Poverty knowledge in South Africa: The everyday life of social science expertise in the twentieth century.

Abstract

Questioning the view that science served only as a handmaiden of imperialism and as an instrument of social control, this dissertation argues that social science research on poverty in twentieth-century South Africa animated public debates about citizenship, racial privilege, and state responsibility in unexpected ways and eventually became a tool of insurgency. Drawing on oral, archival, and published sources, this study highlights Africans' participation in the production of knowledge as local experts, translators, field assistants, and scholars. It also shows how African nationalists, student activists, and labor leaders appropriated academic research methods for their own ends. Rather than searching for the autonomous subaltern voice, this thesis builds on the work of Ian Hacking by revealing feedback dynamics that evolved between social scientists, activists, and the poor around the formidable problem of inequality. In the early twentieth century, government commissions generated voluminous data on poverty under the prevailing assumption that while whites could be poor, Africans were simply primitive. In the early 1940s, surveyor Edward Batson used random sampling techniques to define the Poverty Datum Line (PDL). Batson's contention that people shared the same basic needs (regardless of race) appealed to some post-war social reformers, but failed to sway Afrikaner nationalists concerned with protecting civilized standards of living and addressing the so-called poor white problem. During apartheid, the poverty question became intertwined with official debates about soil conservation in the African homelands. However, in the 1970s, black trade union membership grew and white student activists began effectively using the PDL to support workers' demands for higher wages. Simultaneously, multinationals turned to survey researchers when they came under pressure to prove their wages met humane standards, thus adding to the looping effect. By the end of the century, employers and the state could no longer assert that Africans lived according to non-Western standards or uncivilized customs. Although quantitative definitions of universal minimum needs remained contested, they gained widespread public circulation, eventually displacing qualitative framings of the problem.