The Seed is Mine

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The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine - a South African Sharecropper 1894-1985
Charles van Onselen
(First published 1996)

At the Native Commissioner' s offices, Kas and Mosala joined a long queue of, in the insidious paternalistic idiom of the day, '"boys" from the farms'. There, the sixty year old and his nineteen year old son rubbed shoulders with hundreds of other 'boys', black men who, regardless of age, dress, income, physique or status, had their thumbprints taken like so many common criminals before being issued with a 'dompas' that, overtly, recorded the date and place of their birth and their ethnic identity and covertly determined where, when and at what rates they could sell their labour in the land of their birth. Under these fraught circumstances it was hardly surprising that the sharecroppers at MaHersch's wondered who was responsible for bringing down this bureaucratic plague upon them, and how long it would be before they would be asked to make way for the white farmers who wanted Rietvlei.

On the way home Kas and Mosala each reflected privately on what the passbook was meant to achieve. For Mosala it was a clerical ball-and-chain, a document designed to keep him in the countryside and deny him access to the lucrative labour markets of the Witwatersrand. Indirectly it made him subservient to patriarchal authority. The cautious and pragmatic Kas saw it differently. For him the book, like virtually all government documentation, had the potential both to imprison and to free. The Native Commissioner, on learning Kas had been born before the rinder-pest, had told him he might well be exempted from the poll tax and be eligible for a state pension. For Kas and others like him, the dompas might well be the key to hitherto unknown benefits. Time alone would tell.

Unfortunately, not everything in life could wait for time. At Rietvlei the maize, sorghum and sunflowers continued to suffer from the drought. Kas and Saul Ngakane, who were spending more time together since Bodule's departure, discussed the situation, but there was nothing to be done without rain. Neighbouring farms were no better. Visitors up and down the valley spoke gloomily about the coming winter, pessimistic talk that served only to unsettle people further.

Not all the visitors to the farm were bona fide guests of the inhabitants. Complex legal provisions allowed strangers to funnel through sections of the property at all sorts of odd hours of the day and night. This made the tenants responsible for guarding the livestock and other possessions all the more tense. Yet this unwanted traffic rendered an unexpectedly pleasant surprise.

One afternoon in November 1954, Kas and Mosala were out in the fields with the truck when a white man drove past, stopped and then turned around to take another, more careful look at the Ford. Kas watched, motionless, as the Boer got out of his car and moved very slowly toward them. He edged within speaking distance and then introduced himself as J.C. Marx from Cyferbult, near Buckingham.

The seventeen year old Ford was a complete liability. It was a good time to get rid of it. The only problem was that Marx, like so many of Cas Greyling's peri-urban constituents, was yet another economically marginalised Afrikaner with no capital. In the end, after a great deal of preliminary negotiation Kas decided to take a chance: the Ford was exchanged for an ox-wagon and forty-six pounds in cash payable in December. Marx recorded the transaction for them in the unsteady hand characteristic of most rural folk whether back or white. Marx, unlike Dinta, was an honourable man, and he paid his debt. Afrikaners, like everyone, came in all shapes and sizes. Despite his joy at getting rid of the Ford, Kas knew that all was not well. The exchange of a truck acquired in a time of economic strength for an ox-wagon in a season of financial weakness epitomised the fragility of his defences. He was being left behind in the great race for progress, a race in which he had always been amongst the very keenest competitors, and there was very little he could do about it. He felt vulnerable, and over the next weeks he felt worse still.

Early one morning shortly after the advent of the new year, Kas took stock of what was left of the remaining maize, sorghum and sunflowers in the field. He was in a sombre mood. Then it slowly dawned on him that perhaps it was not just lack of rain that was destroying the crops. Had he not lived through droughts before and survived? No, it was unresolved tensions within the community that accounted for his failure! 'There were fights between the black at Rietvlei and they made use of potions to impoverish one another. My crops died without any apparent reason. I realised that the crop was bewitched.'

Yet again he was being victimised for his virtues rather than his vices. Back at Sewefontein he had had to endure the envy and resentment of neighbouring whites; at Rietvlei it was the blacks. 'They had once heard Mrs. Hersch remarking, "Good Heavens! You have been outfarmed by Maine. He has only just arrived and yet he has produced so many bags." It seems they became jealous.' Success and failure were, in the end, two sides of the same counterfeit coin.

