Starving on a Full Stomach Reconsiderations in Southern African History
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Starving on a Full Stomach reconsiderations in southern african history Richard Elphick and Jeffrey Butler, editors Starving on a Full Stomach Hunger and the Triumph of Cultural Racism in Modern South Africa Diana Wylie University Press of Virginia Charlottesville and London The University Press of Virginia © 2001 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First published in 2001 ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wylie, Diana [date] Starving on a full stomach : hunger and the triumph of cultural racism in modern South Africa / Diana Wylie. p. cm. — (Reconsiderations in southern African history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8139-2047-7 — ISBN 0-8139-2068-X (pbk.) 1. Malnutrition—South Africa—History—20th century. 2. Famines—South Africa— History—20th century. 3. Nutrition policy—South Africa—History—20th century. 4. South Africa—Race relations—History—20th century. 5. Racism—South Africa— History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series. RA645.N87 W95 2001 363.8'0968—dc21 00-012981 Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. In memory of RER (1920–1999) and THM (1948–1985) and In celebration of Xenia and Duncan Contents List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Introduction: Hunger and Ideologies of Exclusion 1 Part One Cultural Racism’s Fertile Ground one European Cultural Pride: An Evaluation 21 two Before the Land Was Lost: African Food Culture in the Nineteenth Century 39 Part Two The Benevolent Father: An Embattled Rationale for White Supremacy three The Politics of Famine: State Paternalism in Rural South Africa, 1910–1948 59 four Scientific Paternalism: Hunger and the Measurement of Urban Poverty, 1910–1948 91 viii Contents Part Three People without Science: A Modern Rationale for White Supremacy five The Threat of “Race Deterioration”: Nutritional Research in Industrial Context 127 six Missionaries of Science: The Growth of the Malnutrition Syndrome, 1920–1960 163 Part Four The Triumph of Scientism and Cultural Essentialism seven Denial and Coercion: The State Response to the Malnutrition Syndrome, 1940s to 1960s 203 Epilogue: The Heritage of Disrespect 237 Notes 245 Bibliography 281 Index 299 Illustrations Map 1. South Africa xvi Figures 1. Pinelands Cooperative Butchery, 1953 22 2. Zulu women, circa 1930 40 3. M. Ballinger opening Cape Town crèche, circa 1949 60 4. Shop in Langa, 1941 92 5. Nutrine advertisement, 1938 111 6. Gold miners at dinner, 1955 128 7. Ovaltine advertisement, 1938 151 8. Hospital nurses and diviner, 1930s 164 9. Holy Cross Hospital inpatient admissions for malnutrition, 1957, 1958, and 1960 183 10. Exhortation to eat vegetables, 1946 204 11. Things Fall Apart, Thami Mnyele, 1977 238 ix Preface I started to work on this book before Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and I completed it nine years afterward. The book bears the mark of that great transition in South African history: because the project began when the apartheid state had lost a good deal of legitimacy, but not power, I wanted in the 1980s to expose its damages; after 1990, it became easier to ask how apartheid had managed to survive for so long. The history of racism could be more readily examined, instead of dismissed as loathsome. The genesis of the book lies in stories that had been piling up in my mem- ory from the beginning of my seven years in Africa. They remained simply memories until 1986. Then I began to research the history of food in South Africa because I believed the subject would allow me to understand better the human consequences of an industrial revolution that took place in a colonial setting. Since I was completing a detailed case study of one chiefdom, I now wanted a large canvas; I admired one painted richly by Jack Goody when he depicted cooking, cuisine, and class throughout the world as well as another, equally rich, by Sidney Mintz when he took on sugar in his epic, Sweetness and Power. Once I made my decision for these abstract reasons, the stories flooded back to consciousness, infusing me with energy and curiosity. The germ of the project was probably planted in my imagination as I sat in Heathrow airport in 1979 waiting for the flight that would take me to south- ern Africa for the first time. Perhaps to display her benevolence, an elderly Anglo–South African lady began to address me on the subject of the food black South Africans eat. “We are trying to teach them to eat brown bread,” she said, “but they insist on