Ranks of Poor Swelling : White Children Join S. Africa’s Bread Lines

For the first time since the 1930s, white children are lining up at soup kitchens for free meals in working-class suburbs of South Africa’s big cities.

Resentful and increasingly insecure, the ranks of poor and unemployed whites are swelling as political uncertainty, recession and threats of economic sanctions batter the economy.

The flaxen-haired Afrikaner children in the bread lines are the offspring of parents who are semiskilled or without skills. Such families are vulnerable not only to the recession but to the crumbling of apartheid laws and practices that for decades kept blacks out of whole ranges of jobs reserved for whites. Now unskilled and semiskilled whites must compete with blacks for jobs.

“We have had children who were fainting at school because of lack of nourishment,” the Rev. Leon de Kooker, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, said. “There is awful poverty, real need.

“We’ve always had some whites with financial problems. But it is only now that it is becoming very bad.”

Donated Food, Money

De Kooker started a soup kitchen 15 months ago in Johannesburg’s Jan Hofmeyer suburb. It survives on food donated from store owners, including one Indian, and cash gifts of about $600 a month.

Poverty among whites still has no comparison to that of millions of blacks in segregated urban ghettos and tribal homelands. But white poverty is real, growing and helping to fuel support for the right-wing Afrikaner Resistance Movement.

The movement’s brown-shirted supporters have broken up four recent meetings of President Pieter W. Botha’s governing National Party, accusing him of caving in to the demands of blacks.

Unemployment is traditionally low among the nation’s 4.5 million whites, who control business, hold virtually all the top- and middle-level jobs in the civil service and dominate the government, police and military.

The Department of Manpower said that white unemployment is rising, but still only 2%, a figure regarded by analysts as inaccurate. The official estimate of 8.4% black unemployment is also considered inaccurate by analysts.

Sanlam, a giant Afrikaner-controlled insurance company, said in its latest economic review that at least 18% of urban blacks are jobless. Researchers at the University of Stellenbosch estimate white unemployment now at 6%, with 188,000 urban whites now looking for work, contrasted with 105,000 a year ago.

De Kooker’s soup kitchen is located in a municipal hall in Jan Hofmeyer, a district of bleak public housing for whites. When it began, about 100 schoolchildren came every lunchtime.

There are now 211 children, most from families who are drawing basic welfare of $65.60 a month for adults and $20 for each child. After six months, even this stops unless recipients can prove weekly they are trying to find work.

Johanna Swanepoel, a matronly figure known as Tannie Swanny, organizes the soup kitchen and is its tireless fund-raiser. (Tannie is Afrikaans for Auntie).

During recent strikes by blacks at dairies and retail outlets to protest the detention of union leaders under the state of emergency imposed June 12, Swanepoel packed unemployed whites into her car to do the blacks’ jobs on occasional shifts.

She complained that managers paid the men $8 for a seven-hour shift instead of a promised $12.

“They treated them worse than blacks,” she said. “I wasn’t having that.”

Swanepoel, a supporter of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, blamed the present troubles partly on a government “that has let the blacks get out of hand.”

“The more you give them, the more they burn,” she said.

Asked about black poverty, she replied: “Lots of blacks live better than these people here. Anyway, it’s different for them. They can survive on pap (porridge) . . . but we can’t.”

But among many whites battling to get by, the politics of South Africa seem far removed.

In the Barnard family, nine people spanning three generations living in a sparsely furnished house with three bedrooms, political questions draw little response.

Frederick Barnard, 33, last worked when he had a three-month stint this year painting street lamps and weeding Johannesburg city parks under a state-funded job program.

The government allocated $240 million this year for a nationwide job program, open to all races. The pay is $6 a day.

Barnard’s last factory job ended, he said, when he and 115 other whites were laid off and mixed-race men were hired.

“I felt bad,” he said. “I don’t know why they did it. There’s nothing you can do.”

The Barnards don’t have a black servant. But some other poor whites do, living in shared economic hardship and with the racial divisions still firmly intact.

Magdelena Lombard’s 54-year-old husband, a former miner, and their son, a house painter with a 10th-grade education, are out of work and have been rejected by the Welfare Department for benefits. The family income is a monthly $72 disability pension that Lombard receives as a chronic emphysema sufferer.

Out back in the tiny yard, living in a storage shed, is a black domestic servant and her two children.

“I need the native girl,” Lombard said. “I don’t pay her anything, but I would if I could. She’s prepared to work just for the room. She gets porridge and other food from her church. If I haven’t got anything, she shares it with me.”