight (Malherbe 1932: 48). The relationship between the Church and the farmers was symbiotic. Each, at least for a time, had needed the other. As the Sociological Report put it, "The Church was one of the earliest social institutions in the life of the nation. . . . The different 'treks' to the interior were speedily followed by the Church. . . . By this means the people were guarded from degradation and degeneracy" (Albertyn 1932: 51).
It was thus that the Ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church were the first to become aware of the problem of what they called "Poor Whiteism" and, even more importantly, for "rousing the public conscience in the matter" (Malherbe 1932: 48). The way in which they "roused the public consciousness" was self-interested. The Sociological Report (Volume 5) stated the case plainly: "The Church is losing ground" (Albertyn 1932: 57). The question, to what degree "the Church is to be held responsible" for the fact that a good many of their parishioners had "sunk into abject poverty" loomed large in the study's background (Albertyn 1932: 47). The clergymen hoped, of course, that the answer to the question of the Church's responsibility for the decline in the welfare of poor Whites was minimal or none. Even in the event they were partially responsible, the clergy should and would be rehabilitated alongside their distressed flock. Indeed, it was through the medium of "Poor Whiteism"---its diagnoses, prognosis, and resolution---that they would save themselves by securing a permanent (and funded) place in the state welfare apparatus. Since one of the chief aims of the report was to demonstrate that it was "self-evident that any diminution of the Church as a social institution is one of the most important factors affecting the maintenance and elevation of the national character," the ways in which they represented rural life---its problems and its promise---gave land a host of complex and often contradictory meanings (Albertyn 1932: 53).
Land, Capitalism, Poverty---A Brief History
The impoverishment of agricultural laborers when they lost access to the land and became dependent upon wages for survival was not, by any means, a new historical phenomenon. In England, the first truly capitalist nation on earth, the peasantry was already being forced in the 16th century to compete on the open market for access to land. As competitive market forces established themselves, less productive farmers "went to the wall and joined the property less classes" (Wood 2017: 103). The poor farmer soon became the exploited proletariat, either as hired farm hands, or, as the industrial sector took off, desperately poor hired hands in factories. In The Condition of the Working Class in England Friedrich Engels described the fate of the "ruined" small peasantry:
An English agricultural labourer and an English pauper, these words are synonymous. His father was a pauper and his mother's milk contained no nourishment. From his earliest childhood he had bad food, and only half enough to still his hunger, and even yet he undergoes the pangs of unsatisfied hunger almost all the time he is not asleep. He is half clad, and has not more fire than barely sufficed to cook his scanty meal. ...His wife and children, hungry, rarely warm, and often ill and helpless, always careworn and hopeless like himself, are naturally grasping, selfish, and troublesome, and so, to use his own expression, he hates the sight of them (Engels [1845] 1987: 265).
The English upper classes shed no tears for the dispossessed farmer turned pauper. In Observations on the Nature, Extent, and Effects of Pauperism, Thomas Walker called the poor "an overstock of sorry, ill-trained animals" who were both "cunning" and "deceitful" (1831: 4). The Report from His Majesty's Commissioners for Inquiring into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws called the best of the English poor "dirty, nasty and indolent" and the worst "a band of savages in a civilized community" (1834: 88, 114). The wretched condition of the poor had more to do with the tyranny of market forces than their own character defects, but the consensus was nevertheless that no state aid or charity should be extended because it would only "reward" the poor for their "idleness." As James Buchanan, author of Facts and Observations in Relation to the Extension of State Prisons in England, put it, the "vicious and lawless" should not have to be sustained by the "sober and industrious" upper classes:
I have been for many years disposed to question the policy of rendering assistance, through the medium of public institutions, to any save the sick and wholly destitute. The working community are safer when they have no such resource to look to (1834: 24).
