LAND DOESN’T SEEK REVENGE
Land reform is a complex issue, in the same way that Kay Karriem’s childhood experience of “the farm” was both a sweet dream and a horrible nightmare. It was only at her great-grandmother’s graveside that she found resolution.
The debate around land reform is something I’ve really only been following with half an ear. I notice how opportunists exploit the issue to get people worked up, and I read online comments on the topic just to see whether the conversation has moved on at all.
But my optimism is always dashed, because it’s still the same people saying the same things. Each one sticks to their old, narrow view of the matter. The majority still see it in black and white – and I mean that literally. There’s no room for movement and also no understanding of what it feels like to be in someone else’s shoes.
It’s not as though I want to lodge a land claim.
I follow the debate because my people were definitely not originally from the Cape Flats. They were farming people. Every winter holiday I had a taste of it when we children visited our family who still worked on a farm. It was a different world.
It’s been 30 years since I last set foot on the farm back in the 1980s, but I remember it well. It was a winter school holiday, and life there was so different to our lives in the “scheme”.
It was a dream and a nightmare, simultaneously. On the one hand, the farm was like the books about nature that I read at school. The air was clean and you could hear the birds singing. There was a vineyard next to the front stoep, and a real dam. Every morning I felt like I was in a storybook, but the reality sank in gradually.
You see, this was also the time of my life when I started to become politically aware, and I realised how different things were for people of different races. I was horrified that my family on the farm had no electricity or running water in their little house. Nobody thought of studying further, because as soon as they finished at the farm school they had to start working. And they really did say, “Ja,Baas; nee,Baas”. It was the ’80s!
I wanted to know everything about how my family had landed up on a farm, because the story was – everything was a story because we had no papers – that we’d been there for generations.
My grandmother said it all started with the late Hetta, who worked in the kitchen on the farm. She was said to have been a slave, and very stubborn. I’m told I’m a bit like Hetta, because I can’t keep quiet – but that’s according to the same grandma who swears I was born psychic… so I don’t know.
I believe the slavery story, because my great-grandmother Getruida was very dark, with straight black hair, telling of East-Indian origins.
But here’s the thing that fascinated me as a child, and something that I encountered as a Coloured person among many farm families… Make of it what you will, but it is what it is. Give me a farm and I’ll show you this phenomenon. There’s my greatgrandmother, very dark, and my grandmother, lily-white with the same black hair. Then my grandmother’s one sister is dark and the youngest sister is light. Let me be clear: Nobody in the family wanted to talk about it – even today – and nobody mentioned that the farmer or his family might have been involved. But it was striking, and until today there are two shades running through our family. The brown ones, like me, and the “off-whites”.
I firmly believe that what I saw on the farm as a child is what made me choose a life in which justice would triumph and that I’d never have to call a White person Baas. It was one of the driving forces behind my decision to study, because I could see how your humanity was affected if you always had to stand back.
Initially, I thought it would be the ultimate revenge to make enough money to buy a farm, but when I went back recently, very little had changed. Other people now live in the workers’ houses where my family lived, and it still looks like they don’t have electricity, and the vineyard is still right next to their front stoep.
Before I left, I took one last stroll down to the little church opposite the station where the workers are buried. My greatgrandmother’s grave is there. And then I realised how silly I was to think I needed to buy a farm to try get even with White people, because the land is already hers. That’s where her bones lie.
Kay Karriem is editor ofKuier magazine.