white.” During the months and years that fol- lowed, I heard this tone of weary paternalism again and again. Usually it was repudiated by younger white South Africans who remembered with distaste the signs on butcher shops that in their youth had jointly advertised Dogs’ Meat, Boys’ Meat. They also remembered the jokes their parents had told about African diet and manners. (How much sugar did Hastings Banda ask P.W. Botha to put in his tea? Two spoons in a cup, five spoons when he drank from a jam tin.) Nearly any discussion among whites about African food seemed burdened with either guilt or condescension. The subject was bring- ing home to me in an appropriately visceral way what it meant to be dominant or subordinate in a rigidly hierarchical society. xi xii Preface Since my destination in 1979 was actually Botswana rather than white South Africa, I was soon challenged by African assumptions about my own diet and manners. Staying with a Tswana family in a small village in the Kwe- neng, I was admonished by my hostess when I assumed that the porridge I couldn’t eat would be thrown away; food was not to be wasted, and it was to be respected. I had been guilty of bad manners. One evening her daughter cau- tioned me that I would not want to eat their supper because it was, she stressed, “an OLD cock.”When she lifted the lid off the three-legged iron pot, I discovered that age mattered less to me than the sight of the entirety of the old bird simmering—head, beak, eyes, feet. Avoiding waste was easy, but pay- ing respect involved forcing myself to jump over great divides of custom and habit. Sometimes those leaps required faith that I would not fall ill. Once, at a Tswana cattle post near the Limpopo River, I was offered milk still warm from the cow. Struggling to convey my rudimentary medical knowledge in English and Setswana, I tried to explain to my hosts my fears of the micro- organisms in unpasteurized milk. Perhaps they were immune, I said, but coming from another country, I wasn’t sure I was. “So, you say you are dif- ferent from us,”their son summed up, articulating exactly the impression I had not wanted to give. Later, in Pondoland, when I was explicitly researching diet and nutrition, I found myself instead having to insist that I did indeed want to eat Pondo food rather than sit at the table with my host and dine on West- ern dishes prepared especially for me. Most encounters over food seemed freighted with either heavy or amusing social significance. These stories lay imbedded in my memory until uprooted by my decision to write a history of the past century in South Africa focusing on food as an index of the changing quality of life. That century unavoidably tells the story of the evolution of African poverty. While many new European and American books about food bear titles like “tastes of paradise,” my choice of place and population ensured that paradise would hardly ever appear and that even taste would be subordinate to survival. The subject matter allowed me to gain insights into colonialism and racism that were far more intimate than research on wages or political parties usually affords. I was struck, for example, by mis- sionaries’ boldness in presuming to tell African mothers when to nurse their infants, and by industrialists’ discussions of how to increase worker efficiency by improving rations, as if raising wages would not do the trick. Whenever I typed words related to “food” into computers at the South African govern- ment’s archival depots, files concerning malnutrition and shortage would appear on the screen. Reading them, I learned how the justifications for white supremacy were changing in South Africa during its first industrial century. Quite unexpectedly, I was discovering that apartheid had nutritional roots as well as consequences. Preface xiii The subject of food is virtually limitless, and so the writing of this book has demanded major exclusions. I have not written a history of manners or of food symbolism. (The meaning of neither the raw nor the cooked is discussed here.) Nineteenth-century Africans would be put out to discover that beer, considered to be liquid food, is for the most part omitted, largely because the topic is too big. Further, given the constraints of time and space, I had to decide whether to stress the social history of food, on the one hand, or the politics of hunger, on the other, and decided on the latter largely because the bulk of my data happened to tip the scale in that direction. Since Starving on a Full Stomach is a foray into a rather fresh field, it leaves a great deal of unex- plored ground for future researchers.