A group of black farmworkers and a few tough white boers in khaki have worked together to turn their farm into a record-producing money-spinner, reports Eddie Koch
The Lomati Valley, a fertile piece of subtropical bushveld that lies in the shadow of the Lebombo Mountains in Mpumalanga, has produced some of the hardiest of South Africa’s pioneer farmers: men who moved into the malaria-ridden area on the Mozambican border in the 1930s and, with DDT pesticides to protect them, turned the land into some of the continent’s most productive real estate.
That is why Piet de Wet, a tough entrepreneur who made his fortune as a beef baron in the Free State, came to the valley early this year. The self-made millionaire decided at retirement age that, instead of hanging up his khaki shorts and velskoene, he would break just one more piece of new ground.
Only Inala Farms’s pioneering men and women are very different, if not exactly opposite, to the kind of white men who came into the valley 60 years ago, took the land and used exploitative methods — harsh even by South African standards at the time – — to fill the valley with lush groves of mangoes, pawpaws, pineapples, bananas, tomatoes and endless rows of sugar cane.
This is because Inala is a place where the farmworkers — about 580 men and women who were issued eviction orders just eight months ago — now own a majority share in a commercial estate worth more than R24-million and fast becoming the most productive real estate in a corner of the country where farmers are already renowned for producing subtropical fruits of the highest export quality.
It is a place where De Wet and his managers, a clan of khaki-clad boers and a former minister from the old KaNgwane government, have decided to stick by the new owners and make the farm dispel the legend that land reform in South Africa will inevitably result in rural decay.
And in the process these men have acquired a new zest for cultivating the land they love.”Land reform will only work if there is a successful marriage between the aspirations of the landless and the motives of private enterprise with a conscience. Development has to be intertwined with real hard- core business for it to work,” explains De Wet.
“A farm, you see, is not like a mine. You have a never-ending cycle of replacement, a responsibility to channel profit and resources back into nourishing its main resources which are the land, the water and its people. When you do this the land talks to you. It says: `You are gonna have to look after me otherwise I’m just going to leave you.’ “
Just two months after De Wet was appointed as Inala’s chief executive officer, he has used this philosophy to turn the farms into a sub-tropical paradise where you can walk among the trees and pluck pawpaws and mangoes for lunch or visit the plantation where local police arrived two months ago to verify that a bunch of Dwarf Cavendish bananas weighed 77kg and could be entered in the Guinness Book of Records as one of the heaviest ever harvested in the world.
New fields have been planted and export contracts are rolling in. Already performance is outstripping a business plan aimed at making a profit of R5- million by the end of next year. The company is already so buoyant that Inala plans to open an offshore company with Reserve Bank approval on Jersey Island that will be 40% owned by the farmworkers, to handle its international marketing and foreign-exchange earnings.
It is estimated that within 10 years Inala will be making a pre-tax profit of R30-million per annum. Already minimum wages have risen by some 250%. And there is, literally, a gold mine on the farm that may be worked in the near future by an association of small miners.
Eight months ago the future of the Inala Farms looked very different. The old owners, a legendary pioneer family in the Lomati Valley called the Schoemans, ran up so many debts that the banks forced the farms into liquidation. A group of sugar- cane farmers from KwaZulu-Natal called the Crookes put in an offer for R16-million, but said they would only buy if the farm was cleaned of its workforce.
The liquidators promptly issued eviction notices and, in November last year, the workers began singing struggle songs and doing the toyi toyi at the entrance to the farm. When the Crooke brothers arrived to inspect the estate, one of them was assaulted.
“You know the amazing thing is three of the old white managers stood with us at the protests,” says Albert Sibiya, chairman of the workers’ committee that represents the new shareholders.
“They didn’t really toyi toyi but one of them, Danie Basson [who belonged to the army’s special forces], had just been bitten on the foot by a snake. He had a drip with medicine and was just waving this about to show his protest. I think it was a sign that they really love this place.”
The workers threatened to burn the farm from one corner to the other if the sale went ahead and the Mpumalanga government was forced to intervene. Premier Mathew Phosa contacted Land Minister Derek Hanekom who asked the Land and Agricultural Policy Centre (LAPC) to visit the area and come up with a solution.
The LAPC, in turn, sent an enterprising consultant called Simon Forster to do a feasibility study on the idea that the workers could use household grants to buy the farm. Forster structured a package that involved each of the 600-odd farmhands putting each of their R15 000 grants into a R9-million kitty, and a consortium of private investors forking out another R7-million to buy the farms — which were promptly given the name Inala by the workers, an isiSwati word that means “Place of Great Harvest.”
“Conditions were appalling at the time,” says Forster. “Some workers were earning R5 a day. There was no running water two of the three compounds and some of the children had kwashiorkor. There was no day-care centre for the babies so mothers had to wrap them up and take them into the fields during working hours. Some workers tell me that some of them died after being bitten by snakes in the cane fields.”
Forster ran the farm — along with its remaining managers — for a few weeks after it changed hands. He promptly took one of the old farm manager’s houses and turned it into a day-care and community centre where milk is served for the babies. He put potable water into the compound and he built showers and toilets near the packing shed for men and women who had been forced for as long as they could remember to relieve themselves in the fields.
“The estate was like a multi-engined aeroplane firing on all cylinders, but all out of sequence,” says De Wet. “It just needed someone to come in and tune and fly off with its people on board. I said to the workers when I got here, `Look I can’t do it without you. You could probably do it without me. But just maybe we can all do it better together.’ And I can tell you it’s a real trip now.”
What is it that drives people like De Wet to pioneer these new ways of using the land and South Africa? “My motivations are two,” he says.
“The one is that I don’t have any problems with making money. The other is that it just gives me a thrill. You could say I have always supported the aim of our new government to improve the lives of these people. But I am not doing this for politics because there are only two organisations I really belong to — the Dutch Reformed Church and the (nearby) Malelane Country Club.”
De Wet, who is fond of saying that the softest thing about him is his teeth, runs the farm with a rod of iron.
“I kick arse when I have to and I tell the workers that if anything moves, you salute it. If it doesn’t move, you paint it or keep it spotlessly clean.”
Is this the kind of thing the workers had in mind when they decided to buy into the farm? It is as though the question never even crossed Albert Sibiya’s mind. “We need him to be like that. If he wasn’t the farm would go bankrupt and we would all lose.”
Down at the new community centre, the workers are now practising songs that are different to the ones they sang whenever the liquidators came to the farm last year. A local schoolteacher has been asked to compose a hymn that tells the story of this unique farm and a choir is practising nkosi Sikelele for the day when President Nelson Mandela comes to witness the way things are being done at Inala.
And in the evening, the white managers sometimes gather at their club on the banks of the Lomati River to have a braai and sing uncouth songs about rugby and women.
At an event like this the farm manager, Johan Minnaar, explained why he was so dedicated to the experiment. “It is because we want to turn history on its head,” he said.
Forster, the mastermind of these strange happenings down in the Lomati Valley, adds: “The experiment has already dismissed the popular notion that land reform simply involves giving marginal land to poor rural people so that they can simply have a secure place to stay.
“Inala is an example of how innovative ways of doing things can evenproduce more benefits than were originally intended by land reform policy makers to benefit people who have always worked the land.”