Ann Eveleth
THOKOZILE BASI described how she and another 200 labour tenants were evicted last week after the owner of the farm on which they were living near Weenen sold his property.
“Our sons and daughters were working for the farmer and one day he told them to stay at home. Then another farmer came and said we must leave.
“Now here we are. We are starving. We are living in the rain and mud, and our houses are demolished,” she said.
Many of the evicted labour tenants have moved into a mushrooming tent-town on the outskirts of Weenen. They said their families had been working on the farm “for generations”.
“We are as old there as anything you could perceive in that place. We were there before the last farmer, and many farmers before him,” said Sebezile Nene.
Some farmers in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands have argued that attacks against them have increased because “we don’t want to sell our farms”. But Indituni Development Trust worker Rory Alcock says there is no direct link between the land hunger evident in the area and the attacks.
“There is terrible poverty here, but it’s not often the people who are living under oppression on a particular farm who engage in violence,” Alcock said. “More often it’s the people on the outside looking in.
“We spend a lot of effort working to prevent landless people from resorting to violence, but I think a lot of farmers create a lot of enemies over a number of issues,” he said.
The evictees at Weenen’s tent city, for instance, say they know nothing about the motives behind recent attacks in the area. What they do know is that farmer Piet Coetzee, with whom “we have had no business”, arrived with the bulldozer that flattened their homes last week.
Coetzee’s nickname is “Piet Skiet”, and the reasons for this are immediately clear. Standing barefoot at his gate in his khaki shirt and shorts, a khaki cap crowning his bearded face, Coetzee makes no attempt to conceal the wooden-handled revolver on his hip.
“If anybody comes into my veld, I’ll shoot them,” he said, cupping his hands in a pistol-grip and making repetitive shooting noises.
Coetzee said he is only protecting his property after he fired his 17 “farm workers” for an illegal strike and absenteeism: “They stole all my tools, the veggies, the sugar, the oil, everything, and now their cattle are grazing for free.
“Tell them I’m going to come and push their huts down one day. They can tell [Land Affairs Minister Derek] Hanekom. I hope he’ll come because I’d like to push him down with my bulldozer, too, along with all the others who’ve made promises they can’t keep.”
Coetzee’s former workers live on the border of the tent city peppered with thornbush. An emaciated 50-year-old Thembi Ndlovu said he had stopped working due to illness, but rejected his former boss’s version of events.
“What I know is that the people who were working wanted more money because they are getting very low wages of R80 per month and R50 per month. We are not farm workers. We are labour tenants who have been there long before he came. I’m the fourth generation of my family on that property,” Ndlovu said.