For the Love of the Land: Being a farmer in South Africa today

1.

Memories of my late father

Pieter Prinsloo, Queenstown, Eastern Cape

IVOR PRICE

For many years, my father felt like a weight on me. I carried him in my spirit, although at times I also wanted to shake him and accuse him. Mostly, though, I wanted to hold him and merge his pain with mine.

It’s his fault that I ended up as a dentist in Kimberley, more than 500 km from our family farms in Queenstown. He refused point-blank to involve me in the farming operations, signalling that I might destroy the Prinsloo legacy in the process.

Looking back, it was the biggest favour ever done to me, although for a long time it felt like I wasn’t quite good enough for him; that I’d had to set aside my dreams of a life on the farm because I’d been weighed on the scales and found wanting.

I did my bit, though. It was during my teenage years in the turbulent 1980s that I first farmed on Pelgrimsrus and Arendskrans, two of our farms on the banks of the Black Kei River. Without fail, my job was to pick up the workers in my bakkie just after sunrise on Saturday mornings to gather the cattle. I was a child when my father first taught me to count the cattle one by one. To check their behaviour, because it often signalled their health status.

I wasn’t paid for it, of course. It was part of my birthright. I was born to follow in my father’s footsteps, until one day when I damaged my bakkie’s chassis on a dirt road. This infuriated my father and wounded me to the point that I decided to no longer serve him, and to move to Kimberley.

At the time, Marietha and I had been married for five years; one morning before dawn we loaded our few belongings onto a cattle truck and started a new life in the Northern Cape with our children, Koot and Helené. I borrowed money to start a dental practice there.

I was now a full-time dentist, but I guess my love for agriculture was the reason I joined a local farmers’ association – a lifesaver that eased our integration into a new community and helped to keep my mind off the lost opportunities in farming.

Eight years later, just as I was getting used to living there, my father summoned me back home to gradually take over the farming operation. I was no longer the 24-year-old warrior who had deserted the Langside family farm in the summer of 1989. You know, I’ve done my bit, sort of. I’ve had my family. I’ve looked after them. I wasn’t doing too badly as a dentist either. But there I was, back on the farm on my father’s instruction.

He never apologised, but I do consider the weekend of my arrival as a reconnection. I no longer felt angry and resentful, and he no longer thought of me as an idiot who would ruin the family farm. It was like the good old days when I had learnt to toil; when I had watched my parents work from dawn to dusk, six days a week.

At my father’s request, we also visited the family graveyard in Hartebeesfontein, the Prinsloo family farm, on the very same weekend. I did not understand it then, but he made me promise that he would not be buried there once he departed this world because we would lose the farm through land expropriation someday.

Two months later, on 7 December 1997, he was dead. The doctor rang me up in Kimberley with the news. I was devastated. My mother inherited everything and, once again, I was left with nothing but disappointment. I obliged, however, when she asked me to return permanently to my beloved Queenstown to farm with her, failing which she would sell everything they’d ever worked for.

*

I was about four years old. Maybe five. We were standing in the yard of the Occupation Post farm and I couldn’t control my excitement. For the first time in a long time our farm was bustling with people. I couldn’t understand why my father was trembling and anxious, though, and mostly mute except for garbled statements.

The farm itself, neatly divided into three portions, was for sale and my father was going to bid to purchase the land. Our land. I was in awe of all the goods that were for sale too – all neatly lined up with strangers bidding for the best price.

My father had a dairy on the banks of the White Kei River. There were huge palm trees in our yard, and some of the visitors were admiring the separator room that was built of stone. This was where the milk was separated to produce rich cream, which in turn became the commodity we produced to make the wholesome butter, which my mother so loved, at the creamery.

My father could only afford to buy one portion at the auction. Years later, it became clear that this moment in 1966 wasn’t a joyous occasion, but a rather painful and life-changing moment in the Prinsloo family’s history. Our farm was being expropriated with compensation by the government for consolidation into the old Transkei region under the jurisdiction of the amaTshatshu clan, one of five clans of the Western Thembuland Kingdom.

