Lisa has her monthly period, which means she can’t work. Her cellphone screen flashes incessantly with the names of her regulars, but she only answers her boyfriend’s calls. Her boyfriend, Pieter, knows her line of work, but condones it because he is unemployed. In the growing poor white community, sex is a key source of income.
Seventy-five years after the armblank (poor white) crisis of the 1930s, the phenomenon is resurfacing. White unemployment has nearly doubled since 1995, according to the Institute for Security Studies.
Today 430 000 whites, of a total white population of 4,5-million, are ”too poor to live in traditional white areas” and 90 000 ”are in a survival struggle”, says Lawrence Schlemmer, director of the Helen Suzman Foundation. Of these, 305 000 are Afrikaans-speaking and 215 000 speak English.
Since 1998 these figures have increased year-on-year by 15%. According to a survey by the South African Institute of Race Relations, white unemployment increased by 74,4%, using the expanded definition, between 1998 and 2002, compared with the national average over the same period of 39,8%. However, the growth of white unemployment is off a much lower population base than black unemployment.
A key goal of the National Party in the heyday of apartheid was to uplift poor whites by using the state and semi-state sectors to provide them with jobs and housing, reserving certain jobs for whites, favouring their trade unions and shoring up the farming sector.
But for the first time in the mid-1970s, there were more white-collar than blue-collar Afrikaners, and the policies of the NP shifted accordingly. Poor whites were increasingly abandoned by the state.
The 1994 election and the advent of majority rule has accelerated the downward precipitation of whites without capital or marketable skills. In desperation, they are clinging to what they know: religion, xenophobia and racism. Many still believe their skin colour puts them above menial labour, and prostitution has become a common way of earning a living.
”I do everything except Greek style and blacks,” says Lisa, who lives in suburban Vanderbijlpark, a microcosm of white economic distress. ”I work nine till five because in the evenings I like to spend quality time with my kids.” She only takes bookings from businessmen and earns up to R15 000 a month.
Her office — a cerise room with a double bed, a crimson lounge suite, and a table carrying with a bottle of Johnson’s baby oil, government condoms and Courtleigh cigarettes — is in her backyard next to her swimming pool. Her children are aware of her business. They say they accept it because it gives them a house of their own and a higher standard of living.
Another Vanderbijlpark prostitute, Nikkie, has size 44E breasts with a red rose tattooed next to her right nipple, making her black string top look like an overstuffed couch. Her husband is unemployed, and she has two small children.
Often Nikkie goes away for weekends with groups of farmers on hunting trips to Kuruman in the Northern Cape. On these occasions she earns R4 500 in addition to her average R2 000 weekly earnings.
”I only do men over 30 because I shake the shit out of anyone younger,” she jokes. ”My husband doesn’t mind — it actually excites him. Often we have a passionate session after a full night’s work. My only three rules are whites only, no anal sex and cleanliness — you can’t do a client smelling like a three-day-old snoek.”
Lisa and Nikkie both insist survival has forced them into the ”game”.
Poor whites typically compensate for their low socio-economic status with aggressive racism. In an era when many black people are upwardly mobile, it serves to bolster their self-pride.
Estelle Claasens lives in a former Iscor home, now owned by the church, with six other families — each one crammed into a bedroom. Last month she walked out of her job — washing dishes at the cafÃ