White, Poor and Angry: White Working-Class Families in Johannesburgby Lis Lange

White, Poor and Angry: White Working-Class Families in Johannesburg by Lis LangeReview by: Robert MorrellAfrican Studies Review, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Sep., 2004), pp. 154-156Published by: African Studies AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1514901 .

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154 African Studies Review

ing and interpreting the lives and voices of the people in Domaayo, but readers without a similar background may be unable to evaluate Regis's work because choices are not made explicit.

As Claude L6vi-Strauss commented in his fax to Bocquen6, "This is life, this is the reality." These two books do indeed bring life and reality to the study of Fulbe cultures and societies. Through their focus on the narratives and

strategies of multiple men and women (in Fulbe Voices) or of one person in different contexts and in different roles through time (in Memoirs), they highlight the contradictions and conflicts in norms and practices of plu- ralistic Fulbe communities. Rich in ethnographic detail, they offer great insight into how people live within the structures described in the existing theoretical works on Fulbe culture and social structure.

Mark Moritz University of California at Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz, California

Lis Lange. White, Poor and Angry: White Working-Class Families in Johannes- burg. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003. viii + 186 pp. Bibliography. Index. $79.95. Cloth.

Poverty and race are concerns that have dominated southern African his-

toriography for a long time. Of course, the emphasis has changed over time and the significance of the categories has altered. In this book, Lis

Lange yokes the two and adds family and housing to produce an analysis of the white poor ofJohannesburg from 1890 to 1922. The book looks at the

family less as a unit of consumption or social category of organization than as the site of community construction. In so doing, the author consciously focuses not on the sphere of production where inequality and oppression in the countryside and in the mines developed, but on the sphere of repro- duction. This starting point allows Lange to tackle some issues that have hitherto been neglected. Using church records, she shows how English and Afrikaner poor merged, married, and lived together as neighbors. She sketches a situation in which ethnic (and even racial) divisions were not

particularly salient and were eroded by harsh living conditions and particularly by the availability, or unavailabilty, of affordable housing.

Some of Lange's material and the approach she adopts will remind readers of an earlier era when social history was hegemonic in South African historiography. This is not altogether surprising, as her mentor in this project was Charles van Onselen, author of the pathbreaking two-vol- ume Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand (1982). The structure of the book harks back to an earlier period when class was the preferred unit of historical analysis and a concern with the material base ensured that employment, wages, working and living conditions, and other



Book Reviews 155

socioeconomic indicators were carefully explored. And yet the book also offers consideration of local and national politics. The relationships between members of local government, randlords, and various national commissions (after Union) are analyzed with a level of detail that some- times obscures her arguments. But what she makes clear is that government was not the servant of capital, even if it was more likely to err on the side of the mine owners than on the side of its poor Johannesburg con- stituents.

The major concern of the book is to show how the housing crisis was never resolved, and that it was a major, if not the major, cause of poor white

militancy. From the beginnings of Johannesburg, monopolistic property ownership patterns prevented any easy solution. Under Reconstruction, metropolitan ideas of working-class housing were introduced, but to little effect. Subsequently, racial policies transformed a housing problem into a

problem of morality: The white poor were considered to be of questionable character because of the relationships they enjoyed with "black" (i.e., African, Indian, Chinese) neighbors. Lange thus succeeds in moving the

housing crisis to center stage as an explanation for the unresolved nature of the poor white problem in Johannesburg.

In other respects, however, the book disappoints. Perhaps the biggest disappointment-and surprise-is the absence of any consideration of

anger. When I received the book to review, I was looking forward to the examination of an emotion that normally is the analytical preserve of psy- chologists. The bold title of the book led me to expect that it was "anger" more than anything else that would distinguish this book from its prede- cessors. By my reading, the first mention of "anger" occurs on page 165. Once it has been mentioned it rapidly becomes the focus, but by now we have entered the short, seven-page conclusion, and the use of the term has an abject and belated feel about it. Were the white poor angry? If the strikes of 1913 and 1914 and the rebellion of 1922 are considered to have been

expressions of anger, then I suppose we may assume that they were, but the book offers little evidence. Rather, anger seems to be a synonym for "militant." And why were the white poor militant? By implication-because it is not anywhere specifically so stated-they were militant because they had been badly housed and politically neglected. Another explanation, unfor-

tunately, also left until the last few pages, is that they were militant because of the ravages of silicosis and the failure of the mines to do much about this deadly lung disease. Convincing explanations for militancy have been offered recently in other contexts. Sandra Swart argues, for example, that the roots of the 1914 rebellion could be found in the undermining of those elements of life that supported ideas of Afrikaner masculinity in the north- ern Free State and the western Transvaal ("'A Boer and His Gun and His Wife Are Three Things Always Together': Republican Masculinity and the 1914 Rebellion," Journal of Southern African Studies 24 [1998]). It would have been good to find references to passion and outrage in Lange's book.



156 African Studies Review

Another disappointment is the absence of narrative. The book starts off promisingly with the discussion of an Afrikaans-speaking and an Eng- lish-speaking family becoming connected through the institution of nomi-

nating godparents. I longed to hear the outcome-what happened to the families? Did they stay together or at least kept in touch? In fact, the short

story of the Kirbys and the van Niekerks is only a vehicle that serves to sig- nal a theme in the book, the breakdown of ethnic boundaries. But even here, the book fails to take this line of analysis far enough. It was not clear whether Johannesburg's white poor in the early twentieth century were

tragic pioneers of an ethnically (though not unambiguously racially) mixed working class or a social class out of step with the major social forces

sweeping South Africa toward racial capitalism. Another disappointment for me was the failure to explore family dynamics. There is now a vast lit- erature on the family: how it operates, how goods are distributed, who wields power, what accommodations are made. And of course, gender is central to much of this writing. In Lange's book, the way in which families held together and the roles that men, women, and children played receives little attention. There is some interesting detail on how the white poor made a living on the margins (illegal alcohol sales, prostitution), but even here very little is said about the gendered dimensions of these activities.

The book contains a great many typographical and spelling mistakes, including (on page 31) an instance where a number of identical sentences follow one another. The bibliography is also uneven, with a number of mistakes concerning publication dates and the spelling of authors' names.

Robert Morrell University of KwaZulu-Natal

Durban, South Africa



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White, Poor and Angry: White Working-Class Families in Johannesburgby Lis Lange