Doubly Discarded: “We have had enough!”

When Thembekile Hlongo received her Ten Years of Freedom t-shirt in 2004, she probably never believed her dreams of a “better life for all” would fade as much as her t-shirt.

Now, eleven years later, the bitter irony of her t-shirt was ignored as she joined other women and men of her community to confront the shock of a second impending eviction in eight months.

Employees of one Kevin Naicker built the 25 two-roomed block houses in Mkhondeni in a settlement called Nkawana in February this year. The majority of the households on Annidale farm, where they had come from, had strongly resisted the move, even threatening one of Naicker’s representatives. But when Naicker’s men persisted, the community gave in, and insisted instead on being provided with a decent settlement. They were then assured that Naicker had promised to build every family a four-roomed house and would ensure the provision of clean water. The households wanted the relocation to take place after the houses and facilities were complete, but when Naicker sent trucks to move them in November last year, promising the completion of the settlement after the relocation, they felt they had no choice but to go. Since the move, no further construction has taken place.                                             

Proper housing and other facilities were not the only promises Naicker reneged on. The only source of water is the trickle of a stream down a sharp rock-strewn path. Less than a kilometer upstream is Mkondeni, one of Pietermaritzburg’s oldest, heavy industrial areas. Thembisile Shabalala’s concern that the water is poisoned with industrial pollutants is entirely valid. “One woman has already died here. How many more of us will die?” 

When Naicker bought Annidale farm and illegally evicted the 55 families living there, demolishing their homes so that he could park his transport business vehicles, he erased generations of history. The families had been labour tenants, providing free labour to white farmers in return for land to live on and farm. Like so many vestiges of labour tenancy around the province, these families mark their place and their history by indicating ancient graves. All that now remains is the graves.

Standing on the bulldozed site where her home had once been, Khethiwe Mngwengwe, showed me the avocado pear and peach trees she and her children used to harvest, and the plot where once her vegetable gardens had been. When her life had been more certain and stable, livestock farming had supplemented her food stocks and income. She never dreamt they would be evicted. “The previous farm manager, Bev, had given us a piece of the farm. The boundary ran from the firebreak [on the far left] right to the top of the hill and all the way down to the valley over there [centre top]. We very happy about this, and we were happy to move up the hill where the owner wanted us to go. That’s why we never claimed the land. We knew it was ours.” However, years later when the Msunduzi municipality failed to support the land donation by providing services, the planned resettlement was abandoned and the farm was sold to Naicker.

Another 15 of the 55 families were sent to houses Naicker had built on traditional land under two amakhosi, amakhosi Mlaba and Ndluli. It is alleged that Naicker paid an induna R20,000 per site, but the families who moved there say they had no idea it was traditional land until after they had been relocated. The remaining ten families were less fortunate. When their houses on Annidale farm were demolished, they were left to fend for themselves. “We have nowhere to live. We just live in the wilderness, sleeping at the houses of relatives who will have us. It is very difficult for those of us who have children,” said Petros Muswire

But, while households at Nkawana settlement all have toilets, rickety though some of them are, the households at Nkanyezini do not. “We are forced to use the veld. Can you imagine that?” asks Khethiwe. What hurts more than the indignity of no toilet, though, is that she has been forced to send her two teenage children to live with relatives, at a significant financial cost. This is both so that they can go to school, and also because the house is too small for privacy for a family of six. “My daughter cannot bath without my boyfriend seeing her. One cannot live like that.” And yet, Khethiwe knows all too well that her struggle to secure a safe place to live, with access to water, clinics and schools, is far from over.

Khethiwe and Bongani Mthalane requested AFRA’s help when, to their horror, they heard they were to be evicted a second time.

Housing scene

It turns out that Naicker not only illegally evicted labour tenants from the farm he bought, he resettled them on land he does not own. This land belongs to Forsyte Porps 5 (Pty) Ltd, and last week the owners served the occupiers of Nkawana with notice of motion (eviction) papers.

