The Baralong people are singing in the rain
It’s not the best weather to be moving house - especially when the place you’re moving to is a patch of open veldt, without even a shack for the kids to shelter in.
But this is the Barolong’s traditional land. In 1973, their belongings were piled into government trucks, and they were forcibly removed.
The land is only a few kilometres out of Potchefstrom, in the heart of Africanerdom.
For the apartheid government, it was a so-called black spot in country reserved for whites.Eventually it was handed over to the local city councilBut now, the Baralong are coming back for good.
City Council Chairman On behalf of the City Council of Potchefstrom, it gives me great pleasure whilst we’re standing here and the skies are opening and giving us all the grace of God, to hand over officially this piece of land to you as the representative of the Department of Land Affairs.
black man: Thank you very much.
The constitution says that there shall be restitution, Handshake cont..
Derek Hanekom, Minister of Land Affairs: because a great injustice was done to people and we simply have to do it. Most people in South Africa have supported the restitution process to the hilt. People recognise that uh shameful deeds were perpetrated in the name of apartheid and these have to be remedied.
Yet even on this land, which everyone agrees once legally belonged to the Baralong people, agreement was only finally reached after the personal intervention of the Federal Minister. And there are thousands of such battles still to be fought - between black claimants and the government on the one hand, and the present landowners on the other. It’s not going to be simple, and it’s not going to be quick.
Back in 1913, a group of fourteen black families clubbed together to buy the Klipgat farm, just north of Potchefstrom. For half a century, they raised their cattle and grew their maize, lived and died here.
But by the 1970’s only their gravestones were left. The living members of the families were forced off the farm, and scattered to the homelands and the townships.
Today, from the townships and the homelands, they’re converging again on Clipgat.
They’ve lodged their claim with the new Land Commission. Soon, they’re convinced, they’ll be back on the farm to stay. Now, they’re bringing the good news to the ancestors.
Dolly Mzondeki: We always pray and pray and pray and say “Oh God we wish one day we can go back again”,because those people, it was their rightful place, they had a title for it, they bought it and it’s written in paper, everything is reflected in their history.
But Klipgat has another owner now.
In 1980, Christoffel Momberg brought the farm from the state.It’s marginal land, he says: not enough rain, and a tough, sour pasture.But he and his English wife battled to make a go of it. Now she’s dead, and he’s prepared to leave -but only if the price is right.
Momberg: What I’d like to get across is that I’ve spent fifteen years here, everything that I’ve basically earnt during that time has gone straight back into the ground,
but the bottom line is, I’m prepared to go, but if I go I want to be compensated fully. If they’re not prepared to do that, then we’re going to have a fight on our hands. I’m not prepared to just go.
Momberg makes no attempt to prevent the caravan of claimants’ families from gathering on his land to visit the graves of their ancestors.
He knows that when it comes down to money, he won’t be fighting them, but the government.So when he meets them face to face for the first time, a wary courtesy prevails.
Johannes: I think you might be aware that we are in the process you know of claiming the land back and so on...
Momberg: I expected you would claim it but then they’ve still got to negotiate with me before they can get that far. I mean uh if you people have got the money to go and pay me then it’s all right (laughs).
Johannes: No I don’t think it will be fair for us to take our money out because we had already bought the farm you see and it was taken away and we were not compensated. You are in a better position because you are going to get some compensation.
Mombert: That’s right.
The question is, how much compensation? In the end, even if he isn’t happy with what the government offers him, there may not be much that Momberg can do about it.
Hanekom: but in any event) if no acceptable negotiated settlement is found then the matter will be referred to a land claims court which would be the adjudicating body. In that case the land claims court can order that the land be restored to the claiming community.Q: Whether the, whether the present owner wants to sell or not?Hanekom Whether the present owner wants to sell or not.
Chris Mombert Well most probably they have got the power to force me off the property, but uh it’s going to be a long fight. I don’t know exactly what we could do, but we’d go full out, I’d call in everybody that I can to help me, and we’d give them a good go and see how far we could get.
There are fears that the whole process could bog down in the courts, or that the shear cost of returning millions of people to the lands they once occupied will prove ruinously expensive
But the government has put strict limits on its generosity. Only those whose forebears once held legal title to the land under white law will qualify for restitution.
Thanks to the foresight of the ancestors, the claimants at Klipgat are almost certain to have their land returned to them.But in some parts of the country, black farmers have never legally owned their ancestral lands - and it’s there that the problems are most intractable.
Sonia Kusters is marrying Berndt Schutter - and just about every farming family in a fifty kilometre radius is at Commondale church for the ceremony.
It’s a godly and prosperous community, bound together by its Lutheran faith, and German heritage.
Fifty years ago, they built the church with their own hands - a little patch of Saxony in the African veldt.But German missionaries and farmers first trekked into the South - East Transvaal a long time before that.
