Why I won’t be wearing black

So let us not talk falsely now

The hour is getting late

 

From Bob Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower

“ ‘I am not from these parts. I do not know why people want to kill each other here.’

‘But you must have given it some thought. You must wonder who is waiting for Mitchell in the bush.’

Mathew adjusts his rifle again and looks me in the eye for the first time. His reply is surprisingly fluent and confident.

‘They want the bush back. Like it was before the whites arrived.’ “

Mathew is a Bushman mercenary, a remnant of the Angolan war, hired as a farm guard and tracker to protect a KwaZulu-Natal farm. Mitchell is the owner of the farm and father of a 28-year-old man who was murdered only three months previously. The man asking the questions is journalist and academic Jonny Steinberg. This is an excerpt from his ground-breaking book Midlands which won the Sunday Times Alan Paton Non-Fiction Award in 2003.

I comment that it was ‘ground-breaking’ … and it was … for some people. For many of those who read Steinberg’s investigative account of a farm killing in the KZN Midlands, the book was an epiphany. It certainly was for me. I took the trouble to read it because issues of this nature interest me greatly. But obviously only those who read the book were affected by its revelations. Not nearly enough people read it. When I suggested Midlands to others as essential South African reading, they’ve mostly said that such things make them uneasy and it’s best to avoid them. Some have responded that if they are to read any book, it wouldn’t be ‘that sort of shit’, meaning that like the majority of people in this country, they don’t read much anyway.

Now nearly 15 years down the road, it’s in this paradigm of naiveté and ignorance that South Africa finds itself; dressing up in black, praying and marching to various symbolic destinations in a desperate attempt to ward off the Devil, Chaos or whatever other dark forces they perceive to be lying ahead.

Steinberg, now Professor of African Studies at Oxford University, has since written other books. He’s become a sort of specialist in the change that has wrenched South Africa out of its pre-1994 apartheid torpor. He’s written about prisons, refugees, the police and AIDS. The former Rhodes Scholar is often to be found examining the immediate and often unbearably uncomfortable effects of change that cut into the status quo of South African comfort zones.

As Mathew the Bushman said, it’s all about land. It’s always been about land and as Midlands suggests, it’s always going to be about how we South Africans manage the land issue in the years to come. If we get it right, we might just ensure a future for everyone living and those who have yet to live in this country.

Like the water issue that the Cape is now grappling with and other regions of the country periodically grapple with, we’ve just lost so much time. It’s now five to midnight and all we can do is dress in black and pray.

This is a sad indictment on a country that prides itself for being tough and resilient in its diversity. Perhaps by now in 2017 we would not have got things completely right – not by a long chalk – even if we had started off on the right foot. But if we had beensolidly on track for most of the past 20 years, we would not be as fearful as we are today.

Let me at this stage state unequivocally that I am not disrespecting those who have died in farm murders over the years. The statistics, however conflicting they might be, are both tragic and shocking: thousands of farmers have died. Attacks on South African farms are commonplace and I don’t think that any other nation in the world compares with us in this respect.

But if we truly address the problem, as Steinberg did in his research that resulted in the publication of Midlands, we have to be truly honest with ourselves.

The problem did not originate from Jacob Zuma, the Guptas and all of his crooked cronies. Neither did it come from FW de Klerk ‘who gave the country to the blacks’ nor even from the millions of refugees who over the years flooded into South Africa and are now living here. Much of the problem can be attributed to the attitudes of white people since 1994.

You may be wondering how I have the nerve to say this. Am I not letting the side down? Am I in fact, qualified to make such a statement? Were things not better in the old days when the police were more effective and kept things under control?

Well, the short first answer is that the sands of time ran out for the apartheid police system. Even if many people still yearn for them, those who policed the previous regime were about to have the carpet pulled out from underneath them. History swallowed them up. There had to be a better way. The fact that we haven’t found it yet doesn’t mean that the old way wasn’t rotten to the core.

