Life in Mandela's South Africa

The politics of poverty

Poor. Now that's a word we seldom hear these days. People are no longer poor. They are Underprivileged. They are Disadvantaged. They are Economically Marginalised.

There's a problem in this. In giving other names to things we don't like to look at. The problem is that if we rename a class of people, we are telling them that we don't like looking at them. We are telling them that what they represent is so repulsive that we are not even going to call it by its proper name.

There's actually nothing wrong with being poor. It's unfortunate, certainly. Unpleasant, yes. But it has no moral implications. A number of the people we regard with awe, a number of the great people of the past, lived in poverty. And what did they do about it ? Did they all decide to burn down their schools ? Did they all become violent criminals, blaming all their misdeeds on their "environment " ?

No! For some reason, poverty was not a precursor to becoming a violent yob. So what happened ? Step one : do-gooding academics provide the problem -- out goes "poor", in comes "economically marginalised". Step two : marketers provide the solution -- we can make you feel better : buy XY Sneakers and you'll never be thought of as marginalised again.

In other words, what society has done is to strip poor people of their pride. We need to realise that we cannot solve the problems of poverty overnight. And, what's worse, whenever we try to, we end up creating more poverty than there was to start with. What has to happen is that we need to remove the stigma attached to being poor. We need to enable poor people to have their lives mean something without relying on consumerism. We need to understand that spiritual and intellectual soundness is more important than material wealth.

But how to achieve this ? I think the last statement is true for all people, but somewhere along the line we have decided that we can buy a solution --"if I buy this, it will make me a better person and I will feel Better". This might be true in the short term, but in the longer term you will just feel worse. We need to wean ourselves from the seductive imagery of mass consumerism. The only way we can do this is to understand what it is we are seeing, and why it makes us feel the way we do.

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