Horrie Hinze - Agricultural Union: I reckon that was round about the 1850’s, so they are about 150-plus years in this area.And who was living on the land at the time they came?According to the elder people they say that uh from here, from Commondale to the east, that was a Malarial area, and there was no people around here.
As the German farmers tell it, the Zulus who live here now were invited in from Natal in the south, to work on the white farms.
Instead of cash wages, they were given land to build their kraals and plant their maize and the right to graze their cattle on the white man’s pasture.
But these days, the real money is in timber.
The pasture the farmers keep for their workers’ cattle is land that could be planted with still more trees. The older labour-tenant system, the landowners say, just doesn’t fit with the needs of a modern commercial operation.
Hinze: I think that is a more feudal system and that has been proved everywhere that that isn’t a good system.
Q: So what is the system that the white farmers would prefer to have here?
Hinze: They’d like to have fully employed people.
So in recent years, thousands of labour tenants have been forced to leave the land they’ve lived on for generations.
Meshack and Gilbert Mavimbela claim that the family has lived at Mantonga since before the German settlers came to the Transvaal.
Meshack: I hear this story from my father, as my father told by his father, his father told by his father - I don’t know where it start from but I know that they were here since the whites were not here.
But its the white farmer who legally owns the land. Now when the Mavimbelas’ return to clear the weeds from their ancestral graveyard, they’re trespassing.
Seven years ago, a Mr. Klingenberg bought Mantonga from its previous white owner. Right from the start, it was clear that he wanted the Mavimbelaws off the farm. For two years they tried to stave off eviction
Then one day in 1990, Meshack arrived back at the kraal to find two men with bulldozers, one white, one black, methodically demolishing the houses that had been home for more than 60 people.
Meshack: I was stopping the white, I was asking some questions, “Why?”
What are you doing here? He said to me the owner of the farm he hired him to demolish all the houses down.
Q. So they knocked down every house?
A. Yes, they knocked down every, all the houses, and the...
Meshack:... furnitures, materials, everything inside.
Q. And you had no warning this was going to happen?
Gilbert No, we didn’t get anything, we just know that we are living here...
It’s just the same old story, say the Mavimbela brothers.
Meshack: We are the blacks, the whites do what he like to us, we follow their instructions, if he says something, we must respect him.
But Mr. Mandela is the president now - things should be different shouldn’t they? It is so, although things are not all right as from today.
And that, says old Jotham Zwane, the Mavimbelas’ family friend and an ANC activist from way back, is the worst of it.
After a full year of the new government the evictions are still going on.
Zwane: Many, many people, even now they are still pushed them off.
Q: Even now?
Zwane:Even now.
Derek Hanekom - Minister for Land Affairs: I think in certain parts of the country that is perfectly true, things have got worse, people have, farmers have been evicting labour tenants, in certain cases have been evicting farmworkers from their land using existing legislation, but we are tackling it head on and we are saying that we believe there has to be strong protective legislation to prevent further evictions.
Meanwhile many blacks believe, the white farmers are getting rid of their labour tenants while they still can.Among the guests at Berndt and Sonja’s wedding, we found Helmut and Imgart Klingenberg. But Mr. Klingenberg refused to talk to us about his treatment of the Mavimbelas.The community’s chief spokesman, Horrie Hinze wouldn’t discuss the Mavinbelas either. But he told us that in general the evictions could be blamed not on the farmers but on black activists.
Horrie Hinze: Tension is building up because there are people and organisations who create false hopes by people, they come and tell them, “listen, hold onto the land, you don’t have to work for the land owner any more.”
Whatever the reason, this is where people like the Mavimbelas end up - in squalid rural townships like Kwathandeka, a hundred kilometres north of Mantonga.
There’s no running water. No electricity. No sewerage. No garbage disposal. And no work.
Yet somehow, fifteen little Mavimbelas have to be fed and clothed and sent to school.
They’d hoped - and expected - that the new government would force Mr. Klingenberg to let them return to Mantonga.Now they’re gradually realising that without legal title to the land, the best they can hope for from the government is the offer of land elsewhere.
Hanekom - Minister of Land Affairs: We recognise historical claims to land, but we felt it was necessary to strictly define who qualifies and who doesn’t, and clearly we cannot, cannot allow everybody, everybody who lost their land as a result of some law or other to go back to their original land.
If the labour tenants are not allowed to go back on their land, by the new law, what do you think the reaction of people here will be?Jothem Zwane I think the people will fight (incomprehensible bit)They will fight They will fight...Against the government Against the farmers or against the government?I think against the government.
To turn the clock back half a century, and put back together what apartheid tore asunder won’t be easy. There’ll be many who lose out.
But there will be winners too. For all the problems, for most black South Africans this is still a time of hope, and expectation.
All over the nation, the scattered children are returning to their ancestors, and to the land in which they lie.