Indeed, the consensus held that it was not that the poor who needed to be protected from the rapacious capitalist, but rather, the capitalists needed to be protected from the conniving pauper. It was such thinking that led to the founding of the Mendicity Society to "protect the nobleman, gentlemen, and other persons accustomed to dispense large sums in charity from being imposed upon by cheats and pretenders" (Mayhew [1861] 1968: 399).
Things were somewhat different in South Africa. Rest assured, the contempt for the poor was the same. "Unwillingness to work and lack of habits of industry are characteristic of many poor whites," declared Volume II, The Psychological Report (Wilcocks 1932: 52). The Economic Report despaired that many Whites were poor due to "mere laziness" (Grosskopf 1932: 181). The Mother and Daughter in the Poor Family,a sixty-page addendum to The Sociological Report,diagnosed the problem of poverty as an outcome, in part, of a lack of "social sense," by which was meant familial training in good manners, polite conduct, and moral righteousness. There was, the Commissioners found, an unfortunate tendency of the unfit to multiply. South Africa, like many industrializing nations, faced the problem of "the irresponsible reproduction of children by parents who are quite obviously unfit to produce normal children, and who most certainly are unable to give them a normal home life and social training" (Rothmann 1932: 196).
South Africans in the 1930s matched the British of the 19th century in contempt for the poor. They were equally convinced of the inadvisability of giving the poor charity. It was because due care had not been exercised to weed out malingerers, that there was "so much abuse" of the system by children who were "well able to care for their parents but are unwilling to do so" (Albertyn 1932: 80). A "well-to-do" farmer had not only taken his wife to a charity hospital, but had insisted that they both obtain free railway tickets to travel (Albertyn 1932: 73). Parents insisted that schools provide free books for their children. Orphanages and foundling hospitals, allegedly, were so well appointed that "there was great danger of parental responsibility being undermined" (Albertyn 1932: 74). All, in all, the report concluded charity was being "exploited by the imposter for his own purposes" (Albertyn 1932: 79).
What set South Africa apart from England was neither the degree of contempt for the poor nor suspicion towards state relief. It was the question of race and numbers. The number of White people in South Africa was small, a mere 20% of the population. Every White person, no matter how degenerate and feeble, was needed if White minority rule was to survive. Whereas the English poor could be allowed to "go to the wall" and starve, South Africans had to take a different tack. The looming problem in South Africa was what the Commission called "loss of racial pride":
Behind the poor white problem lies the native question. If the more privileged European grudges and refuses the poor his patronage and society, the latter will associate with non-Europeans, if he finds no members of his own race to consort with (Albertyn 1932: 106).
Race, Pride, Land:
South Africa had (and continues to have) a sizeable number of persons who trace their ancestors back to England. Indeed, the favored remedy for the scourge of pauperism that was described by Engels, Buchanan, and others quoted above, was emigration to the colonies. In 1820, the English government paid for the relocation of distressed agricultural laborers and their families to South Africa. It was hoped that in the colonies with their abundance of "free land" these distressed mechanics, day laborers, and hired farm hands could remake themselves as country squires.
Some of them did.2 They brought not only their English cultural traditions, but the prevailing English beliefs about the dangers posed by relief given too generously. The Carnegie Report framed their interventions as having been inspired by the "good sense" encapsulated in the English Poor Law of 1834, which decreed that the amount of relief given to the poor should never be so generous that people would choose aid rather than work. The Sociological Report (Volume 5) went so far as to quote directly from the English Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1834):
"Children tested in the intelligence survey," photograph from The Poor White Problem in South Africa.
Carnegie Corporation of New York and Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
A Principle in vogue in England and Germany
For the last 100 years a wise principle has been in existence in England. It was the essence of the "Poor Law Amendment Act" of 1834, and may be summarized as follows:
Care should be taken that the condition of the necessitous person is not made more desirable than that of the poor labourer existing by the fruits of his own efforts (Albertyn 1932: 83).
