The controversial eviction of 300 workers’ families from estates in the Jonkershoek valley near Stellenbosch — including Christo Wiese’s wine estate, Lourensford — has been temporarily halted following a trade union protest campaign.
Farmers are planning to convert workers’ tied housing into tourist and student accommodation to generate extra income.
A march against the evictions was planned in Stellenbosch on Youth Day, but was cancelled after the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), farm workers’ organisations, the provincial government and farmers struck a deal on Tuesday that included a three-month moratorium on evictions, while a plan for the area is fine-tuned. A rally is now being planned.
Land activists say the Jonkershoek saga has again highlighted the inadequacies of the Extension of Security of Tenure Act (Esta) in halting evictions from farms, which cause unique hardship.
”The Act is inadequate in defending farm workers’ rights,” said Cosatu’s Western Cape secretary, Tony Ehrenreich. ”A farmer can still get you off the farm legally if he wants to, with the government’s help.”
He added that Jonkershoek would soon be ”a whites-only valley”, and that the government and farmers were resurrecting Bantustans through the immoral removal of people from their homes with the protection of the law.
Tensions in the valley have been mounting since a march last month that ended in a stand-off between police and farm workers at the Lanzerac wine estate, which Wiese also owns. The protesters wanted to occupy some of the old workers’ houses in the valley, but found students living in them. They then delivered an ultimatum calling for the students to leave so that the farmworkers could move back in.
The plan was to return on Youth Day to occupy houses rented by students and tourists, but the Western Cape government intervened and organised a meeting between the interested parties.
The parties agreed that no more evictions would take place for three months; water and electricity would not be cut off; and that ”bad apples” in the valley — farmers with unacceptable labour practices — would be identified. National, provincial and local governments would work together to find a longer-term solution and provide the necessary services.
Ruth Hall, of the University of the Western Cape’s Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies, agreed that Esta embodied weak tenancy rights.
”It allows farm dwellers to be made homeless by legally sanctioned means and increasingly this seems to be the outcome,” she said. ”Even where legal procedures are followed, occupiers are still left on the roadside without a home.”
Ehrenreich said that everyone at the Tuesday meeting agreed that Esta was a ”balls-up”. Although some of the estate owners, including Wiese, had done good work within the framework of the Act, the legislation itself was faulty.
About 200 Lourensford families were moved to newly built houses in a new township in the Strand. Wiese told journalists that with government grants and a housing subsidy from the farm itself, workers could own their own home for the first time.
Farmers in the area say they are acting within the law by evicting workers and providing alternative accommodation.
But some of the workers insist they have no desire to move. Abraham Jansen received an eviction letter three years ago, and has been fighting it ever since with the help of the NGO Women on Farms.
”The farm owner made land available for us to move to in a township, but we don’t want to go there. It is a different way of life in that place; our children’s lives will be in danger. And our houses here are bigger and better.”
Jansen has lived on Bergsig for 15 years, 10 of them as a farm labourer. He and 11 families in his community are threatened with eviction.
Ehrenreich said that in terms of Esta, evicted tenants jumped the queue to qualify for reconstruction and development programme housing. They then moved into a strange community, which might harbour ill-feelings against them as queue-jumpers.
Western Cape premier Ebrahim Rasool last week called farm evictions the new ”silent epidemic” in the Western Cape. ”It has pushed the housing backlog to the rural towns,” he said.