At the Fireside Page 18

  One thing is certain: Dr Leonard Gill of the South African Museum identified the skeleton of a rorqual whale that was exposed in a Maitland quarry; it was complete which means that there was a rise in the general level of the flats over a long period of time.

  Where does this leave the Chinese? Well, it is known that junks were visiting East African ports in the 15th century and so they could have been there much earlier. We also know that MacIver and Thomson, archaeologists at the Zimbabwe Ruins, found Chinese porcelain and an ancient Chinese coin in the old gold diggings of southern Zimbabwe.

  Professor Dart was of the opinion that the peculiar hats and footwear depicted in old Bushmen paintings along the coastline right down to East London are really Chinese. This does not prove that Chinese junks actually rounded the Cape, of course, but it does leave us with even more unanswered questions.

  The Chinese junks – which were already fully decked when the ancient Britons were still paddling around in hide coracles – were very seaworthy craft, eminently capable of weathering the storms off the Cape shores, as one called the Key-ing proved when she left Canton in 1846, bound for England.

  The vessel was a very sturdy one, with masts and a rudder of ironwood, and sported a gaily decorated main saloon which was seven metres long and four metres wide, and she was obviously very seaworthy – it is reported that although she rounded the Cape in very heavy winter weather, she did not leak a single drop (as a matter of historical interest, she reached the Thames by way of New York after a journey of 17 months).

  I personally believe that in his book 1421, Gavin Menzies really has something, for the evidence is beginning to mount up in other parts of the world like New Zealand, Australia and South America and tilt the scales in that direction.

  One thing is certain: we do not have any definitive answers to these questions, but as new technology and new frontiers of science and discovery push the envelope further into the future, we will probably find that the past was nothing like what we were taught at school.

  The Dividing Up of the Land – Post 1994

  THE DIVIDING UP OF THE LAND –

  POST 1994

  By the time of the freeing of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC, the vast majority of land in southern Africa was in white hands. With our first truly democratic elections, a new government was now in place. It is important to realise that the events that I am going to talk about are in fact actual events that have taken place in our recent history, and are completely apolitical. I will be telling it as it is.

  The decision to use the country’s tax base to acquire land was the only sensible way to go as many peoples of different tribes and races had, in fact, been removed from their ancestral lands. But the trouble with this decision is that if you are using the people’s tax money to pay out farmers, then surely to goodness the taxpayer must have some say in it. If the people pay for the farm, the farm belongs to the people.

  Let me explain something about governments and money which many do not realise. A government does not have any money at all. It never has had any money, nor ever will have. It is merely the custodian of our (the taxpayers’) money.

  You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom, and what one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving, for no government can give anything to anybody that it has not first taken from somebody else.

  So, when half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when that other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they have worked for, then that is the end of a nation for, as the late Dr Adrian Rogers so ably put it, ‘you cannot multiply wealth by dividing it’. Let’s have a look at a few statistics.

  South Africa is not farming-friendly country since only 12% of the total land is arable and that small percentage is itself extremely fragile. The average rainfall in most of South Africa is 460 mm per annum, as against a world average of 850 mm. Then again, 21% of the country has a total rainfall of less than 200 mm annually and 40% between 200 mm and 600 mm, while only 31% records more than 600 mm per annum.

  This 12% of arable land is cultivated by about 35 000-odd farmers of all races – less than 0.1% of our entire population. In spite of that they fill our supermarkets with mountains of fruit and vegetables and all cuts of meat for South Africa’s 45 million or so inhabitants. These are the facts, whether we like them or not. Now let’s have a look at some of the land claims.

  Let’s start in the Letsitele Valley in the Limpopo Province. The average rainfall in this area is 1 000 mm per annum and permanent mountain streams run through fertile valleys. Dams are well-sited and the climate is sub-tropical and frost-free, with an average summer temperature of 29 degrees Celsius and 23 degrees Celsius in winter. The soil is extremely fertile with excellent drainage capacity. The Letsitele Valley can be regarded as one of the best farming areas in the whole country, mainly due to the climate and soil factors but also because of the very professional way the farmers ran their businesses. Then came the land claims.

  The Banareng Ba Ga Letsoalo claim was based on the desire of 1 500 people to return to their original land. Actually, it has now been determined that none of these people returned at all. There was a committee appointed to represent them and to run the farms on their behalf. That committee, as it turned out, never ran the farms at all, and most had businesses elsewhere. One was a Hammanskraal panelbeater, another a teacher and the chairman worked in a bookshop and for a publisher.

  This committee’s members awarded themselves over R12 000 a month each and went through the operating capital of R4,5 million in no time at all. Nothing was managed. The farm labourers continued to work the farm until the pumps broke. These were never repaired. Then there was no money for the vital spraying programme and very soon salary payments fell into arrears which ultimately resulted in these farm workers marching five kilometres to the farm offices where they toyi-toyied and presented a memorandum of grievances.

