INLSA
Max Du Preez
There are few winners coming out of the violent chaos that was the farmworkers’ strike in the Western Cape.
Some workers will get a better deal once the drama is over, but many more will lose their jobs.
And yet the uprising by those who do mostly manual labour on farms was inevitable. It was simply 300 years of history catching up with us. Besides, the agriculture industry needed a loud wake-up call.
The commercial farmers are a lot worse off after the strikes and protest action. Their already poor image in the eyes of most citizens got a further dent; many have suffered huge losses through lost production and damage to equipment, harvests and infrastructure; and they face massive increases in labour costs at a time when agriculture faces its biggest challenges.
Most of the politicians who involved themselves with the revolt have covered themselves in shame. ANC politicians like Marius Fransman and Tony Ehrenreich clearly saw a golden opportunity to capitalise on the anger and advance the ANC’s cause of making the DA-run province ungovernable. They didn’t utter a word that it was their party’s government that had set the minimum wage and neglected to send labour inspectors to monitor farms.
The DA floundered pathetically as it tried to balance the interests of two sections of their main constituency in the province, white and coloured people.
The national government stood exposed as uncaring, ineffective, |opportunistic and guilty of dereliction of duty.
The events brought out the worst in most of us South Africans. Most of us simply took sides based on our own class, race and ethnic interests and our ideological persuasions |and prejudices.
I witnessed some of the drama in the Boland and Swartland last week and I monitored public reaction in the social media, on radio, television and in the newspapers.
I found few heroes and even less a proper understanding of the real issues involved.
As I looked into the eyes of angry workers and traumatised farmers, it dawned on me how much of what I was witnessing had its roots in our bitter history.
The permanent workers on farms in the Western Cape are mostly descendants of the Khoisan and the slaves that were brought to the Cape for more than a century after the arrival of white settlers.
The slaves were first employed on the farms and many farmers lived in constant fear that the slaves would kill them in their beds, poison them or burn down their crops.
The Khoisan, the original people of the subcontinent, lived in peace and freedom in these parts for millennia, but were subjugated quickly after European settlement.
They lost their land, their languages and most of their culture; were almost wiped out by smallpox and flu epidemics brought to Africa by the new arrivals; and ended up as workers on white people’s farms where many were simply paid with cheap wine every day, called the dop system, leading to massive problems with alcoholism.
The dop system doesn’t exist any more and conditions have improved substantially, but the hangovers of history linger on. Most of these farmworkers have no hope of ever improving their lives substantially and face the real possibility that their children will follow in their parents’ footsteps.
My ancestors, especially my French Huguenot ancestors, escaped their dire circumstances in Europe and brought with them skills and knowledge of wine, fruit, cereal and livestock farming.
They helped establish commercial agriculture as the new economy of the southern tip of Africa and came to see themselves as Africans, but without ever properly understanding what they had done to the indigenous people.
Not even the advent of democracy forced them to rethink the |dynamics on their farms.
It was abundantly clear to me that most of the militant strikers last week were recent arrivals from the Eastern Cape or are citizens of neighbouring countries. They are even more vulnerable, because most of them are temporary or “seasonal” workers – and probably more than half are women.
These people’s ancestors were successful farmers for many generations, but here they are selling their labour for a pittance and living |tenuous lives, often far from their families.
I looked at the Xhosa-speaking women being transported in trucks and trains and thought: these |dignified women should be working their own land, as they very well know how to do, and be with their children.
But the reality is that the Eastern Cape, where their roots are, has become a place to escape from and thousands keep on flocking to the Western Cape every month.
Politicians will continue to mess up this crisis.
Organised agriculture will have to wake up from its long and comfortable sleep and come up with innovative and bold proposals to fundamentally change the dynamics of labour on farms, or we will all suffer.
