Eddie Koch
NELSON MANDELA’S air force helicopter was covered in camouflage paint and created a scene from a war film as it thudded over the green hills and thorn trees that surround Weenen.
Although unintended, the image was appropriate because the president had come to this farming town in kwaZulu- Natal on Sunday to help settle a land battle that has verged on civil war in the past six months.
“We seek a solution that is generally acceptable to all, an approach that eliminates the suspicion, mistrust and anger that have characterised land disputes over the years,” Mandela told a few thousand people who had gathered on a rain-soaked football field near the town.
His was a timely effort to help end a bout of social trauma that has swept through the region ahead of anticipated agrarian reforms after last year’s elections. White farmers, fearful of claims from people who have lived on the land for decades, have been evicting scores of black families, impounding their cattle and burning some of their homesteads. These workers and farm tenants responded first by threatening an armed invasion of white-owned land late last year, and then by waging a massive labour strike this year that ended only in February. At different stages of these ferocious conflicts, cattle were hamstrung, fences ripped down and two farmers assassinated.
Class conflict of this nature has become chronic, embedded in the countryside around Weenen, ever since Boer settlers invaded during the 1830s and broke the power of the Zulu state in a series of bitter battles whose monuments still litter the surrounding hills.
After they seized vast tracts of prime cattle country, the settlers forced the local inhabitants to work on their farms for six months of the year in return for a small plot and some land to graze their cattle. That system of labour tenancy, known colloquially as isithupha (the Zulu word for six), has survived in modified form as a reminder of the region’s colonial
As the social conflicts that isithupa has always generated in Weenen sharpened after the April elections, Land Affairs Minister Derek Hanekom was forced to step in. Late last year he brokered a deal whereby the farmers agreed to a moratorium on evictions while the workers promised to hold off on the invasion.
A Weenen Peace and Development Committee, made up of black tenants and white farmers, was established to identify land which can be acquired for
tenants under the redistribution scheme and also at ways to ensure that families who have lived on white- owned farms for decades can obtain secure tenure.
“It could have been war,” said a member of the committee, who asked not to be named. “The tenants had been to the hostels on the Reef (where Zulu migrant workers have been involved in internecine battles with township residents) to obtain shooters and AK-47s. They were ready to fight it out with the farmers.”
Hanekom’s pact may have temporarily thwarted such an outcome, but it is a fragile agreement. Some conservative farmers in the area, desperate to protect their properties against falling prices and possible redistribution, are still trying to push black people off their farms.
An eviction from a nearby farm in January this year sparked the most recent strike — and this time it was bigger and enforced with a degree of brutality that had not yet been experienced in the area. Most farmers were phoned and told that their wives and children would die unless they shut down all farming operations.
With tensions like these simmering in the thornveld around Weenen, the district presents South Africa’s land reformers with their greatest challenge.
Mandela’s visit was a fleeting and symbolic one. He addressed the rally for half an hour before flying out, waved on by people who had never seen their president in person before, over the hills to his next
But his message was clear. “In addressing land hunger, the Government of National Unity is not engaged in a simplistic, punitive and unproductive approach,” he said before he left.
If that approach fails here, there can be only one outcome, says the peace committee member. “All hell will break lose … and these farms will again become the battlefields of Natal.”