The clan had been disrupted by the British colonial government in the early 1900s, and the land reform project was aimed at restoring their land rights. I was too young to fully understand its significance, but I did know that our farm was situated on about 40 000 hectares of the Gwatyu and Bolotwa region.

After our farm was expropriated, we relocated and started anew on a farm much closer to town. On the upside, it was close enough for our Datsun LDV to transport the cream to the creamery, now a mere 12 km away. Also, the farm wasn’t too far away from Southbourne Preparatory School where my older sisters and I were enrolled. We were often late for school because my father insisted on dropping off the cream cans before us. It was in this time that my mother was summoned to school in an effort to get me to stop speaking isiXhosa, which was very much considered a foreign language by the other Afrikaans-speaking white kids.

Towards the end of my school career, my father first said that he saw no future in agriculture. I fulfilled his wishes and studied dentistry at Stellenbosch University. My father didn’t know, but I chose the career because I knew that it would allow me to ranch cattle on a part-time basis.

Coming from a very conservative home, where the Broederbond played a huge role, I was now being exposed to all sorts of experiences, including some of the heated debates about land reform under the apartheid government. I attended the launch of the United Democratic Front in Claremont, unaware that I could have been branded as a rebel by the National Intelligence Service of the Nationalist government. In 1985, during my final year of study, I stuck my neck out by speaking about the need for more black dentists and the oversupply of white dentists. I never told my father about it.

Soon after I returned from the army, Marietha and I got married. It was in this time, in 1996, that my parents suffered another setback. I looked into my father’s eyes and saw something so painful. So different.

Two other farms, Pelgrimsrus and Arendskrantz, were being expropriated – once again under a ‘compassion’ principle as we could no longer farm productively due to the Thornhill community, present in large numbers across the Nciba. This time around, it had to do with the relocation of people from the Herschel area, who did not want to be under the rule of the Transkei Homeland policy of the apartheid government. Back in 1976, only 40 000 people were to be relocated there, but it quickly developed into more than 200 000 people. This resulted in famine and illness, because people were living in tough conditions.

*

Oh, how I miss my carefree days on Occupation Post.

Did I tell you about the time Gofriend, my dog, and I were sitting on a horse-drawn wagon, holding on for dear life as per the instruction of Mahoho, our driver? We were taking cream cans to Oathay Siding to load them onto the goods train to the Bowker’s Park Creamery, 56 km away. I had always begged to go along, and at last my father had given me permission.

And then there was the time I was driving with my father in his old Datsun 1200 LDV going to Gombinja, the pump station at the weir in the Nciba, as we used to call the White Kei. I knew that this was where the water was pumped to flood our many lucerne pastures. We relied on it to feed our dairy cows and to support my father’s other business venture, bartering lucerne bales and dairy heifers for oxen. They were fattened and finished off to be loaded onto the train for selling to butchers at the huge Queenstown sale from time to time.

Oh, wait … going through the river at the crossing by the weir was a bumpy ride to reach the pastures on the island made by the delta that the Nciba formed. One day I wasn’t holding on tightly enough and hit my head on the Datsun’s choke lever, splitting my forehead. My father’s white handkerchief was soon bloodstained as he tried to stop the bleeding. Of course, I was scolded for not holding on.

The ‘cattle trek’ to the auction yard was another highlight of my childhood days, as I was taken out of school to participate. It happened over two days, covering the 60-odd kilometres to the auction site. What an adventure!

The last batch of slaughter oxen was driven into Queenstown not too long after my father’s passing and loaded onto the goods train at a substation in the industrial area. They had been bought by an East London slaughterhouse, and were transported to East London by train. That completed the legacy of my late father’s practice of oxen production.

*

Ironically, more than two decades later, we are farming with oxen again – only now we buy and store oxen, collaborating with fellow oxen producers to market our beef directly to consumers through a network of like-minded butchers and retailers.

