Whites now live in Ghettos

(London Daily Mail)  -  A quarter of a century ago black South Africans were living in squalor while most whites lived the good life in apartheid-era South Africa. 

Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and four years later he took over as President from F W De Klerk and the pair shared the Nobel Peace Prize.

Apartheid - a grotesque and brutal form of government in which whites held all the power and blacks and other racial groups were segregated and oppressed - was condemned to the dustbin of history. 

Nowadays there is a strange form of equality.

While the black South African middle class has grown and many live in big houses, with swimming pools and drive around in BMWs like their white peers; many poor whites live in squalid squatter camps just like their black peers.

Jeanine Maritz, 13, stands down the road from her mother's
makeshift home. She lives with her father and visits her mother
and aunt in Munsieville squatter camp on weekends and holidays.

Photographer Jacques Nelles has captured the life of a poor white community with these images taken in the Munsieville township, west of Johannesburg. 

Around 42,000 of the 4.5 million white South Africans are thought to live in poverty, which equates to 0.9 per cent. 

But 63.2 per cent of the country's 43 million black South Africans also live in poverty and around 37 per cent of 'coloureds' - people of mixed race. 

The squatter camp in Munsieville is one of 80 across South Africa.

It is built on the site of an old dumping ground and is home to around 300 people, of which a quarter are children.

Those living here survive on around 700 rand (£40) a month.

Most of the people here are Afrikaans-speakers, descendants of the Dutch settlers who landed on the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th century. 

Around 60 per cent of white South Africans are Afrikaans. Just over a century ago their grandfathers or great-grandfathers, known as Boers, were engaged in a bloody war with the British Empire.

The word Boer means 'farmer' in Dutch and while some of the Munsieville camp dwellers have come here after abandoning farms in the countryside, the majority have come here from cities like Johannesburg and Pretoria.

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Irene Van Niekerk washes her clothes in a bucket as her daughter
tries to calm down her crying grandson in the background. To
many residents, Irene is the community leader and she and her
husband Hugo try and keep order in the small community.