Vol. 22 No. 11 · 1 June 2000
pages 6-7 | 3826 words
A Dangerous Occupation
R.W. Johnson reports from two commercial farms in Southern Africa
Getting to Dave Lewis’s farm was not easy, even though I had instructions.[*] Travelling any distance out of Harare is fairly tense stuff because you can never be sure you’ll have enough fuel to get back (I freewheeled on all the downhill stretches, keeping a careful eye on the engine revs) – not to mention what’s been happening on Mashonaland farms these last three months. After you get to Norton, you make several fancy turns and then find yourself on a long stretch of dirt road overgrown with trees and with ruts so deep you really need a 4x4. On my humble Mazda 323 the oil sump and exhaust were very vulnerable, so I drove on the verges and hoped. I saw two African women on their way to church – an independent Zionist sect, inevitably – and gave them a lift. Even without knowing Shona, I thought I’d get directions to Dave’s farm out of them. This was indeed a cinch and in no time I was rolling into a beautiful farm with spreading lawns and large thatched buildings in perfectly maintained gardens.
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[*] The names of the two farmers and their families mentioned in this piece have been changed.
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Letters
Vol. 22 No. 12 · 22 June 2000
From David Potter
From 1954 to 1972, I worked intermittently on Natal farms which were propped up by fixed prices and subsidies. They employed large numbers of men and produced food. Mechanisation swept away the men; the free market has swept away the food. Natal farms have been turned over to forestry, craft holidays, pony-trekking, race-horses, even, as R.W. Johnson (LRB, 1 June) reports from Zimbabwe, flowers. All over the world the free market ruins commercial food production on marginal land.
The men who worked on the farms are back, or rather, a new generation is back, armed with the AKs which are the dragon's teeth sown by apartheid in its last-gasp adventures. It is their firepower which will decide who owns what in Natal. The ANC Government is impotent, the police – after heavy casualties – have lost their appetite for war, and white farmers cannot sustain the costs of fortification and patrol.
An African chief is required to protect his people. A white farmer who sacks his employees has failed in his responsibilities. Those duties have been assumed by warlords who run cattle for status, sell cannabis for cash and organise subsistence farming.
David Potter
Bunwell, Norfolk
Vol. 22 No. 13 · 6 July 2000
From Lewis Nkosi
After thirty years of exile I returned to South Africa in 1991 to participate in a literary conference in Johannesburg. I took the opportunity to revisit the Natal village where I went to school. It is part of what is called the Valley of a Thousand Hills. I was astonished by the extent of the overpopulation and land hunger. Some households were scratching a miserable living on plots of ground the size of a London back garden clinging on the hillsides. On a small plateau above the hills, acres and acres of land belonging to a white farmer were lying fallow. Some of it used to be planted out with wattle trees: forty years ago we collected firewood here, illegally – I suppose this was an incipient 'land war'. In South Africa, as in South America, any social change worth the name, to say nothing of elementary justice, requires genuine redistribution of land. R.W. Johnson (LRB, 1 June) is inclined to think a 'concentration of ownership' by less than 1 per cent of the population is better for all those land-starved peasants. With counsels like these, land wars will continue to engulf East and Southern Africa. Mugabe is only a red herring.
Rereading Nadine Gordimer, I found a passage in The Conservationist in which a white woman admonishes Mehring, the business tycoon and landowner. 'That four hundred acres isn't going to be handed down to your kids, and your children's children,' she says sardonically. 'That bit of paper you bought yourself from the deeds office isn't going to be valid for as long as another generation. It'll be worth about as much as those our grandfathers gave the blacks when they took the land from them. The blacks will tear up your bit of paper. No one will remember where you're buried.' Gordimer's novel was published in 1974.
Lewis Nkosi
Basel, Switzerland