Even though charitable support of the poor was usually an unmitigated evil, in this instance it could be countenanced. The Commissioners recognized that, in trying to save the farmers, they were going against the economic laws of progress. They even lamented that the unique misfortune of South Africa was that the rules of economic progress had to be "bent" if the White race stood any chance of survival. As Wilcocks put it in The Economic Report:
The misfortune for South Africa was this, that to the usual social gulf between master and servant was added the difference between a civilized an uncivilized race (1932: 171).
In other words, in a world organized around the principle of "survival of the fittest," some of the "unfit" must be helped to survive. Many of the farmers were committed to inefficient methods and couldn't keep up with the demands of market production. The Sociological Report described the farmers methods as "obsolete and inefficient" (Albertyn 1932: xii). Added to this was the discovery by the authors of Volume III, Education and the Poor White, that poor Whites, on average, were not terribly smart precisely because of their attachment to the land:
As the soil available for cultivation and pasturage becomes less and less for each individual, ignorance and poverty react upon one another, and matters of course become worse. Without any education, they feel themselves bound to the soil and to work, in which they have grown up. They have absolutely no idea of any other kind of work to turn to (Malherbe 1932: 45).
Teaching poor Whites to learn trades seemed hopeless. In fact, the report found that the industrial training in African mission schools might even have been superior. Whereas in the African Industrial schools "the pupils were doing things, producing things," in the European schools "the children were sitting (most of the time) inactive and bored stiff with trivialities and parrotlike performances on the three R's" (Malherbe 1932: 53, emphasis in original).
Paradoxically, even though the point of rescuing poor Whites was motivated by the desire to secure White minority rule, the Education Report recognized that it was the "aristocratic attitude" on the part of Poor Whites that made them such poor students. The poor Whites had a "perverted conception of education and of their position as aristocrats to whom manual and industrial labor would mean a loss of prestige," Malherbe (1932: 53) complained.
It was for this reason that the Psychological Report dealt at length with the complex issue of what the Sociological Report called "racial self-respect" (Albertyn 1932: xxix). On the one hand, racial self-respect and racial pride needed to be encouraged. The Sociological Report sounded the alarm that "sometimes Coloured people and natives occupy better dwellings than Europeans" thus making "social intercourse between white and Coloured families another evil result of bad housing" (Albertyn 1932). The co-mingling of poor Whites with poor people of color indicated the "absence of loss of self-respect." Therefore the fact that poor Whites sought to hold themselves apart from Africans was a good thing and to be encouraged (Wilcocks 1932:62).
On the other hand, however, this could lead to the development of laziness and an entitled attitude. The authors of the Psychological Report described how poor Whites sometimes refused to do any kind of work that they saw Africans doing. Many bosses who employed White workers found that the employees "may refuse to perform the work at all, or may use a part of his wages in openly or surreptitiously engaging a native to do the work for him" (Wilcocks 1932: 56). While the commissioners went to great lengths to evade the issue of class conflict among and between Whites, it lurked not far from the surface and often disrupted their tidy narrative. When a poor White "engaged a Native to do the work for him," he was, from the bosses' point of view, failing to show the proper level of deference to an employer. "The main objection," they surmised, was the offense that poor Whites took at the idea of "becoming a 'hired man' especially under a monthly or longer contract, so that one came to be continually at the beck and call of a master" (Albertyn 1932: 172). To hammer the point home, the report directly quoted the words of a farmer who was described as "an old man of poor parentage whose father had already been without land." The Commissioners emphasized that this socially compromised White man spoke "almost proudly" when he said:
"Never in my life have I worked for another man for money. I trekked about with my own livestock---although I did look after another man's flocks" (Albertyn 1932: 173, emphasis in original).
