The Ingenuity of Rural Life

R.W. Johnson

  • The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper, 1849-1985 by Charles van Onselen
    James Currey, 668 pp, £14.95, February 1996, ISBN 0 85255 740 X

Kas Maine sharecropped on the marginal farmland of Willem Nieman, a staunch Afrikaner, chairman of the local National Party branch and hater of the English and the Jews. When Kas’s first son was born in 1921, he and his family celebrated in Sotho fashion. Kas then picked his way across the stubbled fields to Nieman’s house to enact his part in one of the seigneurial rituals of the Western Transvaal. Sixty years later, among the thousands of hours he spent recalling his life for Charles van Onselen – Kas was blessed with a memory from which nothing faded – he described how the ritual went:

You are not Logged In

  • If you have already registered login here
  • If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
  • If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
  • If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
  • If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions