At the Fireside

by Webster Roger

  Then she turned and walked away. On his return home, Credo found that his eldest son had died – and before a year had passed Adrian Boshier drowned while snorkelling off the South Coast with his brother-in-law.

  Then there is another interesting question: is all this somehow related to the smoke signals of the American Indians which are said to concentrate the mind to allow the receipt of telepathic messages? I don’t know. But I do know that it is a pity that, as these ancient indigenous peoples Westernise, strange phenomena like these will die out and eventually be just an ancestral memory. It is a high cost to pay for progress for a real force of the mind to become no more than a myth or fairytale.

  The Land is Mine

  THE LAND IS MINE

  Misuse

  Land is arguably the thorniest issue in South Africa today. Most of the time a discussion about land is worse than tackling politics or religion; it seems to make people’s emotions and tempers flare up like no other subject. That it is a serious issue within our country cannot be doubted and so, I shall try and make some sort of sense out of the whole thing, relying on facts rather than hearsay.

  The fundamental issue is this. Prior to the arrival of white people there was no private ownership of land. It belonged to all, with the local chief possessing the power to grant the use of certain parts of it to certain people. But take note that this did not imply ownership – the land belonged to the collective, not individuals.

  Where whites came from, land was owned by individuals as well as governments or rulers of various kinds. In all cases land was acquired by war – you lose the battle, you lose your land as well – or by purchase or barter. Not so in the southern Africa of yesteryear. You could not buy land because it belonged to the collective. These two differences are at the very heart of the land issue in South Africa.

  The first thing one has to realise is that in our solar system we are completely unique and completely isolated. There is no other planet like ours that we know of. What this means is that if we get it all wrong, there is nowhere else to go to and nobody to save us, and the human race will become extinct.

  Now, through misuse of the Earth’s resources our planet loses 100 million acres of arable farm land and 24 billion tons of topsoil per annum, and in the process we create 15 million acres of new desert. Bear this in mind: five centimetres of topsoil, ready for growing things in, takes up to 1 000 years to form. When land is misused and we chop down the trees which act as windbreaks, the topsoil will be blown and washed away in a matter of months and 1 000 years of growth goes down the drain.

  Now let’s look at water, which is vital for producing food, and in fact for our very survival. It takes 1 000 tons of water to produce one ton of grain, and if this ton of grain is fed to cattle it produces a mere six kilos of beef. Put another way, it takes 50 000 to 100 000 litres of water to produce one kilo of beef but only 2 000 litres to produce one kilo of soya. And yet the burgeoning populations of both China and India are changing their lifestyles to consume more and more meat, just like the United States.

  Madness, I hear you say. Well, let me pass on an interesting statistic which confirms that lunacy. If all the grain grown in the United States were fed to people rather than livestock we would have sufficient food to feed 800 million people per annum.

  Today, mankind is using 160 billion tons of irreplaceable water per annum – literally irreplaceable water that is not replenished by rainfall, which is 160 billion tons more than the entire rainfall on the planet.

  Let’s put all this into perspective as well. If we had to take all this gone-forever water and pump it into bowsers, we would have a convoy 480 000 kilometres long. That is about 35 times the diameter of the entire planet. Let me just hammer the point home. That’s just one year’s loss and it happens every year!

  In commercial terms this would be the equivalent of living on capital rather than interest, and when you do that, you can live high off the hog for a while, but sooner or later the capital is going to run out. It’s not a question of ‘if’ but simply of ‘when’.

  It is estimated that the world population will expand to about nine billion people, and the ability to feed these people will steadily decrease as the water table drops and farms – particularly in the poorer countries – start disappearing as the new emerging consumer classes in China, India and 18 other countries get hooked on eating meat and driving cars. The equation is starkly simple. The greater the demand for meat, the greater the depletion of the water supply.

  Now, the frightening part is that the planet’s population growth is occurring mainly in poorer countries, but we find that the leaders – or perhaps one should say the ones in power – prefer to go for short-term benefits and ‘quick political wins’ rather than tackle the long-term problems. This is obviously true because they want to remain in power.

  South Africa’s coal mining is a classic example. We are mining coal, a non-renewable resource which takes 10 000 years to form, as if there were no tomorrow. The efficiency with which coal is turned into power is abysmal and the long-term effects on global warming are horrific. And yet, guess what? South Africa is planning to build another five coal-burning power stations.

  And that’s not all, as the TV ads say. In the last 12 months at the time of this writing no less than five towns in the Vaal Dam catchment area were summonsed for pumping raw effluent into the dam’s feeder rivers, and of course the Vaal Dam is the main water source for Johannesburg, the heart of South Africa’s trade and commerce. The subject is no brighter when one looks at other areas like the Hartbeespoort Dam, to name just one. That’s where we stand right now.

  The question that we South Africans need to ask ourselves is this: What sort of place would we like our children to live in? The choice is ours and time to make that choice is running out … fast.

  One of the problems we face is our population growth, and it might come as a surprise to you that in so-called failed nations, teaching women to read drops the population growth. The more educated the women are, the less likely they are to have large families, and let’s be very honest and blunt about it, there are very few developing countries.