  This was in February of 2003, just 24 months after the Department of Land Affairs’ Minister Didiza told the world that the beneficiaries of the handover would, and I quote, ‘go it alone’ and that the project would prove to the world that the new black farmers were not lazy and were indeed capable of running such a going concern.

  Almost inevitably the area that once, by the government’s own estimates, would be worth R100 million by way of export income per annum, inextricably sank into the mire of ineptitude and was finally placed under judicial management.

  A small non-governmental small team of researchers which visited the farms found the avocado trees were dying of thirst and were past saving, although the dams were full; but the irrigation pipes were broken and in places had been stolen, and there was no money to repair or replace them. The mango trees’ spring blossoms were out, but the trees had not been watered either, the papayas hung from dry trunks and grass and weeds were growing between the expertly laid out plantation rows. This in a part of the best rainfall area in our entire country!

  The beautiful packing sheds were empty. The electricity had been cut off and the cool rooms did not operate because of a lack of care and maintenance.

  Totally devastated by what they had experienced so far, the experts moved on to the next farm. There they found a watchman who said yes, there were still some bananas, but they were for ‘the bakkie trade’.

  Let me explain what this means. When banana plantations are left unpruned and uncared for they sprout smaller shoots which grow from the trunk and smaller bananas are the result. And, of course, the bunches are not covered with the well-known blue plastic bags which not only protect the young fruit from the UV rays of the sun but also keep the moisture in.

  In late 2003 large bananas in Gauteng were selling at R1,60 per kg. These d
ays, as you look at these beautiful plantations rolling on and on for kilometres at a time, you wonder at the madness of a policy that would destroy this immaculate farming and replace it with subsistence bakkie-trade production.

  We came across the macadamia groves with thousands upon thousands of nuts lying unharvested under the trees. South Africa’s macadamia exports go mainly to the United States where consumers can afford them and at that stage were priced at R110 per kg. The trees had not been pruned, the undergrowth had not been cleared and a little further on the citrus orchards literally gasped for water in the searing South African sun.

  The original owners had been adequately paid out for these farms, but they wept openly at the total devastation of what had once been their pride and joy. Some families had been there for over 40 years; now they saw that their life’s work had been destroyed within just 28 months. That’s about how long it takes to wreck a farm like that, for it is not like a house that you can rebuild in two months and get on with your life. To build up a farm takes a lifetime of hard work.

  There is an ancient Chinese saying and it goes something like this: ‘If a man knows, and knows that he knows, he is wise – follow him. If a man knows not, and knows that he knows not, he is teachable – teach him. If a man knows not, and knows not that he knows not, he is fool – shun him.’

  There is nothing more totally destructive than a combination of arrogance and ignorance; it is a lethal combination which leads to devastation, hardship and despair. If you don’t believe me, just look north!

  Did the minister in charge at that time know about this paucity of knowledge, realise that not one member of the management team had any agricultural experience whatsoever? And if she didn’t, surely this was something that should have been rectified BEFORE handing over the taxpayers’ hard-earned money?

  In 2002 the secretary of this same management team complained that the government had not provided the team with a business plan and a training programme, a call which, as we shall see, is used time and time again. This was rubbish: there was a business plan in place, but it was never used.

  He said that agricultural extension officers had not been allocated and when the whole R4.5 million operating capital had entirely disappeared the labourers received only R300 per month (by the way, what happened to the minimum wages that the government insisted on for all farmers?) When the farm was eventually placed under judicial management in January of 2003, the last of the mangos were so diseased that they had to be thrown away and the farming equipment, which had been handed over in pristine working condition, was now useless. But the committee members were still pulling their R12 000-a-month salaries right up to the end.

  In the September of 2000 the Letaba Herald ran an article expressing grave concerns about the handover of the valley and said that the government’s land-reform policy would become a sword of Damocles over the country’s agricultural economy, for the people in the area had actually previously seen, and witnessed, the disastrous destruction of the Zebediela and other citrus estates which had also been given to inexperienced recipients.

  Millions of rands were lost, not only in the price paid to the existing farmers, but in the huge deficits in export sales and in the taxes which would have been generated from these, some of our most productive farms. These are the types of events that were not covered in the local press, and we will see how the continuation of this policy starts to have a damning effect on our local and export economy.

  With only 12% of the land being workable, as a country, we cannot afford to have anyone else but experts responsible for its production. Anything else is madness.

  The Drums of Africa

  THE DRUMS OF AFRICA

  Not long ago, as the sun started to set in the west, I could hear drumming from somewhere within earshot of my home – that continual beating that is so particular to Africa. On and on the drums sounded, deep into the night, and when I looked out into the sky, lo and behold, it was a night of the full moon.

