INLSA
A farm worker’s boots. Many farm workers in South Africa have spent their entire lives working on farms with little to show for it.
Never allowed to go to school, forced to wake up at dawn and to brave cold weather to work in the c fields, Nomusa Mchunu was only eight when she began life as a farm labourer on the Granham farm outside Greytown in the Midlands.
Now she is 41 and has been fired.
Mchunu weeps as she says she has nothing to show for the more than 30 years she has worked.
“I worked on this farm my entire life and I have nothing,” she says bitterly.
For many years she was paid in mealie meal and given the right to live on the farm – without electricity or easy access to water.
In 2001, Mchunu and other farmworkers submitted a land claim for the 4 700-hectare farm.
However, the claim was not finalised. The Association for Rural Advancement (Afra) is now preparing to take the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform to the Land Claims Court to compel it to finalise the matter.
After the claim was submitted, the farmworkers’ employer sold the farm and the land now belongs to Maletsatsi Nomalanga Mosala, a businesswoman from Joburg.
Mchunu’s father, Mfanakazi Mchunu, is 84 and blind. He started working on the farm when he was a little boy.
“This is our land. My father worked on this land without payment. I worked on this land without payment. My children, too, were not paid. It would be fair for the department to give us the land that we lived on and worked hard for,” says the old man.
The farm community’s former lawyer, Thabiso Mbense, said the claim was delayed when the Land Affairs Department failed to inform the first and second owners about it.
“We had to take the matter to the Land Claims Court to compel the department to serve notice of the claim on the owner,” said Mbense. “The court ruled in favour of the tenants, who are the labourers.”
Mbense said the new owner, Mosala, was opposing the claim.
Mosala said she had allocated land to the claimants, which was outside the land they were claiming. But the farmworkers say this land is occupied by other families.
“I will not allow those people to build a school on my land until they recognise that I am the landowner,” Mosala said.
