At the Fireside

by Webster Roger

  The state has three options when it comes to land-restitution claims. One is the return to the claimant of the specific land which has been claimed. The second is that other land may be made available and granted to the claimants by way of compensation. The third is that financial compensation may be granted to the claimants for the loss they suffered.

  Now, if the State grants compensation, it is paid from taxpayers’ money to the third party who, of course, is the current land owner. But if the land owner is affected, in so far as the claimants want his land, he then becomes involved in the claim and, of course, must pay his own legal costs – and there have been hundreds of cases in which literally millions of rands have been spent by farmers defending themselves against the claims.

  It is not possible for a farmer to obtain an order against one of the other parties. Now, if the restitution claim goes to court, that court must decide which way the claimant will be compensated, and section 2.2 of the Restitution Act says that if the claimant had previously received compensation, he or she may not apply again. But there are many cases in which people have, in fact, received compensation in the past, yet lodge new claims all the same.

  Now, if the State wishes to return land to a claimant, the present land’s owner must be evicted, and the next part is extremely important. The claimant must give up the existing land that was given to him previously before he may occupy the new land. All right – except that most of the time that part of the clause is simply ignored.

  But, as you will see in this case, although everything possible was done to return the original land to the claimant, no notice was taken as to whether they vacate their compensatory land or not. Now, up to September 2001, for example, 17 such claims had been settled countrywide and in not one of these cases was there continued successful agricultural production. Virtually all have resulted in failed settlements.

  Putfontein is a classic example. The claim took six years to settle from the time it was approved to the time that the farmer was paid out. Now, it should be noted that as soon as a claim is approved, all production aid and financing are suspended so that the resident farmer is placed under enormous financial stress and pressure.

  The community which claimed Putfontein had already received reparation in the form of compensatory land and money when they were previously dispossessed. That is on official record. Yet, the 6 600-odd hectares were bought out for R13 million and given to the Batloung claimants; in other words, they received double compensation, for they also retained the previously given compensatory land.

  Yet only a quarter of the original community came back to Putfontein, which, at the time, had excellent three-phase electricity, irrigation pipes and boreholes. It was a highly successful farm in every way. The owner grew mealies and peanuts, ran an excellent beef herd and a dairy, and had flocks of sheep. Putfontein generated an income of R7 million a year, on which, of course, taxes were paid.

  That was then. Now there is nothing to be seen there except subsistence farming and squatting. Stealing from the local neighbouring farmers has become rife, and the stolen cattle and grain are then sold on by the thieves because they cannot make a living on the farm. There is no electricity, no fencing is left, and what had been an abundant supply of water has dried up because the neglected boreholes have become clogged up, the pipes have been stolen and the pumps were allowed to break down or were sold off.

  After only three years, just six people were living on the 372-hectare farm. Thirteen million rands of taxpayers’ money had gone straight down the drain.

  This is but one example of how redistribution of our precious 12% has gone wrong. It is sheer madness, almost criminal, to take taxpayers’ money to buy out farmers with a lifetime of farming experience, then hand the land over to claimants who allow it to fall into complete unproductive disrepair.

  Eventually it will lead to the total demise of agriculture in our country leaving us in a weakened economic position, with very little or no bargaining power, reliant on imports to feed our ever-increasing, unproductive population. In other words, exactly what happened to the north of us.

  Just when we are going to learn?!

  I shall be giving you examples just like this one throughout the Northern Cape, the Western Cape, the Eastern Cape, the Free State, KwaZulu-Natal and all other provinces. For those who are sufficiently interested, I highly recommend the books Midlands by Johnny Steinberg and The Great South African Land Scandal by Dr Philip Du Toit, for this is now the other side of the coin to the first part of my series ‘The Land is Mine’.

  The Griquas

  Earlier, the story is told of how, right from Day One, the Western/African interface was fraught with mistrust and duplicity, starting with a Goringhaicona chief named Khora in what much later became Cape Town’s Salt River suburb, who came to a sticky end by being hanged on Woodstock Beach for refusing to supply a Dutch ship, and whose descendants then fled up the West Coast and eventually became the Korana tribe (‘Korana’ meaning ‘followers of Khora’).

  The Cape of Good Hope started turning into a melting pot of races and cultures almost from the time the Dutch East India Company’s replenishment outpost was established there in 1652, with people of all walks of life and from all shores distant and foreign intermingling with the local population – the Khoina or Khoi, or whatever name you fancy among the half a dozen or so the experts have coined, and the very first inhabitants, the hunter-gatherer !Kung, Abiqua, Bushmen or the latest inaccurate fashionable name, ‘San’.

  The newcomers included Dutchmen, Englishmen, Irishmen, Germans (a great many of these), Frenchmen (a small number, but they certainly did wonders with the hitherto lousy wine), Flemings, Swedes, Portuguese, slaves (and often free artisans and the like) from Malabar, India (a great number of them, mainly from Bengal), Indonesia (not Malaya, actually), Mauritius, at least one small batch of Chinese, and a trickle from various African areas such as Guinea, Moçambique and Madagascar, if this last is actually part of Africa).

