The National Party and the Ideology of Welfare in South Africa under Apartheid

The expansion of social welfare programmes under apartheid accords with the analysis of most recent studies of apartheid that have emphasised the expansion of modernist governance. Yet the National Party (NP) consistently denounced the concept of a ‘welfare state’. Public provision was always viewed as less important than – and often as detracting from – familial and individual responsibility, even for the state’s white citizens. The survival of Christian, ‘civilised life’ and of the Afrikaner ‘volk’ (or, later, white South African population more broadly) was understood to depend on the individual, family and civil society, not the state. The NP used welfare policy to regulate family life among its white citizens as well as its black subjects. Public provision was concerned more with the rehabilitation of the family than with reducing poverty per se. The NP could not prevent social and economic change, however. Social change among white families pushed the state to new programmes, including residential care for the elderly. The NP’s ideology of welfare points to the uneven modernism of apartheid.