South Africa’s all-black poverty line

Press, 3 May 1984, Page 21

South Africa’s all-black poverty line

From

ALLISTER SPARKS

in Cape Town

® While South Africa’s whites enjoy one of the highest living standards in the world, one-third of all its black children under the age of 14 are stunted in their growth because they do not get enough to eat.

9 While its health system for whites has pioneered heart transplant surgery, its system for blacks has a ratio of one doctor to every 174,000 people in some areas and an infant mortality rate 31 times higher than the white rate. ® While South Africa’s “white” industrial cities are fed energy from a nuclear power station and three sophisticated oil-from-coal plants, the only fuel source for most blacks is firewood, which the inhabitants of just one of its tribal “homelands” have to spend 150million man-hours a year collecting.

Shocking evidence like this of apartheid’s inequality, of Third World conditions in one of the first world’s richest countries, is emerging at a Cape Town University conference that marks the half-way stage of one of the biggest studies

of poverty ever undertaken in any country.

It began two years ago and had involved more than 400 researchers from 20 South African universities. They are presenting 300 study papers. A team of collators will spend another 15 months sifting through the mass of material and drawing up a set of proposals for combating South Africa’s worsening black poverty amidst its increasing white affluence. The study is being financed by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and its findings are bound to displease the Government. But the Afrikaner administration will find it hard to discredit them because the corporation holds an honoured place in its own early history. Carnegie financed a study of poor whiteism during the great depression of the 19305, which was a key factor in galvanising Afrikaner nationalism.

This study has been shrewdly titled "The Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty in Southern Africa,” and it is being directed by a bright young Cape Town economist, Professor Francis Wilson.

“We have gathered the most amazing stuff,” says Professor Wilson. “Essentially, what we have found is that two things have been happening in South Africa over the last decade. Some real wages have risen, and that means even some migrant workers are better off than they were before. “But there is a substantial group which has been cut off from access to the economy, and for this group life is getting very much tougher.” Instead of the straightforward, old apartheid divide between white haves and black have-nots, the division is now between urban “insiders” and rural “outsiders.”

An emergent middle-class of Africans, Coloureds, and Asians is joining the whites as insiders. The outsiders, who are the mass of unskilled blacks, are being shut out of the cities and thus out of the economy, by tightened influx control laws and herded in increasing

numbers into the tribal “homelands.”

Politically, these “homelands” are supposed to be where the Africans can fulfil themselves and exercise their political rights. In reality, they have become dumping grounds for the economically redundant.

One study paper reveals that 70 per cent of the population of rural Transkei, the showpiece “homeland,” live below a household subsistence level calculated to be a monthly income of $246.35 for a family of six. That means, the study says, “that they do not meet the minimum income requirements for survival in the short term.” There is little work in the “homelands,” except for an expanding government bureaucracy which is their only growth industry. Most families live on money remitted by a father or older brother who goes away to a city as a migrant

worker on a one-year contract. These remittances account for 66 per cent of total employment earnings in the Transkei. The migrant system devastates family life. Most “homeland” families are broken up for long periods. Studies of several villages show that a third of the menfolk are away at any given time. At least it means that the families can eat.

One of the most ominous findings is that these migrant jobs are now drying up. As South Africa’s industrial economy becomes more sophisticated and capital-intensive, it needs a more skilled and stable labour force and fewer of the cheap, unskilled migrant workers. This is what is making things better for the “insider” in the cities. In the “homelands,” however, it means that unemployment is now soaring above 25 per cent. At the same time the swelling numbers there have destroyed the base of traditional African subsistence farming and are rapidly destroying the ecology as well. Nutritional diseases are becoming endemic. A team of doctors, who examined several hundred

schoolchildren in the Gazankulu “homeland,” found that four out of every ten had had no food before coming to school, and nearly half needed treatment for tuberculosis.

Another researcher who spent a year in a village in the Venda “homeland” reports that 30 babies were bom while he was there, and 10 of them died.

There are reports of old women getting up at two in the morning and walking miles to fetch the day’s supply of water for their families. A study of 19 villages in the Ciskei “homeland,” with a combined population of 25,000, revealed that 90 per cent of the people have to carry their water from distant dams and rivers that they share with livestock. The key thing, as Professor Wilson points out, is that South Africa’s poverty is rectifiable. It is the poverty of inequality, not of insufficiency. “This is no Tanzania,” he says. “We have just completed a century of industrialisation. We export food while people starve here. We have the means to put it right.” Copyright — London Observer Service.