Yet not even hidden enemies exempted a man from the need to feed his family and, as the battered grain struggled to set, Kas detected a new problem: thousands of small insects, makgwaba, were invading the maize and sorghum. He did his best to minimise the damage by snaring a large hadedah and placing the outstretched wings of the bird over the fields. But eventually he conceded that he was using the charm far too late, for most of the damage had already been done by the time he got around to killing the bird. The plague shrank the harvest even further.

Just as the last nibble of autumn gave way to the first bite of winter, the blight that black sharecroppers feared most of all, suddenly reappeared. The Member of Parliament for Ventersdorp and a few vociferous supporters started visiting the property at odd moments, complaining about 'Jews being made rich by kaffirs.' Cas Greyling told Maine that the issue of 'squatting' had been discussed in parliament and that '...there were many whites who did not have a place' to farm while others said the police were doing nothing to enforce the law.

Without a landlord as a buffer, the tenants at Rietvlei were made uneasy by these pronouncements, but nothing more happened and they regained their composure. The Maines collected a modest 'night harvest,' carefully stacked in the back of the shack. Kas relaxed a little. A week later, on 20 June, he visited Phitise, and while at Doornkop went across to the BaKwena-ba-Mogopa farm at Zwartkop to visit Thakane, whom he had not seen since leaving the Triangle. It was a pleasant reunion but a costly one, because she borrowed thirty-eight pounds from him: Kas took the precaution of getting her to sign an I.O.U witnessed by Phitise and two of her male friends.

Cas Greyling reappeared. This time, in addition to the usual menacing talk about Jews, squatters and lawyers, he expressed interest in buying two of Kas's oxen. Kas was not averse to the idea - the loan to Thakane and the prospect of poor harvest meant that cash would be at a premium - but he was mindful of whom he was dealing with. He told Greyling he would need the written permission of the farm owner before he could dispose of livestock, and Greyling agreed to wait. When MaHersch's son, Oscar, chanced to visit the farm on 28 June, Kas got him to draft a note to assure any prospective buyer that the animals belonged to the tenant and were not stolen.

As far as Kas could see, the landlord at De Beerskraal was a 'poor white man.' Cas Greyling could not have found it easy to do business with an independent black farmer; not only was it personally humiliating to have to deal with black sharecroppers whose demeanour distinguished them from the cowed farm labourers over whom he and his constituents presided, but their presence in the valley was an affront to the theory and practice of racial segregation which he championed. When he called to collect the two oxen a few days later he was in the arrogant and belligerent mood that characterised most of his parliamentary performances. The old regime, which allowed people like Mrs. Hersch to turn 'black folk into bosses,' he announced, was on the way out. He, Cas Greyling, was about to hire Rietvlei so that it could be cleared of 'squatters' and farmed by white men.

The prospect of having Greyling as a landlord was unthinkable. Kas rushed to Saul Ngakane to find out what was happening, but the foreman knew of no plan to let the property. The two of them went to the post office at Rysmierbult to phone the landlady, who reassured Ngakane that she had not even been approached about the matter. It seemed like just another false alarm in a bad year. Cas Greyling reappeared a week or two later to tell Kas that the oxen that he had bought had sickened and died, but he made no further mention of hiring the property.

Kas's share of the harvest was so small that he did not even bother committing the sum to memory. Mrs. Hersch came, bustled about with the big black book and then left for Johannesburg. Shortly thereafter Kas went with Mosala to the police station at Rysmierbult, where the Bantu Commissioner, remembering their earlier encounter at Ventersdorp, gave him and several elderly men from other farms certificates exempting them from the poll tax. Kas felt vindicated. Sometimes he found it difficult to understand why it was that the young made such an awful fuss about the reference books.

But the Afrikaner Nationalists knew what they were doing. For the likes of Hendrik Verwoerd, Cas Greyling and a growing army of bureaucrats, all Acts, Bills and instruments at their disposal 'fitted into a pattern and together formed a single constructive plan,' Apartheid. and Greyling had been far from idle. Once again there was talk of action being taken against 'squatters.'

In 1955 as in 1949, the Afrikaner Nationalists, after careful and conscious deliberation, were putting the Maines and black families like them under the political lash. Twice within six years whites had used their power and influence to attack and render inoperative such paternalistic structures as remained in the countryside so that their demands for an exploitable pool of cheap black labour could be readily met and so that they might benefit from the apartheid regime's twinned objectives of racial segregation and capital accumulation. Only the cruellest twist of fate dictated that Kas should have chosen to construct this last major defence of peasant enterprise on the very site of an enemy outpost. A black sharecropping family fleeing across the face of inhospitable white farmland and already riven within by generational, gender and personality conflicts was no match for the organised strike power of the Boers. The Maines prepared for yet another move.

