Starving on a Full Stomach: Hunger and the Triumph of Cultural Racism in Modern South Africa (review)

Images of heroic Westerners saving starving Africans remain among the most powerful of all the tired tropes that continue to haunt popular discussions of the continent. How can one with a good conscience question the seeming benevolence of charity? In Starving on a Full Stomach, Historian Diana Wylie does so with flair and grace. This provocative work scrutinizes the formation of a complex of ideas about hunger that justified the brutality of the apartheid state. South African medical and agricultural experts explained the causes of deprivation in ways that placed on the onus of blame on Africans. Taking a page from James Scott’s recent study Seeing Like A State, she scrutinizes the assumptions made at the crest of faith in modernization and European cultural superiority in the 1940s and 1950s.

Wylie begins with a grim observation: “Social suffering must be satisfactorily explained to give credibility to the pride that, along with fear, lies at the heart of race domination”(p. 4). She does not, however, blithely neglect the reality of famine. After noting the malleability of nutritional categories and debates over the definition of hunger among contemporary scholars, she sets her sights on a motley group of European intellectuals working in health and government in the early twentieth century. Convinced of the ability of technology to transform humanity, this group increasingly grew deaf to local perspectives on social, ecological, and economic change.

The opening chapters explore of the roots of food snobbery and culinary culture in South Africa. While Europeans and Africans shared common strategies of coping with famine before industrialization, a divergence took place thereafter. Improved transport and food processing techniques made the issue of hunger a question of entitlement exchange for available food rather than a battle against absolute dearth. The development of nutrition as a science in the early twentieth century led Europeans to frame questions of hunger in terms of diet alone rather than an issue of wages and social support. Not surprisingly, specialists looked to European history and social practices for answers without recognizing their weaknesses in African settings.

An easy riposte available to defenders of European superiority is to point to famine and malnutrition in pre-colonial African societies. In Chapter Two, Wylie tries to reconstruct food consumption patterns in nineteenth-century South Africa by concentrating on Zulu communities’ foodways. Although her review of agriculture and eating is fairly convincing, especially by noting the cyclical periods of plenty and hunger, it is difficult given the lack of sources and ecological diversity of Southern Africa to say how typical Zulu practices were compared to the entire region.

In the twentieth century, the study is on firmer ground. Chapter Three takes on state responses to rural famine through a close reading of Native Affairs Department (NAD) correspondence. Officials before the 1930s, acting in a paternalist framework, heeded the advice of some African chiefs and intellectuals on hunger and want. In similar fashion to episodes throughout colonial Africa, battles over defining hunger and finding solutions led to divisions over gender, age, and the proper role of the state. NAD administrators veered from aiding Africans through temporary relief to chiding their subjects for their supposed lack of foresight. By 1940, however, the increasingly bureaucratic and impersonal organization of the NAD chose to blame Africans for hunger rather than offer expensive aid or push to raise the artificially low wages of migrant workers.

A favorite justification of state policy by the 1940s was that unscientific and primitive Africans brought hunger on themselves. In Chapter Four, Wylie profiles several social scientists coming from radically different political backgrounds who surveyed urban households. Far from adopting a monolithic position, these individuals furnished powerful evidence of the existence of urban poverty but differed on its causes. Concerns over African “ignorance” and a sense of the inevitability of suffering in the transition from rural to city life colored their views. Their ambivalent attitudes towards poverty gave ammunition to opponents...