For the longer second answer: whether I’m qualified to air a public opinion in these matters – well that’s subjective, I suppose.  In the last half of my life I spent 12 years in idyllic Simon’s Town where the biggest crime issue was double parking outside the bottlestore. Sometimes divers poached crayfish at Miller’s Point. Then at around the turn of the millennium we moved to KwaZulu-Natal where we lived , in fairly short order, at such places as : Emona behind Tongaat; Tugela River Mouth, a tiny enclave in the tribal lands of the Ingonyama Trust territory on the old Natal-Zululand border; and then on a farm in the Umvoti District near Greytown and Kranskop. Thereafter we moved back to the Cape and lived for a short while in the Bonnievale District while Heidi considered the possibilities of being an olive farmer.

It was during this period that I observed the interaction between various types of white South African farmers and indigent black labour, i.e. the people living and working on the farms. It was not a pretty picture.

‘…the worst is the rule itself. The rule itself says the white man comes down to your home and counts your wives and children. He walks into your bedroom and measures it, sees how many people it can hold. He decides whether you make love to your wife in private or in front of your children. You are no longer the head of the family. The white man is.’

This time it’s one of Steinberg’s contacts, Elias, relating to the author in a Pietermaritzburg bar the source of black bitterness on white farms. To put this conversation into context, Mitchell has imposed rules. He’s told the black residents on the farm that he’d recently bought that he intended controlling their numbers. He’d put a five-head-of-cattle limit on the community, as well as a need to be kept up to date with who was living on the farm. He was keeping a photographic record of physical structures. These rules ultimately led to the assassination of his son. It could as easily have been him who got killed.

I bring this scene up because we also wanted to impose rules on our farm outside Greytown. Heidi was the farmer and she wanted to know who would be staying on the farm. But we were interfering with things that we knew absolutely nothing about. A R500-contract was put out on our heads (I was a bit miffed; I’d always imagined that my life was worth more than that) and several assignation attempts were made. One Rhodesian-style bush war ambush nearly succeeded with logs barricading the farm road though our front gate and shots were fired.

We regularly had to fend off attacks and many of our possessions were stolen.  Our entire Mineola citrus crop, down to the last fruit, was stolen and the next time we saw it was in small bags for sale on the side of the road between Kranskop and Greytown. Our horses were slashed while there were ongoing attempts to drive off our Dexter herd.

In retrospect we were babes in the wood in that beautiful KZN valley, which interestingly was the final resting place of Voortrekker mother extraordinaire Sarie Marais. We’d bought a little farm with the naïve aspirations of growing organic veggies and making artisan cheese with the milk from our goats and cattle.

But as picturesque and fertile the valley was, we were trying to put down roots in stony ground. We’d gone in with our eyes closed. We’d known nothing about a conflict between German settler farmers and the local Zulus that had been ongoing for one and a half centuries. The farmers around us called them ‘monkeys’ to their faces, some expected immediate sex in the mielie fields resulting in a number of half-caste children in the district who everyone knew about, but dared not talk about.

Our neighbour was a millionaire many times over with an inherited farm, many tractors and lots of cars. But his labour lived in hovels on the river that passed through both our properties, without lights, heating or running water. There were times on freezing winter mornings when I crossed the river with Mila driving to Hermannsburg’s Deutsche Schule when I had to look the other way because the women were washing themselves, wearing only panties, on a flat stone near the bridge.

Around us in the district and further on towards Pietermaritzburg, farm theft, rape and murder abounded. We had first-hand experience with some of it.  I knew that we had to leave because it wasn’t normal. Agriforum and the Transvaal Agricultural Union can produce the statistics, but what they don’t show are the stories , some of them going back to before the Bambata Rebellion that led to this situation.

I don’t want to bore you and I don’t have time to relate some of the stuff that we saw and experienced at Emona or Tugela Mouth, except that it was quite shocking. However I will relate something about our brief sojourn in Bonnievale because this was on a farm in another province.

Our initial contact there was with an elderly farmer who went by the name of Pikkie. He wanted Heidi to get on with some farming on his not inconsiderable farm. But on discovering that he had several agendas that he’d kept close to his chest, she decided to examine the possibilities of acquiring a smaller farm next door. Pikkie retained a rag-tag bunch of labourers on his place, mostly by means of an elaborate dop system that he’d imposed.