Even at that late stage, an experienced campaigner could still find ways of hiding his loved ones from the pursuing troops, putting his head down and surviving for one more season. Here and there, if one only knew where to look, a few tumble-down paternalistic structures could be found dotting the increasingly black and devastated highveld social landscape. Kas put his faith in MaHersch.

Paula Hersch knew the names of several farming families in and around Klerkskraal, six miles north of Rietvlei. The Herschmanns, the Rosenthals, for example, had lived in that district for many years, and not only occasionally sub-let sections of their own property, but also knew the names of other landlords who might be willing to take in a few sharecroppers. It was through this network that she had first heard of the farm Varkenskraal (Tswana-speakers preferred to call it Mamanthana) where a friend of hers had hired land to a certain Vermeulen. She got out the black book, made a few phones calls, and then told Kas and the foreman where they might find Hans Vermeulen, who was waiting for them.

Vermeulen did not actually live on the property, which was always an advantage, and the farm was close enough to the upper reaches of the Mooi River, which flowed to the nearby Klerkskraal Dam, for the livestock to have easy access to water. Grazing, too, seemed adequate. The only problems were the many poisonous snakes and the fact that the land set aside for arable farming had never before been put under the plough. Kas and Ngakane exchanged notes in the vernacular and then told Vermeulen that they would join him at Mamanthana as soon as they had wound up their affairs at Mrs. Hersch's.

At Rietvlei Kas told the family to prepare for a short move north which would leave the Maines only twenty miles short of their ultimate refuge, the stands at Molote. His wives and daughters packed up their modest collection of household goods, while he and Mosala assembled their formidable array of agricultural equipment, leather goods and hand tools. On 30 August, only days before leaving Rietvlei, Kas and Mosala took ten bags of white maize and six bags of sunflower seeds in to the Buckingham branch of the Sentraal Westelike Koöperatiewe Maatskappy Beperk (S.W.K.M.B) and sold them for twenty-one pounds, ten shillings and sixpence.

Not having to retreat into the distant wildernesses which had once been known as 'native reserves' and which the word-wizards of the regime was now calling Bantu Homelands, the Maines were amongst the last to leave Rietvlei. They left behind them Bodule's first home, the hut Kas had built for his oldest son. Leaving the farm for the last time, the family passed several other mud houses with gaping holes where fleeing tenants had plucked door and window frames as they ran before the advancing nationalist storm. Where sheets of corrugated iron held down by rounded stones or giant pumpkins had once protected peasant living rooms, the summer sun now scorched deserted earthen floors. The unknown white farmers to come, seeing only the mud shells left by squatters, would demolish what had, for a decade and a half, been the homes of a self sufficient sharecropping community. The Nationalists had already shown they could eat up the ghetto homes of South Africa's urban blacks for purposes of segregation rather than social upliftment, and now they were developing what would become in due course a truly gargantuan appetite for rural homes. As Verwoerd told anybody who would listen, 'Everything fitted into a pattern and together formed a single constructive plan,' apartheid. In another world, in another place, Oliver Goldsmith had once witnessed a not dissimilar phenomenon and written:

At Varkenskraal, his mind still as far away from abstracted generalisations as it had been on the day three decades earlier when he was first approached by the organisers of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union, Kas had urgent immediate tasks: to find a suitable site for the homestead, to build a kraal and some shacks. Then he and Ngakane paced out and marked plots of their own and made a preliminary survey of all the bushes, trees and stones that would have to be removed before they could start ploughing.

Mosala helped Kas clear Vermeulen's field, a task which was less tiring than they had feared, since the soil had been turned so often in the past. As Kas suspected, the real problem was the new fields, which had been allocated so as not to be, among other things, too visible to the likes of Cas Greyling, whose own farm, De Beerskraal, was only a few miles south. Without his two oldest sons to help him, Kas found working the new fields very taxing. Mosala did his best, but even he had to admit that the family was desperately short of muscle power. A little way off Ngakane, too, battled to clear virgin bush by day. But night around a fire, the men reassured one another that it was all worthwhile, for the soil looked so promising and the rains were on schedule.

