Читать книгу Promised Land - Karl Kemp - Страница 7

IN THE KLEIN KAROO there is a valley that curves around the rust-coloured rock of the Anysberg. My family bought land there in 1996 from an old boer called Saaiman.

My father was a young lawyer then, having left Pretoria for the Western Cape not long before, and couldn’t afford much more than the land; there was no house on the property, just a dilapidated foundation with two rooms and a kitchen covered by a basic ceiling. It was a ruin that could once have belonged to anyone.

The land on which my father wished to sculpt rows of olive trees – a childhood dream of his – lay to the west of the homestead, arid, jagged with crags and covered in bush. We spent the better part of the first year rebuilding the house, living sparsely and in marked contrast to our actual home in the northern suburbs of Cape Town. At night, I counted the cracks in the walls to fall asleep.

We were perpetual outsiders in the valley for the first few years: urban Afrikaners who played at farming twice a month on weekends, so long disconnected from their roots that it seemed almost an insult for them to return now. I was oblivious. I ran around the perimeters tracking scorpions and stabbing aloe plants with my pocket knife.

On a scorching day some months after my father bought the land, I followed a path to the only other white-owned house in the immediate vicinity between us and the Saaimans. It belonged to a man called Hennie, and he had no land, just the house, and one sow chained inside a small cage in the front yard. My parents found me there, digging through a pile of cracked tiles, rusted metal and afval, and rushed me back to the house. I didn’t see Hennie, but the front door had been open.

Hennie slept with the volk, said my parents, meaning the community of labourers who lived on the land. He’s not as fortunate as us, my mother told me. He’s a gemors, said my father. Over the next decade, more of Hennie’s story was revealed – the alcoholism, the estrangement from his family, the failed farm – but even then it made sense to me only on a very basic level.

Often, the Saaimans showed up unannounced at our house for dinner. Sometimes we watched rugby at theirs, and then boers from neighbouring farms would join us. Hennie never did. This was years later and we’d settled into the community, and by then I was driving the bakkie around for my dad, and whenever I drove past Hennie’s house I’d see him sitting outside on a fold-out chair doing nothing. I started noticing the untended cuts on his body; the piggish red eyes of an alcoholic; the dirty, overgrown nails on his gesturing hand. At some point, a burnt-out wreck of a car appeared next to his property. Then coloured people started hanging around the house, some of them of the volk, some not. A lot of the time they were young women. A few times they asked my parents for money. My younger sister was told not to walk past there alone. I was asked to be careful. Soon these people disappeared. My father told me that Hennie had been asked to clean up his act, and tried, but that this mostly comprised moving his guests inside and shuttering himself to the outside world.

I didn’t know all the people I saw outside Hennie’s house that year. But I knew the volk. I especially liked Klein Andre, the eldest son of the foreman. Andre was a teenager when I was a child. When I was sixteen, he shared roll-ups with me when we were in the field and my cigarettes were not. At that point, the volk were the only coloured people I had spoken to in my whole life for longer than a few minutes.

My father paid for Andre to take a year of agricultural college in the Western Cape, even though his mother, who cleaned the by now pristine homestead, regularly stole food, booze and cigarettes when she thought we weren’t paying attention, and his father had long ago stopped running the farm properly in my father’s absence.

My father cultivated long rows of olive trees, pouring his earnings into bulldozers and squads of labourers, bending the arid land to his will, bringing to bear on the rock all his frustrations and anger. His victories were intermittent. He brought in sheep and chickens in an attempt to restore a kind of ecosystem to the fields and did things that the Saaimans and the other boere in the area told him would never work. Andre was supposed to be his ally in this crusade, a permanent figure, not a weekend labourer like my father, who drove three and a half hours from the suburbs every time he visited the farm. When Andre returned from college, he stopped calling my father ‘baas’ or ‘oom’ and started calling him by name, apparently at my father’s request. His father, now retired, his mother and his extended family were largely confined to their small house, just up the path from Hennie’s, drinking and watching the DStv my father installed for them.

My father never stopped pouring money into our farm, and never started receiving any revenue in return. But that was never his aim. He was a Pretorian, an attorney, a brash, well-known man of unshakeable integrity and honesty, but he was not a farmer, and he was well aware of it. He had grown up wanting land of his own, but his livelihood was in Cape Town.

Soon after Andre’s stint at college, my father started arriving at the farm to find the olive trees in a worse condition than he’d left them. Weekend after weekend he’d come home and fight with my mother about it. I was a teenager by then and I rarely travelled to the farm unforced, preferring to stay in the city and try to sneak into bars, and so I had no idea what these disputes were actually about.

