Poverty, and Little Sympathy, in South Africa
By Kerri MacDonald, New York Times
June 25, 2010, 6:00 pm
 A woman pushes a cart with a monthly supply of food aid donated to residents of a squatter camp for poor white South Africans at Coronation Park in Krugersdorp. A shift in racial hiring practices and the recent global economic crisis means many white South Africans have fallen on hard times. Researchers now estimate some 450,000 whites, of a total white population of 4.5 million, live below the poverty line and 100,000 are struggling just to survive in places such Coronation Park, a former caravan camp currently home to more than 400 white squatters. Photo: Finbarr O'Reilly, REUTERS [Vancouver Sun] |
If there was one thing Finbarr O’Reilly sought to emphasize when he began reporting on white poverty in South Africa, it was that color shouldn’t have a voice in the conversation.Read more »
“It doesn’t really matter what color it is,” said Mr. O’Reilly, a 39-year-old Canadian photographer for Reuters whose touching 2005 photo of a Niger mother and child was named World Press Photo of the Year. “It’s an issue that really is quite urgent right now in South Africa.”
The story has rarely been told. But it has been on his radar since a 1994 backpacking trip through Africa, when he noticed a number of poor white South Africans begging for change at traffic lights.
“I started asking around and saying, ‘What’s going on here?’” Mr. O’Reilly said over the phone from Dakar, Senegal, where he’s based. “It’s not a new phenomenon, but the numbers seem to be more apparent than they were in the past.”
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