Dispossession to Democracy: Discovering the Historical Roots of Farm Attacks in South Africa, 1652-2008

by

Barb Matthews

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Appendices Copyright Releases (if applicable) Table of Contents

ABSTRACT vi

GLOSSARY vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS viii

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1

Introduction 1

Land Dispossession 5

Labour Exploitation 10

Violent Crime 16

Conclusion 21

CHAPTER TWO: COLONIALISM, DISPOSSESSION AND THE STRUGGLE OVERLAND, 1652-1913 22

Introduction 22

Cape Colony 24

The Great Trek and The Establishment of Natal 40

The Orange Free State and South African Republic (Transvaal) 47

The Anglo-Boer War and the Union of South Africa 52

Conclusion 57

CHAPTER THREE: SEGREGATION, APARTHEID AND THE STRUGGLE OVERLABOUR, 1913-1994 61

Introduction 61

Labour Exploitation in the Segregation Era 63

Labour Exploitation in the Apartheid Era 78

Violent Justice in the Apartheid Era 97

iv Conclusion 102

CHAPTER FOUR: RURAL REFORM IN DEMOCRATIC SOUTH AFRICA, 1994-2008 106

Introduction 106

Crime and Policing 108

ANC Campaigns as Potential Motives in Farm Attacks 117

Labour Issues as Potential Motives in Farm Attacks 121

Land Issues as Potential Motives in Farm Attacks 131

Conclusion 140

CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION 143

BIBLIOGRAPHY 150

v Abstract

One of the most shocking post-apartheid developments in South Africa is the drastic increase in violent crime directed against white farmers. This violence has come to be known as farm attacks, and has claimed the lives of almost two thousand white farmers since 1994. Many white farmers believe there is an orchestrated campaign aimed at pushing them off the land, while the Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks concluded that 90% of farm attacks are simple robberies. This thesis, however, pursues an historical approach to demonstrate that farm attacks are a symptom of complex social ills that have plagued South Africa's rural communities for centuries. Although farm attacks cannot be separated from the wave of violent crime that has engulfed South

Africa, the historical importance of land dispossession and labour exploitation must be examined as motives in this rural violence if farm attacks are to be understood and combated.

VI Glossary

African: used in this thesis to describe the black population of South Africa. Coloured, Indian and white South Africans are excluded from this category.

Afrikaner: the white population mainly of Dutch origin. This group spoke Afrikaans, Dutch or variations thereof.

Boer: Afrikaners who lived in rural regions as stock farmers, cultivators and hunters.

Burgher or Free Burgher: the colonists of Dutch origin who settled in the Cape Colony.

Bushmen: an indigenous hunter-gatherer people who lived near the Cape of Good Hope at the time of the earliest European settlement. The Bushmen have also been known as the San, but Bushmen is the currently accepted terminology.

Commando: militia units primarily comprised of white farmers and their servants. They are tasked with crime control in rural areas, and during the colonial and apartheid eras they were often used against African resistance and liberation movements.

Khoikhoi (Khoi): an indigenous pastoral people who lived near the Cape of Good Hope at the time of the earliest European settlement. European settlers knew the Khoikhoi by the derogatory name Hottentots.

Khoisan: a blanket term describing the Khoikhoi and Bushmen collectively. The term Khoisan indicates the difficulties in distinguishing between the Khoikhoi and the Bushmen in historical contexts.

Mfecane: loosely defined as the socio-political changes and associated demographic turmoil and violence of the early nineteenth century in southern Africa, which were the result of a complex interaction between factors governed by the physical environment and local patterns of economic and political organisation.

Sjambok: a heavy leather whip.

Trekboer/Voertrekker: the Boers who left the Cape Colony in protest in the mid nineteenth century. These people established the colonies of Natal, the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (Transvaal).

vn Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities

Research Council of Canada for its generous financial support. Special thanks also goes to Dr. Gary Kynoch for his guidance, expertise and encouragement. The author would also like to thank Dr. Philip Zachernuk and Dr. Theresa Ulicki for offering their counsel, despite demanding schedules.

viii Chapter One: Introduction

Yes, it is the dawn that has come. The titihoya wakes from sleep and goes about its work of forlorn crying. The sun tips with light the mountains oflngeli and East Griqualand. The great valley of the Umzimkulu is still in darkness, but the light will come there. Ndotsheni is still in darkness, but the light will come there also. For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.

-Alan Paton1

Introduction

Written in 1948, Alan Paton's haunting words continue to ring true in South

Africa. Democracy has come to the nation, yet countless black South Africans await liberation from economic dependence and deprivation, while many white South Africans fear losing their jobs, homes and land to the newly emancipated black majority. To make matters worse, since Nelson Mandela's release from prison and the end of the ban on the

African National Congress in 1990, the rate of violent crime targeting black and white alike has dramatically increased.2 In this respect, although South Africa has achieved democracy, innumerable South Africans continue to await emancipation from "the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear."3 This is particularly apparent on South Africa's farmland.

In 2002, South African reporter Jonny Steinberg released a book entitled

Midlands, which detailed the intricacies of the murder of one young white fanner named

1 Alan Paton, Cry. The Beloved Country (New York: Scribner, 2003), 312. 2 See Crime Wave: The South African Underworld and Its Foes, ed. Jonny Steinberg (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001); and Diana Gordon, Transformation and Trouble: Crime. Justice, and Participation in Democratic South Africa (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2006). 3 Paton, Cry. The Beloved Country. 312.

1 Peter Mitchell in KwaZulu-Natal in 1999.4 At the request of the victim's father,

Steinberg changed the names of people and places in his description of this particular murder; nevertheless, the details of his analysis effectively highlight the complexity of farm attacks. Peter Mitchell was twenty-eight years old when he was found murdered in his jeep on the dirt road between his father's farmhouse and the irrigation fields. His cell phone and wallet were left untouched, indicating that this was not a mere robbery.

Furthermore, "no cartridges were left at the scene, no fingerprints, no cigarette butts from which DNA evidence could be extracted—an unusually professional operation for a rural murder."5 By dusk most of the white farmers in the district had visited the crime scene, and all were filled with an unusual sense of terror, as this was a new experience for them.

"White farmers were not killed under apartheid. Not like this, at any rate. They were killed by jealous spouses, by disturbed neighbours and by crazed children. But never like this."6 To the white farmers of the district, this was a symbol of the political changes sweeping across the nation:

[During apartheid] no black man entered the vast commercial farmlands to kill a member of a powerful white family. And on the handful of occasions when a crazy black man did kill a white, the police would comb the countryside with their fists and their electric shocks and they would get a confession. So the horror of Mitchell's neighbours was starkly, inevitably political. The body before them was inscribed with the signs of the time, a time in which whites had lost institutional power and black men had become brave enough to walk onto a farm and kill its proprietor.7

Although Steinberg concluded that disgruntled black tenants were responsible for Peter

Mitchell's death, the case was never solved in court.

4 Jonny Steinberg, Midlands (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2002). 5 Steinberg, Midlands, 5. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid.. 6.

2 This narrative highlights one of the most shocking post-apartheid developments— the drastic increase in violence directed against white farmers. For centuries white farmers have doled out violence to black labourers; however, since the end of apartheid and the election of the African National Congress in 1994, thousands of white farmers and their families have become the victims of violent assaults, robberies and murders. In some cases, the family's pets are even killed. These assaults are known as farm attacks, which are officially defined as follows:

Attacks on farms and smallholdings refer to acts aimed at the person of residents, workers and visitors to farms and smallholdings, whether with the intent to murder, rape, rob or inflict bodily harm. In addition, all actions aimed at disrupting farming activities as a commercial concern, whether for motives related to ideology, labour disputes, land issues, revenge, grievances, racist concerns or intimidation, should be included. Cases related to domestic violence, drunkenness, or resulting from commonplace social interaction between people are excluded from this definition.8

In 2004, the Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU), which is comprised almost exclusively of white commercial farmers, reported that more than 1,600 farmers had been murdered in South Africa in over 8,000 farm attacks since the election of the African

National Congress. On average, one farmer had been murdered every second day for ten years. The TAU claimed that the murder rate of South African commercial farmers is the highest for any one specific group in the world.9 This level of violence, coupled with recent events in neighbouring Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe's government has confiscated thousands of white-owned farms, has led many white farmers to believe that there is an ANC-orchestrated campaign aimed at pushing them off the land. However,

Committee of Inquiry Into Farm Attacks, Report of the Committee of Inquiry Into Farm Attacks. July 31, 2003, http;//www.issafrica.org/CJM/farmrep/index.htm. 417. 9 Kgomotso Nyanto, "South Africa Land Issue: 'We Cannot Wait Any Longer,'" New African 452 (2006): 14. White commercial farmers have compiled the TAU's statistics, so they may be exaggerated. the Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks, which the South African government commissioned in 2003, reported that in 89.3% of farm attacks, the motive was merely robbery.10

While there is evidence to support the view that some white farms have been targeted to force the owners to abandon the land, and it is clear from police reports that the majority of farm attacks involve robbery, neither of these explanations takes into account the violent history of dispossession, conflict and accommodation that has characterized labour and race relations in white farming areas since colonization.

Following his research into the Mitchell murder, Jonny Steinberg was asked why Peter

Mitchell was killed. Steinberg replied: "You'd think that's the one question I should be able to answer. But it's a long, difficult story."11 Understanding this difficult story is essential to comprehending the nature of violence on South Africa's farms. As Hans Erik

Stolten shrewdly observed, "history...is not simply a product of the past, but often an answer to demands of the present."12 To this end, this thesis pursues an historical approach to demonstrate that farm attacks are a symptom of complex social ills that have plagued South Africa's rural communities for centuries.

It is the contention of this thesis that no simple explanation exists for the recent increase in farm attacks, especially given the difficulty in generalizing about the complex history of South African agriculture due to its local variances.13 However, by exploring the historical significance of land dispossession (Chapter Two), labour exploitation

10 Committee of Inquiry Into Farm Attacks, Report of the Committee. 11 Steinberg, Midlands. 259. 12 Hans Erik Stolten, "History in the New South Africa: An Introduction," in History Making and Present Day Politics: The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa, ed. Hans Erik Stolten (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2007), 6. 13 William Beinart and Peter Delius, "Introduction," in Putting a Plough to the Ground: Accumulation and Dispossession in Rural South Africa. 1850-1930. ed. William Beinart, Peter Delius and Stanley Trapido (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986), 2.

4 (Chapter Three), illegitimate racist policing (Chapters Two and Three), and the legacy of these developments post-apartheid (Chapter Four), as well as the struggles between black and white that have defined the terms of these phenomena, a more sophisticated comprehension of the war that quietly rages in rural South Africa can be reached. The remainder of this chapter outlines the argument presented in this thesis and the related historiography. As this thesis is an attempt to weave an explanation for the recent increase in violent farm attacks from three strands of South African history—land dispossession, labour exploitation, and violent law enforcement—this chapter draws on three aspects of historiography concerning colonialism and apartheid in South Africa.

Land Dispossession

Issues of land ownership and access to land featured heavily in Jonny Steinberg's

Midlands. Steinberg illustrated that some African communities continue to struggle to regain access to land and that, in the Mitchell case at least, "there had been talk in the southern midlands about taking back white-owned land...in the scrappy clumsy signature of parochial politics, a handful of chancers had put their names to white-owned farms."14

Steinberg concluded that, "it is probably true to say that Peter Mitchell would still be alive if talk about taking back land were not in the air."15 The Committee of Inquiry Into

Farm Attacks, however, disagreed with Steinberg's analysis. Chapter Two of this thesis attempts to provide an historical analysis of African land dispossession, white settler accumulation, and the violence associated with this process to illustrate that Steinberg was correct in identifying land as an important motive in farm attacks.

14 Steinberg, Midlands. 173. 15 Ibid.

5 William Beinart and Peter Delius pointed out that the transformation of much of rural South Africa from small black-owned communal landholdings to large mechanized white-owned capitalized farms was a central feature of the nation's history.

No other African country has witnessed comparable sustained growth in agricultural output on the basis of increasingly capitalist farming. But neither have countries elsewhere in the continent experienced the systematic and comprehensive displacement of the indigenous population, which has been effected in South Africa. The white-owned farmlands have stood, for over three quarters of a century, in stark juxtaposition to overcrowded and impoverished African reserves.16

Approximately sixty thousand white capitalist farmers continue to own twelve times as much land as fourteen million rural Africans, despite the promise of the post-apartheid government to redistribute thirty percent of the country's agricultural land to landless blacks by 2014.17 To date only three percent has been redistributed.18 In an attempt to explain this unequal pattern of land distribution, Chapter Two of this thesis begins with the arrival of Dutch settlers in 1652 and ends with a discussion of the 1913 Native Land

Act, which delineated a mere seven percent of South Africa's land for African ownership.

The chapter argues that the violence inherent in settler accumulation, including the policing of race relations, and the culture of African resistance that developed during this period remained imbedded in the collective memory of many African communities and plays an important role in rural race relations in contemporary South Africa. For this reason, unequal land distribution must be considered as a potential motive in farm attacks.

Beinart and Delius, "Introduction," 5. 17 Human Rights Watch, Unequal Protection: The State Response to Violent Crime on South African Farms. (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2001) http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/safrica2/. 18 Nyanto, "South Africa Land Issue," 12.

6 There exists a substantial historiography explaining how this dramatically unequal circumstance developed. George McCall Theal wrote some of the earliest histories of the

European conquest of South Africa and the dispossession of African land. His works justify the racist practices of white settlers. His volumes are littered with references to

"the harassed farmers" who "acted on the defensive only" and the "bitter hostility" of the settlers' African neighbours—"savages of a very low type."19 He also inferred that the land upon which the white settlers established their farms was uninhabited and that the

Bantu speakers who challenged the settlers for ownership of the land were intruders from the north.20 Although Theal's version of South African history has been largely discredited, his views speak volumes concerning the ways in which white settlers perceived themselves and their black neighbours.

Liberal historians, such as William Macmillan and his student C.W. De Kiewiet, rejected Theal's apologetic history of white settler expansion and focused more on the oppression of Africans. Macmillan outlined not only the nature and source of white poverty, but also what he increasingly viewed as the dire importance of the poverty and exploitation of the black majority.21 He was convinced that "the only way of safety for white and black alike is to promote general economic progress."22 Macmillan thus provided "the first systematic recognition of, and attempt to explain, both the nature of

George McCall Theal, History of South Africa Under the Administration of the Dutch East India Company. 1652-1795 (1897; rpt. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 92. See also Compendium of South African History and Geography (Lovedale: Institution Press, 1877) and History of the Boers in South Africa (1887; rpt. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969). 20 McCall Theal, History of the Boers. 85. 21 See William M. Macmillan, The South African Agrarian Problem and its Historical Development (1919; rpt. Pretoria: The State Library, 1974), Bantu. Boer, and Briton: The Making of the South African Native Problem (1928; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), and Complex South Africa: An Economic Foot-Note to History (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1930). 22 William M. Macmillan, Complex South Africa: An Economic Footnote to History (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1930), 18.

7 settler accumulation and the changing relationships of exploitation on South African farms."23 Like his mentor, C.W. De Kiewiet stressed the role of whites in the making of black poverty.24 However, both Macmillan and De Kiewiet wrote of black South

Africans "as an abstraction."25 Africans featured in these publications as objects rather than subjects. As a result, the role Africans played in the shaping of their own destinies, much less of South African society, was largely neglected.

Monica Wilson, Leonard Thompson, and John Omer-Cooper contributed to the work of Macmillan and De Kiewiet by stressing that the interaction between various peoples and the history of African societies, together with white conquests, provides a more inclusive account of South African history.26 Whereas most historians attributed twentieth century African poverty to colonialism's destructive impact on African agriculture, Monica Wilson demonstrated that there was an initial period of prosperity among African peasant communities. Colin Bundy took up this argument and illustrated that many African communities during the second half of the nineteenth century exhibited a successful response to the market opportunities of colonial expansion, and it was only with extensive government intervention that white capitalist agriculture was

23 Beinart and Delius, "Introduction," 5. 24 See C.W. De Kiewiet, The Imperial Factor in South Africa: A Study in Politics and Economics (1937; rpt. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1965), A History of South Africa. Social and Economic (1941; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), and The Anatomy of South African Misery (London: Oxford University Press, 1956). 25 Saul Dubow, "Thoughts on South Africa: Some Preliminary Ideas," in History Making and Present Day Politics: The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa, ed. Hans Erik Stolten (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2007), 61. 26 See A History of South Africa to 1870. ed. by Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1983; John D. Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa (London: James Currey Publishers, 1994); and Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

8 able to thrive at the expense of the African peasantry. Africans were thus to become an essentially captive labour force for white-owned farms and mines.

The colonial police, including commando units, were central to the process of

African dispossession. Diana Gordon provided an historical analysis of South Africa's racist policing, beginning with the introduction of slaves into the Cape Colony in 1658.28

She illustrated that the primary task of the police and judicial systems during colonialism was to establish and maintain "the racial subjugation that was at the heart of all South

African political communities...the role included putting down resistance to the humiliations suffered by blacks and sending an unyielding symbolic message of invincible white authority."29 Furthermore, Gordon underscored the violence to which

Africans were subject from the colonial police and the white farmers who often took law enforcement into their own hands.

William Beinart and Colin Bundy's work contributed to the historical understanding of land dispossession by illustrating the ways Africans opposed conquest and the culture of resistance that developed as early as the seventeenth century and infused rural struggles with "vitality, intensity and inventiveness" long after conquest and annexation.30 Many of these tactics, such as committing arson, hamstringing cattle and destroying fences, are very similar to the resistance tactics Steinberg described in

Midlands. Jeremy Krikler also stressed this culture of resistance.31 Krikler outlined the ways African peasants who had been cultivating the Boer-owned farms in the Transvaal

27 Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1979). 28 Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 29 Ibid.. 26. 30 William Beinart and Colin Bundy, Hidden Struggles in South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987), 25. 31 Jeremy Krikler, Revolution from Above. Rebellion from Below: The Agrarian Transvaal at the Turn of the Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

9 during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) asserted their rights against the white landlords who attempted to reclaim the land with the succour of the British following the cessation of hostilities in 1902. Krikler argued that the memory of this injustice influenced African resistance well into the twentieth century. Likewise, the collection of essays Hans Erik

Stolten edited demonstrated that the memory of violent land dispossession remains imbedded in the collective memory of many African communities, which makes land distribution an important factor in contemporary rural politics.32

Taken together, the preceding works support Jonny Steinberg's supposition of the possibility of land-related motives in farm attacks by illustrating that the violence associated with dispossession, the strength of collective memory within African communities, and the culture of resistance that developed under colonialism continue to influence the struggle for land in rural South Africa today. It is therefore the conviction of this thesis that, despite the Committee of Inquiry's insistence that robbery motivates the vast majority of farm attacks, land is an important motivating factor in the spate of farm attacks that currently holds rural South Africa hostage.

Labour Exploitation

Although Jonny Steinberg identified a land-related motive in the Mitchell case described in Midlands, he also suggested that labour exploitation and poor farmer- labourer relationships played a role in Peter Mitchell's death. Steinberg described an interesting situation in which relationships between white farmers and black labourers are influenced by a series of rules: "There are a host of unwritten rules. Stealing from a

32 History Making and Present Day Politics: The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa, ed. Hans Erik Stolten (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2007).

10 white landowner is often a form of punishment, a signal sent across the racial frontier that the white boss has gone too far." The startling aspect of this is that "white farmers have absolutely no idea that these rules exist." 4 Steinberg thus suggested that the demeaning conduct of Peter Mitchell's father, Arthur Mitchell, and the Mitchells' former neighbour,

Lourie Steyn, unwittingly incited the wrath of some members of the neighbouring

African community, who responded with progressively more violent actions, eventually resulting in the murder of Arthur Mitchell's son. This not only draws attention to poor farmer-labourer relationships as cause for farm attacks, but it also stresses the possibility of multiple motives in the same farm attack.

Chapter Three of this thesis discusses the historical ill treatment of black farm labourers at the hands of white farmers and the white state between 1913 and 1994, and argues that this contributes to the complex explanation of farm attacks. Africans living and working on white-owned farms were often subject to desperate living situations, dangerous working conditions, forced evictions, verbal abuse, beatings, rape, and were even killed. However, under the segregation and apartheid governments, these exploited workers had little hope of achieving justice. White farmers enjoyed almost complete impunity, as racist legislation not only tolerated but also justified this behaviour by portraying Africans as a criminal-minded race that required strict control to protect the white minority. Africans seldom risked the consequences of openly challenging the oppression of white farmers, especially during the apartheid regime, as punishment at the hands of both the farmer and the justice system would be swift and cruel.

Steinberg, Midlands. 50. Ibid.. 51.

11 For many African families, the only hope of securing a better life was to move to another farm, but apartheid laws often prevented Africans from pursuing this option.

Through oppressive, racist legislation, African families were increasingly obliged to labour for white farmers, or they faced forced eviction and relocation to squalid reserves or relocation camps. Bitter struggles between black workers and white farmers characterized the commercial farming landscape during this period, as black tenants, workers and sharecroppers utilized a host of strategies to maintain or achieve a bit of freedom on white-owned farms. However, these strategies consisted of slowing the pace of work, stealing or hamstringing livestock, breaking fences and other subversive tactics; overt violence against white farmers was unheard of until recently. In the post-apartheid era, white farm-owners are no longer immune from the consequences of their violent actions, and retribution for ill treatment seems to have motivated, in full or in part, some farm attacks.

South African historical narratives are rife with descriptions of exploitative and often-violent relationships between white landowners and black tenants, workers and sharecroppers. Sol Plaatje's well-known book, Native Life in South Africa, described the callousness of the white state and the hardships connected with the 1913 Native Land

Act. Publications such as Allen Cook's discussion of the use of prison labour on white- owned farms, the Surplus People Project's report on forced removals, and Wendy

Davies' analysis of farm workers' exploitation during apartheid, tellingly depict the

Sol Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa (1916; rpt. Harlow: Longman Group, 1987).

12 horrendous treatment and appalling living conditions of farm workers on so many white- owned farms during the segregation and apartheid regimes.

Renowned historian Charles Van Onselen argued that "violence was—and no doubt still is—an integral part of the relationship that developed between European landlords and African tenants."37 In a relationship known as paternalism, this violence was often softened by some benign qualities similar to those a father would exhibit toward a child. Shula Marks illustrated that, "even while demanding obedience and provoking resistance, domination operates not simply through coercion but also through

TO concessions that themselves are shaped by the nature of resistance." Unlike Timothy

Keegan, however, who argued that, '"violence and intimidation were tempered by the practice of paternalism,'"39 Van Onselen and Marks illustrated that paternalism and violence can, and often do, go hand in hand. This is especially true when "paternalistic relationships are being rapidly eroded or restructured,"40 such as the restructuring of paternalistic relationships resulting from the advent of democracy in 1994.

Van Onselen significantly contributed to the understanding of the lives of South

African sharecroppers by examining, in extensive detail, the life of a sharecropper named

Kas Maine.41 In The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, A South African

Sharecropper, 1894-1985, he illustrated the ways apartheid's many laws, especially the 36 Allen Cook, Akin to Slavery: Prison Labour in South Africa (London: International Aid and Defence Fund, 1982); Surplus People Project, Forced Removals in South Africa (Cape Town: Surplus People Project, 1983); Wendy Davies, We Cry for Our Land: Farm Workers in South Africa (Oxford: Oxfam, 1990). Charles Van Onselen, "Paternalism and Violence on the Maize Farms of the South-Western Transvaal, 1900-1950," in White Farms. Black Labor: The State and Agrarian Change in Southern Africa. 1910-1950. ed. Alan H. Jeeves and Jonathan Crush (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1997), 192. 38 Shula Marks, The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class. Nationalism and the State in Twentieth-Century Natal (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986), 2. 39 Ibjd. 40 Van Onselen, "Paternalism and Violence," 213. 41 Charles Van Onselen, The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper. 1894- 1985 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996).

13 1913 Native Land Act and the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act, affected the Maine family and the ways the Maines were able to adapt and even prosper until they were finally forced into a relocation camp in 1966. This narrative effectively demonstrates how apartheid's repressive legislation increased the power of white landowners at the expense of the independence of black labourers, especially the more successful sharecroppers like Kas Maine. Furthermore, The Seed is Mine highlighted the gender and generational pressures of a sharecropping family struggling to stay afloat in a sea of racist regulations designed to eradicate independent African cultivators.

Similar to Van Onselen's study of Kas Maine, Timothy Keegan outlined the lives of five rural Africans struggling against the onslaught of apartheid in Facing the Storm:

Portraits of Black Lives in Rural South Africa.42 Through these biographies, the reader is offered a personal account of how each new apartheid law limited the rights and freedoms of rural blacks. However, an important theme in both Keegan's Facing the

Storm and Van Onselen's The Seed is Mine is the resilience and determination of African communities. Neither Kas Maine nor the men in Keegan's book resigned themselves to a life of wage labour without first exhausting all other possible options. The innovation, adaptation and ingenuity of these characters deserve commendation. It is this fortitude and flexibility that continued into the post-apartheid era and encourages rural protest43 in contemporary South Africa.

Timothy Keegan, Facing the Storm: Portraits of Black Lives in Rural South Africa (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1988). 43 This thesis uses the term "rural protest" to indicate rural African communities' resistance to the injustices of the white state (and the legacies of white minority rule) including, but not limited to, unequal land distribution, white farmers' demands and brutality, labour exploitation, and other aspects and remnants of white minority rule that negatively affected the lives of rural Africans. Rural protest includes a variety of tactics ranging fromslowin g the pace of work to physical violence.

14 It is important to note, as Shula Marks and William Beinart have, that segregation and apartheid were considerably shaped by the responses of African cornmunities.44

Africans often resisted the demands white farmers and the white state made of their labour, and in many cases, they succeeded in overturning white demands. One such example concerns the failure of the oppressive Chapter Four of the 1936 Native Trust and

Land Act, as Stefan Schirmer illustrated.45 William Beinart and Saul Dubow pointed out that, "any analysis of segregation must recognize that African societies in the region were conquered but never entirely dominated. Many fought to defend themselves from full incorporation into colonial and capitalist society."46 Resistance to the demands of white officials and farmers was thus an integral aspect of rural relations during the segregation and apartheid eras.

Another important aspect of segregation and apartheid-era South Africa that influenced the nature of farmer-labourer relationships was the violent character of its policing. John D. Brewer argued that apartheid's South African Police (SAP) "never transcended its origins as a colonial police force."47 The problems associated with the colonial police were compounded under segregation and especially apartheid. The SAP was corrupt, racist, involved in death squads and incompetent in investigating ordinary crime. Brewer illustrated that the SAP acted as the servant of the racist state, performed duties beyond the scope of police work on behalf of the apartheid government, and relied

44 Shula Marks, "Natal, the Zulu Royal Family and the Ideology of Segregation," and William Beinart, "Chieftaincy and the Concept of Articulation: South Africa circa 1900-50," in Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth Century South Africa, ed. William Beinart and Saul Dubow (London: Routledge, 1995). 45 Stefan Schirmer, "Land, Legislation and Labor Tenants: Resistance in Lydenburg, 1938," in White Farms Black Labour: The State and Agrarian Change in Southern Africa. 1910-50. ed. Alan H. Jeeves and Jonathan Crush (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemenn, 1997). 46 William Beinart and Saul Dubow, "Introduction: The Historiography of Segregation and Apartheid," in Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa, ed. William Beinart and Saul Dubow (London: Routledge, 1995), 21. 47 John D. Brewer, Black and Blue: Policing in South Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 332.

15 on brute force to suppress the black majority. Furthermore, the SAP and the justice system as a whole were often employed in favour of white farmers against the freedoms of farm workers.

Struggles between black labourers and white farmers over land allocation and labour exploitation have historically been intense, but, as Steinberg's analysis highlighted, they have not necessarily been mutually exclusive. William Beinart, Peter

Delius, and Timothy Keegan all illustrated the close connection between land and labour issues.48 They stressed that, "what have been taken to be episodes of 'primary' resistance by intact African polities fighting off conquest need to be seen as more complex disputes infused with the demands of Africans on the farms."49 Therefore, concluding that farm attacks are motivated primarily by any one specific factor, as the Committee of Inquiry

Into Farm Attacks has done, overlooks the complexity of the interplay between land, labour and, increasingly, violent crime in rural South Africa.

Violent Crime

Crime, especially violent crime, has become a major concern for all South

Africans since the inception of democracy in 1994. As the Committee of Inquiry Into

Farm Attacks concluded, crime is epidemic in South Africa, and farm attacks must be viewed in light of this pandemic. The desire for firearms, vehicles, cash and other valuables certainly motivates many attacks, and in most cases something is stolen from

48 William Beinart, "Settler Accumulation in East Griqualand from the Demise of the Griqua to the Natives Land Act," Peter Delius, "Abel Erasmus: Power and Profit in the Eastern Transvaal," and Timothy Keegan, "White Settlement and Black Subjugation on the South African Highveld: The Tlokoa Heartland in the North Eastern Orange Free State, ca. 1850-1914," in Putting a Plough to the Ground: Accumulation and Dispossession in Rural South Africa. 1850-1930. ed. William Beinart, Peter Delius and Stanley Trapido (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986). 49 Beinart and Delius, "Introduction," 43.

