John Matshikiza:WITH THE LID OFF
`What between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime,” says Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, “and the duties expected from one on one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position and prevents one from keeping it up. That is all that can be said about land.”
The quote is lodged deep in the folklore of an English-speaking farming family in the Karoo, with dry irony. It is regurgitated in other accents on other farms, in different dialects. What are we doing here? Why are we still engaged in this almost futile struggle?
Talk of farm murders and thefts is on everyone’s lips. The problem is real and it is not new. Another quote from the same English-speaking family, this one a memoir written by the founder of the dynasty 150 years ago: “All the British settlers suffered in a similar way. They were attacked in an unprovoked manner by a nation of thieves. Many sacrificed their lives; all may be said to have lost the accumulation of the industry of years.”
It’s a very hot potato, indeed. Who originally stole from whom? Where does vengeance stop and anarchy begin?
Another quote that is floating around my head, whose origins I have lost: “The more space a man has around his feet, the more he is able to grow.” The township house on the township plot where I spent some of my childhood. Not much space allowed for there. Millions of people with nowhere to grow. Stunted generations.
The farm labourers live in tiny houses out of sight of the farmstead. They live rent-free and don’t pay for electricity. A sheep (market value about R350) might be thrown in with the monthly salary (another R350) and they get sacks of vegetables as well. Their children get free education at the farm schools. In the minds of the farmers, all these things supplement the poor wages. The year-end bonus is another perk.
“These city slickers has all got something to say about the farmers,” says Fred, an Afrikaner farmer who has welcomed me into his home so I can talk to him and his wife. (It was actually the wife, Rosemary, whom I had sought out, because she is a well-known local personality and runs the primary school, but Fred couldn’t resist sitting down with us and climbing into the conversation, Lexington in hand.) “They all has something to say about the farmer, but I don’t think there’s an employer in this country who lives and works in as close contact with his workers as the farmer.”
Ken, the English speaker on the other side of the railway line, goes further. “The guys really know about handling the animals,” he says. “They know what has to be done at what season. There’s very little point in me telling them what they already know. I’ve become almost an observer on my own farm. They run things the way they want to, and I go along with it.”
It works well until it falls apart. Month- end is when the breakdown tends to happen. The meagre cash disappears into the bottle store and to the small-time dagga sellers. The whole world bends out of shape. Women and children in the farm shacks are beaten, the men decide not to work after the weekend, the sheep are neglected. The farmers speak, then yell recriminations. The whole thing is deadlocked.
A sheep disappears from the flock, and is found where the farm worker hid it, his own little hedge against inflation. The labourer is fired, sometimes jailed. When he comes out, his revenge is terrible.
“The children are the ones that give you hope,” says Rosemary. “That’s why we carry on with the schools. But you get a shock now and then. One of my seven-year-olds wrote about his granny. He said his granny said it wasn’t wrong to steal, it was only wrong to get caught.”
Is this true or is it disinformation for my benefit? I will never know for sure.
It’s a funny country. They have thrown their house open to me, and insist that I stay and eat lunch with the family. It hits me that I have never even been on a white farm in South Africa. Now I am bowing my head in prayer and breaking bread with them.
Five years ago it would not have been like this. But five years ago, it would also have been unthinkable to Fred and Rosemary that the two daughters of the farm, sitting with us now around the table, would be going into exile in England. But they are. As things look at the moment, there is no future for them in South Africa. Their bags are packed. England is a daunting thought, but they see no alternative. The parents pray that they will see them again.
The wheel turns. The exile that was my badge of bitterness is now appropriated by the descendants of those who made that first exile inevitable.
And it’s all, as Lady Bracknell said, because of this terrible question of the land.