An oral history of a battle against hunger

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Drive Out Hunger
JJ Machobane and Robert Berold
2003
Jacana, Johannesburg

Reviewed by Lisa Macleod

Many southern Africans are no strangers to the grind of regular hunger, whether through poverty, circumstance or simply the unavailability of food of any sort. JJ Machobane was one such man, and swore to do something about it, not only for himself, but for his people too.

Drive out Hunger is the story of JJ Machobane, the Lesotho-based agriculturist who pioneered, perfected and professed the revolutionary Machobane Farming System of agricultural intercropping.

From humble beginnings in South Africa, and later in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho, Machobane discovered that being hungry is a state of being that no human should ever have to experience. As a child, he found himself, through utter desperation and a week of starvation, stealing a chicken to eat, and for an excruciatingly humiliating 30 days, sharing a trough with a group of pigs.

"Machobane discovered that being hungry is a state of being that no human should ever have to experience"

As he says in his book: "This incident taught me there is no way I could defeat hunger. I cried and am still crying even today to think that I have been eating with pigs . . . Even today when I see a man or a woman in tattered clothes and hungry, I cry. If I am eating and I see someone hungry, I want to pull the food out of my mouth and give it to them."

This horror and awareness of hunger, and the way it permeates the lives of the southern African poor, shaped Machobane’s vision for a solution, and drove his devotion to establishing a system that would ensure his people always had food to eat.

Machobane’s father, a sharecropper and proud descendant of Mzilikazi’s Zulus, relocated his family to Lesotho from South Africa when an apartheid law was passed against "sharecropping with kaffirs", and determining that the "kaffir" was instead to be employed (usually by a white farmer).

His father declared: "I am not going to be employed, and my children will never be employed… An employed man is like a nice fat beautiful dog; this dog has no right to do anything but what the master tells it to do."

Thus the Machobane family found themselves living in a mountainous, arid and poor country of Lesotho, where they battled continuously with stock theft and impossible agricultural conditions.

According to a report by the ACP-EU, only 9 per cent of "The Kingdom of the Sky’s" land is arable, and even that figure is declining because of the thin layer of topsoil, limited vegetation and the scourge of Aids on the farmers. Moreover, more than 40 million tons of topsoil are washed and blown away each year. The report states that while wind, weather and geography play their part, the ancient land tenure system and poor farming methods have also contributed to this state of affairs.

The inhabitants of the country have cut down most of the trees for firewood, and free roaming animals eat new shoots, causing further soil erosion, and leaving even less land for agriculture.

It was in the face of this poor state of affairs that JJ Machobane hatched his plan for a sustainable farming system. After years of research, he devised an intercropping system, which centres on the year-round production of a diversity of more than seven crops. As such, while normal farmers will grow one crop all year round, which is unrecoverable in the event of a natural disaster, this system involves planting a variety of vegetables in rows, at different times of the year.

The basic tenet of the system is that the combination of crops nourish the soil, bind it with their roots, and the farmers are able to harvest something at any given time of the year: hence the name of his teaching college, Mants’a Tlala, which means "Drive out Hunger".

In the Machobane Farming System potatoes are grown between July and December with rows of maize, beans, sorghum, pumpkin and watermelons planted between them. In winter, peas and wheat are planted. The land is enriched with ash from the many household fires, and manure from the animals in the area. When the wheat and potatoes are harvested in January and February the excess – of which there is usually plenty, especially potatoes, is sent to market. Potatoes have become a major cash crop for the farmers who use the Machobane system, and for many it is the first time they have been able to sell any of their products.

Machobane tells the story of his first group of farmers’ enormous potato crop, and how it eventually went to waste because of the reluctance of the markets to sell it. Machobane also details the amount of strife he endured throughout his attempt to teach and endorse his farming system: from his neighbours, the government, the church and the law.

His book, written in conjunction with Robert Berold, is essentially an oral autobiography preserved in text. It is an interesting read, peppered with funny anecdotes, and one can almost imagine the old man recounting the trials and tribulations of his life around a campfire. Unfortunately, it doesn’t equal an easy read, and a lot of the oral richness is lost on paper.

While it would have been sacrilege to edit it too heavily, the book is in parts quite difficult to follow, the chronology is lost and the immediate action of the tale peters out with no satisfying conclusion, leaving one to wonder what happened next.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that JJ Machobane’s contribution to African agriculture has been enormous, and his legacy will live on forever. It was also gratifying to read that he was awarded and lauded by the governments of countries all over the world, albeit largely castigated and harassed by the governments of Lesotho and South Africa for daring to challenge their (inferior) agricultural principles.

Truly a remarkable man, with a remarkable vision, Drive Out Hunger is worth reading simply to get an insight into the quirky, determined psyche of JJ Machobane.

Lisa MacLeod is a South African journalist working in London.