A few miles west of Pretoria's downtown, away from the buildings that house the nerve centers of South Africa's bureaucracy, is the old neighborhood of Danville.

This was once home to civil servants and factory workers, miners and truck drivers - all Afrikaners, descendants of long-ago Dutch settlers. They had brick houses and fenced-in yards, pensions and job security. They had promises from South Africa's leaders that no white brother would be abandoned to poverty - a main tenet of the apartheid system.

Irene and Jannie Dupper rented a house in Danville. It had three bedrooms and a yard for Jannie's gardening.

"Ach, it was a nice house," sighs Mrs. Dupper, a slight smile creeping in with the memory.

But to find the Duppers these days, you must go to the end of Danville, and down a short driveway. There, you see an old army building, surrounded by a collection of tents, trailers, and "Wendy Huts," room-size wooden boxes that look like Home Depot tool sheds. This is Kwaggaspoort Reddingsdaad, a white squatter camp.

Twelve years after the end of apartheid, whites on the lowest rung of South Africa's socioeconomic ladder are experiencing role reversal. Apartheid's safety net for Afrikaners is gone, and now blacks are the preferred candidates for civil service positions and private-sector jobs. Whites are even living in squatter camps - the type of settlements long home to millions of impoverished blacks across the country.

Whites - Afrikaners and those of British descent - as a whole are still far wealthier than the 80 percent black majority here. Median income for whites is $11,000, compared with $2,000 for blacks. But what's changing is that whites and blacks seem to have reversed roles at the lowest income levels. The number of whites earning less than $80 a month grew by more than 50 percent between 2000 and 2004 - while the number of blacks in that bracket decreased by half, according to a recent Standard Bank study.

There are many white squatter camps around Pretoria. But most are hidden - either because Afrikaners are too proud to let their poverty show, or because squatting is illegal, social workers say.

"I don't think many people realize there is this squatting," says Andre Vermaak, who runs charity projects for the majority-white Solidarity trade union. "I think we're too proud for our own good, maybe."

So these settlements are hidden behind houses, with up to 100 people living on one small lot, taking turns in one small bathroom. Or, like Kwaggaspoort Reddingsdaad, they're clustered around institutional buildings.

***

Irene Laasen and Jannie Dupper met at a post office in Pretoria in 1978. She was an 18-year-old secretary, daughter of the postmaster. Jannie was 22, a truck driver with the postal service. His father was a traffic cop, his mother a homemaker who "never worked a day of her life," he recalls proudly.

They married, she stopped work, he started a well-paying job at a mechanics shop owned by Irene's brother. They had three children. For a decade they were the solid Afrikaner family: children of civil servants, parents of the next white generation. If they stumbled, they knew, the state would pick them up.

Maybe, in the back of their minds, they were aware of the unrest that would soon unravel their cocoon. The black townships were increasingly violent with protests. A few years earlier, in 1976, students in Soweto marched against laws that forbid any language but Afrikaans in school. Steve Biko was preaching his concept of black consciousness. International outrage at South Africa was growing.

Page: 1 | 2