  In Africa there are dozens of failed countries which the media euphemistically refer to as ‘developing countries’. But a developing country is one that is getting better and failed nations are so poor that they cannot even reach the first rung of the ladder of development because the poverty is so crushing that there is no way out. Hunger and disease become worse and worse. There is no way to educate the children, no way to create better farming practices and no way to enter world trade.

  Is this where we want to go? Is this the place we want to end up in? We South Africans have to face a hard, brutal fact. Only 12% of the entire country is arable! And we want to give 30% away to people who do not farm! That is economic madness, a recipe for total failure.

  Let’s look a bit further afield to the tropical African forests beyond our borders. They play an important part in absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. However, if the temperature were to rise by just 4 degrees Celsius, which is the way the planet is heading at the moment, the forests will start dying off and releasing carbon dioxide which, in turn, will aggravate the extremely serious global warming situation. There should be a simple law in this country that makes it a criminal offence to cut down a tree without planting at least two others in its place.

  In his awesome book Our Final Century, Lord Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom and President of the Royal Society which has been steeped in science since the 1660s, gives a detailed account of why he believes that mankind’s chances of surviving the 21st century are no better than 50-50. Coming from a very learned man like that, this is really scary stuff.

  So let’s get away from the emotive claptrap of hidden agendas and psychological damages, as a nation face the enormity of the problem, and then utili
se that scarce 12% of our arable land to its maximum potential for the betterment of all.

  Our aim should be to make our South Africa a place in which our children will be able to live educated, informed and balanced lives rather than being influenced by stupid, ignorant and short-term political quick fixes that will lead to our utter demise in a very short space of time and turn us into just another failed nation.

  That is why the land issue is so vital to us all.

  Botshabelo

  I have spoken before about Botshabelo in my broadcasts, but for those have have not heard them, here is a bit of background.

  Botshabelo is an old mission station, about 12 kilometres north of Middelburg in Mpumalanga, which was established in 1865 by two German missionaries named Alexander Merensky and Heinrich Grützner.

  Bothshabelo was their second mission. The first had been built further north at Gerlachtshoop in Sekhukhuneland in the area controlled by a vassal chief of King Sekwati’s named Maleo. Then in 1861 Sekwati died and was succeeded by his son Sekhukhune – and the mission ran into trouble at the worst possible time for Merensky whose wife was about to give birth.

  Two of Sekhukhune’s wives had earlier converted to Christianity. This had caused much dissension in the tribe, and one stormy night it all boiled over. A distraught convert woke up the sleeping Merenskys and warned them that a war impi was on its way to the mission. The shock put Merensky’s wife into labour and their daughter was born within earshot of the howling warriors. But somehow they managed to escape over the Steelpoort River which was rising so quickly that the impi could not follow them.

  But the missionaries were made of tough stuff and in January of 1865 Merensky and Grützner bought the farm Boshoek from Jan Abraham Joubert. There Merensky and his family settled with more than 100 refugees led by Johannes Dinkwanyane, Sekhukhune’s brother. He and his fellow Christians had suffered greatly at the hand of the new chief who had plundered their crops and raided their cattle till they had had no alternative except to seek sanctuary with the missionaries.

  Originally Merensky and Grützner named the new mission ‘Toevlugsoord’ (Sanctuary), but later it became known as Botshabelo – ‘the place of refuge’. Johannes Dinkwanyane had no illusions about his brother’s intentions and persuaded the missionaries that the first thing that they should build was a fort because he knew that in due course Sekhukhune would attack them. The refugees set to and the fort was duly built, Merensky naming it ‘Fort Wilhelm’ after Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany.

  In time, though, its original name was replaced with ‘Fort Merensky’, and it stands there to this day. It has been restored, and my wife and I stood on its ramparts some time ago, looking down on Botshabelo and revelling in what we saw to the right and down the valley.

  The original mission station is still there, with other small forts and ramparts scattered about which were erected to beat off Sekhukhune’s long-vanished warriors. Some of the original buildings are intact although others are in disrepair, but one can make out how it must have looked in those days. It had a shop, a mill with a permanent miller, a book bindery, a wagon-making shop and a blacksmith’s shed.

  It is an amazing experience to walk around Botshabelo and see the results of the massive amount of hard labour and steadfast vision that went into it. The Botshabelo school, which initially held its classes in the mission church, flourished to such an extent that by the 1860s it was the largest school in the ZAR.

  Then, unfortunately, a disagreement arose between Dinkwanyane and the missionaries. The missionaries proposed to Dinkwanyane that he pay the ZAR’s taxes, desist from the ancient tribal ritual of lobola and the first fruits festival, and at harvest time provide free labour to the local white farmers.

  Dinkwanyane would have none of this. Reportedly he replied: ‘If I am given the right to vote and the ability to purchase land in the ZAR, then we shall gladly pay its taxes.’ He also pointed out that lobola was not, as many whites thought (and still think today) payment for a bride, but a type of pre-nuptial guarantee since the cattle were held in trust by the bride’s parents; and certain festivals at certain times of the year were actually no different to the Christian festivals held all over Europe, so why should he give them up?