This up-beat assessment was vindicated over the next weeks, and by the time the plumber's assistant returned from Blyvooruitsig in early December, the first sowings were showing signs of promise. Bodule came home to enjoy the statutory break that employees in the building industry were allowed, but he decided to stay on for the birth of his third child, who was due later that month. He was disappointed that not more had been accomplished in his absence, and asked Kas to let him open up another patch of land so that he, too, might capitalise on the rains. It seemed a good idea, all the more so because none of the fields was in any way comparable to those at Rietvlei.

Right from the outset, Bodule let it be known that he was now the head of a household in his own right: his relationship with Kas had changed. This was evident not so much in what he said - for he, too, was a quiet man who often preferred the company of his hunting dogs to that of people - as in what he did. He chose a patch far away from that ploughed by Kas and Mosala, cleared it all by himself, and then signalled his long-term intentions by building a separate grain store and a new hut for his wife. After six years of married life she would no longer have to draw mealie meal from her father-in-law's house.

Kas never overtly challenged these outward manifestations of changing inner convictions. As far as he was concerned, they were part of the life cycle and had been mercifully slow in coming. Yet Bodule's declaration of independence gave rise to minor resentments and tension. Dikeledi, always quick to detect a change in Kas's behaviour, had the impression that her father-in-law sometimes felt that the process had not been taken far enough, that maybe Bodule and his entire family should move right out of his orbit. Bodule, however, was more upset by the harsh words exchanged when his father simply slipped back into his old habits and assumed that his son would weed his field after spending hours working on his own.

This argument left a gash in their relationship, but it was largely forgotten when, on 23 December, Dikeledi gave birth to her third son, Mokentsa. The arrival of the baby, who like all the other grandchildren was ushered into the world by Leetwane, was in itself an occasion for celebration, but it became an even bigger one when Morwesi appeared. She had been away working at the bottle store in Potchefstroom for a long time, but she wanted to spend Christmas with her parents and her daughter, Pakiso.

The composition of the Maine family was changing rapidly. Nthakwana had once again left home, this time to be near Matthews Moate, a new man in her life who worked on Faan Naude's farm near Rietvlei. Mosala had slipped away to visit his lover, a woman named Motshidisi Mogwase. As Kas surveyed this gathering he could not but see that his children were moving out into a wider world, and were being replaced by the five grandchildren.

Yet not even that pattern was clear or constant. The children (with the notable exception of Matlakala and Thakane, daughters of the 'second' and 'third' wives) tended to drift in, and out of the household. As with most young adults the world over, the first break from the family was hardly ever complete. The only permanent loss appeared to have been Mmusetsi. Bodule and Nthakwana shifted around, depending on circumstances. Indeed, later that month Morwesi suddenly told them she would not be returning to Potchefstroom. She had been offered work as a domestic servant at Klerkskraal, where her employer was to be none other than Sergeant Jonker, the very policeman whom Kas had got to know so well during the years at Kareepoort.

A job in Klerkskraal meant that Morwesi would be closer to Pakiso who, at the age of ten, was a major help to her grandparents. Like Nkamang before her, however, she was soon subjected to many pressures that came with working for her grandfather. He would send her out late at night to find stray sheep or goats even though she had a great terror of owls; he was impatient when she shied away from dealing with an ox that had pulled the plough clear of the furrow - he shoved and pummelled her towards the unruly beast. Once, after he had taken a leather thong to her for dithering over her herding duties, she had called him Ramollwana as her aunts and uncles had done before her. At moments like that, when the Box of Matches was in full flame, she became strangely quiet, as if she were keeping a private account that she would one day settle with her grandfather.

Yet, despite their being a rather odd couple - an irascible old man and a timid young girl - they got on well enough and spent many happy hours together. Sometimes the work cheated them of the success they deserved. Despite their best efforts, sheep accustomed to the diet of dry scrub in the Triangle seemed incapable of adjusting to the lusher grasses of the Mooi River valley. Kas discussed this with Bodule and they decided to sell all but ten of the sheep. Luckily the cattle did better: at Rietvlei the herd numbered twenty cows and twenty-eight draught oxen belonging to Kas and Bodule and the landlord was not too concerned about how many animals they kept at Varkenskraal.

