The Whites of the Child?: Race and Class in the Politics of Child Welfare in Cape Town, c. 1900–1924

Abstract

In the first decades of the twentieth century, South Africa started to devise its own formalized child welfare system as part of a transnational (especially British) network of ideas. The state became an increasingly powerful agent in effecting change, and private charities (previously predicated on elite philanthropic volunteerism) buckled to its authority. Poor white children became understood as a category to be rescued, while the poverty of black children became normalized. The essay explores the ironies of embryonic child welfare and also how contemporary role players thought about these contradictions. State involvement did bring about relief for some sectors, but this came at the cost of reinforced racial hierarchies.