Without land rights we’re a hurting nation

MY GRANDFATHER was a farmworker in the Eastern Cape. His son, my father, was also a farmworker.

The cycle of slavery and oppression, however, was broken because of the power of land ownership that enabled my father to reject the colonial repression of the feudal farm owner.

As poor and illiterate as he was, he held the title deeds to property in the small village of Bedford, which enabled him to practise subsistence farming and own livestock, thereby freeing generations to come.

The evicted Soetendal farm labourers, however, did not have this choice. Neither have millions of farmworkers and their children all over South Africa.

The pittance that is paid as farm wages, the exacting hours of labour, the dop system that still traps many and poor access to education are but some of the factors that subject many farmworkers to grinding poverty.

But it is, above all, their lack of access to land that disempowers them.

Alexander Zybrands, the new owner of Soetendal Farm, has the power to evict 23 families (more than 148 people) from his property.

After all, he had bought the land from the previous owner and nowhere in the contract were the rights of workers living on the farm protected.

Their decades of toil, the security and community relations that had been built, perhaps even the fact that their dead are buried there, count for nothing.

Power belongs to the farmowner. He who has no land, has no rights.

As a child, in 1963, I experienced the brutality of eviction as a result of the Group Areas Act.

I remember how, as a child, I prayed to God that we would be given a reprieve from losing property that had been in our family for more than 70 years. I remember how we lost our school, our church. I remember the destruction of a people as a result of relegating them to “hokkies” in the township.

Never again, never again would this happen, I thought.

But Soetendal (how ironic) has proven that our wounded nation has failed to redress the bitter injustices of the past.

Until we realise that land is more than property – that it is closely tied to our birth, our life, our freedom, our power, our death – we remain a hurting nation. ESTELLA MACKAY Kuils River