16 the crime scene. Chapter Four of this thesis provides a discussion of post-apartheid crime, which is largely a result of the illegitimate, racist justice system outlined in

Chapters Two and Three. It argues that colonialism and apartheid nurtured the conditions that bred crime in African areas while protecting white areas from the adverse effects.

Unlike the Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks, however, this thesis seeks a more comprehensive explanation for the murder of white farmers; therefore, Chapter Four will also revisit the land and labour arguments of Chapters Two and Three in light of post- apartheid developments.

Similar to the conclusions Diana Gordon and John Brewer drew concerning the violent legacy of South African policing, Jonny Steinberg and other contributors in Crime

Wave: The South African Underworld and its Foes argue that crime in South Africa is rooted in the country's racist history.50 Steinberg pointed out that the level of poverty found in so many rural black communities, which the dictates of colonialism and apartheid produced to a great extent, significantly affects the level of crime in these communities. However, poverty alone does not explain crime trends. Crime, Steinberg argued, must be viewed as politics. Although it is too simplistic to conclude that post- apartheid crime is the successor of the anti-apartheid struggle, the continuities between the youth liberation organizations in the 1980s and the criminal gangs of the 1990s point to a connection between anti-apartheid politics and post-apartheid crime. Khehla

Shubane added that the relationship between politics and crime partly accounts for the

Mandela administration's relatively weak crime-fighting record.52

50 See Crime Wave: The South African Underworld and its Foes, ed. Jonny Steinberg (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001). 51 Jonny Steinberg, "Introduction: Behind the Crime Wave," in Crime Wave. 4. 52 Khehla Shubane, "A Question of Balance: Crime Fighting in a New Democracy," in Crime Wave.

17 Antony Altbeker pointed out that, given the history of unjust policing pre-1994, citizens' "identities have not been shaped by the law," and as a result, some criminals

"think nothing of committing serious crimes."53 Altbeker thus confirmed Brewer and

Gordon's conclusion that black South Africans did not internalize a respect for so-called law and order and had few moral qualms about breaking unjust laws. This lack of respect for the police and justice system remains one of the greatest challenges facing the South

African government. Altbeker made it very clear, however, that the vast majority of black South Africans are law-abiding citizens who condemn violent crime, especially since they are, in most cases, its victims. Mark Shaw and Antony Altbeker further contributed to the analysis of post-apartheid crime by identifying the difficulties of overcoming the oppressive legacy of colonial and apartheid policing, including vigilantism, and the challenges of transforming the police and judicial institutions to suit the needs of a democracy.54 Corruption, insufficient funding, resistance to reform, lack of dedication and a crisis of legitimacy, coupled with increased crime rates, make policing incredibly difficult in democratic South Africa.

Jonny Steinberg further contributed to the analysis of rural security by highlighting the implications of the impending dissolution of the South African National

Defence Force's Territorial Reserve, widely known as the Commandos, scheduled for the end of 2009.55 The Commandos are predominantly composed of white farmers tasked with enhancing the security of rural areas. Historically, however, the protection of the

53 Antony Altbeker, "Policing the Frontier: Seven Days with the Hijacking Investigation Unit in Johannesburg," in Crime Wave. 25. 54 Mark Shaw, Crime and Policing in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Transforming Under Fire (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002); Antony Altbeker, The Dirty Work of Democracy: A Year on the Streets with the SAPS (Johannesburg: and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2005). 55 Jonny Steinberg, "After the Commandos: The Future of Rural Policing in South Africa," Monographs for the African Human Security Initiative 120 (2005): 1-36.

18 white farming community has come at the expense of the much larger black community.

Commando tactics have often been violent, racist and inappropriate for a new democracy.

Therefore, by the end of 2009, the SAPS are to assume the role of rural law enforcement.

Steinberg concluded that this will certainly decrease the security of white farmers. While the apartheid state ruthlessly dealt with any hint of violence against white farmers, the current government, though not condoning attacks, is tasked with protecting all citizens equally and cannot afford to emphasize the protection of white farmers at the expense of the much larger rural black population. Nevertheless, phasing the Commandos out without an effective replacement, which the SAPS in its current form certainly is not, may lead to more farm attacks. The closure of the Commandos will be a critical juncture in rural race relations.

With the advent of democracy and the election of the African National Congress in 1994, rural black South Africans expected, and were promised, major changes in the pattern of land distribution. Anna Bohlin and Deborah James illustrate the challenges associated with the land reform process.56 Restitution has resulted in substantial agricultural failures; redistribution has proceeded at a snail's pace; and land tenure reform has failed to protect the rights of farm workers. South African newspapers such as

Business Day and Mail and Guardian frequently contain reports and editorials of black

South Africans' frustration with the reform process and white South Africans' fear of

Zimbabwe-style land grabs. Land thus remains a hotly contested issue in South Africa.

56 Anna Bohlin, "A Price on the Past: Cash as Compensation in South African Land Restitution," Canadian Journal of African Studies 38 (2004): 672-687; Anna, Bohlin, "Claiming Land and Making Memory: Engaging with the Past in Land Restitution," in History Making and Present Day Politics: The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa, ed. Hans Erik Stolten (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2007); Deborah James, Gaining Ground? 'Rights' and 'Property' in South African Land Reform (New York: Routledge, 2007).

19 Although frustration with the land reform process and unequal land distribution might be a motivating factor in farm attacks, it is of the utmost importance to bear in mind that the vast majority of rural black South Africans do not consider violent farm attacks a legitimate means of securing access to land.

Labour issues also continue to affect rural race relations in democratic South

Africa. Lauren Segal and Deborah James illustrate that severe violence against farm labourers continued and even increased as apartheid began to crumble in the early 1990s and that this trend persisted into the democratic era.57 Although farm labourers are now protected under government legislation, many white farmers do not feel compelled to reform their exploitative ways in the chaotic post-apartheid environment, and many have actually intensified their offensive against tenants' freedoms in order to reinforce the image of their own dominance. Although black landless workers finally have a degree of representation in the government, including the police and judicial systems, Shaw,

Gordon and others have illustrated that the SAPS is very often ineffective, especially in rural areas, and many African farm labourers remain unprotected from white farmers' brutality. However, white farm owners are no longer immune from the consequences of their violent actions. With the police no longer the servants of a white government, some

African farm workers have been emboldened to commit murderous acts that would have been unheard of during apartheid, and retribution for ill treatment seems to motivate, in full or in part, some farm attacks.

Lauren Segal, "A Brutal Harvest: The Roots and Legitimation of Violence on Farms in South Africa," Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, http://www.csvr.org.za/papers/papfarms.htm. March, 1991; Deborah James, Gaining Ground?.

20 Conclusion

More than three centuries of land dispossession, violent farmer-labourer relationships, unjust laws and brutal punishment have created a volatile state of affairs on

South Africa's farms. Since the end of apartheid and the opening of avenues of retribution previously locked to black South Africans, there has been a dramatic shift in the relationship between white farmers and black labourers. One of the consequences has been a drastic increase in farm attacks. No simple explanation exists for these horrific acts, but a comprehensive investigation of the historical factors will lead us closer to understanding, and therefore combating, farm violence in South Africa. Until the South

African government grasps the complexity of this issue, it will be unable to emancipate rural South Africa from "the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear."58

Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country. 312.

21 Chapter Two: Colonialism, Dispossession and the Struggle over Land, 1652-1913

The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again. The white man has broken the tribe. And it is my belief— and again I ask your pardon—that it cannot be mended again. But the house that is broken, and the man that falls apart when the house is broken, these are tragic things. That is why children break the law, and old white people are robbed and beaten...It suited the white man to break the tribes, he continued gravely. But it has not suited him to build something in the place of what is broken.

-Alan Paton59

Introduction

Many white farmers in South Africa today believe the recent increase in violent farm attacks stems from Africans' desire to reclaim the land that once belonged to them.

Although this conviction overlooks the many complexities of the issue, land has been a point of contention between whites and blacks since the earliest days of settlement in the

Cape Colony, and access to land certainly plays an important role in the renegotiation of rural race relations in democratic South Africa. Moreover, violent and relentless struggle over land characterized the first two hundred and fifty years of European settlement in

South Africa and, as this thesis argues, influenced the relationships between whites and blacks into the twenty-first century.

As the above quotation suggests, the advent of European settlement in South

Africa deprived Africans not only of their land but also of the traditions, values and independence that relied upon unrestricted use of the land. "The swiftly expanding, land- hungry Europeans turned the bulk of the native population into a proletariat, governed by laws that bound rather than unloosed, that restricted their liberties rather than widened

Paton, Cry. The Beloved Country. 56.

22 their opportunities." By divesting Africans' access to land through increased settlement, wars, false treaties, taxation and racist legislation, colonists triggered the decline of independent African life and the growth of the poverty, dependence and exploitation that would come to characterize African life in twentieth century South

Africa. "That there was a class who never rose above vagrancy the circumstances of their recent history made inevitable; nothing whatever had been done to give them any substitute for a degraded 'freedom' of which the coming of Europeans had deprived them."61

In order to portray the importance of land dispossession and the struggle over land that typified life in rural South Africa between 1652 and 1913, this chapter illustrates the ways in which Africans were systematically deprived of their land as European settlement spread from the Cape Colony into Natal, the Orange Free State and the

Transvaal. Although there were differences between regions and administrations, land dispossession, coercive labour conditions, an enforced racial hierarchy and sustained

African resistance were consistent features of rural South Africa under colonial rule. The conquest of South Africa was an incredibly violent process, which initiated the brutal and exploitative treatment of Africans that is still apparent on South African farms today.

This violent history of land dispossession plays an important role in the spate of farm attacks that currently afflicts rural South Africa.

De Kiewiet, The Imperial Factor. 3. 61 William M. Macmillan, The Cape Colour Question: A Historical Survey (London: Faber and Gwyer Ltd., 1927), 36. 62 R. Ross, "The Origins of Capitalist Agriculture in the Cape Colony: A Survey," in Putting a Plough to the Ground: Accumulation and Dispossession in Rural South Africa. 1850-1930. ed. William Beinart, Peter Delius and Stanley Trapido (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986), 73.

23 Cape Colony

Beginning with Vasco da Gama's voyage to India in the late fifteenth century, the

Cape of Good Hope in current day South Africa became a point of contact between

Europeans and the indigenous peoples of what would become the Cape Colony. The indigenous African population at the Cape established friendly trading partnerships with passing European vessels; however, European voyagers largely neglected the Cape until the Dutch East India Company (VOC) relocated its refreshment station from St. Helena in 1652.63 On April 6 of that year, Jan van Riebeeck arrived in the Cape of Good Hope to establish the new Dutch post. This was not originally intended to be the beginnings of a colony, as employees of the Dutch East India Company were merely permitted to utilize small portions of land for gardening. However, in February of 1657 the first Dutch farmers were given permission to settle permanently in the Cape Colony. "The free burghers, as they were afterwards termed, formed a very different class, as they were subjects, not servants, of the Company."64

The indigenous peoples of the area immediately surrounding the Cape Colony were primarily Khoikhoi (Khoi) pastoralists, and beyond them lived the Bushmen (San) hunter-gatherers. The communal nature of land tenure of both the Khoikhoi and the

Bushmen varied drastically from that of the Dutch settlers, and the Dutch East India

Company allotted vast stretches of land to the free burghers without consulting or considering the Khoikhoi who had been in possession of this land for generations.65 This,

Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa. 17. 64 Theal, History of South Africa Under the Administration of the Dutch East India Company. 60. 65 Joan G. Fairweather, A Common Hunger: Land Rights in Canada and South Africa (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006), 25.

24 according to the settlers, was justified, as "a race of nomads unacquainted with agriculture" had less right in land than European cultivators.66

The imposition of Dutch farms on Khoikhoi pastures, coupled with the cattle raids colonists often directed against their Khoi neighbours, rapidly soured the amiable trading relationship between the Khoikhoi and the Dutch East India Company.67 European weaponry and strategy of divide and conquer, together with the extensive farming methods of the settlers and the lack of available water, allowed the colonists to occupy the most ideal locations for raising livestock. As European settlement increased and high-quality arable land near the Cape became scarce, settlers increasingly pushed further into the interior in search of farmland.68 Furthermore, the system of renting as opposed to purchasing land from the Company, known as the loan-farm system, allowed farmers to easily abandon their land if grazing deteriorated.69 This system encouraged rapid dispersion of Dutch settlers, also known as Trekboers or Boers, into the interior of the

Cape, which quickly eroded the independence of the Khoikhoi, and many Khoi were incorporated into the Cape economy as servants.70 Thus, by the close of the eighteenth century, the process of land dispossession was in full swing, and the majority of the

Khoikhoi in the Cape "had been transformed into a class of wage labourers whose status was little better than that of slaves."71 Paradoxically, the expansion of European settlers

Theal, History of South Africa Under the Administration of the Dutch East India Company. 99. 67 Fairweather, A Common Hunger. 23. 68 Leonard Guelke, "Freehold Farmers and Frontier Settlers, 1657-1780," in The Shaping of South African Society. 1652-1840. ed. Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 101. 69 Nigel Penn, "Labour, Land and Livestock in the Western Cape During the Eighteenth Century: The Khoisan and the Colonists," in The Angry Divide: Social and Economic History of the Western Cape, ed. Wilmot G. James and Mary Simons (Cape Town: David Philip Press, 1989), 4. 70 Susan Newton-King, Masters and Servants on the Cape Eastern Frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 22. 71 Penn, "Labour, Land and Livestock," 2.

25 into the interior of the Cape Colony depended on the skills, knowledge and livestock they

79 were able to acquire from the Khoi.

Predictably, violent confrontations erupted between Dutch settlers and Khoikhoi pastoralists, as the Khoi were stripped of their land and livestock. Sporadic conflicts had been taking place since the late seventeenth century, and these occurrences only increased as the colonial frontier expanded. As Trekboers pushed deeper into the interior, they confronted the Bushmen, who posed even greater military resistance to their colonization than their Khoikhoi neighbours. As Beinart and Bundy have argued, however, African politics and resistance to conquest were not limited to military struggles. Certainly contestations over resources took overtly violent forms, and wars were fought, but subtler protests continued on a smaller scale and in different arenas.

One must not underestimate the "importance of struggle and resistance in the political culture that developed in rural areas."74 The Khoikhoi and the Bushmen, often collectively referred to as the Khoisan, resisted further land dispossession and attempted to repossess lost land into the nineteenth century.

Stock theft and cattle killing were common forms of resistance employed by the

Khoisan in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and were "clearly intended as an act of war." One early example occurred in 1659, when a Khoikhoi group, known as the

Kaapmans, found their traditional grazing land near Wynberg and Rondebosch inhabited by European settlers. Unable to graze their cattle, the Kaapmans descended on colonial farms by night and drove away European livestock in retaliation. By day the raiders were

72 Newton-King, Masters and Servants. 42. 73 Such as the so-called "Bushman War" of 1739. See Newton-King, Masters and Servants. 68. 74 Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles. 25. 75 Newton-King, Masters and Servants. 67.

26 not to be found. When asked about the motive of these attacks, one Khoikhoi captive explained that the raids were an attempt to force the Dutch intruders to leave the colony.

The captive explained that the Boers were occupying land that from time immemorial had belonged to the Khoi. "They could no longer even drive their cattle to the river to drink, said he, without crossing cultivated ground, which they were not permitted to do,

77 and they had therefore determined to try to force the intruders to leave the country."

The Governor of the Cape from 1699 to 1707, Willem Adriaan van der Stel, admitted that the Khoikhoi were generally provoked into retaliatory attacks, as their land was dispossessed and settler trade had "degenerated into robbery."78

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Khoisan resistance escalated to include attacks on farm workers. In 1715, Khoisan guerrillas attacked the farm of Pieter

Willem van Heerden, killed two hundred sheep, and murdered two shepherds. Shortly thereafter, two nearby farms belonging to Joost Bevernagie and Pieter Roussouw were similarly attacked. The assailants captured two slaves and burned Roussouw's house to 70 the ground. In many cases, attacks such as these were successful in forcing settlers to abandon their farms, if only temporarily.80 These tactics, hauntingly similar to those employed in South Africa today,81 were "to become increasingly familiar in later years."82

The primary mechanism utilized to ensure white superiority and suppress Khoisan resistance in the Cape Colony was the commando. The system of commandos "evolved 76 Theal, History of South Africa Under the Administration of the Dutch East India Company. 92. 77 Ibid.. 99. 78 Newton-King, Masters and Servants. 64. 79 Ibid.. 65. 80 Theal, History of South Africa Under the Administration of the Dutch East India Company. 100. 81 See Steinberg, Midlands. 82 Newton-King, Masters and Servants. 65.

27 in response to Khoisan resistance, and was part and parcel of the expansionist nature of the Trekboers' pastoralist economy. The principal objective of the commando was to crush the resistance.. .so that the Trekboers could continue to advance." Within the first six months of van Riebeeck's appearance in the Cape Colony, police units were established not only to combat crime but also to control race relations. On the farmland of the interior, crime levels were low; the need for police in these rural areas thus arose

"not from any disorder or fear of crime, but to defend settler territory and regulate interaction with the overwhelming number of Blacks with whom they shared territory.

Of

The spur to the development of policing in rural areas was thus race not crime."

Policing race relations on the Cape's farms became the vocation of the commandos.

First authorized in 1715, commandos were independent, volunteer militia units charged with defending the Cape Colony's interests on the inland frontiers. The commandos were well suited to combat Khoisan resistance tactics, including stock theft, as they were not required to request permission from colonial officials before riding in pursuit of the assailants. Provided that the proper authorities were notified after the event, commandos and individual farmers were free to pursue any Khoisan who committed, or was suspected of committing, any offence against the Colony.86

The liberty afforded to the commandos entailed an effective capitulation of Dutch

East India Company control over its subjects' relationship with indigenous communities in the interior of the Cape Colony and exposed the Khoisan, and later other African communities, to the cruelty and barbarity of the land-, labour- and cattle-hungry

83 Penn, "Labour, Land and Livestock," 14. 84 Brewer, Black and Blue. 15. 85 Ibid. 86 Newton-King, Masters and Servants. 66.

28 burghers.87 As arbitrary as commando justice was, it was a cheap means of policing the frontier and controlling indigenous resistance, which explains its adoption by the Dutch

East India Company, as Susan Newton-King noted:

In the name of efficiency and economy, therefore, the VOC granted its inland subjects "more or less complete freedom to act against the Bushmen as they saw fit." They would use this freedom, alas, to embark upon an orgy of destruction, which, though on a smaller scale, rivalled the experience of the Spanish Caribbean in savage and gratuitous violence.

As Khoisan resistance intensified, the burgher community became more militarized and violence became more systematic. Furthermore, as fewer Khoisan were able to participate in their traditional occupations, some turned to vagrancy and theft rather than live a life of servitude.90 This helped confirm settlers' views of the Khoisan as lazy and dishonest and justified the vicious tactics of the commandos.

Under the pretext of retrieving stolen cattle, commandos often invaded neighbouring Khoisan kraals, sparking a cycle of raids and counter-raids. Moreover, as early as the 1730s, commando units "functioned as instruments of enslavement," raiding neighbouring African communities for slaves, usually women and children, who eventually found their way onto Boer farms. Theal admitted: "The natives were hunted down by commandos in a manner which must ever leave a stigma upon the memory of the frontier colonists of last century.. .No mercy was shown to adults, but the children were spared to be parcelled out as servants among the members of the commando."93

87 Newton-King, Masters and Servants, 66. 85 Ibid. 89 Timothy Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 30. 90 Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 30. 91 Perm, "Labour, Land and Livestock," 7. 92 Fred Morton, "Slavery in South Africa," in Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labour on the Dutch Frontier, ed. Elizabeth Eldredge and Fred Morton (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1994), 261. 93 Theal, Compendium. 116.

29 Access to the finest land, livestock and slaves was reserved for commando leaders, which testifies to the selfish desires of commando motives.94 Thus, "the patterns of informal and brutal proceedings and punishments in a society highly stratified along both class and race lines were set very early. Their dynamics prevailed even beyond the advent of democracy more than three hundred years later."95

The introduction of slave labour into the Cape economy also facilitated the development of a repressive and very often violent relationship between white farm- owners and black workers. As early as 1658, the Dutch East India Company imported substantial numbers of slaves from Asia and other regions of Africa into the Cape

Colony.96 The use of slave and Khoisan labour discouraged the establishment of a white labouring class and caused "every white man, no matter how humble his birth, to regard himself as a master."97 Slavery in the Cape Colony led to the opinion among settlers that unskilled labour was beneath the dignity of a white man, and a pattern of class differentiation that corresponded closely to race soon developed.98 In addition to affecting attitudes relating to labour, slavery laid the "foundations of a hierarchy of rights in South Africa where only the civil rights of white people were respected."99 The introduction of chattel slavery thus marked the beginning of a system of racial repression, with whites as indomitable masters and blacks as perpetual servants—a system that persisted and intensified into the late twentieth century.100

94 Keegan, Colonial South Africa. 30. 95 Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 30. 96 Nigel Worden, "Adjusting to Emancipation: Freed Slaves and Fanners in the Mid-Nineteenth Century South-Western Cape," in The Angry Divide: Social and Economic History of the Western Cape, ed. Wihnot G. James and Mary Simons (Cape Town: David Philip Press, 1989), 31. 97 Theal, History of South Africa Under the Administration of the Dutch East India Company, 51. 98 Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa. 22. 99 Fairweather, A Common Hunger. 33. 100 Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 24.

30 Unfortunately, as the number of slaves in the Cape increased and slaves outnumbered their masters, the means by which they were controlled became progressively more violent. Slaves "were subjected not only to the harsh and haphazard legal system set up by company officials but also to their masters' private 'discipline,' which could be brutal indeed and was seldom punished unless it resulted in serious injury or death."101 This brutal and racist disposition infected settlers' relationships with their

Khoi workers and the Khoisan community at large, as the colonists feared cooperation between their servants and their enemies.102 Treatment of the Khoisan only worsened as the slave trade was abolished in 1807. The British "abhorred the servile status of most blacks, though morality was not the only basis for their views; it was joined with an immediate material concern that forced labour was inefficient." The resulting labour shortage caused the settlers to look to the Khoisan to fill the void—either voluntarily or forcibly.104 The Trekboers took this attitude of racial superiority and brutality with them as they expanded into territories inhabited by Nguni speakers in the north and east.

European agriculture expanded relatively easily until 1770 when it reached the zuurveld—the area of fertile land west of the Fish River that was inhabited by expanding

Xhosa chiefdoms. The Eastern Cape, having better water supplies than the Western

Cape, was ideally suited for agriculture and cattle farming—the source of cultural identity of both the Boers and the Xhosa.105 The independence of the Khoisan having been destroyed, to the Xhosa fell the "burden of resistance to white penetration of the

101 Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 29. 102 Newton-King. Masters and Servants. 107-108. 103 Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 31. 104 Macmillan, The Cape Colour Question. 36. 105 Perm, "Labour, Land and Livestock," 10. To the Nguni societies (including the Xhosa and Zulu), the distribution of cattle played an important role in the relationship between chiefs and commoners and was essential for marriage ceremonies. Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa, 194.

31 South African interior."106 The Xhosa fought fiercely to defend their territory, and they engaged the Dutch and the British in many military encounters between 1779 and

1878.107 Pillaging, committed by both the colonists and the Xhosa, proliferated, and over

1OR four hundred farmhouses were burned to the ground in the ensuing violence. Rather than drive the Xhosa back across the Fish River, the colonists were themselves in danger of being forced to retreat by the advancing Xhosa.109 "In effect, the [Eastern] Cape frontier struggle was South Africa's Hundred Years' War."110

With colonial expansion halted by Xhosa resistance, the eastern frontier was effectively closed. This spelled disaster for the Khoisan. Those who had been able to retain their independence relied on large areas of land to hunt and graze stock, which was no longer available on the eastern frontier, while those who had been incorporated into the colonial economy often bore the brunt of burgher-Xhosa hostilities either as fighting members of commandos or as settlers' shepherds who were usually the first killed in

Xhosa raids.111 The wars and violence that overwhelmed the eastern frontier after 1770 disintegrated independent Khoisan existence, and "precipitated a reign of fear and violence which infected relations on the farms as well, so that even loyal and long- • 11? serving Khoi servants and dependants came to suffer severe brutality."

Many Khoisan had previously enjoyed relatively peaceful relationships with their white bosses, and were even trusted with firearms and went out on commando with their 106 Fairweather, A Common Hunger. 26. Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 34. 108 Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa. 38. 109 Ibid. 110 William M. Macmillan, Africa Emergent: A Survey of Social Political and Economic Trends in British Africa (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1949), 115. 111 Hermann Giliomee, "The Eastern Frontier, 1770-1812," in The Shaping of South African Society. 1652- 1840. ed. Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 431. 112 Keegan, Colonial South Africa. 32.

32 employers. "Many a veeboer [stock farmer] was saved from ruin by timely action of his armed servants."113 Paternalism often characterized farmer-labourer relationships on

Boer farms leading up to 1770; "this implied that the master had to provide for and dispense justice to his labourers and treat them humanely, while his labourers, who had slowly lost the freedom and status of clients, were bound by the duty to work properly and obey their master's commands." However, with the closing of the eastern frontier, farmers feared their Khoisan servants would unite with their Xhosa enemies and release havoc upon their farms. Paternalistic relationships then tended to shade into violence and labour-repression.

Farmers' fears were not completely unfounded,116 for in 1799, an alliance of

117 • • •

Khoisan servants and Xhosa resistors confronted colonial farmers. Beginning in

March of 1799, hundreds of disgruntled farm servants abandoned the eastern frontier farms, joined their Xhosa allies, and initiated a four-year-long war, "not so much to improve working conditions as to reclaim the 'country of which our fathers have been 11 o despoiled.'" Together, the Khoisan and Xhosa were able to defeat strong burgher commandos, seize livestock, firearms, ammunition and wagons, and force many colonists and their families to abandon their farms.119 As late as 1801, the British, who had taken over administration of the Cape Colony from the Dutch in 1795, refused to aid the burghers against their former servants and criticized the eastern colonists who, "by their 113 Newton-King, Masters and Servants. 133. 114 Giliomee, "The Eastern Frontier," 451. 115 Ibid. 116 Although perhaps the brutality with which farmers treated their workers due to this fear actually encouraged their workers to turn against them. 117 Keegan, Colonial South Africa. 33. 118 Richard Elphick and V.C. Malherbe, "The Khoisan to 1828," in The Shaping of South African Society. 1652-1840. ed. Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (Middletown, Conecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 33. 119 Ibjd., 34.

33 excessive and general cruelty have at length provoked these humble pacific people to acts of revenge."120 The war continued until a peace settlement was reached in 1803 under the direction of the Batavian Regime (Dutch administration, which resumed control of the Colony for a brief period between 1803 and 1806).

The Khoisan rebellion was finally settled, but eastern colonists were still contending with their Xhosa enemies. Burgher settlers had thrice attempted to expel the

Xhosa beyond the Fish River, and they failed each time. It was not until the British administration, under the leadership of Governor John Cradock, sent regiments to aid the settlers in their war against the Xhosa in 1811 and 1812 that the Xhosa were finally ousted from the zuurveld.121 The combined efforts of the British and Boer forces defeated the Xhosa and drove them back beyond the Fish River, ending the fourth of nine so-called Kaffir or Xhosa Wars. "This was the first great removal in South African history."122 From 1812 to 1847, the Fish River marked the border between European colonialism and Xhosa independence. Fierce competition for land and cattle continued between the Trekboers and the Xhosa, which resulted in "mutual [and often fraudulent] complaints of cattle-stealing," raids, counter-raids, and five further wars.123 The closing of the eastern frontier accentuated the competition for land, labour and livestock within the Cape Colony. "The struggle for these resources took place under the shadow of the dominant institution of the era—the commando."124

Conflicts between burgher commandos and Xhosa warriors continued to plague the eastern frontier. In 1847 the British defeated the Xhosa in the seventh Xhosa War,

120 Elphick and Malherbe, "The Khoisan to 1828," 34. 121 Giliomee, "The Eastern Frontier, 459. 122 Fairweather, A Common Hunger. 2006. 123 Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa. 33. 124 Perm, "Labour, Land and Livestock," 19.