  The local Khoina, incidentally, were never enslaved – the ‘Honourable Company’, as it liked to call itself, wanted them as trading partners to acquire beef for the ships, and in any case never did any slaving itself.

  The Company was famously stingy but never very colour-conscious, although it did not approve of Christians marrying heathens or freemen marrying slaves, but the skin colour of Christians marrying Christians does not seem to have been a problem, and many a Company servant found himself a comely wife in the shape of a manumitted female slave (which gives us an intriguing subject for speculation about what the modern designation ‘white’ actually describes).

  It is interesting to note, for example, that the renowned Governor Simon van der Stel was actually what we moderns would call a coloured man. The reason why he was governor for such a long time was not because he was in exile here but because, like many another, he thought the Cape was a great place to live. By the early 18th century the term ‘Africaander’ was coming into use, generally denoting a free Capetonian who had been born in Africa, no more and no less.

  Two rather neglected groups were people in the outlying areas born of liaisons (without benefit of clergy) between whites and Khoina, or slaves and Khoina, who were known as Bastaard-Hottentotten. Several groups of Bastaard-Hottentotten ended up trekking to the eastern and northern frontiers in search of better prospects.

  The most prominent of these were the folk later called the Griqua who were originally led northwards to Namaqualand and then eastwards by a remarkable man named Adam Kok. They were, in fact, the first frontier pioneers, and what is interesting about them is that for practical purposes they were Boers – they spoke the same language, had the same sort of names, attended the same church, wore the same clothing and organised themselves into the same mobile, sharp-shooting armed and mounted commandos when the occasion required it.

  As regards their behaviour,
too, the Griquas were much like the ‘white’ frontiersmen – some were upright people in search of a new life who fought only when it was necessary while others were outright freebooters who did not hesitate to commandeer water sources and occupy new territory by force of arms.

  This brings us to an interesting point: the blatantly false myth that has been put out for various political reasons that all the strife in our long and often bloody history was the result of whites invading black ancestral land.

  Even a cursory glance at our history proves that internecine tribal warfare was common all over Africa, including the south, for thousands of years, and it always had the same causes: territorial expansion, elimination of hostile groups and, of course, helping yourself to someone else’s cattle.

  The post-1652 history of South Africa was just another phase of this endless struggle, and everyone’s hands were dirty. The Xhosas, for example, started pushing over the Fish River and displacing the resident Khoina at just about the time Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape, and Shaka formed the Zulu nation by literally wiping out a number of tribes and opposing Nguni clans (some sources say more than 30 altogether). This is not speculation or bias – almost on a regular basis archaeologists dig up gravesites which provide indisputable evidence of violent deaths.

  But back to the Griquas, then still called the Bastaard-Hottentotten. Adam Kok led them northwards, incorporated some of the local Khoina clans like the Grigriqua (hence the eventual name of his people) and established them in the outermost reaches of Namaqualand and the Koue Bokkeveld region, beyond the Company’s area of influence (although, paradoxically, the administration recognised him as a clan chief and even gave him a staff of office).

  Kok’s people spent about half a century in Namaqualand and its environs, leading a semi-nomadic existence which sometimes degenerated into outright freebooting by some. Then they packed up again and trekked eastwards around the turn of the 18th century and founded a new capital at Klaarwater, the later Griquatown or Griekwastad.

  But after only a short time various disputes arose about the succession to the Griqua captaincy (the Griqua chiefs traditionally carried the title of ‘Kaptein’), not to mention a number of local tribal fights and squabbles. The result was that a large faction led by Adam Kok’s son, Adam Kok II, trekked away to the east, into what is now the Free State Province. In 1826 they ended up at Philippolis, a mission founded in 1822 by Dr John Philip of the London Missionary Society to see to the welfare of the Bushmen in that area. For Philip it was a disaster.

  This was a turbulent place and time in which to live. There were many rival Tswana clans in and around the area north of Kuruman and, as I have said, several groups of outlaws among the Griqua ‘inkommers’ (incomers) to coin a phrase which is still used in that part of the world.

  Fortunately for all concerned, the notorious bandit-chief Jager Afrikaner, who was not a Griqua, had stayed ensconced along the Orange River from where he conducted his personal reign of terror. But the newcomers included unsavoury characters like Jan Bloem and Klaas Barends, all of whom had a great predilection for stealing cattle, particularly Tswana cattle, and regarded Bushmen as their natural prey.

  To get a bit of international perspective on this part of our history, this was only about 50 years after the time of the famous Highlander border reiver (cattle rustler, in other words) Rob Roy McGregor, and there are various interesting similarities when one compares the Scottish border raiders with their even older equivalents in South Africa.

  In any case, Dr Philip had naïvely believed that the Griquas would protect the mission from the Tswana clans only to find that instead they set about harassing and attacking the Bushmen. There were various reasons for this hostility. One was that they wanted the land and local water sources for themselves. Another was that the Bushmen did not distinguish between free-running game and domestic animals when it came to killing and eating them – this, by the way, was a centuries-old dispute and was the reason why the hunter-gatherers at the Cape had been harried by the Khoina long before the whites arrived in 1652.

