Poverty in South Africa, Past and Present: A Jacana Pocket History

Abstract

The Jacana Pocket book series provides readers with quick snapshots of South African history. It provides useful background information, equally beneficial for students and the general public interested in learning more about aspects of South African and African history. Most of the series has provided biographical and historical narratives of the anti-apartheid movement but also of pre-apartheid events and history. Colin Bundy’s contribution to this series moves away from this tradition by focusing on South Africa since the end of apartheid.1 This time, Bundy endeavours to uncover just one, but arguably the most discordant, aspect of contemporary South Africa, entitling his piece Poverty in South Africa, Past and Present. Bob Marley perfectly captured the feeling of poor people when he sang “A hungry mob is an angry mob; A hungry man is an angry man.”2 These lyrics continue to be relevant throughout the world and contemporary South Africa. Anger has raged particularly since the ascendency of President Jacob Zuma, but this “rebellion of the poor” has been brewing since the beginning of the new millennium.3 Underlying this frustration has been the realisation of the working class, the unemployed and unemployable poor people that their poverty has not substantially lessened since the end of apartheid. South Africa’s Gini coefficient suggests that since the new millennium it has been “one of