Rural coalition marches
Farm workers and dwellers from the Carlisle Bridge area this week marched in Grahamstown to the city hall where they delivered a memorandum of grievances about land rights.
Identifying the proliferation of game farming as the main threat to their prospects of owning land under the land redistribution programme, the memorandum describes the trend, along with the amalgamation of neighbouring farms, as “land grabbing”.
Outside the city hall, Carlisle Residents area Committee representative Thamsanqa Sideba read a statement. A three-person delegation from the Provincial Health Department and Makana Municipality accepted the memorandum, which was drawn up by the East Cape Agricultural Research Project (ECARP).
The memorandum lists evic- tions, poor living conditions for farm dwellers, lack of access to quality education and poor access to health services as being among the flouting of the community’s Constitutional rights.
The march was sparked by the sale of land earlier this year to a commercial farmer.
The roots of the unhappiness go back to 1998, in which nine farms in the Carlisle Bridge area north of Grahamstown were sold to Norwegian civil servant Ivar Henriksen. He turned them into a single 8 000ha game reserve.
A dispute some years later over cattle belonging to a farm dweller brought Henriksen’s enormous asset to the attention of his former employer, the Nedre Romerike Vannwerk (NRV), a water parastatal in Norway.
Ten years after buying the land, Henriksen was convicted of stealing millions from his employer and jailed. The NRV now owns the farms as part of Henriksen’s payback.
The Carlisle Bridge area committee said the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR) had in a meeting on 30 August 2012 promised the community that they would buy farms and establish an agri-village in the area.
According to the memorandum this meeting took place at the department’s Port Elizabeth offices.
Two of the farms that were in 2008 incorporated in the big game reserve, Skelmdrift and Kwadehoek, were earlier this year sold to a commercial farmer.
This, the Carlisle Bridge Area Committee said, was contrary to what the DRDLR had promised them in 2012. Also, they said, the manner in which one of the people living on Skelmdrift, Totomani “Boyi” Skeyi, had been treated transgressed his tenure rights.