Indeed, Vermeulen didn't seem concerned about anything. His visits to the farm were infrequent, and he tended to confine his attentions to his maize field, which, thanks to above average rainfall, did well. The only time he noticed the two new fields opened up by his tenants, he merely expressed surprise at how well the crops were doing on land he had considered unsuited for them. Of the other Boers there was very little sign. The only remotely suspicious outsider to visit the property was an official from the Transvaal Provincial Administration who appeared in mid-February to issue dog licences and collect a wheel tax. Having already lost two dogs to snake bites, Kas paid him a pound for the right to keep the two surviving dogs and further ten shillings for the ox-wagon.

An outlay of thirty shillings was no great burden on a man who owned close on forty cattle, and Kas did not begrudge the state its income. As with many sharecropping patriarchs, however, it was not so much state taxes he feared as taxes from within. A fortnight or so after the visit by the T.P.A. officer, Mosala told him of his wish to get married and asked him to arrange for the customary discussion about bohadi with his prospective bride's family who lived on a farm near Muiskraal. This predictable development was something of a disappointment to Kas. He had always hoped that his sons, like himself, would marry in their mid - rather than early twenties. But there wasn't much he could do about it, and so he arranged for an intermediary drawn, like the prospective parents-in-law, from the Reverend Jwili's congregation. There could be no room for misunderstanding. The on-going struggle with the Teeus was reminder enough that bohadi was always a potentially explosive issue.

By the time the parties had agreed on a price of ten cattle, the worst of the summer's heat had been drawn and Kas's thoughts were on harvesting. Kas watched as Leetwane and the younger girls brought in the crops from what he still considered the 'family' field, while, out on the smaller patch, Bodule worked with Dikeledi and his 'mother,' Lebitsa, to bring in the grain for his new, separate store. Kas was watching the dissolution of the old household: Dikeledi was participating in the birth of the new. It hurt.

Even without Bodule's help, the old firm managed to produce more than two hundred bags of maize. Farther down the track Saul Ngakane, too, did well. When Vermeulen arrived to divide the harvest, he was satisfied with his tenant's performance and again expressed admiration for what had been achieved on the newly developed fields. Bodule's smaller harvest was exempted from sharing. A private arrangement with the property owner allowed him the right to crop in return for looking after some of the owner's cattle, said to be destined for the Johannesburg meat market. Indeed, he soon drove the cattle to the abattoir, a forbidding prospect. But the privilege of not having to share his harvest only rubbed salt into old wounds and did nothing to ease underlying tensions.

Soon preparations for Mosala's wedding were well advanced. Kas was told his son's marriage would have to be formally registered at the magistrate's offices in Ventersdorp by an appropriately empowered official. The state, it seemed, heard of everything. It could also do as it pleased. On a clear spring day back in 1939, the police had invaded the wedding reception that Joseph Modisalife had organised for his son, turned it into a riotous tax-and-pass raid, overturned the beer and food, and then arrested the guests. In South Africa, not even a well-meaning black patriarch could ensure his son a trouble-free wedding. He tracked down Vermeulen, obtained verbal permission to brew beer for the guests and then got the police sergeant on duty at the police station in Klerkskraal to give him a permit. Even pragmatists could get scars.

But there was no trouble. Mosala's wedding was a perfectly enjoyable occasion, attended by members of both families as well as close friends like the Reverend Jwili and the Ngakanes. Kas soon built the couple a house of their own, a gesture that had been too slow in coming in Bodule's case but in this instance, was especially important since Motshidisi would soon produce her first child. As Kas aged he began to realise that tact and diplomacy which, in his youth, he had tended to reserve largely for dealing with landlords and outsiders, had as much place within the family as beyond it.

With the harvest and wedding behind them, life fell easily and naturally into the rhythm of the off-season. Kas spent time drinking beer with Saul Ngakane; occasionally, he would be interrupted by a former client from Rietvlei in search of herbal remedies and wanting to chat about the fate of MaHersch's tenants. There was cobbling, harness making and leather work to be done, and, as always, winter was the only time to repair planters, ploughs and harrows, which, along with their owner, were beginning to show their age.

And, of course, the women of the household looked to earn a little extra cash making baskets, collecting and drying cattle dung, helping out in the kitchens of local farmers, and, in Leetwane's case, providing sage advice and practical assistance as a midwife. Unlike the winters at Muiskraal and Rietvlei when the spectre of losing the property at Doornkop had cast a pall over their efforts, there was no real conflict about these activities at Varkenskraal, and, until Matlakala reappeared, the family seemed pleasantly relaxed.