34 and the Xhosa were forced to retreat beyond the Great Kei River, ceding the area between the Fish and Kei Rivers to the British. The situation only worsened for the Xhosa when in 1857 a young Xhosa prophetess named Nongqawuse proclaimed that Xhosa society would be regenerated, healthy cattle would flourish, and grain would become abundant if the Xhosa slaughtered all their cattle and destroyed all their crops before the appointed day on which the sun would rise in the west.125 "In a mood of mass hysteria born from despair at repeated military defeat and growing poverty, the Xhosa widely obeyed the message."126 On the appointed day, however, the sun rose in the east. Thousands of

Xhosa died of starvation, and thousands more poured into the Colony to find employment in the colonial economy.

Devastated, the Xhosa looked to the colonists for aid. Rather than thwart this calamity, Cape Colony Governor Sir George Grey went out of his way to exploit this tragedy for the benefit of the colonists. Grey easily could have made food available to the hungry; instead, he used the "desperate starvation of the people to engineer their mass exodus via the colonial labour market, while filling their former lands with white settlers." In this manner, Governor Grey, though he did not instigate the Cattle Killing,

"bears the responsibility for turning it into an irrevocable catastrophe." Shortly after the Cattle Killing, the colonists and the Xhosa fought their final war. In 1879, the British defeated the Xhosa chiefs for the last time, and Xhosa "national, cultural and economic integrity, long penetrated and undermined by colonial pressure, finally collapsed."129

125 J.B. Peries, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856-7 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1989). 126 Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa. 93. 127 Peries, The Dead Will Arise. 317. 128Ibid..318. 129 Ibid, 321.

35 The exploitation of the tragedy caused by the Great Cattle Killing is but one example of the destruction the British administration caused in the Cape Colony. The

British ruled the Cape Colony from 1795 to 1910, except for a brief period from 1803 to

1806 during which the Dutch resumed control. Settler society under the Dutch administration had often been violent, racist and repressive, particularly in the Western

Cape; however, with the establishment of British imperial rule, especially after 1806, racism and repression became entrenched in colonial policy, and violence towards

130

African workers became much more systematic.

In order to ensure adequate labour for farmers, Governor Caledon issued a decree in 1809, known as the Hottentot Proclamation, which "ratified and entrenched" the unfree status of the Khoi.131 According to this edict, Khoi were not permitted in "white areas" unless employed there, and they "could not move around, either in search of better wages and conditions of service or to reach a mission station where they could live without working for a white farmer."132 Khoikhoi workers had to be issued passes in order to leave their place of work, and any Khoi found without a pass or a fixed place of residence were arrested. The arrested Khoi were compelled to serve farmers at very low wages.

"As the great majority of these people did not possess an inch of land, this proclamation virtually placed the whole race in a condition of serfdom." Hence, the pass laws, which would become the bane of African life in the mid twentieth century, were born.

In 1811, Sir John Cradock succeeded the Earl of Caledon as Governor of the Cape and in 1812 issued another proclamation concerning the Khoikhoi. It stated that, "the

130 Newton-King, Masters and Servants. 39. 131 Ibid., 40. 132 Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa. 43. 133 Theal, Compendium. 204.

36 children of Hottentot servants or farm labourers, after being maintained and provided for by the employers for a period of eight years, should be apprenticed or indentured for a further period of ten years, in order to prevent their becoming vagrants."134 This was known as apprenticeship, and had the effect of immobilizing not only the child's labour, but also that of the entire family, as families were reluctant to leave their child behind in search of better wages or working conditions. Thus, whole families of free Khoikhoi were tied to an individual farm.135 Although overly apologetic of violence committed by the Dutch and Afrikaners, Theal made an accurate point concerning apprenticeship:

No regulation under the government of the East India Company exceeded [apprenticeship] in cruelty. The sufferings of the natives in those days resulted principally from the anarchy in which the whites on the frontier lived, but now, under a strong government, the laws were so modelled as to crush out their freedom and humanity. This edict completely ignored the rights of Hottentot parents to their children, and substituted government officers for the guardians appointed by nature...In this manner the first few years of the second English occupation of the colony were marked by a disregard of the natural rights of the natives, which no effort of reasoning can justify and no national feeling excuse.136

Although the British government preached a policy of liberalism, through the proclamations in 1809 and 1812, it created an oppressed work force for white farmers that teetered on the verge of slavery. These laws "laid the basis for the development of a common view, uniting British rulers and Afrikaner notables, of the power of the law as a means of social control."137

134 J.C. Voigt, Fifty Years of the History of the Republic in South Africa, 1795-1845 (1899; rpt. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 109. 135 Ross, "The Origins of Capitalist Agriculture," 78. 136 Theal, Compendium. 205. 137 Keegan, Colonial South Africa, 56.

37 In 1828, the British passed Ordinance 50, which was meant to free the Khoisan population "from the disabilities of its former status," although in practice it changed the status of the Khoisan very little. Ordinance 50 was intended to rid the Cape Colony of pass laws and the crime of vagrancy. It forbade the punishment of Khoisan without trial, and it abolished all forms of forced labour. Labour contracts were to be entered into freely, and some of the most abrasive qualities of former labour relationships, such as the apprenticing of children, were eliminated. Furthermore, Ordinance 50 allowed the

Khoisan to purchase land. Although the aim of Ordinance 50 was admirable, the

Ordinance was essentially ineffective for two reasons. First, most colonists thought

Ordinance 50 to be "the work of the devil" and had little intention of compliance.140

Second, the Khoisan did not possess the means to purchase land, which eliminated any hope of independence. "Without land, their newly won legal equality did not seem of great consequence. Land continued to be their greatest need and most urgent demand, poverty the most essential fact of life."141

In 1834, the British administration abolished slavery, although it allowed apprenticeship to continue for four additional years. On December 1, 1838, slaves were officially freed, and ex-slaves immediately began abandoning the farms. For the next several years, farmers complained of a lack of labour and the inability to control workers.

When farmers complained "of idleness and fecklessness, they in effect were describing a determination by ex-slaves to define the conditions under which they worked."142

Unfortunately, there were few options for ex-slaves: "so advanced was the extent of

138 Macmillan, Africa Emergent. 119. 139 Keegan, Colonial South Africa. 103-104. 140 Ibid.. 105. 141 Ibid.. 117. 142 Ibjd., 123.

38 proletarianisation and economic dependence among the labouring classes that their chances of real freedom from servility were severely limited in the longer term."143

Without land of their own to cultivate, most ex-slaves eventually returned to the farms to work under conditions that varied little from those under which they toiled as slaves.

Abolition thus provided little possibility for "challenging the chains of dependency."

Afrikaner farmers did not share the liberal ideals of the British, and they consistently called for tougher regulations and harsher punishments for Africans. The

Boers demanded a vagrancy law to combat supposed black crime, but the British refused:

How is it possible, said the [Boer] farmers, for us to cultivate the ground or breed cattle with all these savages and semi-savages constantly watching for opportunities to plunder us, with no police, and no law under which suspicious characters can be arrested and made to account for their manner of living?145

Furthermore, consumed by the "ubiquitous conviction of white settlers that manual work was not something they should perform," Boers resented the destruction of their cheap work force caused by the abolition of slavery.146 The migration of Afrikaner farmers out of the British-ruled Cape Colony, known as the Great Trek, was thus a solution to increasing land shortage and a protest of Britain's new official attitude toward Africans in the Cape.147 "The migration increased as Boer trekkers voted with their feet against

English rule of the Cape."148

143 Keegan, Colonial South Africa. 124. 144 Ibid. 145 Theal, History of the Boers in South Africa. 63. 146 Charles H. Feinstein, An Economic History of South Africa: Conquest. Discrimination and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 50. 147 Macmillan, Bantu. Boer and Briton. 199. 148 Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 33.

39 The Great Trek and the Establishment of Natal

Claiming that they were freeing themselves "not of law but of lawlessness," thousands of Boers left the Cape in defiance of British policies beginning in 1834.149 The

Boers organized themselves into well-armed military units and vowed to find a new home for themselves in the interior and make war upon whomever they chose in the process.150 "The Great Trek thus meant that the conditions of continuous tension previously typical of the Cape's eastern frontier had spread to huge areas of the interior."151 The tendency of the Boers to invert law and lawlessness led to the establishment of colonies in which rural race relations were governed by intentions that would seem criminal elsewhere, and, as will be shown in the following chapters, this backwards sense of law and order had enormously negative affects on crime and policing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Trekboers looked to the north for suitable land on which to settle. The

Mfecane, loosely defined as "the socio-political changes and associated demographic turmoil and violence of the early nineteenth century in southern Africa [which] were the result of a complex interaction between factors governed by the physical environment and local patterns of economic and political organisation," had temporarily dislocated much of the African population north of the Orange River. The Trekboers, claiming

Zulu wars had left this vast region uninhabited, moved north to lay claim to this fertile territory. The open plains of what would become Natal, the Orange Free State and the

149 Theal, History of the Boers in South Africa. 70. 150 Theal, Compendium. 232. 151 Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa. 82. 152 Elizabeth Eldredge, "Sources of Conflict in Southern Africa c. 1800-1830: The 'Mfecane' Reconsidered," in The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in Southern African History, ed. Carolyn Hamilton (Johannesburg and Pietermaritzburg: Witwatersrand University Press and University of Natal Press, 1995), 123.

40 Transvaal, seemed an ideal location for white settlement. These regions, however, were not unpopulated as the Trekboers claimed, and their conquest of these lands was an extremely violent process.

As the Trekboers pressed north into what they had hoped was empty territory, they encountered several African chiefdOms that presented determined resistance to the

Trekkers.

The Matabele, under Moselekatze, had to be driven out to the northwest; the Basuto kept the Free State at war for many years; Sekukuni came near to causing the downfall of the Transvaal in the late [eighteen] seventies; and lesser tribes and chiefs took so much "keeping to their duty" that an anti-native "commando" of some sort was an almost annual occurrence in the Transvaal right down into the [eighteen] nineties.154

Thus, although the Voortrekkers possessed superior weaponry, the resistance displayed by the African chiefdoms restricted, if only temporarily, the Trekkers' access to land and resources.155 The Trekboers, and the British colonizers that followed, as well as African chiefs who wanted to protect their independence without resorting to military confrontation, often attempted to negotiate land sharing schemes through treaties.

However, when the treaties failed, and they usually did, "well-armed commandos were the colonial solution."156

Eventually, the Trekboers gained the upper hand, and African resistance was subdued to the point that the Afrikaners were able to establish independent republics: the

Natalia Republic in 1838, which the British annexed in 1843, the South African Republic

(later renamed the Transvaal) and the Orange Free State, which the British recognized as

Keegan, "White Settlement and Black Subjugation," 219. Macmillan. Africa Emergent 117. Keegan, "White Settlement and Black Subjugation," 218. Fairweather, A Common Hunger. 50.

41 independent in 1852 and 1854 respectively. It is important to note, however, that even after African communities in these regions had been militarily conquered, they continued to resist colonial rule by employing tactics similar to those utilized by the Khoisan and the Xhosa in the Cape Colony—tactics such as stealing cattle and committing arson.

According to Afrikaner historians, "the emigrant farmers had now freed South Africa of the destructive Zulu power."159 Liberal historians, however, would remember the Great

Trek and the resulting land dispossession as the "supreme disaster of the country's history."160

The majority of the Trekboers first settled in Natal; however, Natal was not as empty as the Voortrekkers had assumed. Many violent confrontations erupted between the Boer invaders and the Zulu inhabitants of Natal, whom the Boers viewed as foreigners with no right to land. Perhaps the most disastrous of these conflicts for the

Zulu was the Battle of Blood River, in which it is said so much Zulu blood was spilled that the river ran red. Following their defeat, the Zulu ceded almost half the area of the

Zulu Kingdom to the new Boer Republic of Natalia, and the Voortrekkers were able to establish their capital at Pietermaritzburg in 1838.162 The Boers did not have much time to establish firm control over the colony, for in 1843 the British annexed Natal, and a substantial number of the Afrikaner settlers left the colony to join their brethren in the

Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa. 91. 158 Macmillan, Bantu, Boer and Briton. 206. 159 George McCall Theal, The Story of the Nations: South Africa (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894), 219. Similar rhetoric can be found in Voight, Fifty Years of the History of the Republic in South Africa. 204. 160 Macmillan, Bantu. Boer and Briton, 192-193. 161 Africans outnumbered white settlers by approximately fifty to one. Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 37. Even in the late 1850s, after Britain encouraged white settlement in the colony, Africans still outnumber white settlers ten to one. Fairweather, A Common Hunger. 60. 162 Charles Ballard, "Traders, Trekkers and Colonists" in Natal and Zululand from Earliest Times to 1910: A New History, ed. Andrew Duminy and Bill Guest (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press and Shuter & Shooter Ltd., 1989), 122.

42 Orange Free State and the Transvaal. It was in British-controlled Natal that the system of land reservation and so-called Native Law—both integral aspects of the later apartheid regime—were initiated.163

As early as 1846, British statesman Theophilus Shepstone attempted to relocate approximately 80,000 Natal Africans into reserves in order to divide Natal's fertile soil into private farms for white ownership. White farmers criticized Shepstone's policy, however, because they felt Africans were being allotted too much land and would be able to continue to support themselves without labouring in white-owned industries.165 The plots each African family received in the reserves were, in fact, "too small and barren to cultivate successfully and ensured that the residents could not be self-sufficient and would therefore have to depend on colonial employers."166 However, due to the large exodus of Afrikaners following 1843, the failure of immigration plans to create a prosperous British farming class in Natal, and the relative weakness of the colonial government, African farmers were able to retain a substantial degree of independence by cultivating the immense tracts of land owned by absentee landlords and land speculation companies. In this manner, a prosperous African peasantry developed in Natal in the mid to late nineteenth century. The British colonial government encouraged this arrangement in order to ensure adequate food supplies for the white population. "Between 1850 and

1880, there was a considerable increase in the amount of land cultivated by Africans and

Gillian Hart, Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 70. 164 Ballard, "Traders, Trekkers and Colonists," 125. 165 Fairweather, A Common Hunger. 75. 166 Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 37.

43 in the crops reaped." Thus, as long as land remained relatively accessible, and the

"pace of economic development and competition was gentle," the British could not control the terms on which Africans worked.168

This trend changed with the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley in 1867 and gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886. The resulting formation and boom of the mining industry increased demand for agricultural commodities and drastically altered the relationship between landowners and their African tenants. Farming had become a profitable endeavour, and more white farmers pursued commercial farming each year.

Land companies found it more profitable to sell their land to white commercial farmers than to continue leasing it to African tenants.169 Africans, however, were more efficient producers than their white counterparts, and their competition presented a major obstacle to the development of a white commercial farming class. Furthermore, white farmers could not successfully cultivate their farms without black labour, which could not be secured while Africans had access to land. Once the powerful land companies were no longer opposed, the British colonial government pursued measures to force Africans off the land and into the colonial labour market.170

Two things particularly irked white commercial farmers: African land-purchase and squatting. Squatters were defined as Africans who avoided labouring for a white farmer by residing on white-owned land and paying rent.171 Squatting and purchasing

167 John Lambert, "From Independence to Rebellion: African Society in Crisis, c. 1880-1910," in Natal and Zululand from Earliest Times to 1910: A New History, ed. Andrew Duminy and Bill Guest (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press and Shuter and Shooter Ltd., 1989), 376. 168 Macmillan, Africa Emergent 119. 169 Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa, 152. 170 Ibjd. 171 Henry Slater, "The Changing Pattern of Economic Relationships in Rural Natal, 1838-1914" in Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa, ed. Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore (London: Longman, 1980), 162.

44 land spared Africans from toiling for white farmers. Therefore, in 1903, the British colonial government in Natal began imposing a series of taxes on Africans designed to destroy their economic independence and force them to become wage labourers on white farms—the worst paid occupation in the colony.172 It is essential to recognize, however, that Africans in Natal fiercely struggled to maintain access to land and to avoid the pressures aimed at forcing them into the colonial workforce; in the process, African protest rendered much colonial legislation ineffective.

In the Umzimkulu district, for example, Africans were able to successfully utilize subtle tactics to avoid labour tenancy. In 1896 one white farmer named Norse sold his farm due to the "great number of annoyances for which [Africans were] responsible."174

The farmer complained:

The tendency of the native is to drive the white man back....When they have a beer drink they go through your fences, their dogs are worrying one's sheep continually and destroying your game; whenever you are adjoining a location they have their rams, their bulls and their horses, and they are continually breaking through your fences and getting at your stock. They leave your gates open and climb through the fences. The worry, worry, worry of these people simply drives a white man off. Many farms are now entirely in the hands of natives, which at one time were in the hands of Europeans for this very reason.

Many other white farmers in the district were of similar mind, and rather than attempt to farm the land themselves, they relied on African renters and sharecroppers. Even though colonists purchased most of the land in the Umzimkulu district, many Africans were able

172 Shula Marks, Reluctant Rebellion: The 1906-8 Disturbances in Natal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 143. 173 Keletso Atkins, The Moon is Dead! Give Us Our Money!: The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, Natal. South Africa, 1843-1900 (Heinemann: Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1993), 3. 174 Beinart, "Settler Accumulation," 300. 175 Ibid.

45 to maintain a fairly independent living on it. This was a small victory for the African residents of Umzimkulu.

The opinion flourished in Natal that Africans, "though easily contented with their lot, submit to no control save that of force, and accept no bond save that of expediency"—an opinion that influenced much of South African native policy.

Subsequently, throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Natal police were tasked with "stamping out" the '"smouldering fire' of native unrest," such as that in the

Umzimkulu district.177 Moreover, magistrates often imposed "brutal and arbitrary punishments" on Africans convicted of even the smallest crimes against the colony.

On the farms, for example, laws restricted Africans' movements and inflicted weighty, and usually violent, punishments for negligence, desertion, or any other blunder. White farmers viewed the failure of Africans to work efficiently for them as a criminal offence. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, white attitudes towards Africans were "a curious blend of paternalism, fear and contempt."180

Despite strong African resistance, whites' "capitulation to racial repression

1 01 was...blatant." The large proportion of Africans in Natal compared to whites can, in part, explain this phenomenon. White settlers were outnumbered in the Cape as well, but not to such a degree as in Natal. The "warlike reputation" of the Zulu further agitated white settlers, and from the establishment of the colony in 1838, colonists feared what

176 De Kiewiet, The Imperial Factor. 36. 177 Ibid.. 37. 178 Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 36. 179 Marks, Reluctant Rebellion. 17. 180 Ibjd., 11. 181 Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 36. 182 Macmillan, Africa Emergent, 118.

46 Shepstone called "the encroachment of 'barbarism and inhumanity.'" This fear of a large, hostile African population acted as a powerful incentive to brutally repress any hint of African resistance. The psychological well-being of the white population depended on the African population's absolute recognition of white supremacy.184 This was remarkably similar to the opinion of the Afrikaners in the Orange Free State and the

Transvaal.

The Orange Free State and the South African Republic (Transvaal)

Boer farmers forged their own unique identity out of the decades of isolation on the Cape frontier and the perils of life during the Great Trek and the establishment of the new colonies. In their isolation, "Boers had become Afrikaners, the white tribe of Africa, arrogant, xenophobic, and 'full of blood,' as the Zulus say of tyrants." They developed their own language (Afrikaans) and traditions. Afrikaners depicted themselves as "the only whites who had become truly indigenous and who were prepared to fight to the end for white supremacy."186 Decades of violent warfare with their African neighbours, competition with the British, and struggling to "tear from the barren environment the means of survival"187 had forged an Afrikaner identity that was based on self-reliance and was "exceedingly averse to restraint."188 The resulting sense of racial superiority greatly influenced not only the development of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal but also the progress of twentieth century South African society. Although they were often

183 Fairweather, A Common Hunger. 57. 184 Marks, Reluctant Rebellion. 152. 185 Rian Malan, My Traitor's Heart (New York, The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), 16. 186 Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), xvi. 187 Keegan, Colonial South Africa. 1. 188 Theal, History of South Africa Under the Administration of the Dutch East India Company. 218.

47 portrayed as '"the villain, the fanatic, who created or at least perfected institutionalized racial discrimination,'" it would be a mistake to assume the Afrikaners were on the whole

1 SO more racially repressive or apathetic to Africans' needs than the English. In fact, the patterns of land dispossession, labour exploitation and racial repression in the Boer

Republics closely resembled those in British Natal.

Afrikaner traders, ivory hunters and stock raisers penetrated the region beyond the

Orange River as early as the late eighteenth century.190 Large-scale Boer immigration began in the mid-1830s, as the Voortrekkers crossed the Orange River in search of a new home free of British interference. The Boers waged war and pilfered as much land as they could; they encouraged inter-tribal conflict in order to claim land in the wake of the ensuing violence, and they allied themselves with African chiefs in war against other chiefs in return for land.191 All male Voortrekkers were entitled to large tracts of land regardless of the African population already established there. Like the early European settlers in the Cape "who followed the Khoikhoi (as if they were bloodhounds) to well- watered areas," the Trekboers understood the benefits of annexing land Africans already occupied.192 These regions were usually well suited for cultivation and cattle rearing, and they already held a supply of African labour. Many Africans in the Boer Republics thus found themselves dispossessed of their land and expected to work for white farmers or pay rent in cash, kind and/or labour to the new white owners. If they refused, Boer commandos would attempt to persuade them otherwise.193

189 Giliomee, The Afrikaners, xvi. 190 Morton, "Slavery in South Africa," 262. 191 Colin Murray, Black Mountain: Land. Class and Power in the Eastern Orange Free State, 1880s to 1980s (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1992), 29. 192 Fairweather, A Common Hunger. 55.

48 As in the Cape Colony and Natal, African struggles for survival and independence in the Boer Republics "were commonly expressed in the raiding and counter-raiding of livestock, the dominant currency of political control over land and people." Like their counterparts in the British Colonies, Africans in the Boer Republics also viewed fences surrounding settler farms as a symbol of private, white-owned property and their own dispossession. Fences certainly had agricultural purposes such as keeping stock off ploughed plots and protecting farm animals from predators; however, they also demarcated the boundaries between white- and black-owned land, made stock theft more difficult, and prevented African-owned stock from grazing on white-owned land. 5 The race-related importance of fences was evident in the fact that more farmland tended to be fenced off in regions neighbouring African residences than in regions surrounded by other white-owned farms. Consequently, the destruction of fences also became a popular tactic in Africans' attempts to resist further settler accumulation.196

Despite much African resistance and the imperial ambitions of the British, the

South African Republic (later renamed the Transvaal) became an independent Boer

Republic in 1852, followed by the Orange Free State in 1854.197 In all four of the South

African colonies, the system of land tenure was "exceedingly unfavourable" to the

African populations; it was in the Boer Republics and especially the Transvaal, however, that land dispossession was most extreme.198 Shepstone commented on this difficulty:

Notwithstanding the enormous native population which the Boers found in the Transvaal and which continues to reside there, the Government of the Republic never thought it necessary, even as a matter of mere prudence, to

194 Murray, Black Mountain, 16. 195 Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa, 53. 196 Beinart, "Settler Accumulation," 291. 197 Macmillan, Complex South Africa, 14. 198 De Kiewiet, The Imperial Factor in South Africa. 183-184.

49 set apart land for the occupation of the natives; on the contrary the land occupied by the latter was, without reference to the occupants, granted to private individuals; and there are instances in which the residences of chiefs of tribes, with thousands of inhabitants living in one spot, have been so granted to individuals without reference to or even the knowledge of the chief and people concerned.

Without even the semblance of liberal concern for the welfare of Africans, and with the

"desire to permit no equality between coloured people and the white inhabitants, either in

Church or State," farmers in the Boer Republics proceeded to exploit African labour.2

Similar to the situation in Natal, the Boer Republics were unable to obliterate the independence of the African population. Squatting, landownership and sharecropping

(whereby Africans farmed a white-owned plot and gave the owner half of the crops reaped in exchange for the use of his land) continued to allow Africans a substantial degree of independence. As in Natal, Africans performed the majority of the agricultural cultivation in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal; they "either worked their own lands and paid tribute or farmed rented land or worked—largely under duress—as labourers where white farmers were engaged in productive activities."201 Many Africans were able to build profitable farming communities on white-owned land.

White farmers, particularly poor Afrikaners, found this trend of successful

African agriculture unacceptable. "Thus anxiety about the threat to the labour supply represented by prosperous Africans was closely linked to anxiety about white impoverishment."202 The demand for cheap, docile labour in the Boer Republics was

"ruthless and insatiable. We should not underestimate the violence with which this

De Kiewiet, The Imperial Factor in South Africa, 184. 200 Taken from the Transvaal Constitution. Gordon, Transformation and Trouble, 35. 201 Stanley Trapido, "Putting a Plough to the Ground: A History of Tenant Production on the Vereeniging Estates, 1896-1920," in Putting a Plough to the Ground: Accumulation and Dispossession in Rural South Africa. 1850-1930. ed. William Beinart, Peter Delius and Stanley Trapido (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986), 361. 202 Murray, Black Mountain. 75.

50 workforce was created." Fierce wars were fought during the conquest of the

Republics, and extensive proletarianization generally followed.204 Force was not sufficient, however, to establish an adequate labour pool and squash African competition;

"it was only with the enormously important intervention of the state, first in a form of taxation and later in land reservation.. .that supplies began to meet demand."

Following the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886, the Boer

Republics implemented pass laws similar to those employed in the British colonies.

These pass laws "balanced the need for unskilled labour in mining and in the new industries that sprang up around it with the continuing need to keep the natives down on the farm," by controlling the movement of the African population.206 As with most repressive policies aimed at controlling Africans, the pass laws were justified by playing on settlers' fear of African vagrancy and crime. These passes, as in the British colonies,

"were often abused by whites and always bitterly resented by blacks."207 Africans, however, were able to break free of the repression of the Boers during the Anglo-Boer

War of 1899 to 1902. Unfortunately, this was only a temporary respite from the demands of the Afrikaner farmers, for the British aided in reinstating Afrikaner authority on white farms when the Boers were finally defeated in 1902 and British rule extended to the

Orange Free State and the Transvaal.

Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone, "Introduction," in Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation. Culture and Consciousness. 1870-1930. ed. Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone (New York: Longman, 1982), 12. 204 Ibjd. 205 Ibid. 206 Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 41. 207 Feinstein, An Economic History of South Africa. 57.

51 The Anglo-Boer War and the Union of South Africa

During the Anglo-Boer War, thousands of Africans rebelled against Boer rule and joined forces with the British against the Afrikaners in the Orange Free State and the

Transvaal. For these Africans, the war against the Boers was "associated indissolubly with an escape from bondage and the restitution of a world of which they had been dispossessed."208 Africans raided houses, seized cattle, and helped the British forces place Afrikaner families in concentration camps. They also successfully cultivated the land while the Afrikaner farmers were occupied with the war. In this manner, by the end of the conflict much of the white-owned land in the Boer Republics was in the hands of

Africans who "did not view this simply as a temporary enjoyment of a resource during an interregnum in which the rule of a ruling class was suspended: they believed that their appropriations (or, more correctly, ^appropriations) of land would be permanent."209 To their dismay, the British not only allowed the Boers to repossess the farms once the war came to an end, but they also aided their former enemies in retaking the farms from their

African tenants.

It is important to recognize, as Colin Bundy and Monica Wilson have, that

African farmers were incredibly successful, both during the Anglo-Boer War and in the early reserves. "The conventional wisdom that Africans were failed farmers was a convenient justification for taking their lands away from them,"210 and calls into question the fear in white South Africa today that agricultural production in the hands of Africans is doomed to failure. Nevertheless, following the Vereeniging Peace Agreement,

Africans were again forced to become sharecroppers or labour tenants on white-owned

208 Krikler, Revolution from Above. Rebellion from Below. 14. 209Ibjd.,20. 210 Fairweather, A Common Hunger. 78.

52 farms or attempt to find wage labour in the mines or cities. In the aftermath of the

Anglo-Boer War, white farmers in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal largely forgot the peasants' revolt against them during the war. This, Krikler pointed out, was because the revolt's "meaning and potential were simply too terrifying to be directly confronted by the landowners. What the landlords recoiled from, however, can today be embraced as a message of hope for South African agrarian workers and their allies."211

Once they returned from the war in 1902, Afrikaner farmers found their authority undermined by Africans who claimed to have the absolute right to live on the land they had been cultivating independently since the beginning of the war—without labouring for the white farmers or paying rent.212 Boer farmers were only able to retake the farmland with extensive aid from the South African Constabulary. Thus in the years following the

Anglo-Boer War, the police were responsible for the resettlement of the Boer farms and for the restoration of race relations.213 The central function of the police in the post-war

Boer Republics was "to ensure the landowners' power over people and economic resources on private property, and thereby to enable them to renew productive activity."214 Individual Afrikaner farmers were even permitted to take up arms against

Africans in order to once again dispossess them of the land.

Apart from the re-dispossession of their land, the end of the Anglo-Boer War had other important repercussions for Africans both in the Boer Republics and the British

Colonies. The Vereeniging Peace Agreement contained a clause that allowed the former

Boer Republics to continue to deny Africans the franchise—an opportunity available to

211 Krikler, Revolution from Above, Rebellion from Below. 233. 212 Ibid., 29. 213 Ibid., 46. 214 Ibid., 47.

53 non-whites in the Cape Colony although not in Natal. "From then on it would never again be possible for the British government to impose a policy which might have opened the way to the elimination of colour barriers."215 The British thus accepted the foundation of inequality on which the Boer Republics were established.

