Beneath the rainbow

In 1994, when the Afrikaner president F W de Klerk handed over the management of Africa's strongest Western economy to the tricameral 'black-ruled' new government, the unemployment levels among 'whítes' in South Africa was about 2%. It was indeed considered a deep disgrace among Afrikaners to be unemployed.

At that point, the Afrikaners also were among the best-educated population group in South Africa, comprised of the largest numbers of educators, medical staffers, government employees and mining/engineering experts in the country - it is fair to say that this relatively small minority group kept the wheels of this powerful economy turning efficiently and smoothly.

Afrikaners also were the largest single group of people to employ the largest number of black people: for instance the country's 85,000 Afrikaans-speaking farmers alone, employed more than 1,3-million black people fulltime - and also housed them and their extended families on their farms: more than 6-million black people were in other words, living on white-owned farms and were reliant on the industry of this handful of Afrikaner farmers in 1994, who only ever farmed on no more than 6% (six percent) of the entire semi-arid South African land surface.
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By October 2001 -- when the last census was held in South Africa it became clear how poverty-stricken the Afrikaner nation had already become after only seven years of black-majority rule.

The number of unemployed so-called 'whites' was 430,000 in the 2001 Census - out of their employment-age population of 1,863,607. And these workers were getting very low incomes: of those whites who were were happy to cling onto their jobs in 2001, 237,502 whites (13%) earned less than R1,600 a month - that's $150 a month.

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