EXTRACT | Land is one of the most emotive and symbolically powerful issues in Africa

“At its core, this book seeks to prompt reflection on the extent to which the first three decades of agrarian reconstruction following settler colonialism and apartheid have produced continuity and change in the lives of ordinary people. More crucially, it challenges us to consider what we, as agents rather than hostages of history, can do about it”

– Ayabonga Cawe

Land is one of the most emotive and symbolically powerful issues in Africa. In rural contexts, the collision of history, class, race, gender, time and space has made meaningful efforts to overcome economic inequality complex. In South Africa, the end of slavery and its subsequent creation of ‘buffer communities’ for military purposes in the 1850s all collided with the stalled emergence of a relatively self-sufficient Black peasantry. The dismantling of this Black agrarian class in the twentieth century involved the incubation of white producers and their favourable positioning within product markets. In a programme of statecraft, that explains our country’s prevalent inequality and widespread economic inactivity.

‘New’ Settler or ‘Old’ Tenant? explores how this past continues to shape the present. Using a rich body of archival, news, census, legal and primary sources spanning almost two centuries, the book traces the construction and reproduction of racial hierarchies in land, labour and product markets.

Across the rural Eastern Cape – from the lands between the Fish and Keiskamma rivers moving further north towards Kat River Valley, Sada (Whittlesea) and the Glen Grey area – this journey reveals the origin stories of enduring rural economic conflicts and the heavy and tormenting legacy these struggles impose on the present.

From the agrarian reforms of the 1830s, designed to secure labour after the end of slavery, to the failed Ciskeian experiments to ‘remake’ a Black commercial agrarian class as a ‘buffer community’, and the mass resettlement of people into marginal lands, this book follows the long arc of history; to find multi-generation stories of change. At its heart are labour tenants, so-called ‘squatters’ and ‘relocated’ families – historical actors in an over century-long struggle over land and livelihoods. In the democratic era, these communities, once marginalised and displaced, now stand as landholders (or tenants?) and citizens. Who await different futures on the land. In this life. Before heaven.

EXTRACT

Ntombentsha (‘Thandi’) Metula and her ‘scorched’ paradise

Joint ventures and the ‘evasive’ shadow of ownership by ‘leasehold’

Ntombentsha Metula, following the passing of her husband Mphambukeli, ran ‘one of the larger farms in the northern parts of the Kat River Valley’. The Paradise farm was initially handed over to her husband by the Ciskeian government under a probationary lease in 1992, which they would later rename ‘Top Kat’. Metula had received some training in citrus cultivation at Fort Cox with the aid of Israeli demonstrators that had provided support to successive Ciskeian authorities. Yet according to her, she did not work in the fields in the first few years of her settling at Top Kat. She built and ran a crèche for the children of farm dwellers instead.

What the DBSA Annual Report of 1995 did not highlight, however, was that the Top Kat farm had the largest number of labour tenant and farm dweller households in the area. The occupation of the farm had predated its management and control by Metula and her husband. While many of the neighbouring farms (especially the white owned ones) had undertaken the eviction of their farm dwellers as tenure laws changed in the early 1990s, many of the ‘new’ settlers linked to the Ciskeian regime did not. So by 2010, nearly two decades into the democratic era, 28 households shared the farm with Metula.

Metula’s own account to me made reference to 15 households, highlighting some democratic era migration away from the farm by some of the farm dwellers to neighbouring villages and the nearby townships of Seymour and Fort Beaufort. From the late 1990s, Metula began to experience tensions between her and the farm dwellers. The ‘partnership’ structure she had developed on the farm had included some of the farm dwellers, further providing access to an orchard and rights to grazing land on the other side of the R67 for other farm dweller households, while also some enjoying a ‘shareholding’ in her registered company which ran the farm operation.

‘My saliva dries up in my mouth as I recall that experience,’ says Metula, shifting uneasily in the couch she is sitting on recalling that her problems began in earnest in 2004. She experienced the burning of her orchards and recently prepared land intended for further planting. There were negotiations between the community, the provincial government and Metula between 2004 and 2010, with no clear resolution on the claims made by the farm dweller community. This impasse affected the planned planting cycle on the farm, and she would only be able to plant her land again towards 2008, following support from the Uvimba Bank (a successor institution of Ulimicor, now ECRDA). However, a few years later in 2011 her problems with farm dwellers recurred.

‘I found myself locked out of the farm by the farm dweller “community” … who were demanding that I create another joint venture that would include them. Later in the year, around October or November 2011, the community started again, with a toyi-toyi on the farm, with the windows and doors to the farmhouse broken. A few months later in 2012, some of the community members were carrying placards written “get off our land”!’