Another important repercussion of the end of the war was the increased denial of

Africans' right to land. In the wake of the war, reconstruction efforts were marred by a labour shortage. As far as whites were concerned, "the key to the resolution of the labour shortage...was to restrict Africans' direct access to land as tightly as possible."216 The

British were intent on reconciling themselves with the Boers, and the way to do this was

917 through the subordination of the African peasantry. However, while poor white farmers relied on African sharecroppers to keep their land productive, sharecropping allowed African farmers to retain a significant amount of independence and wealth.

Well-off white farmers did not rely on sharecropping and viewed the system as direct competition and an inappropriate use of African labour. Furthermore, "the perception arose that African farmers were growing richer and more independent while an increasing number of whites (mainly Afrikaners) were becoming poor. The so-called 'poor-white- 918 problem' was the basis of a populist mobilization against African competition."

The years between the end of the Anglo-Boer War and 1913 were filled with largely unsuccessful attempts by the British administration and wealthy white farm- owners to control African labour. In 1905, for example, the South African Native Affairs

Commission (SANAC) devised a reserve policy based on Cecil Rhodes' Glen Grey Act

215 Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa. 146. 216 Murray, Black Mountain, 73. 217 Brian Willan in Sol Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, v. 218 Fairweather, A Common Hunger. 78.

54 of 1894 that "formalized the idea of racial segregation by envisaging reserves as a mandatory and permanent principle of land allocation."219 The reserve system was designed to keep Africans separate from white communities and to make them available for labour in white industries. "It must be brought home to them," Rhodes argued, "that in the future nine tenths of them will have to spend their lives in daily labour, in physical work, in manual labour."220 The white administrators were able to justify this exploitation of African labour by depicting Africans as inherently lazy, inefficient and unintelligent.221 Other policies were formulated to control labour by severely restricting

Africans' access to land; however, it was not until after the union of the four colonies in

1910 that the new South African state succeeded in culminating these semi-abortive policies into a law that would succeed in systematically denying Africans access to land and forcing them to labour for white employers. This was the 1913 Native Land Act.

The 1913 Native Land Act legalized the racist distribution of the land by allotting a mere seven percent of the totality of South Africa for African settlement and prevented

African land purchase and independent farming outside these areas.222 These reserves were of very little use to the African population, as they were generally the worst regions for agriculture and were plagued by overcrowding. The Act drew a firm line "between white and black settlement. The segregation of which men had been talking for a hundred years was to be undertaken at last."223 Furthermore, according to the terms of this Act, all existing land agreements, such as sharecropping arrangements, were annulled, and over one million African tenants were forced to leave the homes they had

219 Fairweather, A Common Hunger. 77. 220 Ibid. 221 Ibjd. 222 Davis, We Cry for our Land. 3. 223 De Kiewiet, A History of South Africa. 205.

55 occupied for generations.224 The only form of rent payment encouraged by the Act was

99S labour, and sharecropping was banned entirely in the Orange Free State. "The Boer republican law prohibiting Africans from living on farms except as servants was thus 99f\ extended to the whole Union."

Sol Plaatje made an interesting point concerning the 1913 Land Act. He noted that few Africans would outright object to being a servant, especially if his or her employer were "worth working for."227 However, one of the clauses of the Act stated that white farmers had unrestricted access to their tenants' cattle. The wealthiest and most independent Africans (in other words those with large amounts of cattle) suffered most from these terms, which, ironically, were inspired by the belief in Africans' 99S

"incurable laziness." Faced with losing the right to their own cattle, Africans "would decide to leave the farm rather than make the landlord a present of all their life's savings." This echoes Macmillan's point: Unanimous testimony from African spokesmen [stated] that the restrictions of Pass Laws, the industrial colour bar, and the rest, might be cheerfully borne if only their people were left a real possibility of continuing their old life on the land. The "Native Question," they 9^0

declared, is a land question.

Despite their resistance, each and every African awoke on June 20, 1913, to find himself,

"not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth." 224 Davis, We Cry for our Land. 3. 225 Keegan, "The Sharecropping Economy, African Class Formation and the Natives' Land Act of 1913 in the Highveld Maize Belt," in Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness. 1870-1930. ed. Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone (New York: Longman, 1982), 203. 226 Fairweather, A Common Hunger, 79. 227 Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, 49. 228 Macmillan, Complex South Africa, 243. 229 Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, 49. 230 Macmillan, Africa Emergent. 72. 231 Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, 6.

56 Fortunately for some African producers, the 1913 Land Act was not immediately enforceable in much of South Africa. Although the Act prohibited Africans from paying rent to absentee landlords, many powerful absentee landlords, such as mining companies, continued to allow Africans to rent their land. Some farmers, especially poorer farmers, also maintained sharecropping agreements.232 Furthermore, the Act was not enforceable in the Cape Province, for that would defy the Cape's Constitution, which protected

African franchise. The Act created the greatest difficulty for Africans in the Orange Free

State, where many farm-owners immediately evicted their African tenants.233 The passing of the 1913 Native Land Act largely signalled the end of the struggle over land and the beginning of the struggle over rural labour conditions.

Conclusion

Macmillan once noted that there exists "in the English language no comprehensive word or phrase...which adequately describes the gradual subjugation of uncivilized native peoples and the absorption of their lands, not by exploiting capitalists, but by the remorseless advance of white agricultural colonization." Yet, this is exactly what transpired in South Africa between 1652 and 1913. Beginning in the Cape Colony in the seventeenth century, European settlers forced the indigenous African population off the most fertile land and into the colonial economy as labourers on white-owned farms and, in the nineteenth century, white-owned mines. Following the discovery of diamonds and gold in the nineteenth century, the rate of dispossession accelerated and reached its climax in 1913 with the passing of the Native Land Act.

232 Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 165. 233 Thompson, A History of South Africa. 165. 234 Macmillan, The Cape Colour Question, 11.

57 It was during this period that racist notions of African inferiority became ubiquitous in South Africa. Although the British espoused liberal notions of civilizing the African population and condemned the Boers for their brutal treatment of Africans, with the advent of British colonial rule came the systematic establishment of a racist hierarchy, first in the Cape Colony in 1795, then Natal in 1843, and finally in the ex-Boer

Republics following the end of the Anglo-Boer War in 1902. Brutal, racist policing also originated in the colonial era. As early as the seventeenth century, commandos policed race relations in the Cape Colony and imposed harsh punishments on Africans who resisted dispossession and exploitation. "Policing was not therefore carried out by means of consent, and force was resorted to readily, making colonial police forces notorious for their brutal methods."235 According to John Brewer, twentieth century South African police institutions retained most of the traits of the colonial model. The development of violent, illegitimate policing, therefore, had incredibly detrimental effects for African communities in the apartheid and democratic eras.

It is imperative to bear in mind that the history of African dispossession and settler accumulation was shaped, and in some regions constrained, by African resistance.

Resistance to land dispossession included subtle tactics such as cattle-theft, arson, slow work tempos, carelessness at work, and grazing livestock on disputed areas or on plots ready for harvest. Africans' use of these approaches often contributed to a stereotype among settler communities of Africans being lazy and susceptible to criminal activity; these methods, however, were actually means through which Africans could express slight control over their own fate.

235 Brewer, Black and Blue. 6. 236 Ibid.. 10-11. 237 Beinart, "Settler Accumulation," 290.

58 Another point related to the strength of African resistance is the resilience of

African communities' collective memory. As Beinart and Bundy have argued, "rural popular consciousness was more autonomous, more resilient and more complex than has generally been recognised."238 Keegan made the same point when he illustrated that the abolition of slavery remained an important aspect of ex-slaves' identities: "1 December

1838, a rain-drenched day recalled in folk memories right up to the mid-twentieth century."239 The ability of African communities to preserve social identity in spite of the unrelenting advance of colonial rule, Gordon noted, helps explain how Africans were able to "mount a liberation movement that ultimately triumphed."240 This demonstrates the resilience of collective memory in African societies and the ability of African communities of the twenty-first century to look to the distant past for meaning, identity and inspiration. Therefore, it is not much of a stretch to argue that the memory of land dispossession can, in some cases, motivate Africans today to fight, and perhaps murder, in an attempt to regain their ancestors' lost territory.

In conclusion, the period between 1652 and 1913 witnessed the dispossession of

African land, the destruction of independent African chiefdoms and kingdoms, the advent of racist white rule, the beginning of brutal policing, and the placement of Africans in reserves. Although African labour was exploited during this era, as long as Africans had access to land, white colonizers could not completely control their mobility and labour.

A series of laws and restrictions, the most comprehensive of which being the 1913

Natives' Land Act, disrupted the "labour-shortage, land-surplus political economy"241

238 Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa. 156. 239 Keegan, Colonial South Africa. 123. 240 Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 35. 241 Trapido, "Putting a Plough to the Ground," 339.

59 that supported a variety of landlord-tenant arrangements and resulted in an economy in which Africans were denied access to land and became dependent on wages earned on white-owned farms or mines. This system of land tenure in which Africans were denied access to land was the most important contributing factor to African impoverishment in the twentieth century.242 "While the struggles over land, water, and cattle had, by the turn of the century, already long been won, that over labour had not." The struggle over labour is the theme of the next chapter.

Marks, Reluctant Rebellion. 17. Keegan, Colonial South Africa. 123.

60 Chapter Three: Segregation, Apartheid and the Struggle over Labour, 1913-1994

I say we shall always have native crime to fear until the native people of this country have worthy purposes to inspire them and worthy goals to work for. For it is only because they see neither purpose nor goal that they turn to drink and crime and prostitution. Which do we prefer, a law- abiding, industrious and purposeful native people, or a lawless, idle and purposeless people? The truth is that we do not know, for we fear them both. And so long as we vacillate, so long will we pay dearly for the dubious pleasure of not having to make up our minds. And the answer does not lie, except temporarily, in more police and more protection. -Alan Paton

Introduction

As Chapter Two illustrated, ownership of and access to land were incredibly important and contested issues in colonial South Africa. However, with the passing of the 1913 Land Act, white farmers had effectively won the battle for South Africa's farmland, and the struggle between white colonizers and black peasants largely shifted focus from land allocation to labour conditions. Although some Africans were able to maintain access to land through sharecropping arrangements as late as the 1960s, by the

1920s, and especially following the passage of the Native Trust and Land Act in 1936,

African communities were increasingly embroiled in intense struggles with white landowners over the conditions under which they would labour. Land remained an explosive issue during this period, and it certainly plays an important role in rural politics today. This chapter, however, attempts to illustrate that poor farmer-labourer relationships and the intense struggle over labour conditions that characterized the segregation and apartheid eras play a crucial role in understanding the complexity of farm

244 Paton, Cry. The Beloved Country. 107.

61 attacks. The impunity of white farmers during the segregation and apartheid eras dissolved along with apartheid in 1994, leaving farmers susceptible to the consequences of their callous actions. This chapter also underscores the incredibly racist and violent nature of apartheid policing, which left a significant legacy for rural law enforcement in the democratic era.

The terms of individual relationships between white farmers and black labourers during the segregation and apartheid eras influenced the nature of these relationships post-apartheid, yet both white farmers and the South African government are reluctant to consider this aspect in their explanation of the recent barrage of farm attacks. It is important to note that farming conditions varied widely throughout the country, and labour exploitation was not uniform. Rather, labour patterns changed over time in response to trends in capitalized agriculture, economic dynamics and the resistance of

African workers.245 It is, therefore, difficult to generalize about the conditions of labour on white-owned farms in South Africa, yet it is possible to highlight some of the predominant features of South African commercial farming and how these affected labour relations, bearing in mind that local circumstances greatly affected the nature of labour utilization on white-owned farms.

This chapter illustrates how the twentieth century witnessed the "deepening immiseration of African communities in the reserves and on the farms," 46 which helps explain the deep-seated resentment many Africans today carry for the white farmers and government officials who deliberately destroyed the independent African peasantry in

245 Robert Morrell, "Competition and Cooperation in Middleburg, 1900-1930," in Putting a Plough to the Ground: Accumulation and Dispossession in Rural South Africa. 1850-1930. ed. William Beinart, Peter Delius and Stanley Trapido (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986), 386. 246 Beinart and Delius, "Introduction," 13.

62 order to ensure an adequate labour supply for white-owned industries, especially farms.

The chapter outlines the legislative fiat that gave force, justification and impunity to farmers' violent actions, the evictions and relocation of Africans to desolate reserves that resulted from these racist laws, the exploitative farmer-labourer relationships that intensified as the century progressed, the violent policing that de-legitimized the justice system in the eyes of Africans, and the culture of violent protest Africans developed to ease the oppressive demands on their labour. During the segregation and apartheid eras, the fear of the "law-abiding, industrious and purposeful native people," of which Alan

Paton wrote, drove the South African government to create a class of Africans who were

"lawless, idle and purposeless," for these the government could justifiably suppress to its own benefit.247 It is this same class of Africans that now holds white rural South Africa accountable for the indescribable hardships black peasants and tenants had to endure under the thumb of white farmers. As one newspaper editorial proclaimed in 1982, '"for surely, as there is justice under heaven, there will be a day of reckoning.'"

Labour Exploitation in the Segregation Era

Segregation was the term coined in the early 1900s for the institution of government policies designed to regulate the relationship between black and white South

Africans. Precursors to formal segregation can be found in British and Dutch policies dating as far back as 1652; however, it was not until the twentieth century that the

z Paton, Cry. The Beloved Country. 107. 248 Gilbert Marcus, "Section Five of the Black Administration Act: The Case of the Bakwena ba Mogopa," in No Place to Rest: Forced Removals and the Law in South Africa, ed. Christina Murray and Catherine O'Regan (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1990), 14.

63 ideology of segregation was fully developed and implemented. Segregation was not designed to keep Africans off white-owned land altogether; rather, it was intended to regulate the terms on which Africans remained on the land. The 1913 Land Act was implemented to do precisely that. The Land Act marked the final legal codification of separate land tenure and the intensification of segregationist ideology. It was an attempt by white landowners to destroy the independent black peasantry, consolidate white monopoly over land and other rural resources, and create a subservient black workforce to cultivate the newly acquired terrain.251 The government aspired to replace rent and sharecropping arrangements with labour tenancy—a system under which Africans were given access to small portions of white-owned land in return for labouring for the landowner.

Van Onselen's book describing the life of Kas Maine, a South African sharecropper in southwestern Transvaal, depicts the difficulties of labour tenancy. The

Seed is Mine is filled with anecdotes of Kas Maine and his family's interactions with white farmers on whose land they lived as labour tenants and sharecroppers, which was often an insecure and precarious life. On one occasion, while the Maine family worked as labour tenants, Kas challenged a white foreman who was intent on beating his workers because calves had broken free and were mixing with the cows. Rather than flee from the foreman, Kas picked up a rock and threatened to strike back. A similar situation ensued the following day. As punishment, Kas quickly found his workload drastically

249 Beinart and Dubow, "Introduction," 1. 250 William Beinart, Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 55. 251 Alan Jeeves and Jonathan Crush, "Introduction," in White Farms Black Labour: The State and Agrarian Change in Southern Africa. 1910-1950. ed. Alan Jeeves and Jonathan Crush (Portsmoutfi, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1997), 1. 252 Davis, We Cry for Our Land. 3.

64 increased, "but the son of a labour tenant, caught in the vice of a quasi-feudal relationship where he was accountable to father and foreman alike, found it almost impossible to mount a counterchallenge that did not jeopardise his family's position on the estate."

The altercation intensified until the entire Maine family was forced to split up and leave the farm in search of a new home. Half of the family became labour tenants on a farm twelve miles north, while the other half secured a sharecropping agreement with a neighbouring farmer.254 The life of labour tenants and sharecroppers in the twentieth century was one of continuous insecurity. As one Maine family member later recalled,

'"we grew up in a wagon, trekking from one farm to another.'"

Despite the initial flurry of evictions in the years following 1913, sharecropping was able to survive into the 1930s, and for a fortunate few into the late 1940s, even in the

Orange Free State where sharecropping was banned. This was due to the lack of capital that plagued most farmers following the Anglo-Boer War and the inability of white farmers to establish viable enterprises, even with state-sponsored aid, without the

OKA assistance of African sharecroppers. Peasants' "vigorous productive enterprise" continued to make sharecropping a profitable endeavour, especially for poorer white landowners; "despite widespread conflict over the division of the harvest, each party needed the other." So long as agricultural development was sluggish and white landowners remained dependent on peasants' productivity, sharecropping survived and the 1913 Land Act could not be fully enforced. "If the history of South Africa's

253 Van Onselen, The Seed is Mine. 45. 254 Ibid., 46. 255 Md., 235. 256 Murray, Black Mountain. 89. 257 Adam Ashforth, The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 196.

65 countryside demonstrates anything, it is that legislative edict and administrative fiat have little force in shaping the substance and context of class struggle unless the material conditions are also propitious."258

The 1913 Land Act, nevertheless, caused immense misery for many Africans. As commercial agriculture prospered and farms mechanized, sharecropping arrangements were slowly replaced with other tenancy agreements, despite the fact that most white landowners, "were it not for the sowing on shares, could not stand today where they are now."259 Wealthier landowners generally switched to labour tenancy soon after the passing of the Land Act. They evicted thousands of their former tenants and laid claim to their land, especially in the Orange Free State. Rather than accept responsibility for workers' families, many white farmers preferred to draw labour from the reserves, where, white farmers argued, labourers' earnings would be supplemented by their families' subsistence farming, and labourers could, therefore, be paid extremely low wages. Due to the uneven implementation of the Act, terms of agreements between landlords and tenants varied widely from one farm to the next, and several forms of labour arrangements could exist on a single farm.260

Sol Plaatje, a founding member of the African National Congress, recorded the devastation caused by the 1913 Land Act in Native Life in South Africa. He recounted the heartbreaking scenes of African families evicted from the land on which they had lived for generations and the cruelty with which white landowners, police and government officials treated them. Prior to the passing of the 1913 Land Act, Africans

258 Keegan, "The Sharecropping Economy," 207. 259 Murray, Black Mountain. 89. 260 Ted Matsetela, "The Life Story of Nkgono Mma-Pooe," in Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation. Culture and Consciousness. 1870-1930. ed. Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone (New York: Longman, 1982), 231.

66 on what became white-owned farms were often very successful independent stockowners and cultivators.261 Throughout his journey, however, Plaatje witnessed numerous independent African farmers reduced to toiling for white landowners for £2 10s per family per month: "the husband working in the fields, the wife in the house, with an additional 10s a month for each son, and 5 s for each daughter, but on condition that the native's cattle were also handed over to work for [the white farmer]."262 Those who refused to place themselves, their families, and their stock at the disposal of their white landlord were summarily evicted. A police officer told Plaatje in 1913: '"If ever there was a fool's errand, it is that of a Kafir trying to find a new home for his stock and family just now.'"263

Evicted families had a rough road ahead. Stock and family members alike perished from exposure on the roads. On observing evicted families during a blizzard,

Plaatje commented: "Native mothers evicted from their homes shivered with their babies by their sides. When we saw on that night the teeth of the little children clattering through the cold...we wondered what these little mites had done that a home should suddenly become to them a thing of the past."264 Calves, lambs and kids born on the road had no chance of survival and were "left by the roadside for the jackals and vultures to feast upon."265 Small children fared slightly better. One family in Plaatje's acquaintance suffered the death of a child on the road, but, having no right to any land on which to bury the child, they were forced to dig a shallow grave during the night, lest the landowner arrest them for trespassing.

261 Keegan, "The Sharecropping Economy," 203. 262 Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa. 50. 263 Ibid., 55. 264 Ibid., 58. 265 Ibid.

67 Even criminals dropping straight from the gallows have an undisputed claim to six feet of ground on which to rest their criminal remains, but under the cruel operation of the Natives' Land Act little children, whose only crime is that God did not make them white, are sometimes denied that right in their ancestral home.

Some evicted families made their way to the reserves, but these offered little hope. Those who acquired plots in the reserves "rarely scraped more from the land than an inadequate supplement to migrants' wages."267 By the early 1920s, overproduction and overcrowding in the reserves led to the disappearance of the original vegetation, streams and waterholes, and rapidly advancing soil erosion.268 Government policies and infrastructure continued to support white capitalizing industries at the expense of the underdevelopment of the reserves. The brutality of the evictions and the staggering lack of viable options for Africans, both those evicted and those labouring on white- owned farms, explains the intensity of African resistance to the 1913 Land Act.

There was much resistance to the 1913 Land Act. Poor white farmers resisted the

Act, as they could not afford to lose their African sharecroppers, without whom they could not compete with the wealthier, more mechanized farms. Some white farmers resisted the transition to labour tenancy, for they felt it was unjust to punish hardworking

African peasants and reward inefficient, lazy whites. 70 Most of the opposition, however, came from black South Africans. Stripped of the land they had cultivated for generations and forced to toil for white landowners or seek work in urban areas where there was no security due to pass laws and the lack of adequate housing, many Africans faced

266 Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa. 59. 267 Beinart and Delius, "Introduction," 1. 268 Thompson, A History of South Africa. 164. 269 Philip Bonner, Peter Delius and Deborah Posel, "The Shaping of Apartheid: Contradiction, Continuity and Popular Struggle," in Apartheid's Genesis. 1935-1962. ed. Philip Bonner, Peter Delius and Deborah Posel (Braamfontein, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1993), 2. 270 Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa. 72.

68 hardships beyond description. Reserves offered no refuge, as the majority were already overcrowded and unproductive. Furthermore, the accumulation of Afrikaner farmland at the expense of Africans in the former Boer Republics compounded Africans' sense of betrayal, as Africans had greatly aided the British against their Boer enemies during the

Anglo-Boer War. This historical perspective informed the deep sense of injustice and outrage that fuelled the resistance to the Act.271 "These were the ingredients of a cauldron of discontent."

Opposition to the 1913 Land Act and the pass laws was a central concern for the newly formed African National Congress (ANC).273 The ANC was relatively successful in mobilizing resistance related to the wages and conditions on farms in some Cape districts in the 1920s and early 1930s, but was largely ineffective elsewhere. The

Communist Party (CP) exposed atrocities on farms and attempted to establish networks of organized resistance in rural areas in the late 1920s, but like the ANC, its success was limited. The Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU) was more successful in mobilizing rural protest.

The ICU sent organizers throughout South Africa's rural quarters in the late 1920s and inculcated local protest movements with a more national-oriented sense of resistance.274 Union organizers defended farm workers, squatters and dispossessed peasants on issues such as taxes, wages, treatment of labourers and tenants, and

0*7$ restrictions on the land. The Union aided tenants in their fight against eviction and

271 Murray, Black Mountain. 88. 272 Ibid., 121. 273 Fairweather, A Common Hunger. 86. 274 Beinart and Delius, "Introduction," 46. 275 Paul B. Rich, State Power and Black Politics in South Africa. 1912-51 (New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1996), 46.

69 spread a "millenarian message of return of land to Africans." The ICU also organized rural protests, addressed meetings, and gave advice on an array of topics including boycotts, strikes and demands for written contracts to protect farm workers.2 7 In 1928, the Volksrust Farmers Union in the Transvaal accepted the principle of written contracts between white farmers and black workers, and the ICU celebrated this as a victory for collective bargaining.

Like the ANC and the Communist Party, however, the ICU's effect on rural resistance movements was temporary, and it lost momentum by the 1930s.279 This was in large part due to the difficulties inherent in organizing labour spread across vast tracts of farmland and the repression of resistance movements, especially the ICU, by the South

African state and individual white farmers. Farm workers were often prevented from attending ICU meetings without passes signed by their employers, municipalities prevented farm workers from entering urban areas, and some families were even evicted 9sn for their participation in the Union. However, the ICU did not have the support of the entire rural African community. Some farm workers, such as Kas Maine, were uncertain of becoming involved in a political organization that "threatened to invade the physical and psychological space of the farm."281 Maine rejected the ICU's call for a strike to protest conditions on farms: '"How could they call for a strike in a place where they had no social standing? How can you have a strike in another man's home? You can't do a

Thomas V. McClendon, Genders and Generations Apart: Labour Tenants and Customary Law in Segregation-Era South Africa. 1920s to 1940s (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 2002), 76. 277 Van Onselen, "Paternalism and Violence," 207. 278 Rich, State Power and Black Politics. 46. 279 Thompson, A History of South Africa. 176. 280 Rich, State Power and Black Politics. 46. 281 Van Onselen, "Paternalism and Violence," 208.

70 thing like that!" Moreover, the ICU suffered from corruption and internal conflicts that aided its downfall.

Despite the efforts of organizations such as the ANC, CP and ICU, farm labourers

were largely left to struggle against farmers' labour demands and violent exploits in

isolation. Similar to their predecessors, Africans in the early twentieth century utilized

individual, subtle forms of protest such as slowing the pace of work, refusing to pay rent

and perform certain tasks, breaking equipment, damaging fences and hamstringing

cattle.283 Steinberg illustrates a continuum of resistance tactics. Modes of resistance progressed from passive tactics, such as slowing the pace of work, to more malicious

devices, such as hamstringing cattle or destroying fences but leaving the dead cow or wood on the farmer's property. This was a signal that the farmer had demanded too

much, and more serious forms of protest could follow. Stealing cattle and crops could

also be a "form of punishment, a signal sent across the racial frontier that the white boss has gone too far;"284 however, it is difficult to determine whether theft was a form of resistance or a means of survival in the face of desperate poverty. Furthermore, farmers

often complained of cattle theft in order to persuade the government of the need for tighter controls regulating the actions of African tenants. Therefore, although theft was used as a resistance tactic, it is not the most reliable "barometer of rural conflict."285

Although it is clear that African communities often opposed their exploitation through a variety of methods, there is inadequate evidence to accurately illustrate the

scale and frequency of these resistance tactics. Beinart and Delius pointed out that,

282 Van Onselen, The Seed is Mine. 154. 283 Jeeves and Crush, "Introduction," 26. 284 Steinberg, Midlands. 50. 285 Beinart and Delius, "Introduction," 45.

71 our understanding of the nature of tenantry requires a knowledge of the peculiar histories and divergent internal dynamics of differing communities, and an analysis sensitive to consciousness and organization as well as economic relations. The long drawn out contest between farmers and tenants has yet to be fully charted and—with some striking recent exceptions—its implications for the patterns of rural change awaits incisive exploration.286

Nevertheless, it is clear that African resistance was sporadic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that resistance escalated as exploitation increased throughout the twentieth century. By the 1940s and 1950s, there existed '"a generalised background of unrest which affected almost all African rural communities.'"287

Resistance increased as the white minority tightened its grip on the rural African workforce.

As the 1920s progressed, agricultural capitalization increased, and the demands made on African labour amplified. Individual acts of resistance increased in turn, including assaults on white landowners.288 White farmers responded with violent brutality in order to control farm labour and assert their superiority on the country's farmland.289 This violence was directed at individual African tenants and African organizations such as the ICU, which had many of its offices burned. Furthermore, the industrial boom in South Africa's urban areas acted as a magnet for African labour, which further strained the labour shortage and caused white farmers to become even more violent in controlling their labour force. The 1920s thus witnessed the intensification of the struggle over the terms on which Africans would labour in this capitalizing system.

286 Beinart and Delius, "Introduction," 15-16. 287 Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa, 40. 288 Beinart and Delius, "Introduction," 47. 289 McClendon, Genders and Generations Apart. 70.

72 Despite bitter resistance to the Land Act and pass laws, by the 1920s more and more Africans were forced to seek employment as labour tenants on white-owned farms or as unskilled workers in white-owned industries.290 However, the transformation of the labour system on white-owned farms from relatively independent forms of African peasant production to labour tenancy was slow and uneven due to economic circumstances and local struggles over the conditions of farm production. In the late

1920s, in response to white farmers' incessant demands for tighter regulations on African labour, the South African government attempted to ensure a stable labour supply through

"further elaboration of the broad set of policies known as segregation, the precursor of apartheid."292

The basic facets of segregation were initiated in the 1910s and early 1920s under the Smuts Government; however, it was not until the election of Hertzog's Pact

Government in 1924 that segregationist ideology was firmly entrenched and segregation took on a blatantly racist nature.293 Prior to the 1924 election, many segregationists promoted the ideology not as a means to dispossess Africans and exploit their labour, but as a means to protect African culture from the onslaught of white land encroachment and the demands of an industrializing society.294 By the 1930s, however, the racially exploitative dimension of Hertzog's government (and after 1934 the United Party of

Hertzog and Smuts) was unmistakable.293 The threat of the so-called Black Peril featured

290 McClendon, Genders and Generations Apart. 70. 291 Jeeves and Crush, "Introduction," 3-4. 292 McClendon, Genders and Generations Apart. 1. 293 Nigel Worden, The Making of Modern South Africa: Conquest. Apartheid. Democracy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2007), 85. 294Ibid.,86. 295 However, the establishment of the Liberal Party in 1953 in opposition to apartheid illustrated that many of the early supporters of segregation recognized and opposed the racial exploitative aspects of the segregation and apartheid governments. Ibid.. 87.

