Lost white dogs of Africa

There is a fading misconception in Europe that every white person in South Africa lives the life of Reilly, albeit behind a barbed-wire perimeter fence. The fact is that, apart from all the hardworking white postmen and store clerks, genuine white trash abounds, booted out of one too many doors by bosses and wives and daughters’ boyfriends. They walk the streets, live in small townships and paint houses if they don’t drink the paint first. There are quite a lot of them, presumably more now than ever. Emigrating to Canada or Europe is not really an option for these lost white dogs of Africa. The high commissions wouldn’t let them in the door.

I picked up such a hitchhiker once, about 40 years old, on the road to Cape Town. He was standing by a bridge and confided to me soon after we got going that he had been standing there minutes before considering whether to jump off. It was a conversational icebreaker of sorts, and a chicken pie a while later bought the rest of his story. Madness in Angola, farm jobs and women lost, drink and prison. As Robert Frost wrote: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.’ Not in South Africa.

The existence of poor whites makes South Africa a country that, say, Kenya could never be. I was once up in the dustbowl of the Northern Cape when I came across a town at a dirt-track mission crossroads. There was a sign for the old gallows, a derelict hotel and a small market-place. In the market sat a 70-year-old white man in a suit with his old coloured girlfriend/wife, behind a table on which were stacked seven or eight avocados.