When you drive people off your property, you strike a balance between distance created and resentment generated. My father had by this point acquired several other rental properties in low-income, largely white areas like lower Bellville, and I was used to hearing about difficult tenants, alcoholics who beat their wives, and bringing in the sheriff to evict violent renters who refused to pay a backlog of rent. But with the farm it was different. When we evicted Andre and his family, my father had long since been driven to breaking point by his inability to properly maintain his childhood dream and by Andre’s drinking and lack of work ethic. It had little to do with money. He went to the farm alone the weekend when it happened, and I instinctively knew not to ask about it.

Eventually, Andre and his family, his parents and cousins and selected hangers-on, settled in with the larger volk settlement that serviced the Saaimans’ land. This worried my father. He hadn’t expected the other volk to take them in. And so we bought another gun, and a few years later, after trying foreman after foreman from further afield, who were unknown to ‘our’ volk and who had no ties to the farm, we automated the irrigation system at astronomical expense and slaughtered all the cattle.

I didn’t see Andre very often after this. Sometimes, during season, Saaiman would rope him in for dosing or herding, and I’d see him in the fields. He’d lost a lot of weight. My father kept up to date with him and his family’s movements, but it wasn’t a frequently discussed topic. He became a bit of a bogeyman, and a number of minor break-ins around the valley were immediately and totally without cause blamed on him and his family. Through the farmers’ grapevine we heard that there were other suspects from further afield.

Then, in 2013, a flash flood ripped through the dry riverbed that crossed our land and decimated Saaiman’s flock, tearing a hole in the road to our house from his. Saaiman told me that his workers picked dead lambs from the thorn trees for days afterwards. I don’t think his business ever recovered, and Saaiman died towards the end of 2017. He’d never made much money, just enough to keep him going. Hennie died before this happened, from cirrhosis or some other unspecified disease. The word ‘AIDS’ was floated around but never confirmed. Hennie’s house was left standing and gradually deteriorated. Apparently, a distant family member inherited the lease but was unwilling to deal with the administration of either renovating or selling. For a while, an old coloured lady lived there alone before disappearing without a trace.

By this time, I’d gone to university and become typically self-righteous. I asked my father why we didn’t let some of the volk move into Hennie’s place in the meantime. He said that it wasn’t our property or our prerogative. I wondered then, for the first time, whether Andre would’ve cared more about the olive groves if they were his olive groves. I thought then that the answer was obvious; nowadays I am not so sure.

The olive trees have since flourished. After two decades of struggle, my father appears to have won the war by scaling down and automating the farm where possible, removing human nature from the equation. It cost him a lot, more than just the massive amounts of money needed to redevelop the land in his vision. In 2017, we settled a long-term negotiation to bring springbok onto the property, after having no livestock or animals for almost ten years. Still, it is a massive hole into which my family pours money that can never be recouped. My father has wanted to sell the land since then, my mother having convinced him to put his earnings into other ventures more suitable to retirement, but I have steadfastly refused, and I am still unsure why. In all likelihood, I will be unable to maintain the place. All around the Anysberg, landowners are turning to other business ventures to stay afloat – guesthouses, game drives, restaurants. Farming isn’t profitable.

Why insist on owning land that offers no financial benefit, which my family is excoriated for owning? Why such pride in what is essentially, at its most basic level, and with no labour or industry involved, nothing but soil?

It was only with the advent of the new land debate, in which the concept of ‘land’ has become blurred, and the renewed push for expropriation without compensation that the moving parts of the Anysberg story started coalescing into a picture in my mind. The toil, the pride, the paranoia and the strange, sometimes poisonous ways in which the various peoples of South Africa share this country – I experienced all of these in relation to the land without knowing what they meant, as I am sure many South Africans have.

The story of land conflict is one that often appears irresolvable. It is a picture that speaks of dire unfairness, of thousands of landless, ‘land-hungry’ people, of farmers being slaughtered like pigs in a sinister plot to drive whites off the land and into the sea, of an entire people robbed of what is the closest approximation of a God-given right – their homes. The players are corrupt officials, racist farmers, desperate foreigners, masses of the huddled and hungry poor, gangsters and vagabonds, frontier brigands, Tswana kings, Boer rebels, historians and politicians, imperialists and socialists. The setting is the land.

It was only in researching and writing this book, for which I spent the majority of 2019 driving up and down the country from farm to township, township to land invasion, from riots to fields of shacks stretching as far as the eye can see, to former homelands, to the country’s borders, that I got some sense of the real story of land conflict in South Africa. I hope that the resulting report can in some small way replicate that for you.

KARL G. KEMP

PRETORIA, JULY 2020