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

Abstract

Lis Lange. White, Poor and Angry: White Working-Class Families in Johannesburg. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003. viii + 186 pp. Bibliography. Index. $79.95. Cloth. Poverty and race are concerns that have dominated southern African historiography 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 of Johannesburg 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 reproduction. 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-volume 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 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 sometimes 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 constituents. 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 psychologists. 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 predecessors. …