  What celebration or occasion it was I still don’t know, but it prompted me to look into this phenomenon of drumming. In East Africa there is a Swahili saying that when you play the drums in Zanzibar all Africa dances, as far as the great lakes. A bit of an exaggeration for effect, of course, but there is no doubt that drumming is Africa’s heartbeat.

  In the upper regions of the Congo, the country that Joseph Conrad so rightly called ‘The Heart of Darkness’, he recalls how the Belgian captain of a riverboat was setting up camp for the night when they heard the faint tap-boom-tap-boom of distant drums.

  They listened for a while, and the captain said: ‘Those are the signal drums, and the drums are talking to us. We are needed down the river – there is a white man and his wife and child all trying to hurry to the hospital at Albertville, just pray that we do not hit a sand bank as we go down the river in darkness, for we have to journey about 20 miles.’

  After several hours of zigzagging down the river, ‘there loomed a mission station ahead of us, and there a Roman Catholic father in robes of white came to the bank and said that the mine manager and his family will be arriving shortly. Then they arrived carrying a machila – which is a homemade stretcher – and on it lay an exhausted woman and a delicate little girl. It was exactly the way the drums had said it, and we loaded them on board.’

  How do the listeners interpret the drums? How do they read what the drums are saying? I have heard time and time again of this strange phenomenon. When ‘Bvenkenya’ Barnard, the last of the elephant poachers, went back to his old bushveld haunts at Crooks Corner in the 1930s, his son Izak told me that on their arrival the drums started beating and hundreds of Africans from all over the area came walking to greet Bvenkenya.

  When they were in sight of him, they fell on their knees and approached him on all fours as a sign of the utmost respect that they had for him because he had kept them fed for so long with the carcasses of the elephants he had shot. The drums had called to tell them that Bvenkenya was back and they had all responded to give him their greetings.

  When Queen Victoria died in 1901 the news was cabled to West Africa, and those who were there say that the drums started beating in relays which went on for days; in the remotest areas the tribespeople were talking about the death of the Great White Queen weeks before the government officials in those areas received the official news.

  When Khartoum fell to the Mahdi and General Gordon and his entire staff were killed, the news was drummed across Africa so swiftly that the details were known in Sierra Leone, far south and on the other side of the continent, the very same day. When the Ashanti Campaign began the entire local fighting force in the territory was fully mobilised within hours – by the drums. The rising of Lobengula and the Matabele impis in 1893 was known almost immediately from Mombasa through to Accra.

  Drums are part of the phenomenon known as the ‘bush telegraph’. When Mr Owen Letcher, a South African mining expert and traveller, was passing through an isolated village in the old north-eastern Rhodesia one night in 1911, he heard the women of the Wanda tribe wailing sorrowfully.

  Six weeks later an official confirmation came through of the drum message that had caused so much misery: a company of Wanda troops, recruited from that very village, had been wiped out in an engagement of the faraway Somaliland Campaign.

  Lastly, when I was researching the disaster of the SS Mendi, the troopship that sank in the English Channel on the night of 20 February 1917 while carrying hundreds of black South African volunteer troops to the Western Front, I discovered that the drums started beating out a message and the women and loved ones in the remotest villages of KwaZulu-Natal started wailing, for they knew that their men had died.

  Confirmation of this terrible tragedy only reached Durban three days later, but the mothers, wives and lovers were already in mourning. They did not need some government telegram to tell them that their loved ones
had perished.

  I wonder if this is tied in somehow with something that happened to me many years ago in the Kalahari. I was hunting, accompanied by a Bushman, and at one stage he turned to me and said that the other hunting party had just shot a black wildebeest. I noted the time and that night I compared notes with the other hunters – and found that when I looked at my watch they had just shot the black wildebeest.

  I also recall an incident when the Zulu historian Credo Mutwa and the late Adrian Boshier were doing research in an area called the Makgabeng, on the banks of the Mogalakwena River, then known as Blouwberg and Bochum but now renamed Senwa ka Basarwa (the hiding place of the Bushmen).

  They were in the area of the Bahananoa people and in a recessed cave they came across a very old drum which they took back to the farm where they were staying. That night a young black woman – Credo described her as ‘a black witch’ – appeared on the farm and asked to speak to them. She said she was aware that they had taken the drum, and if it was not returned by sunset the following day, she could not guarantee their safety in the area at all. The veiled threat was very apparent!

  At sunrise the following day they retraced their steps and replaced the drum. At sunset she came to the farm again and thanked them for replacing the ancestral drum. But she said to Credo: ‘Because you, of all people, should have known better than to allow Adrian Boshier to take the sacred drum, on your return home, you will receive very sad news.’ She turned to Boshier and said that within 12 months he would die by water.