  Dinkwanyane said his people would gladly give their labour to the farmers at harvest time, provided the farmers paid a market-related wage, rather than expect them to labour for nothing but the food they ate. And all this in 1866, not 1994!

  Sadly, these points of contention could not be resolved and the upshot was that Dinkwanyane and his followers left Botshabelo, trekked northwards towards the Steelpoort River and bought a farm on which they settled (it is marked on the old maps as ‘Johannes’s Stadt’. They called the settlement Mafolofolo – ‘the place of gladness’ – but the joy would not last long. In 1876, at the outbreak of the First Sekhukhune War, Johannes Dinkwanyane was killed in an attack by Boers and Swazis, and his followers were parcelled out as itinerant labourers.

  That is the history of Botshabelo and Johannes Dinkwanyane which lays the foundations for what happened after 1994 when the descendants of Dinkwanyane’s refugees laid claim to the Botshabelo land under section 11a of the Restitution of Land Rights Act, as amended.

  The claimants were completely undeterred by two uncomfortable facts:

  Firstly, the Botshabelo land had not belonged to their ancestors – they had been refugees from Sekhukhuneland who had been taken in as an act of charity by the missionaries – and in a document dated 8 September 2003 they claimed that they were the direct descendants of the original buyers of the farm, which they were not. Dr Klaus Merensky contested this claim in a letter to the head of the Land Claims Commission who simply ignored it.

  Secondly, they had not, as they claimed, been forcibly removed to the Motetema area in January 1972, with their houses being demolished without compensation or the grant of new land. This was a blatant lie: the records show that lengthy negotiations with government representatives took place in 1972, and that they were paid compensation despite the fact that they did not have any historical claim to the land.

  The result of the claims was that a letter was sent out inviting people to celebrate the handover of what the LCC called the Groenfontein Ramohlakane Land Claim (Groenfontein is one of the seven farms surrounding Botshabelo). So Groenfontein, whose 600 hectares was bought with taxpayers’ money to the tune of R1 750 000, was handed over to 400 households. This is an average of 1.25 hectares per family. Another farm of the seven, Leeupoortjie (428 hectares), which ran 440 head of cattle, was handed over in 1998.

  When my wife and I arrived at Botshabelo there were no cattle. The pens were broken and the owners, as was the case on all the other sites, were nowhere to be found. When I enquired as to the validity of this land claim, I was told that the current owners were born on this land, it was therefore the place of their birth, and this entitled them to that land and the surrounding area (which, by the way, was granted).

  My reply to that was that I was born in Groote Schuur Hospital – did that mean that Cape Town belonged to me and all the others who were born in similar circumstances? All I got was a look of amazement which, I suppose, was some sort of response.

  When I enquired as to why no farming was going on, the reply was: ‘We’re waiting for the government to give us money because we don’t know how to farm, and we don’t have any implements.’ This was another lie. The farms were handed over as going concerns together with all the implements, which were subsequently sold, broken or removed.

  In this regard I want to restate something I have said before. A government has no money; it is merely the custodian of the taxpayers’ money. That being the case, here was another classic example of what was happening to parts of that precious 12% of arable land South Africa possesses.

  The land is bought from competent, hardworking farmers who produce crops and livest
ock for their own advancement, and in so doing benefit the country as a whole! Then it is given to incompetent, unskilled and uninterested people who, I was informed, ‘all have jobs in town’ and don’t even live on the farms!

  Is this what it is really all about? A group of people laying claim to land which ancestrally was never theirs, but which is bought with hard-earned taxpayers’ money and then handed over, not to energetic and competent new farmers, but to people who have spent the last 20 years waiting for the government to give them money and teach them how to plough? How can we possibly see any progress in agriculture in this country of ours if this madness continues to be a reality? I leave you to answer that question.

  Putfontein in the North West Province

  Some years ago, organised agriculture in the North West sent out a questionnaire to farmers regarding their problems with crime, land claims and various other matters. What came back was absolutely astounding. There were few, if any, farmers who could claim not to be living under severe duress; in quite a few cases it had become so bad that farmers had abandoned their properties. Others were completely frustrated and unable to do anything.

  As this so-called land reform process is played out around the country, there are thousands, and I mean literally thousands, of stories of stock and crop theft, intimidation, vandalism and murder. One just has to go and look at the hundreds of white crosses that stand next to the N1 highway just south of Polokwane to realise just how serious the situation really is. Every white cross planted there represents a farm murder in that region alone, and believe you me, there are hundreds of them; truly a damning indictment of what is being allowed to happen.

  Pre-1994 there were about 73 000 farmers in this country. Now, as I have stated previously, their numbers are down to about 35 000. The rest, more than 50%, have ceased farming and the toll on agricultural production in this country is enormous. In this vein I would like to tell you about the farm Putfontein, just outside the little town of Coligny in the North West Province.