73 much more frequently in official segregationist discourse and became a justification for controlling and exploiting the African population. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the passing of more laws affecting Africans than in the entirety of the nineteenth century.

As De Kiewiet noted, segregation was designed to prevent failure in a white man and success in a black man.297 Segregation, therefore, not only repressed African agriculture, but it also uplifted white agriculture. From the early years of Union, segregationist governments went to great lengths to support the development of a prosperous white commercial farming class. Farmers received substantial support through grants, loans, tariffs, subsidies, irrigation projects, agricultural credit and other support programs. The government artificially inflated agricultural prices and "ensured that the advantage was distributed in a racially discriminatory way. White farming also benefited from a tax regime that channelled revenue from the mining sector and from consumers into agriculture."298

Segregation provided more than financial assistance, however, as it was profoundly significant for the development of a cheap, black labouring class.

Segregation linked "rural labor reservoirs controlled through 'precapitalist' social relations and capitalist enterprise through the flow of migrant labor from the countryside."299 Thus, segregation served not only as "the institutional and ideological buttress of the white monopoly of power," but it was also "the central mechanism for the reproduction of cheap and coercible migrant labor." In fact, policies controlling

296 Clifton Crais, The Politics of Evil: Magic. State Power, and the Political Imagination in South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 8. 297 De Kiewiet, The Anatomy of South African Misery. 55. 298 Jeeves and Crush, "Introduction," 9. 299 Marks, The Ambiguities of Dependence. 5.

74 African workers were equally, if not more, interventionist than the policies regulating the production and distribution of agricultural commodities.301

Farmers' demands for labour were insatiable, and rural Members of Parliament used their positions to call incessantly for even more policies aimed at immobilizing black labour at extremely low wages.302 Despite the Native Affairs Department's recommendation of better wages and working conditions for black labourers on white- owned farms, white farmers tightened their grip on black workers. They failed to notice that the amount of labour available to them was inversely related to the amount of violence they used in securing it. "Bad wages, conditions and treatment, which were the norm, especially in the poorest fanning areas, but prevalent also on some of the most prosperous estates, damned the whole fanning sector in the eyes of the labor force."

In 1936, the South African Government passed the Native Trust and Land Act.

The Act increased the amount of land scheduled for African occupation from seven percent to thirteen percent and was "presented as a major gift to the African population."304 It is important to note, however, that much of the land identified to be released to African occupation was neither previously owned by white farmers nor good arable land. In the Orange Free State, for example, the majority of the additional areas consisted of mission land, farms owned by Coloured cultivators, and the few surviving

African-owned farms.305 Furthermore, many African-owned farms and plots of state- owned land long cultivated by Africans were not identified for release, and the Native

Trust and Land Act called for the relocation of these people and the occupation of the

301 Jeeves and Crash, "Introduction," 17. 302 Ibid.. 18. 303 Ibid-, 17. 304 Fairweather, A Common Hunger. 79. 305 Murray, Black Mountain. 95.

75 land by white farmers. The Act did precious little to relieve the plight of Africans in the overcrowded reserves and made life even more difficult for tenants on white-owned farms.

White farmers venomously protested any move that increased the number and

size of reserves, which augmented the labour shortage and gave Africans increased bargaining leverage. The government, nevertheless, remained consistent in its support of white farmers' quest for a cheap and coercible labour force by proclaiming Chapter Four of the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act. Chapter Four increased farmers' control over the labour force by establishing an intricate system of registration of African labour tenants.307 Chapter Four also dictated that each tenant family had to provide a standard six months of labour instead of negotiating a contract with the white farmer. This meant that farmers no longer needed to offer benefits to secure labour according to a negotiated contract, and labour conditions would be worsened for African tenants. Furthermore, a

Labour Tenant Control Board was established to limit the number of Africans on each farm, thereby eliminating sharecropping and squatting.

Like the 1913 Land Act, the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act was not fully enforceable until decades later for two main reasons. First, thousands of white farmers remained dependent on sharecroppers and squatters and were reluctant to enforce the terms of the Act. Second, African resistance to the Act, particularly Chapter Four, rendered it unenforceable. Chapter Four of the Native Trust and Land Act was first

306 Surplus People Project, Forced Removals in South Africa. 37. 307 Moray Hathorn and Dale Hutchinson, "Labour Tenants and the Law," in No Place to Rest: Forced Removals and the Law in South Africa, ed. Christina Murray and Catherine O'Regan (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1990), 196. 308 Stefan Schirmer, "African Strategies and Ideologies in a White Farming District: Lydenburg, 1930- 1970." Journal of Southern African Studies 21 (1995): 514.

76 implemented in Lydenburg in 1938. Throughout the 1930s, African families in

Lydenburg had been defending their independence against the encroaching labour demands of white industry. To the black tenants, Chapter Four was another in a long line of attacks on their freedom, and the resulting conflict was simply part of the historical struggle between African tenants and white farmers, "which was central to the African experience of white farms in the 1930s."309

Many Africans in Lydenburg felt the terms of Chapter Four were "tantamount to slavery."310 Tenants feared that by registering with the Native Commissioner's Office they would be bound to work full-time for the farmer who paid the registration fee.

Furthermore, as Stefan Schirmer pointed out, "African residents of Lydenburg had long memories."311 Recollection of the reoccupation of land, confiscation of cattle, and disarmament of the African peasantry in the former Boer Republics following the Anglo-

Boer War influenced the intensity of the resistance against Chapter Four, which revived memories of previous state depredations.

Resistance to the Native Trust and Land Act predominantly took the form of desertion, refusal to comply with the terms of the legislation, and protest at meetings the

Native Commissioner called. By so doing, the labour tenants of Lydenburg rendered

Chapter Four unenforceable, not only in Lydenburg, but throughout South Africa. After the complete failure of Chapter Four in Lydenburg, the government refused to enforce the terms of the Act in other districts until the 1950s.312 African resistance to Chapter Four in Lydenburg was the central reason for the failure of the legislation and "an important

309 Schirmer, "Land, Legislation and Labor Tenants," 48. 310 Schirmer, "African Strategies and Ideologies," 514. 311 Schirmer, "Land, Legislation and Labor Tenants," 54. 312 Ibid.. 60.

77 moment in a continuum of low-level conflict between white farmers and black tenants."313 It is clear that the aspirations and demands of African labour tenants influenced the implementation of segregationist legislation and shaped labour relations on

South Africa's farmland. Nonetheless, upon coming to power in 1948, the National Party immediately sought to eliminate squatting and labour tenancy and replace it with full- time wage labour in order to ensure a surplus of labour available to white capitalist agriculture. "To this end chapter four of the 1936 Act had to be implemented vigorously."314

Labour Exploitation in the Apartheid Era

In 1948 the Afrikaner National Party (NP) under the leadership of D.F. Malan won the national election on the platform of apartheid. By playing on white fears, especially in rural areas, of swart gevaar (black danger), Malan was able to secure enough votes to win the 1948 election, and the National Party remained in power until

1994.315 Apartheid was the National Party's solution for the so-called Native Question, which, as Macmillan pointed out in 1930, was largely connected to farm labour, as farm workers made up one seventh of all Africans in the Cape, one half in Natal, two thirds in the Transvaal and fourteen fifteenths in the Orange Free State.316 Apartheid was a labyrinth of over one hundred laws intended to elevate even the poorest whites at the expense of Africans and to keep black and white South Africans separate, except where 313 Schirmer, "Land, Legislation and Labor Tenants," 54. 314 Hathorn and Hutchinson, "Labour Tenants and the Law," 196. 315 Sean Connolly, Apartheid in South Africa (Oxford: Heinemann Library, 2001), 22. Ironically, the National Party would have lost the election had the rural constituencies not contained fewer voters than urban constituencies, as defined by the constitution, which Smuts (United Party) had been primarily responsible. Thompson. A History of South Africa, 186. 316 Macmillan, Complex South Africa. 232-233.

78 Africans were required as labourers in white homes, white industries and on white farms.317

National Party leaders felt previous governments had not effectively remedied the labour shortage that plagued white-owned industries, particularly commercial farming.

The NP thus set about creating a "more interventionist state, suitably enlarged and empowered to take a more aggressive role in tackling the problems of labour distribution, low productivity and high labour turnover."318 The subsequent programs intensified and expanded the exploitative legislation inherited from the United Party in an attempt to improve the conditions of white agriculture. The state artificially ensured the success of white farming in South Africa at the expense of black labourers.

Beginning in 1948, the apartheid government increased the support lent to white farmers, the majority of whom were Afrikaner. The Marketing Act, which ensured high prices for agricultural products, was reintroduced. Massive amounts of funding were made available for agricultural development, land purchase, education and mechanization, and in this context, agricultural output greatly increased.319 Not only did the apartheid government aid white farmers by offering economic assistance, however; it also supported farmers by viciously enforcing and furthering the aims of the 1936 Native

Trust and Land Act through the enactment of progressively stricter legislation limiting the rights of black South Africans.

"Having made a very significant contribution to the development of South

African agriculture, [labour tenants] were rewarded with harassment, intimidation and a

317 Deborah Posel, The Making of Apartheid. 1948-1961: Conflict and Compromise (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), vii. 318 Bonner, Delius and Posel, "The Shaping of Apartheid," 5.

79 battery of laws designed to force them from the land, all in the interests of the ruling

elite."320 In 1950, the Group Areas Act defined residential areas according to race and

cleared rural areas of so-called black spots—pockets of black peasantry on land reserved

for white occupation. Under the terms of the Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act of

1951, Africans residing on white-owned land without permission were forced to vacate

the area. The Act also gave farmers the legal right to evict rent tenants and squatters.

This act "criminalized activities far beyond the scope suggested by the title of the Act."322

The apartheid government also sought to drastically tighten the terms of the pass

laws. In 1952, the Abolition of Passes and Consolidation of Documents Act was enacted,

replacing the various passes Africans had to carry with a single reference book containing

a picture of the holder, his or her employment record, tax payments and criminal record.

This act applied to all Africans, including women, who were previously exempt from

carrying passes.323 According to this law, Africans categorized as farm labourers could

not be registered in any other occupation and were effectively imprisoned in their jobs on the farms, suffering the lowest wages and worst working conditions in the country.324

"With a virtually captive labour force, farmers had excessive control and power, and the

scope for exploitation was almost unlimited."325

The labour bureaux' ability to control the rural labour force was severely limited

by Africans' resistance to the issuing of reference books. Many Africans migrated to

avoid the new legislation; others simply refused to produce their identity documents in

320 Hathorn and Hutchinson, "Labour Tenants and the Law," 210. 321 Bundy, "Land, Law and Power," 9. 322 Catherine O'Regan, "The Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act," in No Place to Rest: Forced Removals and the Law in South Africa, ed. Christina Murray and Catherine O'Regan (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1990), 162. 323 Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa. 197. 324 Cook, Akin to Slavery. 5. 325 Davies, We Cry for Our Land. 5.

80 order to receive their reference books or refused to produce their reference books when police demanded them.326 Some farmers experienced a labour crisis due to the intensity of the resistance to the tightened regulations. Despite widespread resistance, the new influx controls were implemented, and between 1952 and 1962, over three million pass law offences were recorded out of a total African population of just under three and a half million.327 The pass laws thus created "a vast class of lawbreakers," which further decreased the legitimacy of apartheid's legal system in the eyes of Africans who had become criminals for failing to comply with laws that would themselves be considered criminal in more enlightened nations.

In 1952, in addition to strengthening the pass laws, the Native Affairs

Department, in cooperation with the Department of Prisons, put convict labour at the disposal of white farmers. Often housed in prisons on or adjacent to white farms, thousands of black prisoners toiled each day for white farmers who were also their jailers.

Known as the 9d.-a-day scheme, prison labour accounted for some 40,500 farm labourers in 1952. By 1958 that number soared to over 200,000.329

Working under harsh conditions and subject to extreme exploitation, these men are victims of the pass laws and other related apartheid laws. Not only do they form a body of cheap and powerless labour for the agricultural and other sectors of the economy, but their condition is one of the threats giving force to the pass laws as a means of controlling black workers and holding down their wages.330

326 Posel, The Making of Apartheid. 140. 327 IWd., 120. 328 Thompson, A History of South Africa. 167. 329 Posel, The Making of Apartheid. 139. Organized agriculture, according to Posel, was the only enterprise to enjoy the routine support of the Native Affairs Department. "The NAD invited participation in all departmental matters affecting the agricultural labour supply, from the SAAU's [South African Agricultural Union's] 'Liaison Committee.'" Ibid., 259. 330 Cook, Akin to Slavery. 1.

81 The use of prison labour occasioned much brutality. One of the men in Timothy

Keegan's Facing the Storm, Petrus, described a scene that symbolized for him the cruelty white farmers were capable of inflicting on convict labourers:

"They were a full span of sixteen men, inspanned and pulling a wagon. I stood and stared as I could not believe my eyes...the men I had seen were convict labourers being used on the farms....I continued on my way still puzzled that human beings could be used like animals to pull a wagon." Petrus, a man without strong political feelings, says that when he thinks of the indignities generations of Africans have had to endure, "I have every reason to support our grandchildren for refusing to submit to any form of oppression." l

Similar to the 9d.-a-day scheme, the petty offenders scheme became national policy in

1954. First introduced in 1947, this program allowed arrested Africans to avoid prison by signing contracts with white farmers. Anti-apartheid activist Ruth First declared that in the townships it was well understood that "the labour bureaux of the Native

Commissioners' courts and local pass offices were dragnets for farm labour, and in

Alexandra Township every year, as the reaping season approached, the police raids for pass offenders became noticeably more frequent."332 The fact that many chose prison over farm labour attests to the disagreeable conditions on white-owned farms.

As agricultural development progressed and farms became increasingly mechanized, more white farmers called for the abolition of the system of labour tenancy, which they viewed as inefficient, and in 1954 the National Party amended the 1936

Native Trust and Land Act. This amendment aimed to replace sharecropping and part- time labour tenancy with full-time wage labour by enforcing and extending Chapter Four of the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act.333 By 1957, all African tenants on white farms

331 Keegan, Facing the Storm, 120. 332 Posel, The Making of Apartheid. 121. 333 Marcus, Modernizing Super-Exploitation. 67.

82 had to be registered and were required to provide a minimum of 122 days of labour each

334 year.

Black families, such as the Maines, painfully felt the effect of the National Party's

onslaught against sharecropping and labour tenancy. In 1955, Kas Maine's landlady was

forced through apartheid's legislation to evict the Maines: "My boys, we have always got

on well, but the Boers are now threatening me with committees and lawyers, saying that lie this farm is occupied by kaffirs while their own children have no land to cultivate."

This was the second time in six years the Maines were forced to find a new home due to

anti-sharecropping legislation. The Afrikaner Nationalists, after careful and conscious deliberation, were putting the Maines and black families like them under the political lash. Twice within six years whites had used their power and influence to attack and render inoperative such paternalistic structures as remained in the countryside so that their demands for an exploitable pool of cheap labour could be readily met and so that they might benefit from the apartheid regime's twinned objectives of racial segregation and capital accumulation.336 Luckily for the Maines, their landlady was able to secure them a sharecropping

agreement on another farm. The vast majority of evicted sharecroppers, such as several

of those in Keegan's Facing the Storm, were not so fortunate; they were left vulnerable to the ever more invasive restrictions of apartheid.

In 1959, the Trespass Act prohibited Africans from accessing white-owned land without permission. The National Party claimed this policy was aimed to prevent

criminal activity, but in practice it was used to secure "the removal of people from land

334 Charles Mather, "Wage Workers and Labor Tenants in Barberton, 1920-1950," in White Farms Black Labour: The State and Agrarian Change in Southern Africa. 1910-1950. ed. Alan H. Jeeves and Jonathan Crush (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1997), 74. 335 Van Onselen, The Seed is Mine. 402. 336 Ibid.

83 where their presence [had], for one reason or another, become inconvenient to the owner

or 'lawful occupier' of the land or to the state."337 Although this piece of legislation

lacked the outwardly racist nature of other acts, it was used extensively against tenants in

many kinds of disputes. Rian Malan described one situation in which the Trespass Act

was used to justify a white farmer's shooting an African boy. The boy had trespassed on

the farmer's property to retrieve a frightened cow that ran onto the farm during a

thunderstorm. The bleeding boy managed to walk to the nearest police station where the

officer on duty asked him if he were on a white man's land when he was shot. The boy

answered affirmatively. "'Well,' said the policeman, 'if I had been that farmer, I would

have put the bullet here,' He leaned over the desk and put a finger against the black

youngster's temple."

Equally important to the vast array of laws controlling black labour was the

absence of even a single piece of legislation protecting farm labourers. In this manner,

South Africa's approximately one million farm labourers were at the mercy of the whims

of their employers.339 As Nicholas Haysom observed in 1990, "no legislation protects them from dangerous working conditions, exploitative terms of remuneration, and the

absence of proper housing or welfare provision for them or their families."340 Compared

with industrial workers who were slowly able to secure more favourable working

conditions, farm workers were unable to procure even the most rudimentary rights on

Raylene Keightley, "The Trespass Act," in No Place to Rest: Forced Removals and the Law in South Africa, ed. Christina Murray and Catherine O'Regan (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1990), 180. 338 Malan, My Traitor's Heart. 320. 339 Nicholas Haysom, "Rural Land Struggles: Practising Law Democratically," in No Place to Rest: Forced Removals and the Law in South Africa, ed. Christina Murray and Catherine O'Regan (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1990), 112.

84 white-owned farms due to their complete lack of legal protection.341 Any attempt to join or form a union usually led to eviction. "It is a sad reflection on human nature that laws should always have tended to entrench power and privilege against the serving and deserving classes who are usually unorganized and mute."342

The combined effect of this battery of laws and the shift to capital-intensive agricultural production was the repression of labour tenancy, which resulted in a flood of evictions and forced removals of Africans from white-owned farms and their relocation to the reserves,343 "which the word-wizards of the regime were now calling Bantu

Homelands."344 Eviction was the most powerful sentence at farmers' disposal, and it was the dominant option for farmers who failed to acquire adequate labour and submission from their tenants. It was also a means of punishment for cattle theft and other misdeeds and affected not only the accused but also his or her entire family.345 For Africans, eviction was not merely the loss of a plot of land; it symbolized the destruction of a community, the breaking of ancestral ties, a split from tradition, and the loss of a sense of ownership and belonging.346

Between 1960 and 1983, approximately three and a half million people were forced from their homes under the terms of one or more of the apartheid laws.347 The

Surplus People Project illustrated that farm tenants were the largest group of people affected by these removals. Approximately one third of all removals during these

341 Davies, We Cry for Our Land. 11. 342 Van den Heever in Hathorn and Hutchinson, "Labour Tenants and the Law," 210. 343' iMarcus , Modernizing Super-Exploitation. 189. 344 Van Onselen, The Seed is Mine. 403. 345 Robert Morrell, '"Synonymous with Gentlemen'? White Farmers, School and Labor in Natal, c. 1880- 1920," in White Farms Black Labour: The State and Agrarian Change in Southern Africa. 1910-1950. ed. Alan H. Jeeves and Jonathan Crush (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1997), 187. 346 Ibid.. 187-188. 347 Marcus, "Section Five of the Black Administration Act," 13.

85 decades involved Africans living on white-owned farms, including "cash tenants, labour tenants, full time farmworkers, and their families."348 Subsequently, the proportion of the

African population living on white farms fell from one third to one fifth, "as farmers mechanized and pushed 'non-productive' people off their land, and as the category of labour tenants was all but expunged."349

Those who resisted eviction were forced out of their homes through arrest, prosecution, bulldozing, and hut burning,350 so that by 1976, labour tenancy in South

Africa had been abolished.351 In the 1980s, the apartheid state professed that subsequent removals would be voluntary as opposed to forced. This softer approach amounted to

"'persuading' people to move by means that progressed rapidly from discussion, to the withdrawal of health services, to demolition of schools, to withholding pensions and finally...to surrounding the village with armed police in the dead of night." By 1990, with the unbanning of political parties such as the African National Congress and the

Communist Party and the easing of the apartheid regime, the pace of farm evictions rapidly accelerated, as farmers anticipated land claims by black tenants "whose occupancy predates white ownership."353

Defined as redundant, victims of evictions and forced removals were usually relocated to reserves or resettlement camps. These people were viewed as "superfluous, unneeded and unwanted in a society in which the color of one's skin quite literally could

Surplus People Project, Forced Removals in South Africa. 41. 349 Bundy, "Land, Law and Power," 10. 350 Hart, Disabling Globalization. 93. 351 Hathorn and Hutchinson, "Labour Tenants and the Law," 197. 352 Aninka Claassens, "Rural Land Struggles in the Transvaal in the 1980s," in No Place to Rest: Forced Removals and the Law in South Africa, ed. Christina Murray and Catherine O'Regan (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1990), 31. 353 Hart, Disabling Globalization. 92.

86 mean the difference between life and death, poverty and plenty." In 1970, the National

States Constitution Act decreed that Africans were no longer citizens of South Africa but of one of the reserves. The apartheid government aimed to grant the reserves independence as Bantustans (also known as homelands) as a means of divesting itself of the responsibility for the residents, securing a migrant labour force, and as an attempt to

"rivet the African people's consciousness to the reserves by insidiously creating tribalism in the form of bogus mini-nationalisms. It was to divide Africans against themselves and stall united nationalist struggles against the regime."355 In the end, however, only four

Bantustans were granted independence.

The reserves and resettlement camps were characteristically destitute for people the government perceived as worthless. The Bantustans were places of impoverishment and misery. Most were located on isolated, inhospitable regions far from railroads and towns, with no electricity and inadequate water supplies. As early as 1949, studies illustrated that the reserves were plagued by severe soil erosion, impoverishment, malnutrition, disease and death, and conditions only deteriorated.356 The people residing in the Bantustans were rural people who made their living from farming. To adapt to the

"quasi-urban" lifestyle of the reserves would be challenging enough; however, with the complete lack of amenities found in a proper urban setting, these people had no chance of earning a decent living in the cramped homelands, which have been accurately described as rural slums.

354 Crais, The Politics of Evil 3. 355 Fred T. Hendricks, The Pillars of Apartheid: Land Tenure. Rural Planning and the Chieftaincy (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1990), 159. 356 Fairweather, A Common Hunger. 82. 357 Cosmas Desmond, The Discarded People: An Account of African Resettlement in South Africa (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1971), 11, and Colin Murray, "Displaced Urbanization: South Africa's Rural Slums," African Affairs 86 (1987): 311-329.

87 It was as though a great wave had swept the people off the land and dumped them like hurricane debris on the far side of the border [of the reserve], where there was no free land for them to farm, and no room for their cattle. God knows how they were meant to survive. Perhaps they weren't expected to survive at all. They were officially known as "surplus •5CO

people," anyway.

The Surplus People Project argued that the long-term social and psychological effects of forced removals and life in the reserves were more significant than the material deprivation inflicted on African individuals and communities. While the prevailing mood in the reserves was often helplessness and passivity, feelings of anger and frustration were generally directed against neighbours, family members, and other newcomers competing for the scarce resources of the Bantustan, rather than against the racist system that was to blame.359 "Poverty picked away at the remaining social fabric, and conflicts about money, liquor or labour turned fathers against sons, mothers against daughters, and brothers against sisters."360 The Bantustans violated the "whole structure of traditional life. They [were] empty of both social and economic meaning for the people."361 The poverty and suffering that characterized life in the reserves for millions of Africans was the consequence of the system of apartheid—a system designed to promote the interests of whites with no regard for the misery inflicted upon blacks. It is certainly conceivable that these evicted people harboured resentment for their miserable conditions into the twenty-first century. As one member of the Dutch Reformed Church predicted in the

1960s concerning the racist nature of apartheid, '"as a result of the laws of God, the

Malan, My Traitor's Heart, 289. Surplus People Project, Forced Removals in South Africa. 2. Van Onselen, The Seed is Mine, 511. Desmond, The Discarded People, 35.

88 whites will not be untouched by the disease that is destroying the moral life of the

Africans.'"362

Despite his stubborn resilience, Kas Maine, like millions of others, was eventually forced off white-owned land altogether. In 1956, the Maines were once again evicted from their home on a white-owned farm. Kas decided the time had finally come to move to a piece of black-owned land (also known as a black spot) named Molote. Kas recalled,

'"I was sick and tired of being allocated a field and then being evicted once it had been cultivated and the soil proved fertile. You were chased away as soon as they discovered that you could produce a good harvest from soil that had previously been considered useless."'363 Eventually, however, the National Party's assault against the black peasantry reached Molote. In 1966 the land was expropriated, and the residents were forced into a resettlement camp called Ledig, which "might as well have been situated in

Satan's backyard since both its climate and surroundings seemed only to challenge the human spirit to triumph over the odds posed by natural adversity."364 Even in Ledig, the

Maines were not free from the tireless onslaught of white accumulation, for in 1978 a game reserve was established and the residents of Ledig were forced to graze their meagre herds elsewhere. It was under these squalid conditions that Kas Maine, the once successful sharecropper, was forced to live his last days.

Africans who were able to retain their positions on white-owned farms as wage labourers also suffered under atrocious conditions. One of the most often citied examples of violence on white-owned farms is the Bethal District in the eastern Transvaal.

362 Desmond, The Discarded People. 27. 363 Van Onselen, The Seed is Mine. 409. 364 Ibjd., 470. 365 Ibid., 498.

89 Conditions in the Bethal District were so terrible that the name Bethal "became

synonymous with callous brutality, ill-treatment, and violent death. In the minds of

Africans, working on white-owned farms there was akin to slavery and was to be avoided

at all costs."366 Many of the farms in the Bethal District had high walls, barbed wire,

barred windows, locked gates and armed guards on the look-out for deserters. The

workers' compounds were filthy and overrun with vermin. Even when the larger farm-

owners constructed new compounds, the Secretary for Public Health commented that the

new structures were "nothing else but formidable prisons."367

Apart from the appalling living conditions, the farms of the Bethal District were

notoriously violent. Beatings, floggings and other forms of assault were regularly applied

to break the spirits of the workers and to ensure work continued apace. "Laborers spoke

in hushed tones about fellow-workers who had been beaten to death in the fields, or who

perished in the compounds from unknown maladies, only to be buried without an inquest

in unmarked graves on the Bethal farms."368 Nelson Mandela powerfully described the

wretched conditions on Bethal farms in a speech in 1953:

You will recall how human beings, wearing only sacks with holes for their heads and arms, never given enough food to eat, slept on cement floors on cold nights with only their sacks to cover their shivering bodies. You will remember how they were woken up as early as 4am and taken to work on the fields with the indunas sjamboking those who tried to straighten their backs, who felt weak and dropped down because of hunger and sheer exhaustion. You will also recall the story of human beings toiling pathetically from the early hours of the morning till sunset, fed only on mealie meal served on filthy sacks spread on the ground and eating with their dirty hands. People falling ill and never once being given medical attention. You will also recall the revolting story of a farmer who was

366 Martin J. Murray, "Factories in the Fields: Capitalist Farming in the Bethal District, c. 1910-1950," in White Farms Black Labour: The State and Agrarian Change in Southern Africa. 1910-1950. ed. Alan H. Jeeves and Jonathan Crush (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1997), 75. 367 Ibid.. 79. 368 Ibid., 92.

90 convicted for tying a labourer by his feet from a tree and having him flogged to death, pouring boiling water into his mouth whenever he cried for water. These things which have long vanished from many parts of the world still flourish in South Africa today.369

White farmers in the Bethal District thus enjoyed near absolute power and authority on their isolated farms, achieved by routine violence.

The mistreatment of workers on the sugar, cotton, wattle and citrus plantation farms of the Transvaal and Natal was slightly less violent than that of the Bethal District.

Workers on these plantations were also housed in cold, dirty compounds, and were given inadequate food and clothing. Workers were locked into the compounds at night, so they could not escape to find better work. Wages were often withheld, and, if they were paid at all, "the wages were often reduced to cover the cost of pass fees, transportation, and even recruiting expenses."370 It is important, however, to remember that these conditions were the worst of the worst. Although the conditions on smaller farms throughout South

Africa were often miserable and plagued with violence, Africans in these situations were more able to influence their relationships with the white farmer than those on the plantation farms and in the Bethal District. Nevertheless, workers on smaller white- owned farms still suffered under harsh circumstances.

Life on white-owned farms was often very dangerous. Labourers were not given appropriate training in the use of farming equipment, and injuries were common. African workers whose jobs required the use of harsh chemical fertilizers and pesticides were not given protective clothing or breathing apparatuses, which caused many workers to become severely ill. Medical attention was seldom provided. Farm workers also

369 Nelson Mandela, The Struggle is My Life (London: IDAF Publications Ltd., 1990), 37. 370 Jeeves and Crush, "Introduction," 25. 371 Davies, We Cry for Our Land. 16.

