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

In the early 1990s, when the scourge of HIV/AIDS had moved relentlessly south from East Africa, the last of the apartheid ministers of health vehemently denied that AIDS would ever devastate South Africa. He believed that his country's medical system was so vastly superior to those of nations to the north that South Africa could successfully halt the spread of AIDS, remaining a place apart. But he and his senior white officials also were focused primarily on the well-being of whites, and were cavalier about, and fundamentally not interested in or aware of, how Africans were endangered medically.

Earlier, in the decades before and during apartheid, South African whites veered between paternalism and disdain in their understanding of African illnesses, African nutritional weakness, and the fundamental causes of African poverty and immiseration. Starving is a carefully conceived and elegantly constructed exegesis of South Africa's long failure to accept the impact of white dominance on the accentuation of African poverty and the myriad physical problems that flowed from deliberate efforts to deprive Africans of economic opportunity, rights to productive land, and a sense of empowerment. Africans were transformed, as Wylie shows so well, from entrepreneurs into labor automatons and from canny agriculturalists and pastoralists into marginalized field laborers with little encouragement to become productive or efficient.

Starving is an intellectual history of how meliorists (Wylie's word) and scientists in South Africa reacted to Africans and African problems, and to South African famines, mostly in the decades after 1913. From her narrative, it is evident that a few missionaries, medical persons, and scientists worked diligently to discover why Africans were ridden with scurvy or tuberculosis, or were seriously malnourished. Many of them, from Britain and South Africa alike, tried to improve conditions by seeking the proximate causes of scurvy or other maladies, and then by inventing or adapting remedies. But nearly all of these energetic innovators were hampered by what Wylie calls cultural racism—stereotypically held and expressed views of why Africans ate what they ate, had to live as they did, and ended up malnourished, badly housed, and uneducated.

Wylie makes her case for racism effectively, but she does not sufficiently explore the political economy or scientific reality of starvation, hunger, and disease, especially with regard to South Africa's recurrent famines. Likewise, her short sketches of the social and medical scientists who grasped the dimensions of South Africa's deeply constructed malaise are fascinating and valuable. But none assesses the lasting impact on South African self-awareness of such meliorists as Margaret Ballinger, John Fleming Brock, Frank Drewe, Frank Gluckman, Ellen Hellman, Gertrude Kark, Eileen Krige, and Ray Phillips. Were they fully effective in attempting to better the lives of Africans within the context of segregation and apartheid? Could each have done more to educate him/herself and his/her society?

Wylie's book is a sophisticated, if in method not notably interdisciplinary, meditation on cultural attitudes in and across a sharply bifurcated nation. More crossing into cognate disciplines would have enriched the author's history of how white South Africa confronted and constructed its responses to the welfare of the country's deprived majority. More attention to the social consequences of cultural racism would also have enlarged the significance of this sensitive book.