South African poverty is black and white

South Africa, once Africa's last bastion of white rule, has something you don't often see elsewhere on the continent: poor whites.

A few years ago it was unimaginable to see whites begging at traffic lights or working as parking attendants. Now it is a common sight.

Pottering around in her scantily furnished house with peeling wall paint, Elsie Smit holds back tears as she talks of her family's battle to survive.

"We struggle a lot. My husband is unemployed. The only one who works in this house is my son. His money goes to paying for the house and for water and lights. So there isn't much that is left of his salary to feed us the whole month," she says.

Several white families in the Vanderbijlpark industrial area, south of Johannesburg, are in a similar position and depend on food parcels.

Guaranteed a quality education and good jobs by the apartheid regime, some whites particularly the Afrikaners who put apartheid in place have seen a reversal of fortunes under democracy. Estimates differ on the extent of the problem and opinion varies on the root causes of white poverty, but all agree that it is growing as unemployment remains a serious concern among all racial groups.

According to a United Nations Development Programme report last year, 6.9 per cent of the country's white population lived on less than 354 rand ($58.57, Dh214.95) per month the national poverty line in 2002 up from 1.5 per cent in 1995.

Statistics South Africa estimates there are about 4.2 million whites in the country and most them still live in the top economic brackets, many with the same pools, maids and imported cars they enjoyed under apartheid.

But white poverty is not a new phenomenon to South Africa, which saw substantial white immigration rather than the scattering of ranchers, adventurers and colonial administrators that formed the white communities in most other African states.

Historians highlight the "poor white" problem, particularly among Afrikaners before the outbreak of the Second World War, as one factor leading to the apartheid system which essentially became a whites-only welfare state.

That system ended in 1994 with the country's first all-race elections sweeping away decades of white privilege.

President Thabo Mbeki has agreed to look into the statistics which indicate a sharp rise in white poverty, as well as claims that government policies such as affirmative action are the cause.

"If indeed there are consequences of the government's actions which are resulting in greater impoverishment, clearly that is something we will have to look at," Mbeki said.

Lawrence Schlemer of the Helen Suzman Foundation, a Johannesburg think tank, estimated that in 2003 there were 120,000 whites living on 1,000 rand (Dh621.75) per month, slightly more than two per cent of the white population. A total of about 500,000 lived on less than 3,000 rand (Dh1,865.27) per month, he said.

"The significance of this 3,000 rand is that it's not necessarily poverty. The point is that it is impossible to live in what used to be regarded as a typical white suburb with less than 3,000 rand a month," he said.

Schlemer says as a result, whites are moving into mixed, socio-economically depressed areas.

Some like Santie Nienaber have found shelter in flimsy structures erected behind other people's property and garages.

In the black townships, such structures are referred to as squatter camps, but Nienaber prefers to call the rows of shacks behind Sally Bruwer's house as a "transit camp".

"At the moment three families [live here]. Most [of the residents] are men who struggle to find work," says Nienaber.

Political parties such as the predominantly white Afrikaner Freedom Front Plus blame the government's affirmative action policy and describe it as a new form of discrimination.

Party leader Pieter Mulder says the government's policy to redress past injustices against blacks was unintentionally shutting new generations of white South Africans out of jobs.

"Whites are very bitter, very angry ... because the new South Africa has brought only poverty to them and they are going in the wrong direction all the time," he says.

"Affirmative action is largely to blame for what is happening. There is no way these people can emigrate, they will never emigrate ... 80 per cent of Afrikaners will always be here. They will always be part of Africa."

But some academics do not see affirmative action as the culprit and blame globalisation, which has seen companies becoming more capital intensive and shifting from blue collar to more skilled labour and in the process leaving many less educated whites behind.