91 typically worked longer hours than any other workers in the country. Schooling on white farms was grossly insufficient. In 1987, for example, there existed one single secondary farm school in all of South Africa. Children had to board in urban areas if they wished to attend secondary school, but very few ill-paid African farming families could afford such an expense. "As a result, another generation emerges after a short school career, with minimal skills and doomed to a life of hard labour on the farms."

Women fared decidedly worse than men on white-owned farms, as they had less access to and security on land.374 Labour tenancy and other labour arrangements were defined according to the terms established by the white farmer and the patriarch of the

African tenant family, leaving the women and children voiceless. The labour tenant contract "revolved around the control of household labour by the patriarch," which meant that women were bound to labour for their husbands and the white farm-owner.375 If the wife refused the terms of labour negotiated for her, or if her work was considered unsatisfactory, the entire family could be evicted. Women's ability to desert a farm in protest of poor wages and conditions was limited by their responsibility to provide for their children. Furthermore, women employed as wage labourers were always paid less than men, and they were often subject to domestic and sexual violence at the hands of the white farmer or his managers.376 However, farmers seeking wage labourers preferred to

3 2 Jacklyn Cock, Maids and Madams: Domestic Workers under Apartheid (London: Women's Press, 1989), 31. 373 Davies, We Cry for Our Land, 20. 374 Catherine Cross and Michelle Friedman, "Women and Tenure: Marginality and the Left-Hand Power," in Women. Land and Authority: Perspectives from South Africa, ed. Shamim Meer (Oxford: Oxfam, 1997), 22. 375 McClendon, Genders and Generations Apart. 6. 376 Linda Waldman and Mampe Ntsedi, "Women on Highveld Farms: An Outlook for Development," in Women, Land and Authority: Perspectives from South Africa, ed. Shamim Meer (Oxford: Oxfam, 1997), 104.

92 hire women, as they are seen as more compliant and less expensive. This remains the case.

Violence certainly was pervasive on South Africa's white-owned farms; however, it would be a mistake to equate the violence found on the farms of Bethal with all white- owned farms. White farmers could treat their workers mercilessly, especially those

"judged to be delinquents," but characterizing South African farming as "rule by sjambo}C would be misleading.377 A complex relationship, and not merely the unrestricted use of violence, guided the actions of white farmers and African tenants.

A common punishment for insubordination and other offences on white farms was "private and summary justice by means of a thrashing."378 However, as Van Onselen and Morrell argued, this form of violence was often part of the paternalistic relationship that developed between white farmers and black workers, and it was not equivalent to the routine violence of the plantation farms or the Bethal District. "The ideology of paternalism contains within it the reason and justification for the use of violence by the more powerful 'father' towards the weaker 'child.'"379 Rather than rely solely on force, farmers also used gifts, concessions, naming practices and other rituals to reinforce a sense of submission and respect among the black workers.380 Morrell argued that the term frequently employed by white farmers, "our natives," spoke of a sense of belonging and mutual trust, which testified to a distinct relationship between white farmer and black worker that did not extend to include the African population in general or even African

Macmillan, Africa Emergent 121. Gordon, Transformation and Trouble, 50. Morrell, '"Synonymous with Gentlemen'?," 189. Van Onselen, "Paternalism and Violence," 212.

93 workers on neighbouring farms. With these anonymous Africans, white farmers would resort to violence (for trespassing for example) much more readily.

Nevertheless, even paternalistic relationships could include severe brutality. The language of paternalism could be used as a "psychological tool" to "subjugate and deprive African workers of their human dignity."382 African labourers never rose above the status of boys and girls, and workers had to address the white farmer as baas (boss).

"Verbal abuse was also commonly used to undermine the dignity and independence of

Africans."383 Verbal abuse, however, was often the least of tenants' worries. In 1981 a spokesman for the South African Council of Churches reported that thousands of farm workers "lived and worked in a situation in which there was virtually no escape from physical assault. He said that many farmworkers had come to accept corporal punishment as part of normal procedure."384 Few workers dared report cases of assault, for they feared eviction or other consequences. When farmers were charged, they were rarely convicted; of those convicted, few served their sentences. 85

Paternalistic relationships between white fanners and black labourers were profoundly unequal, yet they were subject to negotiation. The threat and negotiating power labourers possessed reduced farmers' willingness to resort frequently to extreme forms of violence. Workers could desert the farm or disrupt the labour process if they felt the farmer had made too many demands on their labour, and most farmers realized that '"by showing a little kindly interest in their natives, they improved the old state of

Morrell, '"Synonymous with Gentlemen'?," 184-185. Fairweather, A Common Hunger. 9. Ibid. Cook, Akin to Slavery. 31. Ibid.. 32-33.

94 affairs." Unfortunately, as Jonny Steinberg made clear, white farmers were often unaware when they overstepped the accepted terms of their relationships with their labourers until it was too late.

There are rules for those white farmers who defend their property too harshly, and for those who are not vigilant enough. There are rules for farmers who sink below a commonly held threshold of human decency, and there are rules for those who are considered kind. The bizarre thing, though, is that white farmers have absolutely no idea that these rules exist.387

Van Onselen argued that the potential for individual and collective violence was most pronounced when the terms of the paternalistic relationship were being rapidly eroded or reconstructed. Violence could, for example, be more pervasive during booms or slumps in the economy, as farmers attempted to squeeze as much profit from their workers as possible.389 The rapid renegotiation of rural relationships following the advent of democracy in 1994 represented an extreme reconstruction of paternalistic relationships and presented such an occasion for individual and collective violence. This certainly could motivate some of the recent farm attacks, as labourers attempt to renegotiate the outdated terms of their employment with white fanners. The current wave of violence in rural South Africa can thus be contributed in part to the dismantling of the unjust rules that dictated the unequal terms of rural race relations during apartheid.

Regrettably, not all farmer-labourer relationships were ameliorated by paternalism. Paternalistic relationships could only develop where property ownership was firmly established and not contested by the original occupants. Thus, in areas where white land ownership was more recent, "agreements between farmers and tenants often

386 Morrell, '"Synonymous with Gentlemen'?," 184. 387 Steinberg, Midlands. 51. 388 Van Onselen, "Paternalism and Violence," 213. 389 Beinart and Delius, "Introduction," 37-38.

95 worked against a punitive bureaucratic backdrop...thus, the capacity for violence, prejudice and the naked exercise of power (for example in the many evictions) was great."390 Furthermore, short-term migrant workers had little opportunity to develop relationships with their employers and were not protected by paternalistic considerations.

However, even these most vulnerable employees could desert farms in protest or boycott recruiters for the more violent farms.391 Paternalistic relationships did not extend to include Africans living in reserves or other areas in close proximity to the white farm, and farmers often dealt with these people with an iron fist, causing deep-seated bitterness and resentment among African neighbours.

White farmers' relationships with black workers and neighbours were often shaped by farmers' military experiences. From the early days of settlement, the South

African countryside was subject to wars, violent revolts and other disturbances, which perpetuated a deep-seated sense of militarism in settler masculinity.392 During the apartheid era, upon graduation from high school every white male was expected to join the South African Defence Force, which was frequently deployed against African liberation movements in neighbouring countries and within the townships of South Africa itself. Rural commando units also raided or carried out covert operations against each of

South Africa's neighbours.3 The majority of white South African males were thus deeply ingrained with a sense of militaristic nationalism, which viewed Africans as the enemy and blurred the distinction between the racial and military frontiers.

390 Morrell, '"Synonymous with Gentlemen'?," 191. 391 Jeeves and Crush, "Introduction," 26-27. 392 Robert Morrell, From Boys to Gentlemen: Settler Masculinity in Colonial Natal. 1880-1920 (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2001), 139. 393 Thompson, A History of South Africa. 231-232.

96 Steinberg discovered that for most rural white men, "the war [against African liberation movements] had never ended. They took their imagery of manoeuvres, positions, flanks and enemies with them into the quiet hills of KwaZulu Natal and painted it all over the countryside."394 The habit of equating the enemy with the entire African population infected farmers' relationships with the Africans on and near their farms and justified their use of violence. Furthermore, as the anti-apartheid resistance movement gained momentum in the 1980s, the identities of many black South Africans were shaped by the growing violence. Although the more militant aspects of the anti-apartheid struggle were generally contained within urban areas, migrant workers often took mis sense of militarism with then when they returned to their rural homes. Most white men and some black men in rural South Africa were thus "mobilized in terms of a militaristic nationalism; they were taught a competence with small arms and other weaponry, and an ideology which views violence as a legitimate solution to conflict and a means of both obtaining and defending power."395 This had a violent effect on the renegotiation of rural politics in democratic South Africa.

Violent Justice in the Apartheid Era

The nature of apartheid's justice system also influenced the terms of rural race relations during apartheid and had a monumentally negative effect on post-apartheid law enforcement, which certainly is an important factor in an analysis of farm attacks. Under

National Party rule, "the police (aided by the military) protected the white state; the judiciary (including the lower-court magistrates) lost its reputation for equity and

394 Steinberg, Midlands. 15. 395 Jacklyn Cock, "Weaponry and the Culture of Violence in South Africa," in Society Under Seige: Managing Anns in South Africa, ed. Virginia Gamba (Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies, 2000), 85.

97 independence; and security laws swept aside many procedural protections that had been part of the British legal tradition adopted more than two centuries before."396 The justice system was apartheid's "very cruel and visible instrument," and responsibility for the current crime epidemic can, to a large extent, be placed at the feet of colonialism and apartheid, as white minority rule cultivated the social conditions that bred violent crime.398 Apartheid intentionally destroyed independent African livelihoods and spread poverty throughout the African population. Africans who were evicted from their homes and forced to relocate according to one of the many segregation laws suffered from severed community ties and dissolved kinship networks "through which people [found] spouses, jobs and safety in times of trouble."399 The migrant labour system often left children alone to "grow up on the streets...They became strange creatures that instil fear in their elders; adults before their time, and yet, simultaneously, still children even when they are fully grown."400

Apartheid eroded the sense of belonging and social unity in countless African communities, and many youth turned to gangs and crime to fill the resulting void.

Desperate poverty, broken homes, unemployment, dislocated communities and a severe lack of viable alternatives among the African population forced some people to survive through the only means they could—crime.401 Despite the flurry of change that has swept South Africa, the marginalization, poverty, unemployment and deprivation of the apartheid era, "have not only been sustained, but continue to underpin much of the

396 Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 51. JW Ibid.. 23. 398 Shaw, Crime and Policing in Post-Apartheid South Africa. 2. 399 Steinberg, "Introduction: Behind the Crime Wave," 3. 400 Ibid. 401 Graeme Simpson, "Shock Troops and Bandits: Youth, Crime and Politics," in Crime Wave: The South African Underworld and its Foes, ed. Jonny Steinberg (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001), 123.

98 criminal violence which dominates the social and political landscape in the post-apartheid

era."402 It is, therefore, understandable that, being the only sites of affluence in a sea of

black poverty, white farms have been targeted for robbery, and in the process have

become sites of murderous violence.

Poverty, unemployment and the loss of a sense of belonging, however, are

incomplete explanations for the extent and violent nature of South African crime.

Another important factor is apartheid's criminalization of the African population and the

resulting lack of respect for the racist justice system. Pass laws and other apartheid

legislation ensured that many Africans at some point in their lives were convicted of a

criminal act, even if it were as simple as not having one's pass in order. With so many

people, including such revered personalities as Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu,

spending time in prison for breaking unjust laws, the stigma that going to prison might

otherwise carry was largely removed.403 As a result, generations of Africans were raised

who "regarded defiance of the law as a badge of respect."404

In a speech at a court hearing in 1962, Nelson Mandela exemplified this point.

He stated: "I challenge the right of this court to hear my case on two grounds. Firstly, I

challenge it because I fear that I will not be given a fair and proper trial. Secondly, I

consider myself neither legally nor morally bound to obey laws made by a parliament in

which I have no representation."405 After decades of resisting apartheid's laws, "the

institutions of the law—much less the law itself—are rooted so shallowly in the

402 Simpson, "Shock Troops and Bandits," 115. 403 Wilfried Schfirf, Gaironesa Saban and Maria Hauck, "Local Communities and Crime Prevention: Two Experiments in Partnership Policing," in Crime Wave: The South African Underworld and its Foes, ed. Jonny Steinberg (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001), 111. 404 Arnold, The New South Africa. 84. 405 Mandela, The Struggle is Mv Life. 133-134.

99 consciousness of some of the citizens of South Africa that they think nothing of committing serious crimes."406 The justice system of democratic South Africa still

straggles to overcome this legacy of apartheid.

Apartheid also created crime by nature of its policing. Since Bantustans were not

considered part of South Africa, the South African Police (SAP) did not patrol these areas to prevent crime. The SAP only sought to ensure that crime remained contained within the Bantustans and black townships. The SAP's own official historian admitted that,

during the apartheid era, only one in ten members of the police force was tasked with

crime detection and investigation; the remaining nine merely enforced racist legislation

and crushed opposition.407 By allowing crime to flourish in black areas and sealing off white areas, the apartheid state "reinforced notions of black savagery and white

dominance central to justifying its necessity."408

The anti-apartheid straggle also nurtured a lifestyle that, for some activists, turned criminal following the advent of democracy. The counter-culture of youth organization

inherent in the anti-apartheid struggle "lent itself as easily to criminal organisation as it

did to political organisation."409 During the last decades of apartheid, youth who may

have become involved in gangs had the alternative of joining the anti-apartheid struggle.

With the coming of democracy, the ANC leadership advised the youth to go back to

school and work, but with schools in chaos, money for school fees absent and jobs

lacking, the propensity for sustained lawlessness increased. The ANC's call to make

South Africa ungovernable in the fight against apartheid proved difficult to retract once

406 Altbeker, "Policing the Frontier," 25. 407 Shaw, Crime and Policing in Post-Apartheid South Africa. 1. 408 Ibid., 10. 409 Simpson, "Shock Troops and Bandits," 121. 410 Shaw, Crime and Policing in Post-Apartheid South Africa. 24.

100 democracy was achieved. "Political violence in South Africa has thus left a legacy with important consequences for crime trends."411 Although it is too simplistic to view the political resistance of the 1980s as a precursor to the violent crime epidemic of the post- apartheid era, the continuities are crucial and express a close proximity between crime and politics.412 For many youth, violence and crime became an acceptable and legitimate part of everyday life.

For more than forty years the police had been the face of apartheid; they brutally enforced illegitimate, racist laws, "which would produce a major scandal if applied to even the worst elements of the European population."413 The police forcibly removed

Africans from their homes, arrested them for pass law infringements, controlled their movements, and quelled resistance with the "extralegal brutality of beatings, killing and torture."414 As early as the 1950s, the SAP adopted the use of "systematic inhumane treatment and torture."415 In 1954, Head Constable Nieuwenhuis of the Orange Free

State admitted to using electric shock to force an alleged stock thief to confess to the whereabouts of cattle he was accused of stealing. Police frequently demanded sex from women in violation of pass laws as an alternative to prison. Furthermore, money and goods were sometimes stolen from Africans' homes during pass and liquor raids.416

As resistance to apartheid grew, so did the repressive nature of the justice system.

During national states of emergency in the 1980s, every police officer was bestowed

411 Shaw, Crime and Policing in Post-Apartheid South Africa. 20. 412 Steinberg, "Introduction: Behind the Crime Wave," 4-5. Some observers feel that Mandela was easy on criminals during his term as president because in many cases they were the political activists that sprung him from prison after 27 years and brought apartheid to an end. 413 De Kiewiet, The Anatomy of South African Misery. 52. 414 Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 5. 415 Brewer, Black and Blue. 215. 416 Ibid., 217.

101 broad powers of arrest, detention and interrogation, which "effectively permitted uncontrolled violence" against Africans. Almost all National Police Commissioners were appointed from the ranks of the Security Branch and gave precedence to matters of state security over crime prevention, blurring the distinction between criminal and political acts.419 The courts were given power to detain indefinitely any African who, in their opinion, "threatened 'the safety of the public or the maintenance of public order.'"420 The justice system was the primary instrument of apartheid's repression.

Thus, by the early 1990s, the entire system had lost all legitimacy in the eyes of the

African population and was in dire need of reform to respond to the needs of a democratic nation.

Conclusion

As Jonny Steinberg argued in Midlands, farmers' treatment, both past and present, of their black workers, tenants and neighbours can affect the terms of the renegotiated relationships between these groups after apartheid. When Steinberg asked an African elder what Arthur Mitchell should have done to avoid the death of his son, the elder responded, '"respected human dignity.'"421 Furthermore, unbeknown to white farmers, following the advent of democracy old paternalistic relationships were often considered void by African tenants and neighbours.

It was part of the new mood of the times; the old paternalistic relationship, the one Mitchell assumed to be alive and well when he went down to Langeni to address his tenants, had vanished with apartheid. The new

Thompson, A History of South Africa. 235. Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 68. Shaw, Crime and Policing in Post-Apartheid South Africa. 12. Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 5. Steinberg, Midlands. 237.

102 breed Mitchell addressed at the side of the road was no longer convinced that white proprietorship of the countryside was inevitable.

Labour exploitation and the poor farmer-labourer relationships that developed during the segregation and apartheid eras thus need to be examined as potential motives in farm attacks.

During the segregation era, government legislation such as the 1913 Land Act and the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act, suppressed independent African agriculture and supported white commercial farming. Many African communities were relocated to squalid reserves where they provided cheap migrant labour to white-owned farms, and many African families that remained on white-owned farms were forced to enter exploitative contracts as labour tenants. However, the terms of segregationist legislation could not be fully enforced, and as long as Africans could secure access to land, they could not be completely subjugated. Under the apartheid regime, however, segregationist legislation, such as the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act, was thoroughly and ruthlessly enforced and independent African agriculture was obliterated.

Apartheid laws such as the Group Areas Act, the Prevention of Illegal Squatting

Act, the pass laws, the Amendment of the Native Trust and Land Act and the Trespass

Act created a virtually captive rural African work force, which white farmers were able and encouraged to exploit with impunity. African farm workers had absolutely no legal protection from the demands of white commercial farming, and white farmers enjoyed

"extensive power over their African workers, sometimes amounting virtually to the power of life and death."423 Farm workers were often subject to heavy workloads under dangerous conditions, long hours, extremely low wages, squalid living quarters, rape,

422 Steinberg, Midlands. 173. 423 Cook, Akin to Slavery. 6.

103 eviction, physical and verbal abuse and even murder. The apartheid government further supported white commercial farming through the use of prison labour, which was pitilessly exploited. Therefore, the period between 1913 and 1994 saw the destruction of

African land ownership, rent tenancy, sharecropping and labour tenancy, and approximately one million African farm residents were relocated to the neglected reserves. The story of Kas Maine clearly demonstrates this progression from once- independent and successful African peasantry to exploited wage labourers on white- owned farms and neglected residents of overcrowded reserves.

Violent illegitimate policing, including the use of commandos in rural areas, also flourished under apartheid. This not only denied Africans legal representation against the violent and exploitative behaviour of their white employers, but it also created a crisis of police legitimacy and a crime epidemic that would have grave repercussions in the democratic era. Nevertheless, despite racist policing and violent punishment on farms,

Africans' struggle against the demands and injustices of the white state became more sustained as exploitation intensified, and Africans were often able to shape the terms of their tenancy on white-owned farms. "Countless individual or small-scale acts of non­ compliance proved more pervasive, elusive, persistent and difficult to suppress or control than more formal and organised political struggle."424 Not only did these subtle resistance tactics play "a decisive role in the rise and fall of apartheid," but they also continue to influence the relationship between white and black in rural South Africa.

When democracy was finally launched in South Africa in 1994, relationships between white farmers and black workers and neighbours were subject to rapid

424 Bonner, Delius, and Posel, "The Shaping of Apartheid," 2. 425 Ibid., 2.

104 renegotiation as rural power relations were drastically altered. White farmers no longer enjoyed the impunity of the apartheid era. This represented an occasion ripe for individual and collective violence, both on the part of the white farming community, which wished to preserve its position of superiority and in many cases actually tightened its grip on black labour, and the rural African community, which had been so ruthlessly exploited under the segregation and apartheid regimes. The culture of protest that developed in many African communities following the destruction of the African peasantry intensified in the democratic era. Resistance to exploitative labour conditions on white-owned farms and retribution for past ill treatment can thus be a powerful motivating factor in some farm attacks. When apartheid was still in its infancy, Alan

Paton feared a gloomy end: "He was grave and silent, and then he said sombrely, I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating."426 The ferocity of the recent torrent of farm attacks could lead one to believe that, at least in the hearts and minds of some rural South Africans, Paton was absolutely right.

Paton, Cry the Beloved Country. 71.

105 Chapter Four: Rural Reform in Democratic South Africa, 1994-2008

Have no doubt it is fear in the land. For what can men do when so many have grown lawless? Who can enjoy the lovely land, who can enjoy the seventy years, and the sun that pours down on the earth, when there is fear in the heart? Who can walk quietly in the shadow ofthejacarandas, when their beauty is grown to danger? Who can lie peacefully abed, while the darkness holds some secret? What lovers can lie sweetly under the stars when menace grows with the measure of their seclusion?

-Alan Paton427

Introduction

With the unbanning of the African National Congress in 1990 and the dawn of democracy in 1994, South Africa underwent incredible changes, as pre-existing power relationships were hotly contested. Many black South Africans vied for increased influence in the new social order, while many white South Africans desperately attempted to retain a degree of their former authority and personal and economic security.

One result of this changing social environment has been a drastic increase in violent crime in areas of white residence, which were formerly relatively immune from this threat. In rural areas this increase in violent crime has taken the form of vicious farm attacks that have claimed the lives of more than one hundred white farmers each year since the early 1990s.

In 2001, the South African government, distressed at its inability to contain farm attacks, commissioned the Committee of Inquiry Into Farm Attacks "to inquire into the ongoing spate of attacks on farms, which include violent criminal acts such as murder, robbery, rape, etc., and to determine the motives and factors behind these attacks and to

427 Paton, Cry the Beloved Country. 106.

106 make recommendations on their findings." The Committee released its findings in

2003. It concluded that in the vast majority (89.3%) of farm attacks, "the motive was clearly robbery."429 Furthermore, concerning Steinberg's assessment of the farm attack under review in Midlands, the Committee concluded that it "found no support whatsoever for [Steinberg's] claim that the behaviour of the deceased's father contributed in any way to the murder. Nor could it find any corroboration for his argument that the killing was part of a drive in the area to remove white farmers from their land."430 However, the

Committee could not support the claim that robbery motivated the murder of Peter

Mitchell, which leaves other motives open for discussion.

This chapter concurs with the Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks that robbery certainly motivates many incidents, and farm attacks cannot be divorced from the wave of violent crime that has engulfed South Africa. Criminals view farms as easy targets due to the large distances between farmhouses and the vulnerability of rural residents, many of whom are older and less able to physically defend themselves.431

However, given the historical importance of land and labour issues dating as far back as

1652, coupled with the intensity of the struggles over land and labour throughout the colonial and apartheid eras, it would be naive to overlook the significance of these issues during the extreme restructuring and renegotiation of rural relationships of the post- apartheid era.

To illustrate the multi-causal nature of farm attacks, this chapter begins with a discussion of crime and policing in the aftermath of apartheid. It then revisits the labour

428 Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks, Report of the Committee. 417. 429 Ibid., 419. 430 Ibid.. 434. 431 Wyndham Hartley, "DA Seeks Special Police Unit to Fight Farm Attacks," Business Day. December 9, 2004.

107 and land arguments of Chapters Two and Three to illustrate that these struggles did not simply disappear in 1994. It is not the intent of this chapter to argue that concerns over land ownership and labour exploitation motivate the majority of farm attacks. Rather, this chapter argues that without giving serious consideration to the possibility of motives other than robbery, the complexity of farm attacks cannot be understood, and any rural protection plan aimed at eliminating this phenomenon that omits the possibility of land- and labour-related motivating factors, will fail.

Crime and Policing

Crime certainly has become a pervasive and frightening aspect of South African society, and, as the above quotation poetically illustrates, the fear of violent crime has caused many South Africans to forgo some of life's sweetest pleasures. In his analysis of post-apartheid crime, Mark Shaw noted that most South Africans' fear of crime does not result primarily from the scale of the epidemic but from the severe viciousness of the incidents: "a man whose face was burnt with a clothing iron during a home burglary, women gang raped and then killed, people shot in their homes, shacks, on their farms, pulled from their cars, buried in ditches."432 For many white South Africans, the cruelty associated with the rise in violent crime indicates more sinister motives than poverty- induced robbery.

The white population has been particularly affected by the increase in violent crime following the introduction of democracy; for them, being victims of violent crime is a new phenomenon. With the fall of apartheid crime seeped into white areas, where, as

Shaw, Crime and Policing in Post-Apartheid South Africa, xii-xiii.

108 Shaw pointed out, it was much more likely to be reported and recorded.433 As one

Member of Parliament noted: "with the coming of democratic society, crime democratized along with it. It started affecting middle class and more prominent people, not only blacks."434 It must be remembered, however, that black South Africans are victimized much more frequently than their white neighbours. Even in democratic South

Africa, black people make easier targets than whites, as they generally cannot afford the security systems found in many white homes and neighbourhoods.

When the African National Congress won South Africa's first democratic election in 1994, it began to restructure the repressive aspects of South African society. Among the first institutions targeted for reform was the police force. The success of transition from authoritarian to democratic government is measured, to a large extent, by the ability of the justice system to operate in service of the people rather than the state.435 For that reason, the reformed police department, the South African Police Service (SAPS), has been tasked with two incredibly important and exceptionally difficult challenges: to move beyond its authoritarian history and to repel the spate of violent crime, "or, as it is sometimes put in the corridors of police headquarters, 'to transform under fire.'"436

Unfortunately, when the ANC gained office, it found the government coffers near empty.

433 Shaw, Crime and Policing in Post-Apartheid South Africa. 21. Louw and Sch6nteich argued that crime statistics in South Africa are highly unreliable, as abnormalities and inconsistencies in reporting methodologies from almost 1200 police stations nation-wide lead to statistical errors. One station, for example, recorded incidents of pick-pocketing that occurred in taxis as cash-in-transit heists. Crimes are not always reported, as the population has little faith that the police will actually convict the perpetrators. Furthermore, the better an area is policed, the more crimes will be reported and recorded. Therefore, an increase in crime rates on paper does not necessarily mean that actual crime rates have gone up. Antoinette Louw and Martin SchOnteich, "Playing die Numbers Game: Promises, Policing and Crime Statistics," in Crime Wave: The South African Underworld and its Foes, ed. Jonny Steinberg (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001). 434 Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 89. 435 Ibid.. 5. 436 Shaw, Crime and Policing in Post-Apartheid South Africa, xi.

109 Without adequate funds, reforming the police force was an immensely challenging

task.437

Transforming the police service has been a long and difficult process. The SAPS

was created out of the eleven police agencies in the country, and many senior SAP

officers occupied key positions in the upper ranks of the new SAPS and, to a large extent,

dictated the pace of change.438 The "institutional culture" of the apartheid police force

resisted new models of proper police conduct.439 Many of the best detectives in the SAP

left the force to pursue careers with private companies where the wages were more

competitive, and many who stayed suffered from a lack of commitment. Resources were

incredibly limited. Altbeker noted that, "by 1997, three years after the incorporation of

the Transkeian Police into the SAPS, nineteen of the region's thirty-three police stations

still had no telephones and its senior officers had an average of only nine weeks of formal

training in their entire careers."440 Bureaucratic reorganization and the slow adaptability

of apartheid's antiquated criminal justice system strained the SAPS limited resources, and

corruption plagues the SAPS to this day. Segal, Pelo, Rampa and Altbeker described

incidents of police corruption they encountered while conducting research on the

SAPS.441 National police commissioner Jackie Selebi is currently awaiting trial on three

counts of corruption and one count of defeating the ends of justice.442

437 Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), 649. 438 Shaw, Crime and Policing in Post-Apartheid South Africa. 28. 439 Scharf, Saban and Hauck, "Local Communities and Crime Prevention," 67. 440 Altbeker, The Dirty Work of Democracy. 33. 441 Lauren Segal, Joy Pelo and Pule Rampa, "Into the Heart of Darkness: Journeys of the Amagents in Crime, Violence and Death," in Crime Wave: The South African Underworld and its Foes, ed. Jonny Steinberg (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001), and Altbeker, The Dirty Work of Democracy. 442 "Selebi Charged for Corruption," Business Day. February 1,2008.

110 The under-funded and under-staffed SAPS was required to expand its presence in black townships, which were largely unpatrolled during the apartheid administration.

