EMSIE FERREIRA, Cape Town | Wednesday
TWELVE sugar cane farms in eastern South Africa have been torched and about 1_000 black families are occupying portions of 63 sugar farms in a land dispute that has turned violent, a farmer said on Tuesday.
Police and soldiers have been on the farms since last week to protect the farmers and to patrol the land but had been unable to prevent the arson, said farmer John Hunt.
The arson is the latest manifestation of a bitter dispute pitting the farmers, who are mostly mixed-race, against blacks who say they want back the land some 180km north of Durban from which they were removed under apartheid.
Hunt said 160 hectares of cane were burnt down in fires on May 25 and 26 and more was lost in three fires set overnight on Sunday to Monday.
“Twelve farms have been burnt, two of which were totally destroyed. The damage comes to about one million rand [$124_000] and we are still trying to assess the damage of this week’s fires,” he said.
The farmhouses themselves have been spared, but a community hall for farmworkers has been burnt down, he said.
Hunt said about 1_000 black families were occupying parts of the 63 cane farms that make up the Mangete Landowners Association’s farms and is at the centre of a six-year-old land restitution claim.
The dispute has its origins in colonial times, though the actual removals occurred in 1976, at the height of apartheid.
The contested land was ceded to a Scottish settler, John Dunne, by the Zulu king in 1856.
Dunne married 48 Zulu wives and their mixed-race offspring have farmed on the land for more than a century, chief land claims commissioner Wallac Mgoqi said on Tuesday.
Third generation descendant Patricia Dunne heads the landowners’ association and has opposed a claim by 302 families of the Macambini clan who say they were removed from the land and want it back.
The landowners argue that South African law only allows dispossessed people to claim back land taken from them after 1913, while King Cetswayo gave the land to them decades earlier.
Dunne said: “This land has been in our family for 150 years, why should we give it back? There is no question of parting with the land.”
Chief Mathaba, the ruler of the Macambini tribe whose members have put in a claim for the land said he was shocked by the arson on the Dunne farms, but accused the family of wanting to retain their apartheid privileges.
“I have told my people they must not do that again,” he said, before adding: “The Dunnes think they are whiter than us, but they must remember that they are also Zulus, they are kaffirs [a derogatory term for blacks] just like us and they must share the land with us.”
Dunne counters that her “coffee-coloured” family, who still own most of the Mangete farms, are victims of “a sustained campaign because we are not black enough”.
She said the arson and the land invasion began in 1993 and has caused production to drop to such an extent that 5_000 jobs had been lost.
The matter of the 63 Mangete farms is due to be heard by the land claims court on July 2, but the government wants the Macambini tribe, to whom the claimants belong, and the landowners to settle out of court.
“There is a lot of historical resentment, a lot of anger … We need a settlement, because if somebody wins in court and somebody loses we will never have peace,” said Thabi Shange, the regional land claims commissioner for KwaZulu-Natal,
She said matters were complicated by the fact that 700 of the families occupying the farms had nothing to do with the land restitution claim, but had nowhere to live.
FEATURES:
Dunns feel they’ve been ‘done’ again March 2, 2001
ZA * NOW:
Peasant farmers threaten land grabs February 20, 2001