Often, when I look at our veld-reared animals, I miss my father. He was a hard man, and in many ways the perfect farmer. Perhaps, if he were still alive, he would be proud of how my son, Koot, and I have transformed the original dairy building into a state-of-the-art meat deboning plant where our beef is processed and aged for the niche markets we supply.

Despite our land having been expropriated twice in our lifetime, the Prinsloos are still farming in Queenstown five generations later, with the next two generations already on the ground. We have survived and we have flourished, and our relationship with the local Xhosa people is better than ever before. This is our land. This is their land, too.

Historically, our first family farms date back to just after the 1914 rebellion when the Prinsloos relocated from the Cookhouse and Somerset East areas. The colonial government of the day granted the ‘border farms’ to white farmers, such as my predecessors, to form a buffer between the Ciskei and Transkei regions of the Xhosa nations. At the time, the border between the Cape Colony and Xhosa land was moved from the Fish River to the Kei River. My great-great-grandfather, Willem Frederick Prinsloo, was relocated with some of his brothers to inhabit these border farms. They were prepared to do so as they never wanted to move north with the Great Trek and had good relationships with the Xhosa people.

Unlike my father, I embraced the chance to involve my son, Koot, in our farming operation. I am proud of how we have integrated the value chain to beef consumers, but the real pleasure lies in the Prinsloo legacy being carried forward. Our daughter, Helené, loves the platteland too, although she works in the publishing industry, far away in the city.

Our first grandson, my namesake, is much like me. He too loves being around the cattle and speaks isiXhosa. Our second grandson, Dirk, was born recently. I hope that he too will speak the language of this region so that he can better understand our commitment to this land, and be willing to farm alongside his neighbour, whoever that may be.

2.

The accidental farmer

Wadea Jappie, Schaapkraal, Western Cape

    RICARDO ARENDSE

Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem.

In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.

If you require me to be frank, I will tell you this. I am a Muslim, a woman, a mother and a wife, but between all of these earthly labels I am a farmer, too, whether by accident or fate. Inshallah. If God wills.

It is not a big deal, this whole Muslim-woman-farmer-thing. I mean, when has something ever been big when it comes to women? We have proven ourselves repeatedly throughout the course of history; or has history forgotten about Jeanne Baret, the French botanist and explorer, or Harriet Tubman, the Moses of the African Americans’ fight for freedom? Malala Yousafzai is the youngest Nobel Prize winner. She was just 19 at the time and a symbol of hope to millions of girls across the globe. Here in South Africa, Muslim women have just recently won the same legal rights as those enjoyed by other married women across the country.

Is it easy being a woman and achieving such heights? Of course not, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be done.

After school, I wanted to study law. Thanks be to Allah, I never followed that path.

My father was a businessman who, from when I was young, put me through my paces. He was bold and moved fast between industries that were as different as night and day, and I had to be as bold and as fast – leaping from the transport industry into fisheries and then opening a bakery. While other kids spent their holidays frolicking around on the warmer beaches of the Strand and Somerset West in the Western Cape, I spent my time counting pennies and learning the ways of big business. Hey, what can I say? I was the daughter of an ambitious man and was later to be wedded to an equally ambitious and handsome man, my husband, Achmat Brinkhuis. Mashallah. As God has willed it.

I was 21 when Achmat popped the question. We hadn’t been courting for that long, but we both knew it was what we wanted. People say that some women marry the guy who most resembles their father. I don’t know about that. All I know is that, like me, Achmat is a devout Muslim who grew up in a middle-class family in the Strand. He is a self-made man who has tasted both the bitter and sweet of life, and for the most part I was right there by his side.

This was most certainly the case when Achmat handed over his building contractor’s business to me in 1994 so that he could serve as a ward councillor for the former National Party. It was a glorious time and we revelled in the fact that we could be in the thick of things: part of the new dawn and witnesses and contributors to Madiba’s rainbow nation.

If 1994 could be condensed into one day in a week, I would say that the most befitting day would be a Saturday. From the Monday to the Friday, which in this case would represent pre-1994, people navigated hard terrain to