different views
Simon Ndebele
‘That’s where the school used to be”, says Simon Ndebele, pointing to a piece of veld dotted with fragments of rubble. “My parents helped build it in 1946, and it became a wonderful place of learning for the Tswana aristocracy. By 1956, with the help of the missionaries, we had a clinic. The soil was rich, our lives were good.”
He pauses. “Then they chased us from paradise and dumped us on dry grass.”
We are standing on a sand path overlooking a vast pancake of land which seems to have been overlooked by the recent heavy rains. Yet the canvas Ndebele paints, the rough edges of memory blunted by nostalgia, is of a pastoral paradise, with fertile alluvial fields teeming with plant life and livestock.
“It looks dry now but there is an underground water source which once served our subsistence farming needs perfectly. What I miss most of all is the sense of belonging. For 19 years my people have been like the Israelites exiled from the Holy Land.”
The “holy land” is the district of Putfontein in what was the Transvaal, later part of Bophuthatswana. The area was purchased by the Batloung under chief Shole shortly after the Anglo-Boer War. With the implementation of the Native Land Act of 1913 and the Native Trust and Land Act of 1936, the Batloung — along with millions of other black people — were deprived of the right to own land.
Ndebele was only 10 years old when the trucks arrived to relocate his community to Ramatlabana, more than 100km away. But he remembers every detail of October 31 1977, when he was awakened by the sounds of dogs and shouts.
At gunpoint, 1 000 people were herded onto open trucks alongside sheep and cattle and transported to their “new home”.
But, says the son of a Batloung elder, “It was nothing like home. It was like the desert.”
Paid between R15 and R40 for their Putfontein plots covering thousands of acres, the Batloung were provided with little water, no sanitation, shops or schools, and scant shelter.
“When the government officials showed the chief and my father this so-called promised land, it was like throwing shit in our faces.”
The younger members of the Batloung community have no recollection of Putfontein, yet no sense of belonging in their present home either. Dreams and jobs are in equally short supply. Alcohol, gangs and Lemon Twist are not. And beneath the lethargy is a simmering anger.
“How much longer must we remain here?” asks Ndebele, “Waiting, wanting … like builders without bricks.”
# Gerrie van Zyl
On either side of the only route to Gerrie van Zyl’s Putfontein farm are two road signs saying “Cecilia’s Home and Sweethome”. They frame the route like bookends.
Called Omega, one of three subdivided, identically titled farms, it is more than a home to the Van Zyl family. It is an invisible umbilical cord constantly feeding into and off them, entwined with their identity.
But soon the cord will be cut: Van Zyl is one of 15 farmers who will have to return the land to the Batloung community. Van Zyl accepts the inevitability of it. He is willing to move on, but not at any price.
“I bought this farm in 1981, when there was nothing here. I have made it the flourishing place it is today,” he says, indicating manicured gardens and fertile sunflower and mielie fields melting into the horizon. “I have planted every blade of grass and hammered each nail. This farm became my life and my family’s future. Now the only life we have is uncertainty. As for the future … God knows.”
Born in Stellenbosch, Van Zyl studied agriculture before coming to the Transvaal in search of the quintessential South African dream. He thought he’d found it in 1981 when he saw an ad in the newpaper offering farms for sale in the then northwestern Transvaal at absurdly low prices.
“We were aware at the time that other communities had been occupying the land before us,” he admits, “but for a farmer just starting out, it was a fantasy come true.”
Van Zyl insists the purchase price of the farm, although below market value, grew to a substantial investment, because the farm had to be developed from scratch. “It would have been much easier for me to purchase a farm with an existing infrastructure, instead of having to develop one myself. How then can the government calculate the value of my land? They did not witness the work, commitment and love that went into it.
“All I ever wanted was to farm,” says Van Zyl. “And that is all my son wants to do. Yet unless we receive adequate compensation to enable us to start up another farm, we will have nowhere else to go.
“This land is not for the faint-hearted, it drains you. Yet my soul is bound to it.”