On April 3 it will be 25 years to the day since the first white Government Garage (GG) lorry rumbled on to Klipfontein farm, and the recollection is still etched in Desmond Njajula’s memory.
”The trucks came,” he says. ”The trucks just loaded us by force. They just broke our houses without any permission. They took hammers and tommy bars and broke our houses. We did try to speak to them, but they didn’t listen to us.”
Within two brutal weeks labourers from the euphemistically named department of plural relations, backed by police, had uprooted about 150 so-called squatter families from the rolling green hills of Klipfontein, just outside the resort town of Bushman’s River on the Eastern Cape coast.
They, their possessions and bellowing cattle were transported on the GG lorries just more than 100km inland and dumped on a farm named Glenmore on the edge of the Ciskei bantustan.
If a family refused to move, the removals squad simply demolished their home — sometimes by looping a chain around it and using a truck to pull it over — loaded the pieces of destroyed house and contents on to a truck and sent everything off to Glenmore.
Faced with a Supreme Court challenge, officials coerced and tricked residents into signing ”letters of consent” and presented these to the judge as evidence of the legitimacy of what they were doing.
At Glenmore they were deposited in jerry-built plank houses, and given regular state rations only after the reports of hunger and dying children became too embarrassing for the apartheid government. The authorities did, however, have the foresight to provide free coffins.
Twenty-five years later Njajula is still living at Glenmore, now an established settlement of about 550 households. The plank shacks were replaced in the mid-Eighties by brick-and-mortar homes, and though their residents still do not have title deeds, they do have electricity, community offices, three schools and an established community development trust.
But the difficulties that Glenmore faces, Njajula says, are in many ways the same as those of 25 years ago.
”The problems now: there is no work, we are still dying of hunger,” he says. ”Our cattle and goats have got nothing to eat … There are pensioners, but we don’t get pensions, all of us, and we are not working.”
The 53-year-old Njajula is in fact one of the lucky few who do have a job: he is a caretaker at one of the schools. Some people have left Glenmore altogether, to seek jobs in towns such as Grahamstown, 50km to the west in what was once ”white” South Africa; others are migrants, working elsewhere but still regarding Glenmore as ”home”.
As in poverty-stricken communities throughout South Africa, state social grants — old-age pensions and child-care grants — serve as the frail matrix of many family units there.
”We all depend on this old-age pension day,” says storekeeper Temba Yose. ”There’s nobody working, no one at all.”
Even though his business — which offers only the most basic of supplies — is, he says, hand-to-mouth, he still gives credit ”because I’m thinking for them. Some of them they come and cry, and I can’t do anything except say okay. Most of the thing is the hunger. I never saw a place like this.”
Asked if conditions at Glenmore had improved in the 10 years since 1994, Yose says: ”In this question I really can’t say there is an improvement. I don’t say the government doesn’t work for us, but staying in Glenmore it’s almost the same thing ever since [1979].”
This is not to say that the community has not made attempts to better its circumstances. With the assistance of the Eastern Cape government and development agencies, irrigated food plots have been laid out on a hillside opposite the settlement, producing mealies and vegetables such as superbly tasty sweet potatoes and cabbage.
When there is money to pay for diesel, there are even tractors to do the ploughing.
A small sewing cooperative runs its two sewing machines and one overlocker in a cramped room in the community offices; two hundred metres away is a small piggery, and next to that, a poultry project.
But these projects have their own difficulties. At the poultry project — a cinder-block building divided into two rooms, one of them empty — disability pensioner Iris Mbonge (58) is feeding a batch of scrawny pullets she locks in at night for fear of thieves.
”We’ve got many chickens now because of the market: we’ve got no market to sell them,” she says. Local people, she explains, find it difficult to afford chicken, and the project has to sell on credit.
”They have no jobs here,” she says. The sewing cooperative has similar problems.
Have things improved in the past 10 years?
”There are little jobs that other people get, and we have these things, the chickens,” says Mbonge. ”But we get nothing for the chickens. We buy the food for the chickens. We have gardens, we get a little, a little. It is better.”
And on election day, on April 14?
”I will vote for this government,” she says. ”This child [indicating a one-and-a-half-year old grandchild] gets a bit from the government, the grant. It’s not so very difficult now.”
There is in fact a more substantial manifestation of delivery at Glenmore than the social grants.
The settlement lies on the east bank of the Fish River, and at the time the forced removals took place, one of the Ciskei government’s pet projects, an irrigation scheme growing a range of vegetables for the Eastern Cape’s urban markets, was in full swing on flat land further down the river.
The scheme eventually collapsed, partly because the cost of pumping every drop of brackish water from the Fish meant it was never economically viable.
This week, however, construction crews are putting the finishing touches to a holding dam at the terminus of a newly laid pipeline that will use gravity to carry good quality Orange River water to Glenmore and three other villages downstream.
According to Thembesile Mani, who acts for the four communities as liaison officer with the project management, 46ha of the irrigable land are to be set aside for individual food plots, and the remaining 300 will be used for commercial farming.
The Eastern Cape government has set aside R25-million for the project, which will include sugar beet trials due to start in 2005. Mani says it is hoped to lure investors into partnerships with the communities to farm cotton, barley for the beer industry, canola and plants for essential oils.
One hurdle so far, he says, has been the issue of security of tenure, which will be resolved when the Communal Land Rights Bill is signed into law.
”It is very positive: in time we will have moved a major step forward, ” he says.
”It is clear that in five years no child will cry because of hunger. We are in the stage of implementation now, but the target is total alleviation of hunger. It is a matter of putting things in place.”
African National Congress councillor for Glenmore in the Ngqushwa municipality Welcome Gqamane, who was also one of the victims of the 1979 forced removals, agrees.
”[There will be a] big, big difference to Glenmore if it can succeed, ” he says.
Asked for his verdict on whether things have deteriorated, stayed the same, or improved at Glenmore over the past 10 years, he says: ”What I can say, between better and the same, let’s take out worse, and then we have got two, the same and better.
”We have got both, because we have still got all those things we had before, we have still got those houses, we have got those food plots. The better thing is that from 1994 we are determining, saying that this is what we want. The new government is asking us what we want. That’s a very, very important thing to us.
”This new government, I’m not saying it is doing all we want, but it is listening to us.”