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Abstract
This article deals with the practice of work on farms in the Sundays River Valley, a farming district located near the city of Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. Situated on a historical frontier zone where land has been claimed by multiple generations of both farmers and farm workers, I analyse the incidence of paternalism and payment in kind on one particular farm in the district, with particular reference to ostrich work. I point out that paternalism has meaning beyond that of subservience and enslavement, and that working relationships among masters and servants have produced a very rural and conservative ‘Red’ identity among workers, based on historical claims to land and a working knowledge of farming techniques. The article argues that this type of ‘frontier paternalism’ produces ways in which workers can resist working practices on farms, particularly through sustaining ties with kin and maintaining memories of past tenure on farms in the district. Overall, the article argues that the relative recency of tenure relationships in the Sundays River Valley re-orientates the analysis of farm labour beyond subservience, and centralises workers as people with a vested history, culture and identity. These idioms of place provide recourse to even the most temporary and unstable forms of work in the district, since it is within the experience of disruption that the greatest level of resistance is eventually experienced.
Note on Contributor
Teresa Connor is a Senior Researcher at FHISER in East London and has completed research dealing with borders and border communities in the Transfrontier Limpopo Park in Mozambique. Her focus on the Eastern Cape has dealt with farm workers in around the Addo Elephant National Park, where she has looked at how conservation and ecology have influenced the livelihoods and histories of local residents. Her current interests are mainly frontier historiographies in the Eastern Cape, border communities and continental experiences of borders and frontiers.
Notes
1. The historical Zuurveld (literally, sourveld) encompassed the former district of Albany, with the Sundays River Valley along its far western side, and was considered one of the first frontiers in southern Africa, where contact between indigenes and colonists initially took place.
2. This event was motivated by the visions of the prophetess Nongqawuse, who urged people to stop cultivating and kill their cattle in order to guarantee the coming of a ‘new people’ that would proclaim victory over the Europeans. The Gqunukhwhbe in the Zuurveld slaughtered almost 100 per cent of their cattle (Mostert Citation1992:1183), creating a mass refugee movement out of affected areas in the Eastern Cape to unaffected areas like the Sundays River Valley.
3. Darlington Dam, October 2003.
4. Afrikaans surnames (such as April and Grootboom) are common even among Xhosa-speaking workers, and the hybridity of the Gqunukhwebe Xhosa is still evident in the mixed racial make-up of many workers, even those who classify themselves as ‘Xhosa’ or ‘coloured’.
5. Literally, the term bywoner means to ‘live next to’, or ‘close to’.
6. This is particularly evident on the farm Korhaansdrif, where land claim records indicate two competing claims made by the white (Holthauzen) and black tenants (Mapela) of the same property.
7. A total of 18 land claims were registered by claimants for land in the Sundays River Valley in 1995. A group of new claimants, who mainly reside in Uitenhage and Kirkwood, have made renewed calls for retribution and access to lost land through a Port Elizabeth-based organisation, Khanyisa Education and Development Trust.
8. See <http://www.mywage.co.za/main/salary/minimum-wages/farm-worker-wages> (accessed 5 October 2012).
9. The word lokamp is used by people in Kirkwood specifically to refer to those workers who live on properties that have been divided into grazing camps.
10. Alec Mbosini, Darlington Dam, February 2002.
11. Bitterwater is a pseudonym, but the original names of workers have been retained for the sake of authenticity and in order to avoid ‘writing people out of their own histories’.
12. Bitterwater farm, January 2004.
13. This was the going rate in 2003, and increased to around R15 per chick in 2011.
14. All information from Alfred April was obtained at his homestead near the town of Kirkwood during November 2001 and April 2003.
15. The ‘coloured’ labour preference policy was intended as a labour control measure by the apartheid state, designed to exclude blacks from non-Bantustan areas. It was implemented west of a line near Knysna, to Hopetown in the north, but was not applied to the Sundays River Valley, although there is evidence that many farmers did prefer to employ a coloured labour force in the 1960s.
16. Lizzie Pieters, nee Baipeli, Bitterwater farm, December 2003.
17. Spot Hektor, Grayston, October 2003.