The tragic story of an 11-year-old girl whose leg was mangled by a tractor has spotlighted the use of child labour on South African farms
Marianne Merten
‘Sometimes I forget the leg is gone,” says 11-year-old Waronice van Wyk. “I am unhappy, but I’m getting used to it.”
She lost half her right leg in an accident while helping with the peach harvest in the December holidays on an orchard just outside Ceres in the Boland. It was the third year she had worked at the farm, Daytona, where she lives with her mother, grandparents and three siblings.
Van Wyk was paid R27 for two-and-a-half days’ work the week before the accident. But the farmer, Mike Barnard, who paid her, has only responded to direct requests for help from the family, such as transport to school and a hospital visit in Cape Town. He has yet to offer to pay for the medical and other costs incurred by the family, which earns less than R450 a week.
Van Wyk was packing into boxes the peaches picked by older women. On the Monday before Christmas during lunch, she caught a ride back to the farm in one of the wooden “bins” in which the fruit is transported.
The tractor, pulling several of these bins, hit a pothole on the road.
Van Wyk lost her balance. Her foot was caught between the wheels, mangled and the flesh torn off her calf. Behind her other children shouted and threw peaches at the tractor driver. He stopped some 30m away.
A woman worker helped extricate the remains of her leg.
Later, the little girl was rushed to Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town, more than 100km away, where her leg was amputated.
The family and four of Van Wyk’s school friends visited her in hospital on Christmas Day. “When her friends came she ripped the sheet off her leg and said: ‘ I don’t have a leg anymore. I can’t play with you anymore,'” her grandfather, Niklaas Bezuidenhout says.
On New Year’s Day the family had to raise R150 for another visit because the farmer, who had provided transport the week before, declined this time.
The family says it is hurt by farmer’s failure to discuss the accident with them. “He said he hasn’t got much to say to me. He didn’t see it necessary to talk because I am not the father and he had already spoken to the mother,” Bezuidenhout says. “This was heartsore. That’s when the tears came … I was heartsore because the farmer was not prepared to sit down with me and my daughter and talk about what happened.”
Instead the family approached the local advice office. This week the lawyer for the Daytona Stud Farm, Justin Forster, said the company intended setting up a trust fund for the child and co-operate with the investigation by the provincial labour department.
“Assisting fruit pickers is extremely popular among youngsters. It is tragic that Lande [Waronice’s nickname], one of those youngsters, has been hurt,” he said.
Land and farm worker NGOs say child labour is widespread. But the problem rarely comes to the attention of officials because of fears of victimisation. The Department of Labour is apparently quietly conducting its own research into the problem.
It’s illegal to employ a child under 15, yet hundreds of rural children are believed to work during school holidays to supplement meagre family incomes, or to earn pocket money.
Last year the provincial labour department stopped two boys from herding sheep during school hours – for a weekly R30 – and a girl working in the house on a farm near Touwsrivier.
Van Wyk jumps around the home without her wooden crutches. On the shelf in the living room are her school trophies. She represented her school at athletic events in nearby towns and is one of the top pupils in her grade.
She returned to school three weeks ago. In class she sits alone on a bench which usually seats two. At the end of the day she waits outside, her crutches leaning against her, to wait for her lift home. The farmer agreed to provide transport because she cannot get on the bus which collects pupils from farms.
“She is a very bright child,” says Morrisdale Primary principal Henry Fredericks. “We promised to help wherever we can.” The school has collected R600 for her.
“None of us adults really know what the child is going through. Maybe one day it will come out,” her grandfather says.