ABSTRACT
In 1987 Iliffe described how the ‘African poor’ had throughout history been forced to rely on their own ingenuity because there were few other sources of support. Iliffe argued that colonial states had played a very limited role in social welfare. In the 1940s, colonial states developed policies for policing specific categories of the supposed poor (notably ‘vagrants’ and ‘juvenile delinquents’ in town), and in the 1950s they began to organize contributory insurance or provident schemes for small numbers of formal sector employees. Caring for the poor, however, was left to kin and charity (mostly church-based). The Great Depression and Second World War had pushed colonial officials towards ‘development’ as their primary strategy for reducing poverty, and little changed after independence. The family remained the ‘first defence’ against poverty. In Iliffe’s account, at best, post-colonial states performed the functions of their predecessors. When civil war or famine resulted in prospective starvation, it was generally up to international relief agencies to limit mortality. South Africa was an exception to this general picture, with a variety of formal state interventions from the 1930s (Iliffe 1987).
