Racial tension crops up

STELLENBOSCH, South Africa

The bucolic valleys that produce South Africa’s best wines are also producing tension as white farmers are accused of forcing black workers from their homes.

Agriculture Minister Lulu Xingwana also charges farmers with abusing and intimidating workers. Incensed landowners say Miss Xingwana’s charges are exaggerated and risk stoking violence on farms and complicating the delicate path toward land reform.

The problems are not confined to the rolling vineyards and fruit farms of the Western Cape, but are also evident in the vast game and cereal farms elsewhere in the country.

“For a long time, the issue of evictions and violations of workers’ rights has not been on the agenda,” Miss Xingwana said in an interview.

“We must come up with a strategy to stop the evictions” that she said are taking place “every day in every corner of our country.”

A 2005 survey estimated that from 1994 to 2004, some 942,303 persons were evicted from their homes on farms, which are often part of their employment package, compared to 737,114 the previous decade. About 2.9 million people worked on farms and 950,000 lived on them, it estimated.

Unlike neighboring Zimbabwe, where white owners have been forced off the land by the government, in South Africa it is usually poor, illiterate blacks who are pushed away.

Martha Jonga, 62, worked for 40 years on a grape farm in De Doorns, a village about 75 miles from Cape Town. She said in January that she was given a week’s notice to quit the three-room cottage she shared with her two grandchildren and move to a damp one-room shack near a dam.

“I feel very bad because I want to stay in my own home,” she told a meeting of rural women attended by Miss Xingwana on a wine estate near Stellenbosch.

Annelize Crosby, parliamentary liaison officer with AgriSA, the main commercial farmers union, said people like Mrs. Jonga are entitled to stay in their homes as long-term occupiers. She said AgriSA tells all of its members to abide by the law.

Housing the aged costly

But farmers reply that, in a world of cutthroat competition, the cost of housing retired or sick workers is often prohibitive.

The Confederation of South African Trade Unions ascribes many of the evictions to the trend of turning farms into golf estates, safari lodges and tourist accommodations in preparation for the 2010 World Cup.

“Ruthless, apartheid-era employers treat [farmworkers] little better than slaves, exploiting their labor for poverty wages and then throwing them out of their homes when they make demands for basic rights and a living wage,” said labor union spokesman Patrick Craven.

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