Added to this was the "problem" (from the employer's point of view) that helping poor Whites hurt the bottom line. Africans were routinely paid less than Whites. This left more money in the pockets of those who chose to employ them rather than poor Whites. It was thus that "many farmers flatly stated that they preferred to work with natives rather than with Whites of the poorer class" (Albertyn 1932: 180). Racism and discrimination, of course, played a huge role in determining wage rates. However wage differentials were not due to prejudice alone. Precisely because of the fact that some Africans retained direct access to land as a means of their own self-reproduction, they were able to accept less in compensation. A common insult levied at African men was that they only went to work long enough to get enough wages to buy some cattle and "get a wife" and then they would quit. The Economic Report put it slightly less insultingly: "A laborer who has not to live by his wages alone, can easily offer his service more cheaply on the labor market. The majority of native laborers are not obliged permanently to support a family by their pay" (Grosskopf 1932: 166). Therefore, one of the aims of the Carnegie Commissioners was to strike a balance between the competing needs of employers as employers (and thus interested solely in profits) and employers as "Whites" and thus interested in shoring up their numbers. The Commissioners defined themselves as uniquely able to help White employers "strike a happy mean between treating his European hand as a European, and so in a sense as still his equal, and at the same time as his subordinate" (Wilcocks 1932: 60).
Land, History, Memory
The Carnegie Commission investigators were faced with a troubling problem, and it had to do with the history of conquest and its relationship to land. The conflict between African ethnic groups and the encroaching European settlers, Dutch and English, always turned on the question of land and labor. When Jan Van Riebeeck landed at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, the Dutch East India wished to build a way station on the way to India. They did not envision permanent settlement, but rather sought to use "carrots and sticks" to get the indigenous people to trade Dutch-made goods for cattle. Frequently they were not successful. Already in 1658, the Company was forced to try to breed and raise their own cattle because "nothing or only bad cattle can be obtained from the natives," wrote Van Riebeeck in his diary on the 20th of August. The various clan and ethnic groups within the San and Khoi (the indigenous people of the Cape) selectively engaged with the Dutch, sometimes to secure advantage over one another. But granting exclusive permanent access to the land by any one group was jealously guarded against. Van Riebeeck described the vast sweep of land under indigenous control:
These three tribes, of which the Cochoquas are the most powerful, enclose, or with their encampments enclose, the whole region between both the seas of India to the East and Ethiopia on the West. The whole breadth of the land between the Mountains, and the beautiful valleys, are travelled over by them (183).
In the same diary entry Van Rieebeck reported that the Company Directors was advising him "as much as possible to promote agriculture" (1658: 153). As a permanent class of Dutch settlers grew, their interactions with the indigenous people became more predatory and violent---escalating to enslavement, forced labor, and kidnapping as well as forcible expropriation of the land. Africans battled the Dutch and, later, the English for the land from the 18th century onwards. The Carnegie study, necessarily, had to deal with this history of dispossession because it was the historical context for the current impoverishment of the Afrikaner farmers.
The frontier wars violently dispossessed many African ethnic groups. The Carnegie report, however, dealt with this history perfunctorily, writing, "Since the establishment of European authority, which practically put an end to internecine warfare, as well as to famines and epidemics, the natives have multiplied enormously as a result of natural increase" (Grosskopf 1932: 158).
This was, to put it mildly, stretching the truth. The "famines" and "epidemics" that the report treats like forces of nature, were a direct result of colonial dispossession. Losing direct access to land, oftentimes meant having to buy food. When prices rose, people starved. The Report, however, made this a function of "natural increase." "While the natives thus grew in numbers they were no longer able, as in former times, to usurp the land of other tribes or to occupy practically uninhabited areas" (Grosskopf 1932: 159). Subsequent to the discovery of diamonds (1868) and gold (1884), the colonial government instituted "hut" and "head" taxes to force Africans into wage labor. The Carnegie report also naturalized this process, noting, "It was the mines and subsequent railway construction that first brought about the use of natives in great numbers as hired labourers, in the modern economic sense" (Grosskopf 1932: 159).