This placed additional pressure on the police. Moreover, the SAPS had to adjust its tactics to observe the rights of suspects according to the new constitution; gratuitous police violence is not acceptable in the new South Africa. The change from a confession- based to an evidence-based criminal justice system has decreased the conviction rate

(although it has most likely also decreased the number of false convictions).443 In the view of many South Africans, these factors have combined to make the South African

Police Service less effective than its predecessor and have emboldened criminals to commit acts unprecedented under the apartheid government.444

The South African Police Service thus struggles with a lack of experienced detectives, inefficiency, a lack of accountability, corruption, a severe lack of resources, an increased service area, and a violent crime wave engulfing South Africa.445 This,

Altbeker pointed out, is the "enormous weight of the crimogenic legacy of apartheid,"446 and helps explain the proliferation of violent crime in South Africa, including on its farmland. The inability of the SAPS to effectively curb violent crime has led to an increase in private security companies for those who can afford such a luxury and vigilante groups for those who cannot.447 Regrettably, these security organizations,

Scharf, Saban and Hauck, "Local Communities and Crime Prevention," 66. 444 Makubetse Sekhonyane and Antoinette Louw, Violent Justice: Vigilantism and the State's Response (Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies, 2002), 12. 445 It should be noted, however, as Altbeker has, that since 2000, the SAPS has "effected a hugely impressive turnaround at strategic, organisational and operational levels. They have gotten more resources, and they are deploying them wisely. More I think, could not really be asked of its management." Altbeker, The Dirty Work of Democracy, 263. 446 Altbeker, "Policing the Frontier," 38. However, as Mark Shaw noted, the existence of private security organizations and vigilante groups "does not alter the fact that the vast majority of the country's citizens wish to work with the police, but are often frustrated from doing so." Shaw, Crime and Policing in Post-Apartheid South Africa. 101.

Ill especially vigilante groups, function in opposition to the democratic justice system and threaten the country's fragile rule of law.448 In rural areas, the undemocratic and often brutal nature of white vigilante organizations, especially commandos, may in fact lead to more farm attacks.

Retribution for farm attacks by commandos, individual white farmers and private security personnel has been known to be "short, sharp and often outside the ambit of the law."449 Victims of commando violence are often unable to criminally charge commando members due to the frequent friendship and family ties between farmers, commando members and local police. "As a consequence, farm owners and managers, private security personnel, and police or army reservists who commit violence against black farmworkers and residents do so largely with impunity."450 Farm workers may be forced to resort to violent means in response to commando brutality.451 Meanwhile, the ferocity of farm attacks fuels more iron-fisted vigilantism.

In February 2003, South African President Thabo Mbeki announced that the

South African Defence Force Territorial Reserve, also known as the commandos, is to be phased out by the end of 2009 and replaced by rural crime prevention and borderline control units of the South African Police Service.452 Given the apparent inability of the

SAPS to effectively curb the crime rate in rural South Africa, dismantling the commando system and replacing it with more rural police does not seem like an effective method of reducing farm attacks. In their current form, commandos certainly are an outdated and

448 Sekhonyane and Louw, Violent Justice, v. 449 Shaw, Crime and Policing in Post-Apartheid South Africa. 99. 450 Human Rights Watch, "Unequal Protection." 451 Nasreen Seria, "Farmers Fear a Security Vacuum: Police Expected to Take Commandos' Role of Protecting Rural Communities," Business Day. February 19,2003. 452 Steinberg, "After the Commandos," iv.

112 inappropriate form of crime control for a democratic nation, and Human Rights Watch has documented chilling cases of human rights abuses by commando members.453

However, eliminating the commando system at such a critical juncture without a well- planned alternative form of rural protection seems a hasty decision that may prove to have deadly consequences.

After assessing the role of the commandos and the ability of the SAPS to take on the daunting task of policing South Africa's rural areas, Steinberg concluded that, "the policing of agricultural crimes, and of the rural sectors of small town police stations more generally, is likely to deteriorate after the closure of the Commandos."454 Black tenants, workers, and neighbours considering violent action against white farmers, for whatever motive, already have less to fear from the constitution-bound SAPS than they did from its predecessor; the disbanding of the commandos would heighten this sense of impunity.

Institute of Security Studies analyst Martin Schonteich commented that disbanding the commando system was a hasty decision: "rural areas are exceptionally under-policed.

The police do not have the resources, such as helicopters and vehicles needed for that terrain. While there may be better models than the commando system, alternatives should be discussed before the system is simply abolished."455 If white farmers comply with Mbeki's announcement, the transition from commando to SAPS patrol may lead to situations where agricultural regions go almost completely unpatrolled. However, it is very possible that many white farmers will ignore Mbeki's call to abolish the commandos, which will be very difficult for the government to enforce.

Human Rights Watch, "Unequal Protection." Steinberg, "After the Commandos," v. Seria, "Farmers Fear a Security Vacuum."

113 It is clear that, given the challenges facing the South African Police Service and the growing crime epidemic in the country, the Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks was certainly correct in identifying robbery as a primary motive. Until the conviction rate increases and the social and economic conditions that breed violent crime are reduced, one cannot expect the rate of burglaries to subside substantially. However, the

Committee failed to satisfactorily defend its claim that 89.3% of farm attacks are motivated by nothing more than robbery in two key ways.

First, the Committee's methodology is questionable. The Committee based its research on examining the records of 2,644 farm attacks, but only forty-five case studies were analyzed "in detail."456 The majority of the Committee's interviews consisted of administering "a structured questionnaire,"457 which leaves little room for comprehending the intricacies of each case and draws into sharp relief the personal, meticulous nature of

Steinberg's work, which focused exclusively on one case for more than two years.

Nevertheless, the Committee was able to clearly identify land-related motives in several of the forty-five cases.45 (Labour exploitation and poor farmer-labourer relationships were not given consideration in the Committee's Report except to say that there existed no "evidence to support the theory that farm attacks, with the exception of relatively few cases, are related to labour disputes or grudges."459)

The Committee's belief in the importance of land issues is apparent in statements such as, "The illegal occupation of land is therefore one of the major causes of farm attacks," and "It is obvious that the question of land has become an enormous problem. It

456 Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks, Report of the Committee. 421. 457 Ibid.. 14. 458 See Chapter Five of Report of the Committee. 459 Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks, Report of the Committee. 411.

114 may well become a bigger threat to the farming community than the problem of farm attacks in the narrow sense of the word."460 However, upon completing its research, the

Committee concluded that, "the forty-five case studies cannot be regarded as a valid sample of farm attacks in general... the frequency of a certain set of circumstances in the case studies should not be taken as an indication of its incidence in general."461 The trends identified in these cases were thus dismissed as unrepresentative of farm attacks as a whole. If the generalizations garnered from these forty-five case studies cannot be utilized "to determine the motives and factors behind these attacks,"462 which the

Committee was tasked to do, it seems that analyzing these case studies was a rather pointless venture. The Committee's conclusion that, "by far the greater majority of cases are motivated by a desire to rob or steal"463 seems disjointed from the evidence presented in the fifth chapter of the Committee's report.

Furthermore, the Committee acknowledged that part of its mission was to determine whether farm attacks had political motives, yet it neglected to specify what constitutes a political motive. It hinted that political motives were connected to land issues, but the Committee was not clear whether farm attacks perpetrated by individuals or communities independent of any political parties, unions or other organizations were defined as political.4 4 This becomes particularly troubling when the Committee admits in chapters five and eighteen that land invasions (black South Africans' illegal occupation of white-owned land) are closely linked to acts of intimidation and arson, and often lead to farm attacks "in the narrow sense of the word where robberies, and even rape and

460 Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks, Report of the Committee. 121. 461 Ibid, 421. *° Ibid. 417. 463 Ibid., 445. 464 Ibid.. 408.

115 murder may follow." The fact that the Committee discussed land invasions in a separate chapter suggests that it considered farm attacks committed on land under invasion as a unique phenomenon; however, it is unclear whether farm attacks that are linked to land invasions are included in the two percent of attacks that the Committee concluded had "some political or racial motive."466

The second problem with the Committee's report concerns its failure to prove that the majority of farm attacks were not motivated by factors pertaining to land and labour and were in fact motivated by the desire to rob. The Committee failed to provide adequate evidence that perpetrators of farm attacks were motivated solely by the desire for material goods. Although there were at least one hundred fourteen perpetrators, seventy-eight of whom were convicted, in the forty-five case studies the Committee analyzed, the Committee itself only interviewed two convicted criminals who admitted to attacking a white farm in an attempt to rob it. The rest of the Committee's argument was based on the assumption that "comprehensive" research conducted by an outside source was accurate.467 It seems that if one were intent on discovering the motives behind farm attacks, extensive discussions with perpetrators of these crimes would be a most valuable source. Furthermore, the Committee failed to investigate the possibility of robbery as an intimidation tactic or punishment for white farmers' malevolent actions. Issues pertaining to land or labour disputes could motivate robbery, but this prospect was not considered.

The Committee reported that most of the 10.7% of farm attacks that had

"obvious" motives other than robbery also reported items missing from the scene of the

465 Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks, Report of the Committee. 412. 466Ibid..419. 467 Ibid.. 427.

116 crime. In fact, of the forty-five case studies, the Committee concluded that six cases included revenge as a possible motive and another seven cases had overt racial or political overtones. Nevertheless, all forty-five cases included robbery or attempted robbery.469 This leads one to question whether the cases that were deemed to be mere robberies were not in fact motivated by other influences, and the perpetrators snatched a purse, a gun or car keys on the way out thus making the crime scene appear to be the site of mere robbery gone wrong. The probability that perpetrators would help themselves to material goods during a farm attack, no matter the motive, makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to determine the actual motivation behind the attack. Furthermore, the

Committee reported 900 other cases between 1998 and 2001 whose motives did not appear to be robbery, but did not have "obvious" motives. Once the figures have been added, this means that out of a total of 3544 farm attacks between 1994 and 2003, 1183 or 33.4% did not appear to be mere robberies, and an unknown number of the "obvious" cases of robbery could be incorrectly labelled. Therefore, it is arguable that a substantial number, if not the majority, of farm attacks are motivated, in whole or in part, by something other than simple economic gain. The remainder of this chapter will attempt to shed some light on the issues the Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks left in darkness.

ANC Campaigns as Potential Motives in Farm Attacks

Many white farmers in South Africa today are convinced that a political campaign aimed at pressuring them off the land is responsible for the farm attacks. Most white

468 Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks, Report of the Committee. 419. 469 Ibid., 422.

117 farmers are not satisfied that the Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks adequately investigated the possibility of political motives. Many farmers believe that, "the cruelty, the torture and the degradation to which some of the victims are subjected is proof that it is not just crime. The military precision with which these murders are carried out...is proof."470 Examples of attacks in which the perpetrators entered the farmhouse while its occupants were away then waited for the victims to return before killing them are frequently cited by white farmers as a "clear indication" that political issues prompt attacks.471 Many farmers believe political slogans such as "kill the farmer, kill the boer," which the late ANC MP Peter Mokaba popularized, and the Pan Africanist Congress' slogan "one settler, one bullet" made farmers acceptable targets for attack and were overlooked by the Committee.472 The Committee did, however, comment that victims of farm robberies had "a considerably higher risk" of being killed or seriously injured than victims of urban robberies, and in 71.1% of the cases examined in which a victim was killed, the Committee reported that there appeared to be no real reason (such as preventing later identification) for murder.473

The example of land grabs in Zimbabwe and President Mbeki's friendly relationship with Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe also kindle white farmers' notions of a sinister political operation against them.474 Zimbabwe suffered from unequal land distribution similar to that in South Africa. Rather than work with black tenants and white landowners to develop a land reform scheme, however, Robert Mugabe endorsed

470 Neels Blom, "White Farmers Key to SA's Food Security, Says Union," Business Day. September 21, 2006. 471 Hartley, "Farm Attacks." 472 "SA Belongs to All," Business Day. June 21,2002. 473 Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks, Report of the Committee. 414 and 421. 474 Meredith, The Fate of Africa. 672.

118 land grabs as a means of satisfying land hunger. Mugabe identified white farmers as the root of Zimbabwe's economic difficulties and turned a blind eye as black mobs burned farms and seized white-owned property.475 As of 2006, at least four thousand white farms had been seized for redistribution to landless blacks.476 Despite Mugabe's endorsement of this behaviour, only "several" white farmers have been murdered in

Zimbabwe.477 Nevertheless, as the land grabs continued, Mbeki endeavoured to shield

Mugabe from Western outrage and to overturn the Commonwealth's decision to suspend

Zimbabwe.478 This behaviour certainly won Mbeki support in "Africanist circles in

South Africa who celebrated Zimbabwe's example of giving the whites a good kicking and hoped for similar in South Africa."479 However, it increased white farmers' fears that they were under attack from a similar ANC-orchestrated campaign. A few members of

South Africa's government openly supported these land grabs as an effective means of land reform, which seem to justify white farmers' suspicions of the ANC.480

Despite these seemingly incriminating factors, there is ample evidence relieving the ANC government of culpability in farm attacks. Former President Nelson Mandela made farm attacks a priority with the launch of the Rural Protection Plan in 1997 and the

Rural Safety Summit in 1998.481 An integral player in the rural protection plan was the

South African Defence Force Territorial Reserve—the same white-protection group that frequently terrorized the rural black population.482 Far from encouraging further violence

Connolly, Apartheid in South Africa. 58. 476 "More White Farmers Face Eviction in Zimbabwe," Mail and Guardian Online. October 23,2006. 477 Rachel Swarns, "For Zimbabwe White Farmers, Time to Move On," New York Times. August 4,2002. 478 Meredith, The Fate of Africa. 673. 479 Bad. 480 James, Gaining Ground. 3. 481 Human Rights Watch, "Unequal Protection." 482 Martin Schonteich and Jonny Steinberg, Attacks on Farms and Small Holdings: An Evaluation of the Rural Protection Plan. http;//www.iss.co.za/Pubs/Other/Farm%20attacks/lContents.html.

119 against white farmers, these political acts are widely criticized by black South Africans,

as the Rural Protection Plan has "significantly increased insecurity for black residents of

and visitors to commercial farming areas, as they have become the targets of sometimes

indiscriminate 'anti-crime' initiatives."483 In fact, the Rural Protection Plan neither

included black farm labourers and residents in its plan to fight rural crime nor considered

farm workers' protection in the arrangement.484 The Rural Protection Plan is concerned

primarily with the protection of the white rural population and leaves black rural

residents vulnerable to the whims of farmers' so-called anti-crime tactics.

President Thabo Mbeki publicly denounced the "kill the farmer, kill the boer"

slogan in 2002 and proclaimed that white farmers are as South African as he is. He

concluded that, "nobody anywhere in our country, whoever they are, has a right to call

for the killing of any South African, whatever the colour, race, ethnic origin, gender or

health condition of the intended victim."485 The ANC government, under Mandela and

Mbeki, has actually placed a disproportionate emphasis on farm attacks considering they

make up only 0.69% of murders in South Africa.486 The conviction rate for farm attacks

is "far above" the national average: 43% for house robberies on farms compared to 6% in

urban robberies.487 According to Institute for Security Studies researcher Duxita Mistry, the high conviction rate of farm robberies is "the result of political will, resources and

investigation techniques."488 It is highly unlikely, given the government's determination to quell farm attacks, that there exists any ANC-orchestrated campaign against white

483 Human Rights Watch, "Unequal Protection." 484 Chantelle Benjamin, "Study on Farm Attacks Highlights Abuses," Business Day. September 3, 2003. 485 "SA Belongs to All," Business Day. 486 Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks, Report of the Committee. 418. 487 Chantelle Benjamin, "Conviction Rates Increase But Farm Attacks Still a Thorn in SA's Side," Business Day. January 12,2004. 488 Ibid.

120 fanners. However, there is evidence to suggest that the motives behind farm attacks run deeper than mere robbery.

Labour Issues as Potential Motives in Farm Attacks

The Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks concluded that disgruntled employees carried out only two to three percent of farm attacks. The Committee pointed to the fact that the majority of farm attack victims were unknown to the attacker as evidence that labour relations were not a significant factor in farm attacks. White farmers themselves are equally unwilling to consider exploitative labour arrangements as a possible cause of the farm attacks, as this would infer that farmers are at least partially responsible for the attacks.489 Given the limitations of research projects, it is difficult to prove that poor labour relations contribute significantly to farm attacks. It can be proven, however, that there exists a "severe crisis in the relationship between farmers and traditional labour, of which the roots go back several decades."490 Considering the historical struggle between black labourers and white farmers over labour conditions, it is plausible that with the relaxing of police and farmer retribution, African tenants' personal grievances against white farm owners have been given a less oppressive theatre for expression, and tactics in the struggle over labour conditions may have expanded to include direct attacks on farmers.

Steinberg's analysis of the Mitchell murder in Midlands provides a prime example of the ways in which labour exploitation and white farmers' cruelty could plausibly lead to a farm attack. The Mitchells' troubles began shortly after Arthur

489 Sandra Botha, "Politics Behind Farm Killings," Business Day. October 30,2003. 490 SchOnteich and Steinberg, Attacks on Farms and Small Holdings.

121 Mitchell purchased a neighbouring farm, Normandale, from a man named Lourie Steyn in 1998. Colin Waugh, the managing director of Farm Watch, told Steinberg that Arthur

Mitchell had "walked into a situation of blind racial hatred that had been instigated by another man [Steyn]."491 Waugh described Steyn as "a right-wing Afrikaner...six-foot- two and much feared. He was very hard with labour, not fair, not honest. After thirty years of his presence, Normandale was fertile ground for racial hatred."492 However,

Steinberg concluded that Arthur Mitchell did not concur with Waugh's description of

Steyn: "the problem, for Mitchell, was not that Steyn was too strong; he was much too weak."493

During one of Steinberg's first meetings with Waugh, he told Steinberg that

Arthur Mitchell is "'no ordinary farmer. For years he was a high-ranking member of the

South African Defence Force. Intelligence was his forte. He is as tough as nails, and he knows how to gather information.'"494 Mitchell flexed his strength during his first meeting with the black tenants of Normandale. Mitchell intended to turn Normandale into a game reserve; therefore, the residents were limited to five head of cattle per family, and they were not permitted to graze their cattle outside the designated area. The five head per family was a general rule in the district, but few farmers, including Steyn, enforced this limitation. Given the meticulous manner in which Mitchell had been policing his farms, however, his new tenants feared that those with more than five head would be forced to sell. This is a serious prospect for rural African families. "Cattle are the source of one's success, an emblem of one's escape from destitution, a guarantee that

491 Steinberg, Midlands. 17. 492 Ibid., 18. 493Ibjd. 494 Ibid,, 13.

122 one's children will marry well and that one's lineage is secured."495 One black tenant expressed his revolt with the five cattle rule to Steinberg: "Do you know what happens to your family when you are restricted to five cattle? It disappears. Never mind that your family has been carrying its name for 200 years. Never mind that the spirits of your ancestors are shouting and cursing you. No cattle, no family name."

Furthermore, during this first meeting Mitchell demanded a list of names of all the residents of Normandale so he could monitor who was living there. Mitchell prohibited the building of additional huts without his authority, and he threatened eviction for those who failed to comply. This was when the trouble began. Mitchell explained:

A member of the Mashabana family, a man who had worked for Steyn for many years, got up and started shouting. He said blacks do not give their names and identity numbers to umlungu—the white man—because umlungu cannot be trusted with such information. He will keep it innocently for a while and then turn it against you. You must understand how hostile and provocative that comment was. I came to them in my capacity as the owner of the land on which they lived. He responded by addressing me as mlungu. He was telling his neighbours that I was not an individual man but a member of a hostile race. He was saying that we are at war with each other.497

When Steinberg described this situation to other Africans in KwaZulu-Natal, his listeners

"would compose themselves and nod sagely. 'Ah, so that is what happened. You see now that it is no great mystery that the son was killed.'"4

Following this incident, Mitchell had numerous run-ins with several of the black tenants of Normandale. They shouted at him, set his farms alight, and tore down his fences. Mitchell was convinced: "They were talking to me. They were telling me to get out. Between February and the day in September when Peter was killed, I opened 21

495 Steinberg, Midlands. 234. 496 Ibid.. 230. 497 Ibid.. 20. 498 Ibid., 235.

123 criminal dockets with the police. That is four incidents a month, one a week. This was a

silent war."499 Three weeks after one the more heated arguments between Mitchell and his tenants, Arthur Mitchell's son Peter was found "slumped over his steering wheel with his brains splattered across the window."500

It is clear from this example that poor farmer-tenant relationships were a plausible motivating factor in Peter Mitchell's death. During Steinberg's discussion with two men who feature in Midlands as one man under the alias Elias Sithole, Steinberg asked what

Arthur Mitchell should have done differently. Sithole responded,

Respected human dignity. You do not march into people's homes and count them like goats...He should have gone down to Langeni [the tenants' community on Normandale] with a crate of beer, black people's beer. He should have invited the heads of the families to drink with him, asked them something about their lives, how they supported themselves, where they got their firewood, how many family members had good jobs. And then he should have said, "Listen, the nine families that are here I can live with, side by side, in peace. But nobody else is welcome. I have a farming operation to run here and I can't have hundreds of families living on my land. So, do me a favour. Build by all means, when your daughter gets married, when kids are born. But don't build in order to bring strangers onto the land."501

According to the evidence presented in Midlands, it appears that Arthur Mitchell's iron- fisted attempts to re-establish control over Steyn's farm may have been a motivating factor in his son's murder. However, it is important not to overlook the land issues at play in this case, which are discussed below. Even after his extensive research concerning the case, Steinberg was still unable to determine whether any white farmer could have dealt with the tenants of Normandale in the aftermath of Lourie Steyn.

Would a subtle liberal of the twenty-first century have been spared his son? Or has the battle for the countryside been honed down to a lean,

Steinberg, Midlands, 21. Ibid.. 23. Ibid.. 236-237.

124 zero-sum affair, where every commercial farmer risks his life to keep his farm? As much as it would comfort me to think otherwise, I am not sure the tenants were ever going to allow somebody to regain Normandale as a commercial farm.502

The fact that the perpetrators and the victims of farm attacks are often unacquainted, to which the Committee of Inquiry Into Farm Attacks points as proof that labour issues seldom motivate attacks, does not rule out the possibility of farm tenants' involvement in these crimes. Steinberg noted that even in farm attacks where the perpetrator did not know the victim, upon close investigation,

A personal connection [between the criminal and a labourer on the affected farm] crops up again and again. Somebody will have informed the perpetrators of the white family's age and gender profile; or its daily routines; or that Friday is payday and the farmhouse is flush with cash on Thursday nights. There is often a black person's eyes seeing and mouth whispering; a person who has spent time on the victim's land, and who has dark thoughts.3

Angry farm labourers may not commit the farm attack themselves, but they may act as informers or accomplices for relatives, friends or sometimes hired killers. During the apartheid era, disgruntled farm workers, or acquaintances thereof, would almost never risk the consequences of attacking a farmhouse and murdering a white farmer. In democratic South Africa, however, with the police bound by the rule of law and white farmers restricted in the amount of violence they can legally dole out, black farm labourers may be emboldened to commit or assist acts that would have been unheard of under the apartheid regime.

South Africa's new constitution enshrines the rights of all who live there, even farm labourers who were previously unprotected under the apartheid regime. Nelson

502 Steinberg, Midlands. 240. 503 Jonny Steinberg, "Soured Brand of Paternalism Blights Rural Communities," Business Day. February 1, 2004.

125 Mandela himself pledged that, "Never, never again shall the laws of our land rend our people apart, or legalize their oppression or repression."504 However, despite protective

legislation, farm dwellers remain "amongst the poorest, most underprivileged and most

disenfranchised section of the population."505 They are often beaten, raped, and even

killed. Guy Arnold argued in 2000 that there remains a deep resentment among African

farm labourers that, years after the fall of apartheid, they still received R20 or less in pay

each month and were still subject to corporal punishment.506 David Coplan also

emphasized the probability of worker retaliation. He viewed the "ashes swirling over the

many thousands of pitch-blackened hectares of winter forage deliberately set ablaze" as

evidence that,

Rural workers, uprooted from their homes and cut off from even marginal access to the means of production, now refugees of eviction in hopeless rural slums, were taking revenge. So were employed or recently employed workers for whom a new sense of material, legal, and social entitlement had led to irreconcilable differences with their racially paternalistic employers.507

Farm labourers have many reasons for begrudging their white employers. The most obvious reason is linked to the sustained level of violence white farmers dole out to their black workers. Although there exists no comprehensive statistical evidence concerning farmers' abuse of their black workers, in 2001, Human Rights Watch reported that African labourers and residents on white-owned farms are routinely subjected to physical abuse at the hands of their employers.

This abuse ranges from casual blows with fists for alleged mistakes in work or impertinence, to serious physical violence, including murder.

504 Fairweather, A Common Hunger. 89. 505 James, Gaining Ground. 19. 506 Arnold, The New South Africa. 145. 507 David Coplan, "Unconquered Territory: Narrating the Caledon Valley," Journal of African Cultural Studies 13 (2000): 187.

126 While there are no reliable statistics relating to the number of assaults on farmworkers by their employers, and there has been no effort to collect such information similar to that in the case of "farm attacks," the problem is clearly widespread. Racial insults are routine. Rape of women employees by white farmers remains an unquantified problem...Violence against farmworkers and residents is perpetrated not only by farm owners and managers, with whom they are in daily contact, but also by private security companies and vigilante groups hired by farm owners. Those seeking to uphold farmworkers' interests have also been harassed and assaulted when they have sought access to farms.

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the Agriculture and Land

Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana have made similar claims, although Xingwana later retracted her statements, and agricultural unions reject Cosatu's accusations as "devoid of all truth."509

Farm workers are officially protected from violent employers according to

government legislation; however, the difficulty in effectively implementing and enforcing these policies on isolated farms throughout South Africa has left many farm labourers feeling unprotected.510 Workers often fear that reporting their employer's violent behaviour would result in the loss of their jobs. In light of the sustained levels of violence Africans continue to endure on white-owned farms, coupled with the lack of protection they receive from the government, African labourers may have no other outlet for expressing their discontent than in increased levels of violence against white farmers.

Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that farm workers might support white farmers in their battle against farm attacks and rural crime if the workers were offered a safer and less exploitative position on the farms. One African community leader expressed his discontent with the lack of protection on white-owned farms:

508 Human Rights Watch, "Unequal Protection." 509 Neels Blom, "Farmers in War of Words with Cosatu," Business Day. September 3,2007. 510 Neels Blom, "Bitter Harvest for Farm Dwellers," Business Day, December 8,2006.

127 The farmers are under threat from criminals, but they don't organize to protect all who live on the farm, just themselves. If it were inclusive it would be OK, but it seems just to be for the white farmers. As a result the criminals have an easy time, because the workers say we don't care, and if someone is killed no one on the farm will come forward.

The disregard of farm workers' rights can motivate attacks, or, at the very least, make attacks easier for others.

Farmers' non-violent behaviour may also be detrimental to labourers and may influence farm attacks. Steinberg discovered that rural Zulu communities bestow white farm-owners with Zulu names describing the character of the farmer. "Farmers with the pejorative names are often the ones who experience the most grief."512 Actions such as hiring cheap labour from Zimbabwe and Mozambique, while many African communities in South Africa suffer severe unemployment, infuriate neighbouring black communities.

According to the Pan-Africanist Congress, attacks on farms are more often motivated by bitterness than greed.513

Steinberg gave a prime example of workers' retaliation. On a farm in Ixopo in

1999, an African worker suffered a stroke, but the white farmer did not take the man to a hospital. Instead, the farmer took the man back to his kraal, and the man died that evening. Following that incident, the tenants and workers on that farm decided to punish the white farmer by stealing each newborn calf in the farmer's herd and placing it among the tenants' cattle. "The remarkable irony of the story," commented Steinberg, "is that the farmer did not know he was being punished.. .Probably a professional syndicate based

511 Human Rights Watch, "Unequal Protection." 512 Jonny Steinberg, "Foot-and-Mouth Disease Will Take its Place in Unrecorded Drama," Business Day. November 22,2000. 513 Arnold, The New South Africa. 145.

128 in Richmond, he speculated." Although no farmers were physically injured in this scenario, it illustrates that the struggles between white farmers and African tenants over conditions on white-owned farms, which characterized the apartheid era, are still alive and well in democratic South Africa, and that in this case, a personal grievance precipitated robbery.

