March revealed whiteness of farming in an inept state
Apartheid flags aside, what the protests highlighted was the ANC’s incompetence regarding land restitution
Last Monday, SA was in the middle of a full-blown racial war. No one died because the war was fought in the echo chamber of Twitter. But the conflict did claim two important casualties: facts and social cohesion. Black Monday was ostensibly a response to the murder of Stellenbosch farmer Joubert Conradie. According to News24 editor-in-chief Adriaan Basson, “Conradie’s friend, Chris Loubser, recorded a video in his bakkie, calling on his friends and family to join him in a small gathering on Monday wearing black. Because of its amateurish authenticity and his raw emotion about his friend’s death, the video spread like a veld fire over social media and soon caught the attention of organised labour movements, lobby groups, right-wing organisations and thousands of decent, law-abiding South Africans.”
By Monday morning, the whole event had gone south. The news about the protest had turned into a digital racial conflict. Farmers, who were overwhelmingly white, blockaded roads with their trucks across the land, with signs saying, “No boer, no pap” (No farmer, no porridge).” Social media were awash with old apartheid flags and Die Stem videos. The ghost of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging’s Eugene Terre’Blanche was well and truly resuscitated. The story was no longer about farm murders but about recalcitrant white South Africans longing for the good old days of apartheid. Or was it? As I watched footage of the Black Monday protest, I wasn’t much bothered by the apartheid flag doing the rounds on social media. In reality, the flag wavers were a minority. Basson says his reporters who travelled with the main march from Stellenbosch to Cape Town Stadium saw only one old South African flag on a biker’s jacket. The biker wasn’t even a farmer. There were apparently a couple of similar flags at some of the other protests.
In 1999, I watched the Rugby World Cup semifinal between SA and Australia on a big screen in Hatfield Square in Pretoria. It was a sunny afternoon and there were many happy faces. Among a multitude flying the rainbow flag were two young men draped in the old South African flag. After the loss to Australia, the two men walked off towards some oblivion. They were a pitiful sight. Not only had they lost to Australia but their old country was never coming back. The rest of us ignored them.
Most of us who have lived in this country since 1994, have seen the old flag displayed occasionally. But we know the system it represented was defeated. Two things about Black Monday were bothersome: the politicisation of farm murders and that 23 years after the end of apartheid, the profile of South African farmers remains largely white.
That politicisation was inevitable the moment AfriForum took centre stage. It is unclear if Loubser and his late friend Conradie were members of the lobby group. But when AfriForum became the face of the protest, it was guaranteed the focus would not be on farm murders, but race.
The EFF released a furious statement, saying the marchers should march to the sea and go back to where they came from. Not to be outdone, the ANC released an equally angry statement, saying that “the racial characterisation of crime and the stoking of racial hatred … are indicative of an unrelenting yearning for apartheid fascism and white supremacy and make a mockery of the national reconciliation project”.
You would think AfriForum is the single biggest political development since the end of apartheid. Yet the facts suggest otherwise. The outfit’s main focus is to protect “the rights of Afrikaners as a community living on the southern tip of the continent”. But out of 6.85-million Afrikaans-speaking South Africans, AfriForum has managed to convince fewer than 200,000 that they need AfriForum’s protection. It is unclear what they want to protect them from.
So we have a toxic cocktail: the EFF, which relies on racial mobilisation for political relevance; AfriForum, which does the same thing to promote itself as protectors of a people who are hardly victims of racial subjugation; and an ANC that is overjoyed when there is focus on nonissues. Instead of talking about why the typical profile of a South African farmer remains white, we are having an irrelevant discussion about a handful of white people carrying old apartheid flags and singing Die Stem.
One reason so few black farmers were at last Monday’s protest is that the ANC government has made it almost impossible for black people to become successful farmers. At the same time, the lack of a rural safety strategy affects black and white farmers as well as farm workers, who bear the brunt of crimes committed on farms.
Twenty-three years into democracy, this government is yet to conduct a proper land audit. The ANC presidential hopefuls are going around the country promising to return the land to their rightful owners, but they have no idea how much of the land is in whose hands.
In the absence of a proper land audit, farmers’ interest group AgriSA has stepped in with its own audit report. The report glowingly states that the willing-buyer, willing-seller market successfully delivered land transactions between 1994 and 2016. It asserts that white agricultural land ownership stands at 73%, down from 85% in 1994. This means a mere 12% of agricultural land has been transferred to black people since the dawn of democracy. It is perhaps revealing that the report lumps together the government and individual blacks.
What the report doesn’t say is how much land has been transferred into the hands of actual black farmers. Nor does it say what percentage of state land is on lease to black farmers – bearing in mind that lease holdings make it impossible for black farmers to access the capital that can turn their farms into productive enterprises.
According to the latest figures from AgBiz, of the 17.5-million tonnes of maize produced in 2017, 16.7-million was commercial production, mostly by white farmers. Where are the black farmers? If this picture doesn’t change, “No boer, no pap” will very soon become SA’s reality.
So while politicians seize on an imaginary racial conflict, and as the incompetence of the ANC government continues to wreak havoc in cities and in the countryside, the interests of white commercial farmers will continue to set the policy agenda for agricultural reform.