  The Griquas commandeered the local springs – the very staff of life in that dry area – but the Bushmen quite naturally refused to be evicted, so the Griquas formed a commando and went to war. Part of the commando attacked the male Bushmen and drove them into the hills south of Philippolis. The rest rounded up all the Bushmen women and children they could lay their hands on, stoked up a huge fire and tossed their captives into the flames.

  A ghastly atrocity, to be sure … but let us not forget the beam in the eye of theoretically more ‘civilised’ Europeans of that general era. For example, we should not forget that when the Pope’s adherents got hold of the last of the Cathar heretics at Monseigneur in southern France a few hundred years earlier, they burnt 250 of them at the stake (the place where this happened is still known as Frais de Crémat (the field of cremation).

  But back to our story. The women and children having been reduced to ashes, the two halves of the commando joined hands again, telling the surviving Bushmen that their wives and children had been burnt to death, and that they intended to lay siege the area which meant starvation and death from thirst. But if the Bushmen agreed to leave the area and never come back nearer than 100 miles, they would be given safe passage to leave.

  The survivors had no option but to flee, never to return, mourning the deaths of their families and the loss of the land they had occupied for countless centuries. Dr Philip was so totally disgusted that he also packed up and left, and when he got back to Cape Town he complained bitterly to the government. Later, this was one of the pretexts the Crown used to annex the entire future Free State and kick the Griquas out! But that’s another story.

  Philippolis exists to this day, a quiet little place in which such an atrocity would seem unthinkable, but a couple of local place names remain to remind us of that terrible time. One of these is Huilberg (the ‘mountain of tears’) where the women and children were burnt to death; and among the hills where the surviving menfolk took refuge is Versoeningsberg (the ‘mountain of reconciliation’) – for such was the Griquas’ arrogance.

  This is merely one example of the type of deeds perpetrated by men of colour on one another – Khoina and Griquas on Bushman, QuenuQuebe on Gcaleka; Bhaca against Mfengu; Zulu against Hlubi – the lamentable list goes on and on. I don’t suppose that any South African except one who has just stepped off the plane from Europe can clasp his hand to his heart and start pointing fingers at his countrymen about the horrors their ancestors committed in the past.

  The logical thing to do, therefore, is to say: ‘That was then and this is now – let’s all get a life.’ All things considered, it is amazing that among ordinary people there is so little real ill-will about the bad deeds of the past. And that’s the way it should be.

  The Geysdorp Area

  Some time ago, when I first started looking at the land question in South Africa, my wife and I went up to visit an elderly couple who were very dear to us, Izak and Anna Barnard of the farm Vlakplaas, just outside Delareyville in the North West Province.

  The surrounding area has a specific niche in our frontier history – in the 19th century its freebooter founders called it the Republic of Stellaland, but before long Colonel Sir Charles Warren and his soldiers had chased the freebooters away and annexed both Stellaland and its fellow freebooter republic of Goshen.

  Izak was a bit of living history himself as the only surviving son of Cecil ‘Bvenkenya’ Barnard, the very famous ivory hunter whom TV Bulpin immortalised in a classic bushveld book called The Ivory Trail first published in 1954.

  The Barnards were on the farm long before our visits there, though, in the days when migrant labourers used to catch the train in Nyasaland (now Malawi), then set off on a long journey which took them down through the then Rhodesia, over the border into the Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana) north of Fr
ancistown.

  Then the train would head southwards to Mafeking (now Mafikeng), and at a siding called Madibogo the migrants would get out and start walking towards the newly discovered gold deposits in the Stilfontein–Klerksdorp–Orkney area, or Alanridge, Odendaalsrust, Welkom, Virginia and so on in the Orange Free State.

  Arduous through the trip was, the labourers were usually in high spirits. They had enough to eat and knew they would be able to get work and earn money to remit back to their families. So although they were homesick already, they used to sing as they trudged along that long, dusty road, weighed down by the belongings on their backs.

  By long-standing custom Vlakplaas was the first night’s stop-over for the migrants and they were always made very welcome. The farm’s workers would run to Bvenkenya to tell him that the singing men were coming. Then everyone, children included, would be roped in to prepare for their arrival which consisted mainly of cooking a gargantuan meal. Massive iron cooking pots would be brought out and cleaned, and mealies and pumpkins fetched from the storerooms to turn into a rib-sticking stew.

  With their bellies full, the migrants would bed down for the night in Vlakplaas’s large barn. Before dawn next morning their indunas would come to thank the Barnard family for the hospitality so freely given, and then the migrants would raise their right hands in salutation, sing a song of farewell and set off again towards Delareyville on the next stage of their journey to the goldfields.

  I have stood on that very road, dimmed my eyes and ears, and pictured the arrival and departure of those good men, for good men they were. In all that time the Barnards never had anything stolen, there was never a word of anger and certainly no one was ever accosted. It was a time of personal honour and goodwill in spite of all the inequalities, when good men reached out to other good men … which, I’m afraid, is something that has virtually disappeared in our country.