A few years later she was evicted from the farm following a ‘fallout’ with these farm dwellers and former labour tenants over a claim to the land. According to a news report at the time, her farmhouse had been, ‘vandalised by an angry mob of farm dwellers’. From the report it seemed that notwithstanding her near three-decade occupation of the farm, her ‘lease agreement’ with the provincial authorities was set to expire in 2018. She had no title deed to the farm she cultivated for that period nor any semblance of ‘secure’ tenure rights. Whatever ‘permission’ she had (explicit or tacit) to occupy was clearly not worth much.

Her involvement in the area as a ‘new’ settler was complicated by the rights that labour tenants and other farm dwellers enjoyed under the democratic dispensation. Following the introduction of legal instruments such as the Extension of Security of Tenure Act 62 of 1997 (‘ESTA’). Even three decades later Metula (in no small part because of her role as a ‘new’ settler benefiting from the Ciskeian privatisation scheme, and later development bank support), was not seen as part of the community but as a settler farmer brought in from ‘above’. For her this seemed bizarre, when she considered the warm relations she had cultivated in the area.

‘I buried many of the people in that area, from buying the casket to paying for the costs of the funerals, I showed up for them,’ Metula said, with a deep sense of betrayal.

It is worth contrasting rather briefly, the story of Metula, with that of Solly Sikotile. The other farmer profiled in the two-page spread in the same 1995 DBSA Annual Report. Then, a middle-aged man in a white shirt and brown flannel trousers, Sikotile, was born in the Kat River Valley. He had grown up on the farms in the area. Working his way into a role as a foreman on one of the farms, which would later be taken over by the Ciskeian authorities and Ulimicor. His cousin Daniel also ran another ‘consolidated’ farm in the area. Sikotile ran a formerly white-owned citrus farm in the valley, the Torties Farm. In the early 1990s farmers like Metula and Sikotile were supplying around two-fifths of the navel oranges packed at the nearby cooperative KatCo. However, with the ‘drying up’ of credit lines to finance working capital needs (following the liquidation of Ulimicor), farmers like Sikotile found it hard going.

Many gave up citrus farming altogether and ‘fully’ returned to the places they had come from before they were ‘settled’ in the valley. Some returned to other non-agrarian work as funding for fertilisers, sprays, diesel and wages between the harvest cycles dried up or new planting became impossible. Many of these famers were in urgent need of capital and packhouse relationships to turn their two available resources – rights to land and access to labour – into viable livelihood or accumulation opportunities.

Sikotile approached neighbouring agricultural interests in the white community – Riverside, which was owned by the Roberts and Painter families, two historic white farming families in the area. Riverside, much like the case of many former white cooperative and Control Board players, had now begun to function as financial intermediary and administrators of the production loan agreements these farmers struck. Further, Riverside was a grower and value chain participant in its own right – owning a nursery, research and development facilities and its own orchards. As well as a financial intermediary serving as a conduit for development finance institutions to reach large sections of the more than 20 ‘new settlers’ who occupied the formerly white owned farms in the parts of the Kat River Valley that fell into the Ciskei.

In 2006, Riverside and the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) began a strategic partnership to implement rural development projects with IDC providing the capital and Riverside the intermediary, administration and advisory support. The relationship between ‘new’ settlers like Sikotile and Metula and strategic equity partners emerging from the white commercial agricultural community and the IDC, had kept many of the ‘consolidated’ farms going. Sikotile himself, with help from the IDC had expanded his citrus orchards from 25 hectares to over 35 hectares. And his citrus and pomegranate operations sold into downstream packhouse and export channels – a slightly ‘different’ form of ‘contract farming’, but with synonymous ‘complications’. Riverside suggested that this model of extending production loans to Black farmers through these intermediary interests was ‘a model that can be replicated in other regions of South Africa’. But by 2019 it had failed. A ‘subset’ of the ‘kulak’ class earlier settled by the Ciskeian authorities in the Kat River Valley were in crisis once again, and now indebted to the IDC, the Eastern Cape Rural Development Agency (ECRDA) and LONA (which had by then acquired the Riverside operation).

Many of these farmers were in a situation similar to that which they had confronted two decades earlier following the liquidation of Ulimicor, which necessitated the intervention, once again, of the provincial and national government – and of course, another development financing institution, through a combination of debt bailout and production loans now managed by the Land Bank. The provincial authorities intervened and provided a R50 million facility to pay down some of the debt and in the main to provide working capital facilities for ‘inputs and related operational costs for the existing citrus crop preparation’. The story of why and how this happened ‘again’ highlights why the ‘comforting shapes’ of the Ulimicor ‘privatisation’ experiment continues to hamstring attempts at land reform in the area. The ideational ghosts of Sebe and Botha stalk the promise of land reform in a democratic society. We are yet to meaningfully ‘escape’ them.

New’ Settler or ‘Old’ Tenant? The ‘Origin-Story’ of South African Inequality in Distributive Conflicts in Land, Labour and Product Markets by Ayabonga Cawei published by Tracey McDonald Publishers. Extract provided by Janine Daniels (J Doubled Publicity).