Strangled+by+poverty+and+rejection,+Janet+Smith,+The+Star



=Strangled by poverty and rejection=

**Janet Smith, The Star, 25 October 2007**
There's a place of worship on the outskirts of the city which was once a weapon for poor whites in the psychological war of the Afrikaners versus the English.

Gerhard Moerdijk designed the Cottesloe temple not for Buddhists, as it has been used, but as an NG Kerk, to be a direct visual assault on the grandly aloof Sir Herbert Baker homes gazing out on the opposite hill. Between them lay a seething class abyss.

Poor Afrikaner whites earning less than 20 pounds per month had been shifted there from slums around the time of World War 2, their little houses crammed together in short streets named from a seed catalogue, their tiny gardens hunched below the ridge where wealthier, mostly English-speaking whites took tea and directed servants from their airy verandahs overlooking the forests of Joburg.

Irma du Plessis of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research gave insight into this prime spot for a soap opera in an important paper, Making and Imagining Lives After Apartheid, published in 2003. And even within her academic treatise it was irresistible to note that television's major starmaker of the 1980s, Agter Elke Man, was filmed in this authentic location - specifically, the tiny working-class suburb of Jan Hofmeyr, wryly known as Jan Blom.

The TV series introduced South African superstar Steve Hofmeyr as poor white biker boy Bruce Beyers. It was a performance that left a shudder in the soul, as did the series with its focus on the violent, painful integration of white disappointment and apartheid supremacy in a place set out of sight, designed to be out of mind for the middle-class and the moneyed.

The streets of Jan Hofmeyr sound fragrant - Aandblom (Evening flower), Katjiepiering (Gardenia), Sonneblom (Sunflower) - but that's the contradiction.

Still, there is no doubt that the place has its advantages. Unlike Soweto and Alexandra, Westbury and Eldorado Park, where blacks and coloureds were put out of sight, the poor white developments on the outskirts of the city were close to bus routes and close to town. But just far enough away from the rich and influential so as not to be an embarrassment.

There are still many white people living in Joburg who do not know that Jan Hofmeyr exists, just like they have never been to what was Triomf, and just like those in sedans waxed to a high gloss prefer to ignore Danville, the capital city's hideaway for poor whites.

In truth, the issue of poor whites and their degradation by class has long been largely ignored by politicians, and left open to interpretation rather by writers, filmmakers and photographers.

Agter Elke Man - which has, perhaps surprisingly, kept its edge in reruns - told troubled stories about the humiliating consequences of living in dislocation in incestuous white communities. And now the film Triomf, which is being shot in Jan Hofmeyr, is to expose even more disturbing truths about the black sheep of South Africa's white minority.

Based on Marlene van Niekerk's multi-award-winning novel of the same name, it shocks as it tells the story of a family of four intimates - Mol, Pop, Treppie and Lambert. It's a miasma of alcohol, filth, fights, sex, masochism, racism and dread as we are drawn to a devastating conclusion that seems inevitable.

Vanessa Cooke, Paul Luckhoff, Eduan van Jaarsveldt and Lionel Newton are the stars, while Zimbabwean filmmaker Michael Raeburn directs.

While the film, in Afrikaans with English subtitles, is already creating great excitement, a recent exposition of white poverty in photography also caused a stir.

Nadine Hutton, previously the chief photographer of the Mail & Guardian, scratched hard along the lines of injurious neglect in her exhibition, Ek Het Geval.

The portfolio is as empathic as it is because Hutton herself grew up white and poor. She revealed something of herself, but the shots of men in filth in underground drains, living alongside highways and in ragged tents and settlements remain difficult to look at, and harder to accept.

York-born Roger Ballen, who has lived in Joburg, caused an outcry more than a decade ago when he attracted grotesque curiosity around the world with his alarming portraits of the white rural poor in his 1994 book, Platteland.

Photographs like Dresie and Casie, Western Transvaal - an infamous image of twin men who, it must be assumed, were born out of incest as they are so physically deformed - drew much-repeated comparisons with the work of American photographer Diane Arbus who had also journeyed into white poverty in the '60s and '70s.

Ballen's intention using his art was to show that not all white South Africans had the means to access the political advantage. "Many of those people the photographer encounters," explains his website, "feel strangled by poverty and preconception, rejected and downgraded. Above all else, most are severely alienated by the radical changes taking place in the society around them … Ballen penetrates a world that had previously been shrouded under the mantle of white supremacy."

In one image, the wife of an abattoir worker is pictured gently holding three puppies. This juxtaposition of warm innocence with the rawness of a woman who has lead a harsh life is even stronger in Marlene van Niekerk's Triomf.

Her main character, Mol - played by Vanessa Cooke in the film - also has a close relationship with her dogs. Like the woman in Ballen's picture, they appear to give her a bit of happiness in a meaningless, frightened life.

White poverty has received far less attention than black or coloured poverty in theatre productions, but Athol Fugard's work, particularly the legendary People are Living There, gave insight into the emotional devastation which some experience. Cooke has played Sissie in a staging of the Fugard classic, and she reflects on the difficulty of developing the emotional capacity to deal with such sorrow in a character.

Emotional emptiness is also elucidated in another Fugard play, Hello and Goodbye, in which a character's impulse to keep everything, however insignificant, is based this on his own childhood when "all the rubbish that (my mother) hadn't been able to throw away … ended up in cardboard boxes and suitcases and bags and biscuit tins under beds and on top of already jam packed wardrobes and chests of drawers".

In literature, Van Niekerk is probably rivalled only by Jeanne Goosen, whose book Ons is nie Almal earned the highest praise for its authenticity and honesty on the subject of poor whites.

The complex character Doris van Greunen unravels her disappointment with her life in her escapes, like the bioscope, but it's not a romantic tale with a satisfying ending. It arouses actual fear, to the extent that book critic Joan Hambidge wrote in Beeld that it would be advisable to have a drink when you read it.

Try as they might to awaken the odd moment of dark beauty out of their characters, writers Goosen and Van Niekerk's magnificence lies in uncovering the decaying textures of white loss. In a country which is fixating on the pleasures of new money and different kinds of lives to those lives in the past, the terrors of white poverty are sometimes simply too much.


 * From: http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4096096**

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