Forced off their land almost 40 years ago, the people of Metsimatshwe-Groot Vlakfontein near Kuruman in the Northern Cape are preparing to return home in triumph. The Community Property Association will officially receive their 5000ha property on March 21.
The apartheid government displaced about 100 people in 1966. But the community has grown since then and hundreds will return to Groot Vlakfontein, says Nancy Sephiri, who was a young girl when her family was displaced.
“Black people are suffering; there are people who can’t afford a thing. People have to steal to get by, people dig in rubbish bins for food and some have to beg. I’m happy that we’ll be moving back to arable land.
“We will be starting from scratch, but we can create our own jobs this way and don’t have to wait for the government to provide for us. “We can grow crops, and farm sheep and goats. We can feed ourselves and still earn an income by selling eggs, milk and livestock,” says Sephiri.
But government officials are cautious about the pace of the resettlement. Five commercial farmers must make way for the community. “We are still negotiating prices with the farmers, so nothing has been confirmed yet,” says Peter Mokomela, project manager for the Land Claims Commission in the Northern Cape.
“We need to get a mandate from the minister and then we can start finalising matters.”
Mokomela says the farmers have cooperated and have agreed to settle the matter out of court. “The price of land has gone up since we last made our estimation, so we need to reconsider the price that the land will be sold for,” he says.
Hundreds of people were forcefully removed from the Metsimatshwe [dirty water] area in 1966. The area was named after a nearby fountain that spewed black water. It was renamed Groot Vlakfontein after its new inhabitants took over.
Sephiri was just 14 when the bulldozers came to Metsimatshwe and razed her family’s home with hundreds of others in the area. “Back then there was a vast language problem. My parents and many others didn’t understand what the Boers were telling them and they just went along with whatever they were directed to do,” she says.
She remembers that in those days black people were roughly treated by white farmers. “They used to come to our land and ask us why we had so many goats and sheep, and why we were planting crops on this land,” says Sephiri.
“Our forefathers were told that they were only allowed five goats each and that the rest would be bought from them for R2 each. “They made demands and did as they pleased. My forefathers did nothing because they didn’t understand.”
Sephiri says the authorities arrived one day and announced that they would move the whole community the next day.
The Metsimatshwe community was moved from their farmland where they were self-sufficient. People were loaded on to lorries and carted off. Then the bulldozers came in and demolished anything that had not been packed.
“Many of the people’s belongings were lost. Crockery and all kinds of possessions were broken. Some children were born on those lorries in 1966. They didn’t care — they just took us by force,” says Sephiri.
The community was dumped on a barren farm in Kagong, where there was no water for irrigation and the stony soil made it almost impossible for the community to raise crops or feed livestock.
In 1996, after the African National Congress government had taken power, the community put in a claim for their old land. But they lost. In 2001 about 20 people decided to take matters into their own hands and resettled in the Metsimatshwe area. They were arrested and charged with trespassing.
“They should have arrested those farmers for taking land that did not belong to them,” says Sephiri.
Gaoganelwe Motsamayi, chairperson of the Groot Vlakfontein Land Committee, says the community devised a plan to get back their ancestral land.
“We planned how we were going to get in. We wrote a letter to the commission and on June 22 2001 at 6am we pitched our tents on the land. We stayed there the whole day and at 9pm we were arrested.”
They were released the next day. “Things were different after our reoccupation of the land and getting arrested. We saw a lot of things happening and consultation took place for the first time,” says Motsamayi.
The Land Claims Commission took up the community’s case and negotiated a settlement with the farmers who had bought their property from the apartheid government.
Hannes van den Berg, a representative of three of the five farmers who now own the Groot Vlakfontein land, says that they are pleased with the resolution. “We could’ve pushed harder for concessions, but in the interest of reconciliation and the whole process of land distribution in the country, we are pushing ahead.”