Furthermore, the people Naicker relocated to land that falls under the two amakhosi have heard that this too may have been an illegal settlement. “There’s a case before the court now because the inkosi does not want us on his land,” Khethiwe explains. “It seems the induna was not supposed to allocate these sites because the people who used to live here a long time ago, before it was made into a game reserve, are now all returning. Some houses here are even built on their graves. The inkosi is very angry about this, and the people all around here do not want us here.”

  

On Sunday, Siya Sithole from AFRA explained that AFRA will not oppose the eviction from  because Naicker had no right to put them on this land in the first place. “It is hard to have to say this but it is unlikely that any court will rule against this eviction.” However, AFRA will bring a case of illegal eviction against Naicker. And AFRA will also request the court to consider the question of where the families must live if they are forced out of these homes too.

Along with Siya and AFRA staff member, Donna Hornby, Muden community activist, Jeffrey Ngobese, had come to investigate. We listened as one person after another said they could see no choice to their predicament other than to return to the land they had been evicted illegally from in the first place. They want Naicker to take them back and to rebuild the six-roomed houses he demolished.

In response, Jeff pointed out: “Here you have no rights. Your rights are where you came from. But if you think Naicker is going to help you, you will keep waiting for those rights. It is not for us to beg him; this action you want requires pressure. And government did help us after 1994 when it passed laws to protect our land rights, laws that Naicker has now broken. If you want to wait for Naicker, you will be forced off this land too – that is certain.” When Jeff warned them that the struggle for land requires passion, a call rose up “we are angry!” Jeff told them that Muden had struggled long and hard for land and had won back much of the land. “I am here to say we, as Muden, will support you. We are with you.”

“Now it is time to take back our land. We need to say clearly: ‘Do not play with our lives! Do not play with our rights!’.”

12 July, 2015

Copy by Donna Hornby

Photos Yves Vanderhaeghen

Siyaphambili Emajuba Farm Dwellers Association (SEFA)

TRAINING WORKSHOP

02 & 03 July 2015

Newcastle - Amajuba

Click Here For More Pictures

AFRA, through its ICCO funded Farm Dweller Legal Support Project, plans and carries out training workshops in farm dweller communities in KZN where rights-violations are prevalent. It is the view of AFRA that a right not known is as good as a non-existent right. Farm dwellers need to be capacitated to take control of their own struggle to protect their own rights. AFRA has built and maintained partnerships with community leaders and community based organisations across the KZN province in the quest to give those in the proverbial hole tools to dig themselves out. The youngest of the already mentioned partnerships being the AFRA chaired FARM FORUM; made up of municipal ward councillors in municipalities within the KZN midlands, a representative of CoGTA , FAWU and SEFA.

AFRA organised this training to equip SEFA members with the necessary information to effectively assist farm dwellers in the Amajuba area. 30 members of SEFA were invited to the 2-day workshop held at Majuba Lodge. This group was made up of 10 members from each of the following areas; Bothas Pass, Dannhauser & Utrecht. 

The training was facilitated by AFRA’s Siyabonga Sithole and Nokuthula Mthimunye, who designed the programme to deal with specific issues that farm dwellers & workers in Amajuba are faced with. The facilitators adopted a train-the-trainer approach and invested as much time as possible on each item in the programme in the aim to achieve the necessary level of capacity for SEFA to be able to disseminate accurate and relevant  information to clients. The 2-day programme comprised of the following items:

• The AFRA Labour Tenant Class Action
• Taking Statements From Clients
• Relevant Government Departments to Refer Cases to
• Rights & Responsibilities of Occupiers and Land Owners
• Agri-Villages
• Organisational Internal Communication
• Labour Relations Act
• Mediation

The workshop was a success as participants showed good understanding of concepts and were actively involved throughout the training. During the last session of the workshop SEFA chairperson Mama Mthembu had the following to say, “It is inevitable that new programmes & projects will direct AFRA to focus on other areas of South Africa and spend less & less time in Amajuba. As much as this is the last thing that SEFA would ask for, we are nonetheless grateful and thankful for all the information that AFRA has passed on to us over the last decade or so. Today we are able to stand as informed and confident leaders of farm dweller communities thanks to invaluable efforts of AFRA representatives such as Thabo Manyathi, Ndabe Ziqubu, Isaac Sibeko, Philip Shabalala, Nonhlanzeko Mthembu, Nokuthula Mthimunye and Siyabonga Sithole.”