The super-exploitation of African workers, coupled with discriminatory legislation that limited their ability to establish permanent residence in urban areas, meant that African labor was cheap and growing in availability. The Report noted that, although it had once been the case that "natives mostly went out to work amongst the whites in order to obtain additional income," things had changed. It was currently the case that "congestion of their tribal habitations and poverty force them more and more to seek a living outside" (Grosskopf 1932: 159). But what did this have to do with Whites? Quite a bit, as it turned out. The Economic Report stated the case plainly: "Non-European labor deprives white men of jobs, and thus contributes to make the poor-White question more acute" (Grosskopf 1932: 164).
"Losing My Religion": Land and the Science of Social Welfare
While many poor Whites clung desperately to the land, equally large numbers took refuge in the cities, where they lived in terrible squalor. Unlike the farms, where you could eke out an existence by hunting or even eating wild grass, in the cities "you have either to work or to starve" (Wilcocks 1932: 118). And, starve they did. "Especially in the smaller towns the chances of their gaining a fair livelihood are limited, and often they continue living there in great poverty," the authors of The Psychological Report explained (Wilcocks 1932: 122).
The concern of the academics, social workers, and clergy who approached the Carnegie Commission was not, however, entirely selfless. When the poor Whites left for the cities, the rural lawyers and social workers and clergy lost their clientele. When the poor went to the cities, the churches suffered. They could not compete with the lure of city life. Prior to the collapse of the rural economy, "the care of the poor played an important, almost a preponderating role in the life of the Church." The fact that people depended on the Church for not only spiritual but also material support "furnished the best possible advertisement for Christianity" (Albertyn 1932: 60).
But times had changed. Now it was the case that "the State is more responsible than the Church for the poor" (Albertyn 1932: 60). The Dutch Reformed Church took an active part in proposing the Carnegie Commission study. Clergy conducted many of what, in the end, totaled close to 800 interviews with poor Whites and the teachers, psychologists, poor wardens, and social workers who managed them. This was all part of a well-thought out "pitch" to the South African government to try to ensure that the clergy become part of the government apparatus for governing, managing, and administering to the poor.
The degree to which self-interest played a part in the conception, design, and recommendations of the report becomes clear in "The Church and the Poor," a sub-section of The Sociological Report when it states:
Within the last two generations, the whole face of the nation's social life has been largely changed, and we now find thousands of poor families in the cities, exposed to new conditions and temptations which have a detrimental effect on their religious life. Without continual and thorough care, they are bound to drift away and lose contact with the Church (Albertyn 1932: 62).
In making the case that clergy of the Dutch Reformed Church not only take the lead in poverty management but also receive rather hefty subsidies from the government to do so, the Church stressed its unique ability to determine how to stop the rural exodus and rehabilitate those Whites who stayed in the rural areas. The Church called on the government to provide the funds for "Church trained social workers" (Albertyn 1932: 64). They determined that four special classes of Church-trained social workers were urgently needed: family case workers, nurses, child welfare experts, and hostel matrons.
The clergymen also promised that they could keep the poor out of the "godless" labor movement. "The warning voice of the Church against certain aspects of present-day socialism, as seen in communism, is also necessary" (Albertyn 1932: 65). But, most importantly, because the Church was in the business of knowing and saving souls, they were best equipped to deal with the "curse" that was "dependency on the State and Church" which they determined to be at epidemic levels in South Africa (Albertyn 1932: 65). The Church was uniquely positioned, the Report argued, to determine which rural Whites were the "deserving Poor" who had not fallen so far into degeneracy that they were irredeemable. Only the Church could do this because "many of the finest qualities to be found among the poorer classes of South African society must in large measure be attributed to the influence the Church has exercised over them in the past" (Albertyn 1932: 66). It was up to the Church, therefore, to assess the degree to which the "spirit" of independence, that they deemed the natural gift of the White farmer was still alive inside the degraded hired hand.
