It is 11am. The scorching sun saps the earth of moisture and bakes the soil into a hard, barren crust. Donkey carts, ridden by soiled teenagers, move along the dusty main road. The stench from the carcasses of cattle along the road fills the air.
This is Stolzenfels, a tiny village near Bochum in Limpopo. It is one of many villages in the province buckling under a long spell of drought. The severity of the drought in Stolzenfels is having a devastating affect on its residents, who have lost thousands of head of cattle over the past few months.
Like millions of rural people in Limpopo, the Stolzenfels community relies solely on livestock and subsistence farming for a living. Stolzenfels is part of the Blouberg municipality, one of the hardest-hit municipalities in the province. The drought here means that unemployed villagers like Linky Makgafela have lost their only source of income.
She has lost almost all of her livestock over the past few months. She inherited 79 head of cattle from her late husband but has been left with only six. And she believes that they will also eventually die. As the dry winter season draws closer, hopes for rain are receding. With two of her 10 grandchildren by her side, Makgafela (59) speaks of times when she sold some of the cattle to keep the family going.
“I used to have a good life in the past. Now I have to go around begging for food because of lack of money,” she says. Looking up at the sky, she adds that she no longer has money for food to feed her family. “Sometimes we even go to bed without a meal.”
Makgafela’s plight is shared by many in Stolzenfels. William Maifo used to own 71 head of cattle. Like Makgafela, he has lost cattle — 31 head — to the drought brought by the El Niño weather phenomenon, which has suppressed rainfall in that province.
“My cows have been dying one by one since November. I have been watching them die but there is nothing much I can do to save them,” he says.
Maifo used to buy forage to feed his cattle in times of drought, but he can no longer afford it. “The only hope I have is to wait until the rainy season comes, but maybe they will all be gone by then. I do not know what I will do if I lose all of them,” he says.
Maifo welcomes the provincial government’s assistance in providing subsidised forage to struggling communal cattle farmers. The government has pledged to pay 75% of the total cost of the forage.
However, he says he cannot afford even to pay the difference. Other communal cattle farmers in the area echo his sentiments. Some simply do not want the forage. Daniel Moeta, a communal cattle farmer from Doorfontein who lost 37 head this year, says he does not have the money to pay for the forage, but says that even if he had money he would not buy it “because it is not good for cattle”.
“The government should find suitable farms for our cattle, where there is grass, instead of giving us the forage. I used to buy forage every month, but I have stopped doing that because my cattle were dying even after I had given them the forage.”
Moeta says he will not sell his cattle as people are paying way below the market price. Cattle in the area are selling for as little as R50 a head. “I would rather wait for the rainy season than to sell my cattle for small amounts.”
Some communal farmers in Blouberg have, however, registered to receive the forage in the first week of April. The government started supplying the forage to affected areas on Tuesday April 1. The supply is expected to last for three months.
Blouberg, the worst-hit area, is expected to get the largest slice of the supplies. Even as the supplies were pouring in many residents in Blouberg told the Mail & Guardian of their fears that the longer the drought lasts, the more they will be caught up in a cycle of poverty.
Around villages in Blouberg, one is commonly greeted by residents in donkey carts — the main mode of transport in the area. The villagers say donkeys are the only livestock that are surviving the drought. Besides cattle, some say they have also lost goats and sheep. Villagers fear that if the drought continues donkeys will also die, putting an end to the use of the carts to fetch firewood and water and to transport children to and from school.
Some villagers use donkey carts for business — they collect sand and sell it to communities who use it to build mud houses. There is also a fear among many that the carcasses of cows in their areas could spark an outbreak of cholera as some locals dump the remains of their cattle in streams. The streams are a source of drinking water for villagers as borehole water is not sufficient to sustain communities.
Phenius Hlako, a leader in Molinda village of Lephalale (formerly Elisrus), expressed concerns about the effect of the drought on the education of children in the area.
Hlako says that because cattle have been wiped out, poor residents no longer have sufficient milk for their children. Most children in the area are now forced to work in the afternoon to make ends meet. Along the main roads, they cluster in donkey carts to collect firewood or sand, which they sell to locals.