Written By:

Siyabonga Sithole

Agri-Villages Will Do Nothing To Secure Our Tenure On Farms

I’m a labour tenant on Jericho farm in Utrecht, under the Emadlangeni Local Municipality. I have lived here with my family for many years. There is talk that the municipality wants to move us to an agri-village. For me this is just another way of evicting us. No one has asked us if we want to move.

We submitted a claim over this land under the Labour Tenant Act years ago and are still waiting. We asked the Department of Rural Development about our claim and were sent from pillar to post. We are living in limbo and cannot plan a meaningful future for ourselves. 

Over the years the land owner has curtailed our rights to graze our livestock, access to water and other resources that we depend on to survive. 

An official from Madlangeni Municipality told us recently that we will never get the title deed. Instead, they want to move labour tenants like us to an agri-village where, they say, they will bring development. We were not asked, we were told  this. 

We belong on this land. Our ancestral graves are here, our history, our heritage. If we are moved, we will lose it all, all that makes us who we are. We have worked this land for several generations of land owners, we have learnt our rights as labour tenants. We want secure tenure and development support here on this land where we belong. We don’t want to move to an agri-village with a promise of development. We call on the municipality to listen to our plea and not take decisions without us. 

We are saying  “Nothing for us, without us”!

Phansi ngama agri-village, Muwubuye Umhlaba Wethu!

11 June 2015

by Ntombi Makhubu, Labour Tenant, Utrecht KwaZulu Natal

A Struggle In Vain

His name means Struggle, and despite turning 101 in January, Zabalaza Mshengu is still struggling to get government to process his legal claim to the land where he hopes to live out the time he has left.

From his derelict home on a commercial farm near Ashburton, Mshengu points across the N3, shaking with emotion at his memory of a precarious life. “This all used to be one farm before the highway came. My mother and father worked there for no wages, and when I was old enough I also worked on that farm. In return, the farmer gave us land to graze our cattle and grow our crops. My father’s grave is there – I don’t know if that owner even knows it is there.” 

 

Mshengu had reason to hope in 1996 when a new law promised to secure his rights to the land he had grown up on. The Land Reform (Labour Tenants) Act derives from the Constitution, which guarantees tenure to people deprived of it in terms of racially discriminatory laws. The act addressed the plight of labour tenants who, like Mshengu, had clung to land and the remnants of independent farming by working for land owners without receiving wages despite attempts by successive apartheid laws to destroy this way of life. It provided for labour tenants to claim ownership of the land they and their fathers had lived on and used. By the closing date for the lodging of claims in March 2001, about 19,000 labour tenants had applied for land ownership. Mshengu was one of them.

 

But 14 years later, the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform has once again failed to comply with a Land Claims Court order that it explain how it will resolve these land claims. The application was brought in July 2013 on behalf of all labour tenant claimants by the Legal Resources Centre acting for the Association for Rural Advancement (AFRA) and four labour tenants who reside on land belonging to Hilton College. The Department has, on at least five occasions, either failed to respond to Court orders or has submitted affidavits late. A report on the case by AFRA’s director, Mike Cowling, a former professor of law, states: “The bottom line is that the Department has comprehensively and systematically failed to carry out its basic mandate in respect of labour tenant applications.” 

 

Cowling’s conclusion was once again confirmed last week when the Department failed to provide the information the Court required. Once again, the Department failed to show the courtesy of informing the Court or the applicants that it was unable to comply with its orders. And once again, the applicants’ lawyers have had to request that either the information is provided or that the Department is found to be in contempt of Court. It has until Friday to respond.

Mshengu, understating his exhausted patience, says simply: “Land affairs is taking far too long to settle my claim.” 

By Donna Hornby 

3 April, 2015