Land, Spirit, Whiteness
Some of the poorest Whites in South Africa were the so-called "trekboers"---which literally translates to "traveling farmers." They grazed their stock over large areas and generally lived an itinerant existence. The Psychological Report described the "trek spirit" as a "disinclination to settle down in one place and build up a permanent means of livelihood there." They agreed that "the trek spirit is one of the important causes of rural impoverishment in South Africa" (Wilcocks 1932: 7). The Report traced the origin of the "trek spirit" to 1838, when large numbers of Dutch farmers left the Cape Colony for a variety of reasons including the abolition of slavery by the English government. As the report put it, they fled due to their "discontent" with "measures taken by the government affecting their relation to and treatment of the native and coloured peoples of the country" (Wilcocks 1932: 8). When they left the Cape Colony, they necessarily came into conflict with the indigenous groups of the interior. "The trekkers in the eastern, and later, to the north-eastern parts of the country had continually to take part during the nineteenth century in a long series of wars against the natives" (Wilcocks 1932: 9). The wars were, predictably, about land. One of the chief desires of the trekkers, the The Psychological Report noted, was "the desire to reach so remote a part of the country, that its very remoteness was a guarantee not only of their own freedom, but also that of their children and of their future descendants" (Wilcocks 1932: 9). But what of the freedom of the people who occupied these "remote" lands? Of this, the Report said nary a word, other than to remark that the trekkers were often "forced to change their place of abode because of the danger threatening from the natives" (Wilcocks 1932: 9).
The authors of The Psychological Report are generally quite fawning in their assessment of the trekkers of old, noting their "sprit" of independence and self-reliance. They also make the "spirit" a matter of both nature and nurture, writing that "biological heredity" had "played its part in the development of the trek spirit" (Wilcocks 1932: 12). This spirit was easily fostered, they averred, by the fact that it was "easy" to obtain grazing and watering rights in what the Report called "thinlypopulated areas" (Wilcocks 1932: 10). The areas actually were not thinly populated. What fostered this "spirit" and allowed for its successful flourishing was government assistance in supporting frontier wars and in providing the money for erecting wire fencing to help in registering and recognizing settler-initiated land claims.
The era of free and abundant land was now, however, over. "The possibilities of moving to land, as yet unoccupied, have become very limited," Volume II warned (Wilcocks 1932: 12). Spiritual tendencies to independence and self-reliance needed to be adjusted to meet the exigencies of modern conditions. There were, of course, "hardened trekkers who tend to move away on relatively slight provocation" (Wilcocks 1932: 11). Not much could be done about them. The Report was hopeful, however, that a large portion of the poor Whites they interviewed indicated that they moved around so much because of droughts, diseases, poor agricultural land, or having been dismissed by their employer. Thus, the Commissioners concluded that, for the most part, "the trek spirit as well as the motives which have caused the trek to become traditional do not, in the main, fall outside the bounds of the mentally normal" (Wilcocks 1932: 12).
These kinds of people were candidates for agricultural settlements paid for by the State and managed by the Church. The agricultural settlements were meant to rehabilitate the rural poor and give them the opportunity of eventually becoming independent farmers. The settlers were given land, which required little or no capital on their part, with periodical payments being made from the proceeds of the farms after a term. The way in which the agricultural settlements were set up and run created a permanent place for the middle-class Church reformer to play an integral and permanent administrative role. Because the success of the rehabilitative effort depended on the poor White recipient having the proper "qualities of character and intelligence," it was the job of the trained social worker/clergyman to assess those qualities (Wilcocks 1932: 106).
These settlements were not a novel invention. The State had been running some version of them since the late 1890s. However, the agricultural settlements run by the State, the clergymen judged, were of only middling success. Their own, such as the Kakamas Settlement of the Dutch Reformed Church, were given (by them) the highest marks. The Report called it an "outstanding experiment on the possibility of rehabilitating and restoring the Poor White to independence" (Wilcocks 1932: 108). The clergy praised the fact that the Kakamas settlement was run on the principle of self-help with the settler being required to "fend for himself" with "the necessity of personal achievement emphasized from the very beginning." It was thus that this Church-run experiment was able to able to avoid the undesirable effects of "purely charitable" assistance (Wilcocks 1932: 108).
