”Women are moving forward!” they sang as they danced, swayed their hips and clapped their hands, their chant vibrating through a packed conference hall.
Some economic analysts say the passion for land is dying out in modern South Africa as more rural residents move to urban areas to escape the crushing poverty that contrasts sharply with much of the country’s prosperous cities.
But these women, who met from October 13 to 15 in the largely rural Eastern Cape province to launch a government-driven project to help women in agriculture, showed land hunger was still strong at a conference with hundreds of activists, officials, traditional leaders and farmers.
Apart from the deeply rooted ties that Africans have to land, participants at the conference said farming was also the most accessible way out of poverty in places where many who cannot afford education can earn their livelihood from the soil.
”It’s a gift from God to start with and we have hands so we need to use them,” said Linda Ndumdum, a 32-year-old teacher who sells vegetables she grows on a small patch of land on her property in the rural heartland of the Eastern Cape.
”If you have land, you are producing from that land, you are helping the community,” said Ndumdum, whose township in Ntywenka is about 300km from East London and, like so many, has no running water or electricity.
‘We want the land back’
Women in Agriculture and Rural Development (Ward) will set up regional offices to improve access to information about government services — vital for those in far-flung areas where word of state programmes often fails to reach.
”Now we will know that someone is suffering, we’ll be able to voice the problem, sharing some sentiment, giving them a remedy,” said Ndumdum.
Throughout speeches and comments from the floor there was one common thread: women want to stake a bigger claim to a domain for long dominated by men.
Figures for the number of women farmers were not immediately available but officials and rural women alike said tradition still proved one of the biggest stumbling blocks to giving them access to property.
Some of the most frequent complaints were around customs that do not allow women to inherit or own property, unless through marriage.
”Three-hundred-and-fifty years ago the land was taken by white people. Now that we have a chance we must use it,” said one land activist. ”We want the land back.”
Ward comes as South Africa tries to add momentum to its flagging land reforms, which have done little to tilt the scales of land ownership, still heavily in favour of the white minority 12 years after the fall of apartheid.
South Africa wants to see a third of arable land in black hands by 2014, but whites still own over 90%. It has touted this policy as key to restoring property rights taken from blacks under white rule and for spurring economic growth.
Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Lulu Xingwana said the involvement of women was at the core of achieving this.
”We think women should be part and parcel of every programme in South Africa,” she told reporters at the end of the meeting. — Reuters