Abstract:
This thesis seeks to expand existing scholarship by examining the Carnegie
Commission of Investigation on the Poor White Question’s conception of poverty that
pathologized poor whites, in particular the bywoners, Boer tenants and sharecroppers on
large Afrikaner-owned farms in areas such as Middleburg in the Transvaal or the Karoo
in the Cape Province. The Carnegie Commission was the first study of the “poor white
problem” in South Africa to link concepts of environment, disease, and poverty in one
causal explanation of poor white “maladaptation” to modernity. Poor white disease, as
described in the Carnegie Commission Report, was induced by the “unhealthy”
ecological and socio-economic environment in which poor whites lived. The Carnegie
Commission took into account the bodies of knowledge about poor whites generated in
previous studies, as well as the political, economic, and ideological debates they evoked,
including: environmental theories of disease and racial degradation; the role of South Africa’s "frontier" past in shaping the country’s twentieth-century future; the fate of tens
of thousands of unemployed whites in an industrial economy saturated with “native”
laborers; the rise of Afrikaner nationalism; and tensions between state and church over
who was to assume responsibility for the poor, elderly, and infirm. Sources from the
South African National Archives Repositories in Pretoria and Cape Town demonstrate
how the Carnegie researchers considered these debates in the process of devising their
methodologies and conducting their field research. The Carnegie Commission’s studies
of malnutrition and of mothers and daughters reveal how the researchers interpreted their
data so as to pathologize Afrikaners who were living in poverty.