Evictions may also be a factor in farm attacks. Although the Extension of

Security of Tenure Act and the Labour Tenants Act now protect farm dwellers, evictions remain a common occurrence. Thousands of tenants have been evicted from their homes on white-owned farms in advance of legislation that gave farm labourers tenure rights.515

Furthermore, the nongovernmental organization, Nkuzi Development Association, in partnership with the land affairs department and the Rural Legal Trust conducted a

National Elections Survey, which concluded that, '"not only are illegal evictions commonplace, but that it has occurred on a massive scale since the promulgation of the prohibitive legislation in 1997.'"316 Only one percent of evictions since 1997 have been conducted with a legal court order.517

Deborah James' research illustrated that some white farmers felt they did not need to reform their exploitative ways in the chaotic post-apartheid environment, and many actually intensified their offensive against labour tenants' freedoms in order to reinforce the image of their own dominance.518 This highlights another important factor in post- apartheid farmer-labourer relationships: the renegotiation of paternalism. Given that white farmers had long been among the most ardent supporters of apartheid, and black

514 Steinberg, "Foot-and-Mouth Disease." 515 Arnold, The New South Africa. 145. 516 Blom, "Bitter Harvest." 517 Ibid. 518 James, Gaining Ground. 135.

129 farm labourers had been among the poorest and most exploited of apartheid's victims, it is not surprising that this relationship is fraught with difficulties post-apartheid. Lauren

Segal illustrated that, as it became clear that farmers' unquestioned authority was coming to an end, their behaviour became increasingly defensive, suspicious and often violent, as they clung desperately to a way of life that would not survive the transition to democracy.519

Jonny Steinberg described paternalism, "even in its heyday," as "a stylized drama, a set piece for betrayal."520 With the fall of apartheid, he argued, paternalism "is in trouble. The end of apartheid has not killed paternalism; it just made it malignant."521

Steinberg argued that the black tenants, workers and neighbours of white farms were unlike their predecessors; they no longer felt obliged to act in accordance with the old rules of paternalism. Their identities had been shaped by decades of intense anti- apartheid resistance, and they often considered previous generations cowardly for agreeing to work under the demeaning conditions paternalism dictated. In the past, farm workers would negotiate for better conditions, but murder was not an option. The younger generation, Steinberg argued, is not bound by this limitation.522

Deborah James felt that Steinberg overemphasized the destruction of paternalism.

She argued that "expectations of paternalism are still keen, there are strong visions of its re-establishment, and white farmers and black country-dwellers alike subscribe to the idea that there is a need to reconstruct client-like relationships across the colour line."

519 Lauren Segal, "A Brutal Harvest: The Roots and Legitimation of Violence on Farms in South Africa," (Black Sash, 1991) http://www.csvr.org.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=611<emid=85. 520 Steinberg, "Soured Brand of Paternalism." 521 Ibid. 522 Steinberg, Midlands. 179. 523 James, Gaining Ground. 21.

130 James emphasized the "unexpected partnerships" between white landlords and black tenants in reorganizing rural power structures and offers hope for reconciliation.524 It is yet uncertain whether paternalism will be able to survive the transformation to

democracy, and it is very likely that patterns of paternalism will vary widely from region to region and even from farm to farm. Perhaps the manner in which farm attacks are

handled locally and nationally will determine the future of paternalism. Either way, it is

clear that Van Onselen was on the mark when he declared that, "it is at these moments, when paternalistic relationships are being rapidly eroded or reconstructed, that the potential for individual or collective violence is at its most pronounced."

Land Issues as Potential Motives in Farm Attacks

Since the mid seventeenth century, land ownership and access to land has been a violently contested issue between blacks and whites in South Africa. Fourteen years after the dawn of democracy, the legacy of colonial and apartheid policies remain painfully apparent in the "huge disparities in economic and social conditions between those who have been dispossessed of their land and the current landholders."526 Tales of when the

land was stolen remain the abiding theme in the local memory of many rural African communities. Land is not only a central aspect to African communities, but it is also at

"the emotional core of Afrikanerdom. Disputes about land may last longer and be more politically damaging to the new South Africa than many of the other problems of

James, Gaining Ground. 21. Van Onselen, "Paternalism and Violence," 213. Fairweather, A Common Hunger. 160. Steinberg, "Foot-and-Mouth Disease."

131 adjustment that have to be faced." Given that land dispossession was the historical precursor to racial repression, land reform plays a central role in reversing the psychological and physical effects of racial segregation and oppression. Similar to the

Truth and Reconciliation Commission, land reform is intended to produce reconciliation and healing between races through the return of, or compensation for, land. Also like the TRC, land reform has been an incredibly emotional process; land claims have crystallized memories of trust and paternalism as well as hatred and violence on both sides of the racial divide.530

In the 1955 Freedom Charter, the African National Congress declared that, "the land shall be shared among those who work it! Restriction of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended, and all the land re-divided amongst those who work it, to banish famine and land hunger."531 In 1998, Mandela warned that only a fair redistribution of the nation's land to its former black owners would ensure peace in South Africa. For

South Africa's rural poor, justice would require more than merely eliminating colour bars and racist abuses; it would also demand "fundamental changes both in land ownership and in production relations on the land."533 Rectifying the drastically unequal distribution of land represents a colossal challenge to the post-apartheid government.

Expectations for land reform were incredibly high with the advent of democracy.

The ANC promised it would transfer thirty percent of agricultural land to landless blacks

528 Arnold, The New South Africa. 141. 529 Anna Bohlin, "A Price on the Past: Cash as Compensation in South African Land Restitution," Canadian Journal of African Studies 38 (2004): 673. 530 James, Gaining Ground. 24. 531 Mandela, The Struggle is My Life. 51. 532 Arnold, The New South Africa. 145. 533 Davies, We Cry for Our Land. 57.

132 by 2014; however, a mere three percent has thus far been transferred. For millions of rural Africans, life has not improved, and unfulfilled expectations of the ANC's promise to provide land for all have given rise to threats of withdrawing voter support.535 Given the snail's pace of land reform, it is highly possible that a small minority of the African population has taken the land reform process upon itself. It is crucial that land reform addresses the needs and demands of the dispossessed African population as quickly as possible; however, this is no easy feat.

The South African government has been determined to redistribute land in an organized, market-led approach rather than follow Zimbabwe's example of encouraging violent and chaotic land grabs.536 In Zimbabwe, the government simply issues white farmers letters stating:

Your farm have been acquired by the government and we therefore request you to wind up your business before the start of the rainy season...You are advised to comply with this order since you risk being forcibly removed...We also take this opportunity to tell you that you are not allowed to move out with any of your farming equipment.537

Despite the comparatively benign nature of South Africa's land reform program, the process remains "slow, fraught with emotional and political dangers—and essential to the long-term well-being of the country."538

The ANC's program of land reform aims to restore rights in land to those who have been denied them due to racist legislation, and contains three main components:

Nyanto, "South African Land Issue," 12. James, Gaining Ground. 122. Ibid.. 3. "More White Farmers Face Eviction in Zimbabwe," Mail and Guardian. Arnold, The New South Africa. 144.

133 restitution, redistribution and land tenure reform. Restitution entails returning land that was taken since 1913 as a result of racist legislation to its former owners. When the original land is unavailable, alternative land, monetary compensation or access to development projects are also offered. Redistribution involves enabling those with no claim to land to purchase farms according to market principles with the help of government grants. The government aims to redistribute thirty percent of white-owned agricultural land to landless blacks by 2014. Tenure reform was designed to protect the rights of farm tenants and labourers and is often practiced in combination with redistribution and sometimes restitution.540 The government developed three methods of addressing dispossession in order to accommodate the various needs of communities with diverse historical experiences on the land.541 To date, the vast majority of land claims have been settled; the redistribution of thirty percent of agricultural land to landless blacks, however, is well behind schedule, and land tenure reform has failed to adequately protect the rights of farm workers.542

Despite the government's careful planning, the land reform process has been fraught with difficulties and has not significantly benefited the lives of the nation's rural poor. One critique of the land reform process echoes a critique of the Truth and

Reconciliation Commission: land reform, in many cases, offers no closure for victims of violent dispossession. According to many beneficiaries of land reform, the process

Anna Bohlin, "Claiming Land and Making Memory: Engaging with the Past in Land Restitution," in History Making and Present Day Politics: The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa, ed. Hans Erik Stolten (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2007), 114-115. 540 James, Gaining Ground. 8. 541 C.R.M. Dlamini, "Landownership and Customary Law Reform," in Land Reform ad the Future of Landownership in South Africa, ed. AJ. Van Der Walt (Cape Town: Juta and Company Ltd., 1991), 43. 542 Neels Blom, "Agrarian Reform Comes Down to Earth," Business Day. May 15,2007.

134 actually "opened up the past." For many Africans, the lack of an official apology and the absence of any formal engagement with the white community is a serious

shortcoming of the land reform process.544 Another malady concerns tenure reform. As previously mentioned, reforming land tenure and ensuring African farm tenants and workers are treated in accordance with the new laws protecting all farm employees is a very challenging task. The isolation of the farms makes enforcement difficult, and farm workers are generally unfamiliar with their new rights. Evictions and other flagrant abuses, therefore, continue.545

Another major problem is the "glacial pace" of redistribution.546 This is related to the pitfalls of the willing buyer-willing seller model, in which compensation for a farm purchased for redistribution to landless blacks would be determined according to the price that a willing buyer would pay a willing seller for the property on the open market.

Unlike the willing buyer-willing seller model implemented in Zimbabwe in the 1980s, the South African government does not have the right of first refusal; white landowners have the right to decide not to sell to black people.547 This "effectively gives white landowners veto power over a fundamental issue of land and justice."548 Furthermore, the willing buyer-willing seller model allows for corruption on the part of farmers and property speculators. Bankrupt or rundown farms are purchased at low prices and resold to the government at inflated prices. In 2003, for example, the government purchased a farm for redistribution for R5.7m only to discover that land speculators had recently

543 Bohlin, "A Price on the Past," 679. 544 Ibid., 682. 545 Blom, "Bitter Harvest." 546 Coplan, "Unconquered Territory," 186. 547 Nyanto, "South Africa Land Issue," 12. 548 Ibid.

135 purchased the property for a mere R250,000. These problems have led many to call for expropriation with just compensation, which is within the limits of South Africa's constitution. The government has attempted a few forced sales recently, but the sellers sometimes challenge the prices in court, so the pace of redistribution remains slow.

There is also a fear that the forced-sale principle, which preceded government-sanctioned land invasions in Zimbabwe, will lead to a similar catastrophe in South Africa.549

Compared to the difficulties of redistribution, the restitution process appears at first glance to have been a tremendous success. Land claims had to be submitted by

December 31, 1998, and the vast majority of restitution claims have since been settled.550

Nevertheless, restitution cannot yet be declared a triumph. Like successful cases of redistribution, restitution begs the question of sustained agricultural productivity. Often in these cases, once land has been restored to its former owners, the medium and long- term viability of the farm is compromised.551 This is certainly not to insinuate that

African farmers are less competent than their white counterparts. As Chapter Two of this thesis illustrated, without massive government assistance, white farmers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century could not compete with African producers. Nevertheless, when African farmers take possession (or repossession) of their farms, they usually lack the training, equipment, capital, management skills and other resources necessary to efficiently engage in highly mechanized commercial farming. Unfortunately, the government does not possess the financial means to remedy this situation, and food security has become a major concern. Therefore, failed land reform initiatives have dire

549 Neels Blom, "'Zimbabwe' Land Option Mooted By SA Officials," Business Day. October 16,2006. 550 Neels Blom, "Historic Mpumalanga Land Deal to Benefit Thousands," Business Day. August 18,2007. 551 Colin Murray, "South African Land Reform: Case Studies in 'Demand' and 'Participation' in the Free State," African Affairs 96 (1997): 213.

136 consequences, and thus far, "a series of spectacular commercial failures have

CM overshadowed the modest successes."

Given the frequent failure of restitution beneficiaries to establish viable farming

enterprises, the snail's pace of land redistribution, and the inability to enforce protective legislation on white-owned farms, it is understandable that so many rural African communities have become intensely frustrated, and it is plausible that some farm attacks are the result of this frustration. In a poll conducted shortly after the 1994 election, twenty percent of those asked said they would resort to violence if their expectations of the ANC government were not met. Perhaps patience with the land reform process is dwindling. The continuity in the subtle resistance tactics Africans employed to secure more freedom on white-owned land into the post-apartheid era, and the intensification of these tactics to include attacks against white farmers and their property, hints that farm attacks very well may be the next phase in some African communities' struggle to secure access to land. However, it must be made clear that these violent tactics are not popularly endorsed within African communities, and the majority of rural Africans would never consider murder to be an appropriate method of securing access to land. To some, however, the violent, repressive legacy of colonialism's dispossession and apartheid's exploitation warrants a violent response.

Jonny Steinberg explained the expression of African peasant farmers' disapproval with the unequal land distribution as "a host of insouciant and subterfuge games."554

Such games include the familiar schemes of hamstringing cattle, committing arson, firing

552 Blom, "Agrarian Reform." 553 Val Percival and Thomas Homer-Dixon, "Environmental Scarcity and Violent Conflict: The Case of South Africa," Journal of Peace Research 35 (1998): 295. 554 Steinberg, "Foot-and-Mouth Disease."

137 gunshots in the night, tearing down fences, and disrupting commercial farming by herding African-owned cattle, which often carry diseases against which white-owned cattle are not immune, into white-owned kraals. Such exploits "drive dairy and beef farmers round the bend."555 These practices have been utilized since the early days of settlement in the Cape Colony to remind white farmers that, "the question of who controls the valleys and hills is not yet settled."556

In the more open social order of democratic South Africa, with expectations running high within the African community for the righting of past wrongs, it is very possible that these subterfuge games have escalated to occasionally include the murder of white farmers. Steinberg learned that during the apartheid era, some white children in the

Midlands region enjoyed playing "ambush" games with their black neighbours. "The white boys would wait silently in the bushes for the black kids, and as they were walking past would hurl rocks and stones and pieces of timber and then rush out and storm them with sticks...it was no game. There was real violence, real force." Steinberg wondered if the "military style imagination that conjures a quiet dirt track as the site of an ambush [was] learned from the games white supremacy's children used to play.. .Maybe one of the killers, when he heard the sound of Mitchell's car, smiled to himself at the irony of the reversal."558 So many of the resistance tactics African communities utilized in the struggle over land "toyed with the past, mocked it, redeployed it for new ends."559

Farm attacks have, in some cases, actually succeeded in securing access to white- owned land for landless blacks. The Committee of Inquiry Into Farm Attacks highlighted

555 Steinberg, "Foot-and-Mouth Disease." 536 Ibjd. 557 Steinberg, Midlands. 42. 558 Ibid. 559 Ibid.

138 several cases in which African communities utilized a series of intimidation tactics, including farm attacks, to secure access to land. In Mangete, KwaZulu-Natal, African communities had been illegally building homes on white-owned land since the mid-

1990s. When the owners appealed to the High Court for permission to evict the illegal occupants, the occupants responded by registering a land claim, although less than one third of the illegal occupants were legitimate claimants. Arson then became a serious problem. Crops were regularly burned, the community hall was destroyed, and on one occasion, six isolated farms were set alight simultaneously, causing Rl ,000,000 in damage. The landowners then began receiving death threats, and Ms. Dunn, the chairperson of the Mangete Landowners' Association, was attacked in her home, not once but twice. During the second attack, Ms. Dunn was severely beaten, and her husband was shot. Both victims survived the attack, but their house was robbed, their dogs were poisoned, and they were both severely traumatized.560 Based on numerous cases such as this, the Committee concluded that, "the illegal occupation of land frequently leads to farm attacks."561 It is clear that, at least in these land invasion cases, intimidation tactics progressed from fence cutting and arson to death threats and vicious farm attacks.

Steinberg discovered a similar situation concerning Steyn's farm Normandale:

"Steyn had in fact been pushed off his farm. The steady stream of cattle thefts, the fields that burned in the night, the death threats, the shooting of his foreman, the shots fired at his son—Steyn had not decided to leave, he had been defeated by a long, brutal campaign

Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks, Report of the Committee. 96-99. Ibid.. 121.

139 of psychological warfare." Although the black occupants of Steyn's farm and those in the Mangete case did not secure legal ownership of the land, they had been able to use the land for their own benefit, even if only temporarily. Deborah James concurred that farm attacks have been successful in securing access to land in some cases. "By contesting the frontier of racial power, farm attacks have had the effect of blurring the boundary between the communal African land of the former homelands and the white farms. They thus, in effect, push back the racial frontier."563 Although the Committee of Inquiry Into

Farm Attacks downplayed the significance of land-related issues, it is nonetheless essential that farm attacks be considered in light of the intense historical battle between white and black over the use of South Africa's farmland.

Conclusion

Some farm attacks certainly can be attributed to the rise in violent crime in South

Africa since the inception of democracy in 1994. This violent crime has been particularly troubling in areas of white residence, which were relatively immune from such violence during the apartheid regime. The rise in violent crime and robbery-related farm attacks can be attributed to the "crimogenic legacy of apartheid."564 Transforming the police service to suit the needs of a democracy has been an incredibly difficult process, and inefficiency and corruption plague the South African Police Service. The SAPS also has a larger area of operation, as it is tasked with policing the black townships, which were relatively unpatrolled during the apartheid era. With less to fear from the police force, criminals have increasingly targeted white areas. As the only sites of prosperity in rural

562 Steinberg, Midlands. 221. 563 James, Gaining Ground. 20. 564 Altbeker, "Policing the Frontier," 38.

140 regions, isolated white-owned farms have been targeted for robbery. In this sense, this thesis agrees with the Committee of Inquiry Into Farms Attacks that robbery is an important motivating factor in farm attacks. However, the Committee's methodology and conclusions are questionable, and its declaration that farm attacks are motivated primarily by robbery is naive.

The Committee of Inquiry failed to adequately examine potential motives other than robbery. Its use of structured questionnaires and its failure to conduct interviews with more than two convicted perpetrators who admitted to attacking a farm in order to rob it, render the Committee's findings deficient. Furthermore, the Committee's evidence does not support its conclusions. Although it identified land-hunger as an important motive in some case studies, it denied that unequal land distribution is a significant contributing factor to farm attacks. The Committee also erroneously concluded that theft during farm attacks proves robbery to be the motive, and it failed to consider robbery as an intimidation tactic in struggles over land or labour. This chapter, however, illustrates that farm attacks cannot be divorced from the historical struggle between white farmers and black labourers over the conditions of labour and access to and ownership of land.

Considering the historical struggle over labour conditions and the notoriously brutal treatment white farmers doled out to black workers, it is certainly conceivable that these poor farmer-labourer relationships have motivated some attacks. As Jonny

Steinberg noted, there is a personal connection between the perpetrators of farm attacks and farm workers in most cases. Disgruntled workers may not commit attacks themselves, but they may be accomplices. Despite political changes since apartheid and

141 protective legislation, farm workers still suffer from farmer brutality, dangerous working conditions, and evictions on many farms. Furthermore, the transition to democracy offered an opportunity ripe for violence as pre-existing paternalistic relationships were hotly contested and renegotiated. Although there is very little statistical evidence, and workers' voices are often neglected in reports such as that of the Committee of Inquiry

Into Farm Attacks, it is plausible that white farmer misconduct motivates some farm attacks.

Land has been an area of contention between whites and blacks since the earliest days of white settlement; consequently, expectations for land reform were high with the election of the African National Congress in 1994. However, despite the government's careful planning, the land reform process has been fraught with difficulties and has not significantly benefited the lives of the nation's rural poor. Given the frequent failure of restitution beneficiaries to establish viable farming enterprises, the snail's pace of land redistribution, and the inability to enforce protective legislation on white-owned farms, it is understandable that so many rural African communities have become intensely frustrated, and it is arguable that some farm attacks are the result of this frustration. It is thus important to recognize that unequal land distribution, labour exploitation, robbery or any combination thereof, are all important motivating factors in farm attacks. It is only when this complexity is recognized that farm attacks can be overcome.

142 Chapter Five: Conclusion

Some of us think when we have power, we shall revenge ourselves on the white man who has had power, and because our desire is corrupt, we are corrupted, and the power has no heart in it... Yes, that is right about power, he said. But there is only one thing that has power completely, and that is love... I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men, desiring neither power nor money, but desiring only the good of their country, come together to work for it.

-Alan Paton*65

Farm attacks certainly are a frightening aspect of the new South Africa, and, as this thesis illustrates, the roots of these vicious attacks reach deep into the country's violent past. The recent spate of rural violence that has destroyed the lives of so many white families is the result of centuries of African dispossession, exploitation and crime- inducing law enforcement at the hands of the white minority. Deborah James commented that, "in one sense the attacks could be seen—in the light of the sheer weight of intersecting and accumulating factors—as inevitable. The social, political and economic context conspires, even if human agents do not do so, to make such violence unavoidable."566 It is, therefore, not overly surprising that rural South Africa has witnessed such violence in the post-apartheid era. As early as 1948 Alan Paton was able to read the signs of discontent, and he accurately predicted a gloomy future for rural

South Africans on both sides of the racial frontier. As this thesis argues, farm attacks are not only a symptom of the culture of violent crime that has clutched South Africa, but they are also the intensification of the three-century-long struggle between white farmers and black peasants over land allocation and labour conditions.

565 Paton, Cry. The Beloved Country. 70-71. 566 James, Gaining Ground. 20-21.

143 As the Committee of Inquiry Into Farm Attacks concluded, crime is epidemic in

South Africa, and robbery is a major motivating factor in farm attacks. Through the destruction of the independent African peasantry, forced removals to squalid reserves and resettlement camps, and the impoverishment of the African population in general, white minority rule "generated crime rather than controlling it. Social dislocation as a result of apartheid policies gave rise to conditions conducive to criminality."567 By emphasizing the control of race relations over the detection and prevention of ordinary crime, colonial and apartheid policing allowed crime to fester in areas of African residence, while it protected the privileged white minority from the negative affects. "The police were agents of a state which created crimes in its concern to erect moral, economic, and political boundaries between the statutory defined races." The colonial and apartheid so-called justice systems "relied on racial restriction and the use of criminal penalties and extralegal violence over the previous three centuries to maintain white dominance."569 In the process, many Africans were labelled criminals for breaking apartheid's many unjust laws restricting the freedoms of the African majority. Together these factors destroyed the legitimacy of the colonial and especially the apartheid police in the eyes of the

African population and created a detrimental legacy, which the democratic government now struggles to overcome.

Although farm attacks cannot be divorced from the culture of violent crime in

South Africa, robbery alone is not an adequate explanation for these vicious attacks. In fact, in some cases robbery appears to be an intimidation tactic rather than the actual motive of the attacks. Furthermore, as Jonny Steinberg argued in Midlands, the

567 Shaw, Crime and Policing in Post-Apartheid South Africa. 1. 568 Ibid. 569 Gordon, Transformation and Trouble. 50.

144 perpetrators of farm attacks often have more than one motive. Farm attacks are, therefore, a more complex phenomenon than the Committee of Inquiry Into Farm Attacks concluded. The long history of labour exploitation and poor farmer-labourer relationships during the segregation and apartheid eras and the dispossession of land during the colonial period can also motivate attacks.

Exploitative labour regulations during the segregation and especially the apartheid era, coupled with the intense historical battle between blacks and whites over the conditions under which Africans would work on white-owned farms, created a volatile situation in rural South Africa when democracy finally came to the nation in 1994.

Paternalistic relationships were subject to renegotiation, which, as Van Onselen pointed out, created a situation ripe for individual and collective violence. Pre-existing labour relationships on white-owned farms were called into question, as African workers began to hold white farmers accountable for their violent and cruel actions. In the post- apartheid era, Africans continue to resist the exploitative aims of white farmers and struggle to better their working conditions through increasingly violent means. In the post-apartheid atmosphere of fear and anxiety among the white farming community, farmers have tightened their grip on labour, which has fuelled the culture of violent protest on South Africa's farmland. As Steinberg discovered, white farmers' disrespect of the human dignity of their black workers, tenants and neighbours can have deadly consequences.

Poor farmer-labourer relationships and the culture of violent crime that has developed in South Africa certainly are fundamental to comprehending the complex nature of farm attacks; however, perhaps the most powerful motivating factor is the same

145 issue that has caused the most strife between whites and blacks since the earliest days of white settlement—land. "Despite the centuries since the wars of conquest, the legitimacy of white landownership has not been established."570 The violent and relentless struggle over land that characterized the first two hundred and fifty years of European settlement in South Africa, coupled with the strength of collective memory in many rural African communities, influenced the relationships between white farmers and African communities into the twenty-first century.

The conquest of South Africa was an incredibly violent process that initiated the brutal and exploitative treatment of Africans characteristic of the segregation and apartheid eras and that is still apparent on many South African farms today. The injustices of the last century cannot be overcome without reforming the unequal distribution of land, which allowed these injustices to occur. As one rural African resident told Aninka Claassens during her research in 1989:

Umhlaba, the land. Our purpose is the land, that is what we must achieve. The land is our whole lives, we plough it for food, we build our homes from the soil, we live on it and we are buried in it. When the whites took our land away from it we lost the dignity of our lives, we could no longer feed our children. We were forced to become servants, we are treated like animals. Our people have many problems; we are beaten and killed by the farmers, the wages we earn are too little to buy even a bag of mielie-meal. We must unite together to help each other and face the Boers. But in everything we do we must remember that there is only one aim and one solution and that is the land, the soil, our world.571

Furthermore, the resistance tactics Africans historically utilized to maintain and in some cases regain access to land from white settlers are frightfully similar to those that often precede contemporary attacks on white farmers and their families. Given the slow pace of land reform, it is plausible that the desire for land has escalated to the point that some

570 Claassens, "Rural Land Struggles in the Transvaal in the 1980s," 27. 571 Ibid.

146 rural African residents have looked to overt violence against white farmers as a means to gain access to much needed land. It is essential to recognize the "centrality of the land question to the South African past, present and future."

The motives behind farm attacks, therefore, are incredibly complex. In some cases robbery appears to be the primary motive; in other cases labour exploitation, unequal land distribution or a combination of factors seem to motivate attacks. One

African elder explained the cause of farm attacks to Steinberg: "It is difficult to explain to an outsider...Sometimes it is bandits. Sometimes it is that a farmer is cruel, and people want to punish him. But in the main it is because this land once belonged to the [African people] and it was stolen."573 Once farm attacks are understood as a multifaceted phenomenon "connected to social relations, values, beliefs, practices, and—most importantly—to different social identities," it becomes clear that increasing the number of rural police units is not an effective means of overcoming this crisis.574 Only "original thinking and legal imagination can build upon existing and available values, principles and ideas in order to revive the enormous potential of land."575 The key to this process is cooperation.

Time and again observers stress the importance of cooperation as the only solution to the land reform crisis and, as this thesis argues, the farm attack dilemma. Any plan aiming to increase the security of rural residents, black and white, must include

African farm workers, tenants and neighbours; thus far, these people have been largely excluded from the rural reform process. After reporting extensively on South African

572 Bundy, "Land, Law and Power," 11. 573 Steinberg, Midlands. 123. 574 Cock, "Weaponry and the Culture of Violence in South Africa," 75. 575 A. J. Van Der Walt, "The Future of Common Law Landownership," in Land Reform and the Future of Landownership in South Africa, ed. A.J. Van Der Walt (Cape Town: Juta and Company Ltd., 1991), 35.

147 agriculture, including farm attacks, reporter Neels Blom argued that success in land reform will be measured by "the degree of co-operation that can be achieved between the emancipated and their former masters." David Coplan's argument is in accordance with this opinion: white land-owners need black workers on their farms, and black workers, even if they receive land through reform programs, need white farmers' credit, capital, equipment, and technical know-how, which are essential to productive agriculture in a globalized market, and which the government cannot provide.577

Although cooperation is the only way forward, it will be a very challenging task.

Much hostility still exists between many black and white communities, and most white farmers certainly will not be overly enthusiastic about aiding the process that will see their land transferred to other owners. If one considers white farmers' point of view, it is understandable that they are anxious about the land reform process. Land reform challenges assumptions the white farming community has held for centuries. Many white farms have been in the hands of a single family for generations and hold significant sentimental value. The prospect of having this land expropriated and redistributed to black families, who have often been the white family's servants, is a very upsetting possibility. Being born and raised in the culture of white superiority, many of these white farmers most likely never considered the possibility that their behaviour and the pattern of land distribution was unjust.

However, without cooperating with the land reform process, including reforming labour conditions, African farming communities will not be able to engage in successful agricultural production, and white farmers and their families will not be able to sleep

576 Neels Blom, "Land Reform in the New South Africa," Business Day. August 18,2007. 577 Coplan, "Unconquered Territory."

148 peacefully without the worry that they could be the next victims of a brutal farm attack.

Without cooperating to secure social justice, "there will be no security of any kind for anyone, farmers included. The best thing, the only thing, farmers can do to improve the farming environment is help ensure an orderly and efficient transformation of the agricultural sector."578 Cooperation for social justice, combined with an inclusive crime- fighting plan that not only cracks down on criminals but also eliminates the root causes of violent crime, is the only possibility for reducing farm attacks and promoting a degree of social cohesion in rural South Africa. As Alan Paton so compellingly wrote, there is

"only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men, desiring neither power nor money, but desiring only the good of their country, come together to work for it."579

578 "Harvest of Reality," Business Day. September 22,2006. 579 Paton, Cry. The Beloved Country. 71.

149 Bibliography

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