The cost of living in South Africa is increasing and it is hurting consumers’ pockets everywhere. Photo: Getty Images
South Africans, it seems, have a high threshold for pain. It has been a hard couple of years and still, somehow, many seem to be holding out hope that our collective fortunes will change.
High food prices threaten to change this.
In many parts of the country, food is a matter of survival. The emotional weight it carries makes it a powerful symbol of a shared despair — an emptiness that can easily be turned into anger, protest.
The years that led up to the French Revolution were characterised by increasingly frequent strikes and boycotts, which sowed the seed for deep solidarity. At the heart of the unrest was the mounting cost of living. As grain harvests declined the average 18th-century worker spent half his daily wage on bread.
“Everybody believed that the price of bread should be controlled and held at a level which ordinary people could afford,” British historian William Doyle wrote of the French Revolution. “When it rose above that level, they felt morally entitled to take action to hold it down.”
The price of bread helped spark another history-altering revolution nearly 130 years later. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky wrote that by the end of 1916, prices were rising leaps and bounds.
On 16 February, the Russian authorities introduced bread cards in Petrograd. “This novelty rasped nerves,” according to Trotsky.
“On the 19th, a mass of people gathered around the food shops, especially women, all demanding bread. A day later bakeries were sacked in several parts of the city. These were the heat lightnings of the revolution, coming in a few days.”
“Peace, land and bread” became the slogan of the Bolsheviks.
In South Africa, the retail price of white bread rose significantly between January and December 2022, from R15.47 to R18.62, according to the Competition Commission’s latest essential food pricing monitoring report. Today a loaf of white bread could set you back as much as R22.
As we tend to do, consumers have adjusted their behaviour — opting for brown bread over white, unsliced over slices, searching far and wide for the best deals. The pinch, we hope, will only be temporary. We’ll get back to normal — enjoying butter on our toast and lots more milk in our coffee — when the economy comes right again.
This may well be temporary. But the question is, how much pain can we endure and for how long? That time is undoubtedly different for those who are used to buying their bread at Woolworths and for those for whom a few slices of bread is it for the day. With the economic crisis threatening to add numbers to the latter group, we should be wary.
But most of all, we should use this moment to nurture the solidarity that for many of us has gone unwatered for years.
This week, Yola Minnaar, who feeds people in her neighbourhood from her home in Vrededorp, Johannesburg, said she believes she is being tested. “Only Allah knows best,” she said.
These conditions may well be a test — not of our resilience, but of our willingness to look pain in its face, even if it is not our own, and say, “No more.”