Ficksrus, Free State June 19th 2011
The 1988 sports comedy film Bull Durham starring Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins put a spotlight on life in the farm teams of American minor league baseball and ultimately became a cult classic. I’m thinking of this while watching some talent labouring in the obscurity of what is a real farm team. It’s Sunday afternoon on a farm in the plattelands of South Africa’s Free State and the workers are facing off against a soccer team from a neighboring property. The pitch is a grassy uneven field and the sidelines are a tractor-ploughed trench and with some rickety old goal posts at either end of the field. Neither team has uniforms and some of the players are in bare feet and ragged clothes. I am among poor people—landless farm workers who live on the property.
These are not the poorest of the poor—unemployment is high in South Africa and it is the jobless who struggle; work is hard to come by. Farm workers have regulated wages and good protections in the new South Africa as well as, in this case, a range of other benefits that include free—or cheap—food from the farm as well as housing and access to land for their own crops and livestock. In effect, de facto land reform and black economic empowerment programmes. For workers in town these are enviable benefits.
But the inescapable fact in rural South Africa is that the owners of these farms, which are highly efficient, provide employment, feed the nation and compete globally in export markets, are white people who live in comparative comfort; in many respects a lifestyle indistinguishable from the commercial farms of North America. Farming is an unforgiving discipline—such people work long and hard to stay ahead and many fail every year. But given South Africa’s unhappy racial and economic legacies there is a stark and inescapable contrast to being on a white farm among black workers: a racial minority owns most farmland.
South Africa desperately needs a good land reform programme. Most farmers and whites in general would agree although land reform has been both slow moving and ineffective and the main constraints are the lack of government capacity rather than resistance.
When I show up at the soccer pitch, not speaking Afrikaans or seSotho, no one really knows what to make of me; I’m a foreign white guy living on the farm—a pretty rare, basically unknown, commodity in these parts. But I’m here to deliver a new soccer ball one of the workers asked me for; I’m also going to help get the team a set of uniforms. Otherwise, I’m happy to sit down and watch the game, left alone apart from curious kids and the occasional person who wants to practice a few words of English.
Of the latter is one man known to be a difficult customer. Already today he’s asked me for new shoes, bandages, fuel and a ride to town, 25km away. I’m more intrigued than taken aback by this apparent entitlement which gives voice to a widespread if mostly unspoken sentiment—that white people have a lot more and should share more of it.
Among whites there is the occasionally voiced frustration that they are already giving a lot: exceeding legal wage requirements, caring for their workers health and personal problems, providing loans, paying children’s school fees, giving business advice. In effect they are running their own black economic empowerment programmes and don’t know where it should, or will, end and despair about what is an open ended dependency relationship, underlaid by the sense that whatever they do is an entitlement required for historical redress. That, certainly, is a message that shapes much social and political discourse in this country, whether coming from the government and its policies or work place and social relations.
On top of this is the sense that things in general are deteriorating, that they themselves are tolerated but resented, under threat physically—farm murders and crime in general are part of the spoken and unspoken anxiety of farm life for rural whites—and even at risk of losing their land and livelihoods. Radical voices in the ruling party have begun calling for white farms to be expropriated without compensation and refer to whites in de-humanising terms. The political rhetoric of grievance falls on fertile ground in South Africa; this is a country that has experienced horrendous racial and social injustices which are both fresh and real, have left lasting psychological scars. The sense of unfinished business is inescapable.
After two months on this farm and in this community the quality of race relations seems functional and positive—people get along. But more is going on beneath the surface; there is grievance. The worker who has introduced himself today by demanding a laundry list of things from me is one example and is someone known to play the race card when a dispute arises. This is not particularly worrisome; a new found assertiveness from a people subjected to historical injustice is hardly surprising or even undesirable. And, anyway, it can be easily dismissed when coming from someone like this who is an easy to spot pain in the ass—the barracks room lawyer or malcontent you can find stirring trouble in the work place anywhere in the world. But in today’s South Africa that can lead in far more dangerous directions when given free rein. Social tension and work place violence is common and political rhetoric about historical retribution helps sustain the antagonism.
Even on these local farms the work environment is more politicized than almost any other country. The farm labourer who uses rhetoric that could be drawn from the texts of Frantz Fanon—the late 50s Marxist radical and chronicler of the mental psychology of decolonialisation—is someone acting out a narrative heard elsewhere. Such rhetoric does not emerge from thin air—it is the lifeblood of this country’s political and social discourse. Consider this exercise, drawn from a government text book on labour relations that one of my own workers renovating my house is studying:
“The history of race, labour and economic relations in South Africa can be regarded in individual and collectivist terms, discuss”.
Apart from being doctrinaire collectivist claptrap this is a narrative of injustice nurtured and kept alive. For the ruling party whose historical purpose and political legitimacy is so closely associated with racial injustice there is every incentive to play to and sustain such sentiment and, in fact, as its own record of service failure and corruption has put it on the defensive, it has begun to abandon the narrative of reconciliation and non-racialism in favour of grievance.
The new South Africa with its remarkable and inspiring transformation and strides toward justice and reconciliation is also a place with sharp edges and unfinished business. Whites complain that “transformation” is already proceeding fast, that public governance is, quite undeniably, collapsing as a result, and that empowerment has enabled corruption and entitlement, a take over by unqualified people with political connections who are quick to see racism behind critical comment. Blacks only see that the process has not gone far enough—that most whites are still better off and hold most skilled jobs, that political power has not brought economic power. An unfinished business.