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Zimbabwe Haunts SA 21st September 2002 A COURT case begun this week by one of South Africa's most successful white farmers has stoked growing fears among his 40,000 colleagues that South Africa's future could develop along the disastrous lines found in Zimbabwe. Abraham Duvenage, who farms at Benoni, 30 miles east of Johannesburg, went to the Pretoria High Court to seek implementation of a year-old order to evict nearly 50,000 illegal squatters from his land. The removals were meant to be carried out by a Johannesburg sheriff, but he has declined to act, arguing Mr Duvenage must pay him 1.8 million rand (£115,000) to hire a security company to do the work. Mr Duvenage has named the national police commissioner, Jackie Selebi, the local council, President Thabo Mbeki and three of his ANC government ministers as respondents. Agri South Africa, the farmers' umbrella organisation, points to wide and serious political implications in the case, which was postponed until November to allow lawyers time to prepare their arguments. An Agri South Africa spokesman said it comes against the background of Zimbabwe's land invasions and murders of white farmers. Killings of South Africa's farmers are running at more than 15 times the equivalent rate in Zimbabwe but go barely reported and militancy is quickly accelerating among landless blacks. Furthermore, a best-selling book shows that white farmers are being attacked and killed for political reasons, not as part of the worsening crime wave. The mantra in the splendid malls, shops and restaurants in enclaves where whites and the new black élite spend their money is: "What's happening in Zimbabwe can't happen here." But the trend is well under way, said Jonny Steinberg, author of Midlands, a complex story of land appropriation and killings of white farmers in the Midlands area of KwaZulu-Natal province. Landless blacks are flying Zimbabwean flags in support of President Robert Mugabe's policies and the Midlands story is being repeated across South Africa. From January 2001 to April this year more than 1,400 armed attacks on white farms occurred, resulting in nearly 200 deaths of farmers and their families. In the previous five years some 700 white farmers were killed. By comparison, 11 white farmers have been killed in the past 12 months in the more obviously unstable Zimbabwe. Steinberg began investigating the murder of Peter Mitchell, 28, who farmed near the Midlands town of Sarahdale. He was shot dead in his Land Rover with a bullet through his head. His killers have not been brought to book. "In the district's kraals, where few whites had ever wandered, I discovered that three generations had kept alive their inherited memories of 1910," said Steinberg. "That was the year the chieftaincies of the district had large tracts of land confiscated [by the British rulers] in punishment for their participation in the unsuccessful Bambatha Rebellion of 1906. "An old man told me matter-of-factly, 'This land was stolen from us. Ask anyone you meet and he will tell you the same'." Midlands describes how white farmers have been killed, wounded or driven away by Zulu peasants with long memories and resentments of baasskap [servitude to whites]. Mr Mitchell's neighbour, Lourie Steyn, an unsympathetic employer, was forced off his farm by landless peasants. "First, vast stretches of his fence came down during the night," Steinberg said. "Then one grazing field after another was burnt. Hundreds of his prize cattle were stolen and slaughtered. There were death threats. His foreman was shot in the chest while watching TV one night. And then someone crept into Steyn's garden and took a shot at his son" Alarmed by growing farm destabilisation, many groups have urged President Mbeki to speed up greatly his sluggish land reform programme. Among the more surprising of these is the Afrikanerbond, successor to the Broederbond, the secret Afrikaner society that provided the intellectual underpinning of apartheid. The Afrikanerbond has made comprehensive proposals for more equitable distribution of land between blacks and whites. "We want to empower disadvantaged [black] communities to engage in successful agriculture," said Tobie Meyer, the Afrikanerbond's land reform convener, who served in Nelson Mandela's post-1994 transitional government as deputy agriculture minister. "We argue in our paper that a new government strategy needs urgently to be launched to set up commercial partnerships between first-time black farmers and communities and established white commercial producers." Mr Meyer said the Afrikanerbond argues that the new partnerships had to be reinforced by wide-ranging support services. "These would include the transfer of our modern technologies, widespread training facilities, reasonably generous start-up finance, subsidised seeds, fertiliser and chemicals in the early stages and much after-care and in-service training once the new farmers are established." The Afrikanerbond said speedy restitutions are needed of drawn-out land claims, such as those in the Natal Midlands. The Afrikanerbond has also proposed a 1 per cent levy on imports to provide sufficient funds for farm reform, which it says would raise 1.2 billion rand [£80 million] a year. While the former architects of apartheid wait for government decisions, they have begun their own land reform measures. One, near the beautiful town of Paarl deep in the mountains behind Cape Town, involves helping and training 90 former ANC Umkhonto we Sizwe guerrilla fighters - whom the Broederbond once pledged to eliminate - to establish their self-owned commercial farm. "The Umkhonto group leader, Deacon Mathe, is a fine man by any standards, and is now one of my closest friends," Mr Meyer said. Mr Meyer, 63, a farmer, added: "It is one of South Africa's wildest myths that black people can't farm. Given the right help and training, many of them can farm every bit as well as Afrikaners - and often even better." Kobus Visser, spokesman for Agri South Africa, last night told The Scotsman that it had so far proved impossible to distinguish how many farm murders, attacks and land invasions were politically motivated and how many could be attributed to the crime wave. "But it is a much more complex problem than simple crime, Mr Visser said. "Farm squatting and occupations have become big problems. Farmers are complaining to us and we are trying to work something out." Japie Grobler, Agri South Africa's president, was much more blunt: "We cannot simply accept that these attacks are motivated by criminality." Mr Grobler said groups affiliated to Agri South Africa and targeted by land invaders and killers were victims of a concerted endeavour to push white agriculturalists off their land. He said it was a more covert operation than in Zimbabwe. Werner Weber, chairman of Action: Stop Farm Attacks, a member of Agri South Africa, appealed to the government to acknowledge what lies at the root of the deaths. He said: "If this was a matter of mere criminality, why do these perpetrators wait for hours for farmers to return late at night, then torture the man and rape the woman, only then to kill the farmer? "It is time the government admitted that farm attacks are not part of the normal criminal cycle. It is an orchestrated effort to intimidate farmers to share or leave their land." In South Africa's Limpopo province, bordering Zimbabwe, Joyce Lesiba warned that blacks who own only scraps of land might be forced to occupy white farms illegally. Mrs Lesiba, who runs an agricultural training project for Limpopo's rural poor, added: "If the government does not move fast we may see Zimbabwe happening here, even though most of us don't really want to see that happen." At the lake-dotted Lavalle Estate, in an exquisite mountain valley near Paarl in Cape Province, Mr Meyer introduced The Scotsman to black Xhosa and coloured [mixed race] workers who have been helped by the Afrikanerbond to acquire part-ownership of the finest olive farm in South Africa. They have also been given the rights to establish commercial fisheries in estate lakes and take all the profits for themselves. John Scrimgeour, from Skye, manager of the estate, said: "Together, the management and the workers have turned the old autocratic leadership into an inclusive co-operative partnership. We are a community, part-owned by workers who have security of tenure on their farm homes for life. Since they acquired shares, productivity has increased and farm profits have increased. "It's so basic. There's no magic to it. We must transform this country completely. But do we have enough time left? We must do this on a really large scale right across South Africa. Unless we do, we will be in a Zimbabwe situation for sure." The Scotsman (UK) - Fred Bridgland In Johannesburg |
