Bringing white workers back in

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Race and class have been intertwined throughout much of South Africa’s modern history, and continue to play a central role in shaping contemporary South African politics. Yet, in a country in which one cannot speak about race without speaking about class, historians have effectively ceased to do so when it comes to the white population. While there is vibrant scholarship on white workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they are neglected as historical subjects beyond this period. This chapter argues for the extension of the study of white working-class lives, politics and organisation to the apartheid and postapartheid periods. It draws on emerging new scholarship to demonstrate how revisiting this particular race–class nexus can revise existing understandings and open new perspectives on the processes, structures, societies and experiences which have shaped contemporary South Africa. First, it demonstrates how attention to white workers in the decades following 1948 opens new perspectives on the apartheid state, on its relations with and regulation of white society, and on the limitations of race-based ideology, experience and identity during this period. Second, it shows how a focus on white working-class politics and experience in the late-apartheid period facilitates the revision of existing understandings of class formation and reveals alternative chronologies of change in South Africa embedded in broader global processes. Finally, it contends that a focus on white working-class lives in the post-apartheid present reveals the emergence of new social strategies, political tactics and subjectivities with transnational resonance.