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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 June 2011
In 1983, a year which some might view as the high watermark of apartheid, a strange thing happened in Roodepoort, a town in the West Rand mining area, near Johannesburg. A Mrs van Rensburg, visiting a local, all-white school, realised that some of the children were starving. She gave them food. When she returned the next day, the childrens’ parents were sitting on the pavement in front of the school, waiting for a meal. Van Rensburg's husband, Leon, took on the task of feeding the parents and children on a regular basis. He was a man of extreme right wing sympathies and was to become active on the West Rand as a follower of Eugene Terreblanche's neo-Fascist Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). By 1985, the AWB had initiated a nation-wide Volkshulpskema (People's Help Scheme). By 1988 the scheme was providing 14,000 meals a day for white children. On the West Rand, where Leon van Rensburg became organiser for the scheme, 2,000 children a day were being fed. The scheme was explicitly aimed at fostering racial solidarity. Leon van Rensburg told a journalist: These people need not be members of the AWB. They are Afrikaners. We help any white person, in spite of their political beliefs.’
1 The Star (17 September 1988).
2 Some solutions to this ‘problem’ attained unintended hilarity. For example, a South African follower of Nicos Poulantzas accounted for the non-revolutionary character of the white working class by explaining that white miners were not workers because they did not meet Poulantzas’ criteria for the production of surplus value: Davies, R.H., Capital, State and White Labour in South Africa, 1900-1960 (Brighton 1979)Google Scholar.
3 The author carried out the interview in this paper with ‘Arnold Mentz’. Candice Harrison carried out those with ‘Karel and Tamara Crozier’, ‘Carmen Potgieter’ and "Roelf Braun’.
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12 The New York Times (International Edition 12 September 2000).
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14 Ibid.
15 Hyslop, ‘Why did Apartheid's supporters capitulate?’.