It’s not the best weather to be moving house - especially when the place you’re moving to is a patch of open veldt, without even a shack for the kids to shelter in.
But this is the Barolong’s traditional land. In 1973, their belongings were piled into government trucks, and they were forcibly removed.
The land is only a few kilometres out of Potchefstrom, in the heart of Africanerdom.
For the apartheid government, it was a so-called black spot in country reserved for whites.Eventually it was handed over to the local city councilBut now, the Baralong are coming back for good.
City Council Chairman On behalf of the City Council of Potchefstrom, it gives me great pleasure whilst we’re standing here and the skies are opening and giving us all the grace of God, to hand over officially this piece of land to you as the representative of the Department of Land Affairs.
black man: Thank you very much.
The constitution says that there shall be restitution, Handshake cont..
Derek Hanekom, Minister of Land Affairs: because a great injustice was done to people and we simply have to do it. Most people in South Africa have supported the restitution process to the hilt. People recognise that uh shameful deeds were perpetrated in the name of apartheid and these have to be remedied.
Yet even on this land, which everyone agrees once legally belonged to the Baralong people, agreement was only finally reached after the personal intervention of the Federal Minister. And there are thousands of such battles still to be fought - between black claimants and the government on the one hand, and the present landowners on the other. It’s not going to be simple, and it’s not going to be quick.
Back in 1913, a group of fourteen black families clubbed together to buy the Klipgat farm, just north of Potchefstrom. For half a century, they raised their cattle and grew their maize, lived and died here.
But by the 1970’s only their gravestones were left. The living members of the families were forced off the farm, and scattered to the homelands and the townships.
Today, from the townships and the homelands, they’re converging again on Clipgat.
They’ve lodged their claim with the new Land Commission. Soon, they’re convinced, they’ll be back on the farm to stay. Now, they’re bringing the good news to the ancestors.
Dolly Mzondeki: We always pray and pray and pray and say “Oh God we wish one day we can go back again”,because those people, it was their rightful place, they had a title for it, they bought it and it’s written in paper, everything is reflected in their history.
But Klipgat has another owner now.
In 1980, Christoffel Momberg brought the farm from the state.It’s marginal land, he says: not enough rain, and a tough, sour pasture.But he and his English wife battled to make a go of it. Now she’s dead, and he’s prepared to leave -but only if the price is right.
Momberg: What I’d like to get across is that I’ve spent fifteen years here, everything that I’ve basically earnt during that time has gone straight back into the ground,
but the bottom line is, I’m prepared to go, but if I go I want to be compensated fully. If they’re not prepared to do that, then we’re going to have a fight on our hands. I’m not prepared to just go.
Momberg makes no attempt to prevent the caravan of claimants’ families from gathering on his land to visit the graves of their ancestors.
He knows that when it comes down to money, he won’t be fighting them, but the government.So when he meets them face to face for the first time, a wary courtesy prevails.
Johannes: I think you might be aware that we are in the process you know of claiming the land back and so on...
Momberg: I expected you would claim it but then they’ve still got to negotiate with me before they can get that far. I mean uh if you people have got the money to go and pay me then it’s all right (laughs).
Johannes: No I don’t think it will be fair for us to take our money out because we had already bought the farm you see and it was taken away and we were not compensated. You are in a better position because you are going to get some compensation.
Mombert: That’s right.
The question is, how much compensation? In the end, even if he isn’t happy with what the government offers him, there may not be much that Momberg can do about it.
Hanekom: but in any event) if no acceptable negotiated settlement is found then the matter will be referred to a land claims court which would be the adjudicating body. In that case the land claims court can order that the land be restored to the claiming community.Q: Whether the, whether the present owner wants to sell or not?Hanekom Whether the present owner wants to sell or not.
Chris Mombert Well most probably they have got the power to force me off the property, but uh it’s going to be a long fight. I don’t know exactly what we could do, but we’d go full out, I’d call in everybody that I can to help me, and we’d give them a good go and see how far we could get.
There are fears that the whole process could bog down in the courts, or that the shear cost of returning millions of people to the lands they once occupied will prove ruinously expensive
But the government has put strict limits on its generosity. Only those whose forebears once held legal title to the land under white law will qualify for restitution.
Thanks to the foresight of the ancestors, the claimants at Klipgat are almost certain to have their land returned to them.But in some parts of the country, black farmers have never legally owned their ancestral lands - and it’s there that the problems are most intractable.
Sonia Kusters is marrying Berndt Schutter - and just about every farming family in a fifty kilometre radius is at Commondale church for the ceremony.
It’s a godly and prosperous community, bound together by its Lutheran faith, and German heritage.
Fifty years ago, they built the church with their own hands - a little patch of Saxony in the African veldt.But German missionaries and farmers first trekked into the South - East Transvaal a long time before that.
