HRC on the attack against farmers
Officials, watchdogs focus anew on agriculture’s grim record, writes Bongani Mthethwa.
On a wintry morning in April 2003, Simphiwe Bophela and her two cousins set out to gather fire wood in a forest near their homestead at Hlobane, near Vryheid in KwaZulu-Natal.
They giggled as their breath turned to mist in the cold air. The task was arduous as veld fires had consumed most of the available wood in the area — and the fires were still burning that morning.
Suddenly, a 4×4 revved and charged at them.
The girls scattered in terror as the driver leant out of the window and hurled abuse at them for collecting wood in his forest.
Two of the girls — Nomfundo Bophela, 14, and Nomcebo Ntshakala, 15 — managed to escape unharmed .
Simphiwe Bophela, then just 11 years old, was not so lucky.
As she fled from the farmer, she fell head-first into the flames. She sustained third-degree burns on her legs, torso , neck and face.
Simphiwe’s mother, Nokuthula Bophela, 35, said police took statements after the incident, and a case was opened at the local police station — but that was the last the family heard of it .
“What makes me angry is that our family has been collecting fire wood from that forest since 1999. I can’t understand what changed that day, and why today my child suffers due to that man.
“It’s been four years, but my daughter is scarred for life, not to mention the pain. I have to take her to the doctor at least three times a month,” said the unemployed mother of two.
For Simphiwe, the ordeal has changed her life forever, and remains etched in her memory like acid on metal.
After spending six months out of school recuperating from her burns, the young girl faced another ordeal — teasing at the hands of some of her peers.
The Grade 10 pupil, who is scarred on the left side of her face and neck, said after she returned to Pikhwakhe High School, Ulundi, a fellow pupil dropped her a note with a crude reference to the rest of her body.
“I was very humiliated and angered by the incident, but I had to resign myself to accepting my condition with the knowledge that I knew I wasn’t born like that,” she said.
She said she found solace in the fact that her teachers and some of the children at the school accepted her as she was. And she decided to carry on with her life.
Simphiwe’s ordeal is one of several tragedies that have befallen farm dwellers in northern KwaZulu-Natal over the past six years.
The incidents include:
|
Things came to a head last month when two farmers and five commando members, charged with assaulting and suffocating two boys suspected of cattle theft, were acquitted by controversial Vryheid magistrate Johan de Bruin. Before their acquittal, De Bruin had ordered that proceedings be conducted in Afrikaans, despite protestations from the state prosecutor that he didn’t understand the language and therefore couldn’t prosecute the case. The farmers, Jan George van der Wath, 58, of Goedehoop farm in Utrecht, and Jacobus Johannes Uys, 56, of Potgietersust farm, were arrested in October 2005 after allegedly kidnapping Bongani Ndlovu and Thulani Sithole and taking them to an army base near Gluckstadt. There they were seriously assaulted, and suffocated with plastic bags. Ndlovu later committed suicide, saying in a note that he had done so because he had been punished for a crime he didn’t commit. The perceived bias of the justice system towards white farmers in the conservative towns of Vryheid, Utrecht, Newcastle and Dannhauser has sparked outrage among rural communities and farm dwellers. It has also prompted KwaZulu-Natal’s MEC for Transport, Community Safety and Liaison, Bheki Cele, to establish a special task team to re-investigate about 100 cases of farm assaults in those areas, dating from 2002. Cele conceded in an interview with the Sunday Times that there was a problem with policing in Vryheid and that the local police station was perceived to be a “volkstaat.” He said the KwaZulu-Natal Cabinet had formed a farm security committee under the auspices of the provincial Agriculture Department, which would look at the issue of human rights violations on farms KwaZulu-Natal Agricultural Union president Robin Barnsley said his organisation would not support any illegal activity by farmers. “If there are any illegal activities perpetrated by farmers, the law must take its course. But our fundamental premise is that facts [about such illegal activities] must be put on the table. “We’ve raised the matter with the provincial MEC for Agriculture, Mtholephi Mthim- khulu, about the need for this issue to be high on the agenda of the provincial Land Forum to be launched within two weeks.” Allegations of farm abuse and increasing brutality towards farm workers are not confined to KwaZulu-Natal and seem to be prevalent throughout the country. Last week a Pretoria farmer was arrested for allegedly injecting his employee with medicine meant for pigs after he asked for time off to see a doctor. Farm labourer Rams Madibogo, 23, from Atteridgeville, alleged that the farmer’s friends had offered him R4000 to drop the case. In another incident, a Limpopo farmer, Johan van Niekerk, 69, was arrested and charged with the murder of Richard Mkhari, whose decomposed body was found tied to a tree with a rope on Vygeboom farm. He had been missing since he went hunting on the farm and Van Niekerk had been charged with his kidnapping. This incident and others of abuse faced by farm workers have prompted the South African Human Rights Commission to have a fresh look at relations between farmers and farm dwellers. The persistently appalling conditions faced by farm workers will be recounted before public hearings on human rights violations on farms, convened by the commission next month. Commission chairman Jody Kollapen said the organisation had been inundated with complaints of human rights viola tions on farms and decided to hold public hearings over three days. The hearings are a follow-up to the commission’s 2003 initial inquiry into human rights violations on farms, which highlighted the appalling conditions endured by farm workers. The inquiry painted a disturbing picture of South Africa’s countryside, characterised by grim living and working conditions, physical assaults on farm workers and frequent evictions. Many of these problems persist, and relations between different farming communities remain fragile. “We thought it would be correct to revisit the work that we did then,” said Kollapen. “ The most critical issues we identified are land issues, relations and human rights violations. But relations remains the most difficult issue,” he said . He said there appeared to be a systemic problem in Vryheid and surrounding areas, which may warrant a separate hearing in that area. AgriSA, on the other hand, believes that it is farmers who are under siege . In a statement posted on its website last month, the agricultural union said that during the past year the farming community had been more vulnerable than in previous years, with an increase of almost 25% in farm attacks. However, scores of ANC and tripartite alliance marchers who took to the streets of Vryheid on Friday last week in protest against farm abuse in the area would have none of that. Among other things, the marchers demanded transformation of the judiciary in Vryheid and that the local police service be overhauled to reflect the demographics of the area. They also demanded that all cases that “disappeared” from the hands of police in the past few years in Vryheid be reinvestigated and the perpetrators brought to book. One of the marchers related the story of a local farmer who did not allow workers to use a footpath near his forest. When the farmer found someone on the footpath he would take them back to where they had come from, said the woman. “We’ve used this path for years and the previous farmer didn’t have a problem with that. Now there’s this new farmer who doesn’t want us to use it. These are some of the problems we are subjected as farm dwellers,” she said. |