As difficult as it was to deal with poor Whites whose lust for trekking was overdeveloped, they were no match for the persons in whom it was underdeveloped. By this was meant those poor farming families who passed down a single plot of land from generation to generation. Each generation had less and less acreage to farm. Sometimes the plots were passed from family to family in a patchwork fashion, with one farmer having parcels scattered inconveniently on different parts of the original. As the third chapter of Volume II, "The Attachment to Farm Life" explained, the "deplorable results" of excessive subdivision of plots came about from the parents' desire to "treat all their children fairly" by giving each one "a plot of ground from which he cannot be driven away" and where his children could "live more cheaply than in town" (Wilcocks 1932: 16). An admirable sentiment perhaps, the Report averred, but disastrous from a financial standpoint. The Commissioners believed it was their job to help poor farmers to recognize the error of their ways. Farmers needed to be convinced to abandon their belief that education was a waste of time and be encouraged to leave their farms when necessary. The Commissioners would help the farmers overcome their "lack of self-reliance amounting to timidity which helps to prevent their going further afield" (Wilcocks 1932: 21).
The Commissioners recognized that inefficient farming techniques were a huge problem and contributed greatly to impoverishment. However, they didn't have many skills in that department. No one went to a clergyman or social worker to learn how to work the land. They could still be of help, however, because, as they saw it, even though the methods followed in farming were "not directly a psychological question," they did reflect "a particular mental outlook" (Wilcocks 1932: 24). The clergy/social workers would assess, for example, to what extent inefficiency was the result of using African rather than European labor on the farms. They would also be there to help the poor farmers to overcome the "passivity verging on fatalism" which the Commissioners found poor Whites possessed to an abundant degree (Wilcocks 1932: 30). This was a particularly important trait to eliminate, since so many farms were mortgaged to the hilt. A passive and defeatist attitude might lead to widespread defaults:
If his farm is heavily mortgaged, he may become disinclined to apply his energies fully to his farming "because my work only benefits the mortgage holder." Similarly, cases occur of farmers who have obtained land from the State . . . who show little inclination to work hard, ascribing their disinclination to the impossibility (which they allege to exist) of making the payments and so retaining their land (Wilcocks 1932: 48).
The Commissioners thus positioned themselves as important aids to the business community on which they were simultaneously asking the state to levy higher taxes so it could pay them for their expertise. By working on and with the poor Whites to stamp out any inclinations they might have to stop paying their debts, trained clergy would in essence become important adjuncts of the state serving both business interests and South African society in general.
Conclusion
Land, it turns out, is never just about land. It is also about race, class, and history. The Carnegie Commission, in seeking to reaffirm the "right" of poor Whites to stay on the land, no matter what it might "cost"---in taxpayer dollars, in violence, in time, or in effort---demonstrates the Commissioners' own commitment to framing White poverty in terms that suggested that they alone possessed the wherewithal to define the problem and deliver its solution. When they declared that the rural poor were often "credulous and easily imposed on, especially by those enjoying the prestige of being better educated or hailing from a town or city," they imagined that they were pointing a finger at the saloon keeper, the merchant who charged usurious interest, or the pimp leading a farm girl astray (Wilcocks 1932: 71). A closer look at their report, however, suggests that they might, just as easily, have been talking about themselves.
1 South Africa was colonized by both the Dutch and the English. The Dutch arrived via the auspices of the Dutch East India Company in 1652. The descendants of the Dutch are known today as "Afrikaners" and speak a creolized form of Dutch called "Afrikaans" which includes indigenous, English, Dutch, and Malay words.
2 According to Volume 2, The Psychological Report, the majority of Poor Whites were Afrikaners, with a small sprinkling of Englishmen. Of the 800 families they interviewed, 200 had some English ancestry, which they concluded was a consequence of British men moving into Afrikaans-speaking territories and marrying Afrikaans-speaking women.
Works Cited
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