Horrie Hinze - Agricultural Union: I reckon that was round about the 1850’s, so they are about 150-plus years in this area.And who was living on the land at the time they came?According to the elder people they say that uh from here, from Commondale to the east, that was a Malarial area, and there was no people around here.
As the German farmers tell it, the Zulus who live here now were invited in from Natal in the south, to work on the white farms.
Instead of cash wages, they were given land to build their kraals and plant their maize and the right to graze their cattle on the white man’s pasture.
But these days, the real money is in timber.
The pasture the farmers keep for their workers’ cattle is land that could be planted with still more trees. The older labour-tenant system, the landowners say, just doesn’t fit with the needs of a modern commercial operation.
Hinze: I think that is a more feudal system and that has been proved everywhere that that isn’t a good system.
Q: So what is the system that the white farmers would prefer to have here?
Hinze: They’d like to have fully employed people.
So in recent years, thousands of labour tenants have been forced to leave the land they’ve lived on for generations.
Meshack and Gilbert Mavimbela claim that the family has lived at Mantonga since before the German settlers came to the Transvaal.
Meshack: I hear this story from my father, as my father told by his father, his father told by his father - I don’t know where it start from but I know that they were here since the whites were not here.
But its the white farmer who legally owns the land. Now when the Mavimbelas’ return to clear the weeds from their ancestral graveyard, they’re trespassing.
Seven years ago, a Mr. Klingenberg bought Mantonga from its previous white owner. Right from the start, it was clear that he wanted the Mavimbelaws off the farm. For two years they tried to stave off eviction
Then one day in 1990, Meshack arrived back at the kraal to find two men with bulldozers, one white, one black, methodically demolishing the houses that had been home for more than 60 people.
Meshack: I was stopping the white, I was asking some questions, “Why?”
What are you doing here? He said to me the owner of the farm he hired him to demolish all the houses down.
Q. So they knocked down every house?
A. Yes, they knocked down every, all the houses, and the...
Meshack:... furnitures, materials, everything inside.
Q. And you had no warning this was going to happen?
Gilbert No, we didn’t get anything, we just know that we are living here...
It’s just the same old story, say the Mavimbela brothers.
Meshack: We are the blacks, the whites do what he like to us, we follow their instructions, if he says something, we must respect him.
But Mr. Mandela is the president now - things should be different shouldn’t they? It is so, although things are not all right as from today.
And that, says old Jotham Zwane, the Mavimbelas’ family friend and an ANC activist from way back, is the worst of it.
After a full year of the new government the evictions are still going on.
Zwane: Many, many people, even now they are still pushed them off.
Q: Even now?
Zwane:Even now.
Derek Hanekom - Minister for Land Affairs: I think in certain parts of the country that is perfectly true, things have got worse, people have, farmers have been evicting labour tenants, in certain cases have been evicting farmworkers from their land using existing legislation, but we are tackling it head on and we are saying that we believe there has to be strong protective legislation to prevent further evictions.
Meanwhile many blacks believe, the white farmers are getting rid of their labour tenants while they still can.Among the guests at Berndt and Sonja’s wedding, we found Helmut and Imgart Klingenberg. But Mr. Klingenberg refused to talk to us about his treatment of the Mavimbelas.The community’s chief spokesman, Horrie Hinze wouldn’t discuss the Mavinbelas either. But he told us that in general the evictions could be blamed not on the farmers but on black activists.
Horrie Hinze: Tension is building up because there are people and organisations who create false hopes by people, they come and tell them, “listen, hold onto the land, you don’t have to work for the land owner any more.”
Whatever the reason, this is where people like the Mavimbelas end up - in squalid rural townships like Kwathandeka, a hundred kilometres north of Mantonga.
There’s no running water. No electricity. No sewerage. No garbage disposal. And no work.
Yet somehow, fifteen little Mavimbelas have to be fed and clothed and sent to school.
They’d hoped - and expected - that the new government would force Mr. Klingenberg to let them return to Mantonga.Now they’re gradually realising that without legal title to the land, the best they can hope for from the government is the offer of land elsewhere.
Hanekom - Minister of Land Affairs: We recognise historical claims to land, but we felt it was necessary to strictly define who qualifies and who doesn’t, and clearly we cannot, cannot allow everybody, everybody who lost their land as a result of some law or other to go back to their original land.
If the labour tenants are not allowed to go back on their land, by the new law, what do you think the reaction of people here will be?Jothem Zwane I think the people will fight (incomprehensible bit)They will fight They will fight...Against the government Against the farmers or against the government?I think against the government.
To turn the clock back half a century, and put back together what apartheid tore asunder won’t be easy. There’ll be many who lose out.
But there will be winners too. For all the problems, for most black South Africans this is still a time of hope, and expectation.
All over the nation, the scattered children are returning to their ancestors, and to the land in which they lie.