‘Look at this Andrew. Look at this one. You know I can get him to do anything for me. Anything. What do you want him to do?’ Pikkie gestured a small dark man called Koonsie over and produced a 750ml bottle of cheap Bonnievale wine out of nowhere. As soon as he saw the wine, Koonsie perked up.

‘Wat is jou naam?’ asked Pikkie.

‘My naam is Koonsie,’ replied Koonsie, trembling.

‘Nee man,’ said Pikkie as though his party trick had been blemished. ‘Jy moet sê: my naam is Koonsie, ek is ‘n Hotnot and ek is baie dom.’ Not taking his eyes off the bottle, the labourer repeated Pikkie’s words verbatim while his workmates looked on. He then made a grab for the bottle, but the farmer was taller and held it above him. Pikkie was guffawing with laughter, his face suffused purple. Eventually he let Koonsie have it and pushed him off so that he could consume it around the corner. ‘

You see Andrew. You have to have something to control these bastards. Otherwise they’ll steal you blind.’

And now we are in Hopefield. Here I see with my own eyes that it’s quite okay for a farmer to stop some strange black person on the road and ask him what his business is in the area. As most town and city folk do, the local people here seem to tacitly approve of class domination, control and racism.

On the Hopefield social media forum I’ve read posts that convey the angst of a lady who saw a black man walking past her house. ‘Daar’s ‘n swart man op my straat. Pasop,’ she warns fellow residents.  Before she went to Germany, Mila was working at a coffee and fresh produce shop in the main street. A black man stopped and she chatted to him while he bought some spinach. The neighbouring estate agent and attorney’s secretary who hav offices next door, looked on in horror. She was talking to a black person as if he was a normal human being! ‘Aren’t you scared?’ she was asked after he’d left.

What I am attemting to communicate here is that these things are happening all the time – all over South Africa. We let racism slither around at our feet while we look away because either we think it’s all right, it’s not so bad or it doesn’t matter. And a person doesn’t want to make a scene does he or she?

After all farmers are responsible for food sovereignty and they must run their farms as they see fit. It’s always been that way.

Yet the hatred and resentment builds up all the time. As do the farm attacks and murders. ‘I would have thought that after 20 years of democracy they would know better than to attack the hand that feeds them,’ I overhead one matron say not long ago.

Indeed yes. After 20 years of democracy I would have thought that all of us would have known a lot better.

As I write Angus Buchan is praying for a message from God due this weekend which he promises to disseminate tomorrow morning. Apparently he received the first part of it while jogging. ‘It’s time,’ says Uncle Angus in his video clip, an hourglass with sand running, placed next to him as a prop to underline the seriousnss of the situation. Two words: ‘it’s time’. Time for what?

If we all pray, we might get a divine communication that will make it all go away? I have been pondering on Angus and as to the possible implications of God’s promised message.

What if he tells us to get our shit together and really do something about this land problem? What if he advises us that many of us white people in South Africa have had the wrong attitude for the past 20 years?  What if he tells farmers to treat their labour better? Pay them better? Give them decent facilities? Treat them like human beings?

What about all of these Men of God; the pastors, dominees and priests? Many of them were conspicuously absent in the apartheid times and they haven’t been much use since. Instead of platitudes and warm sounds, would it not be better for them to give some hard instructions? Or is it okay to be directed by false prophets and hypocrites? Because to solve this problem requires a sea change of attitude among all South Africans. We need to become familiar with the notion that nobody is really better than the next person – no matter what his culture, language or colour might be.

Above all, we need to get really good with practising the art of what is possible and less worried about what we have to lose in terms of material possessions, culture and language.

Because if we go on like this we are going to lose everything anyway. By engaging with the people and the problem – we can only come out on top. We can win back our humananity and maybe … just some of what we’re so frightened of losing.

Putting on black and praying might make some of us feel a bit better. Maybe for a day or so. But the problem’s not going to go away unless we become less selfish, less proud and really do something about it.

That’s why I’m not wearing black tomorrow.