Security of tenure points to the attachment of people to the biosphere and the entrapment to land and its ecosystem. When that attachment is threatened, ephemeral relationships marked by what appears to be irrational flights off the land in search of more secure tenure emerge.
In the Sesotho language — and possibly in all Bantu languages — there is an idiom, “hloma u hlomolle ha e ahe motse”, to describe constant flight from your anchor. The English translation is “a rolling stone gathers no moss”.
Apartheid was designed to turn blacks or non-whites into rolling stones. The community of Winterveld near Mabopane was such a rolling stone with dramatic and abrupt convulsions on the eve of the 1994 breakthrough.
I headed Bophuthatswana Statistics as the director, but I also had a two-year stint at Agricor as a development researcher. In preparation for the 1985 Census of Bophuthatswana I came to have intimate knowledge about settlements in the area and their evolution. Between 1989 to 1993 there were abrupt convulsions in Winterveld that showed how apartheid created conditions for perpetual rolling stones. It embedded seeds of endless conflict.
The Jericho cropping scheme to the north west of Winterveld had shown so much success that two developments were intended by the Agricultural Development Corporation of Bophuthatswana for which I was an employee. The first was to expand the cropping lands and the second was to deepen and increase irrigation capacity in this area.
To achieve the second objective, water from the Klipgat water treatment plant near Kgabalatsane would be diverted from flowing into the Toloane river through a pipeline that would be constructed and slope through Winterveld. My task was to establish the socioeconomic implications of constructing the pipeline through Winterveld. This is when I had a much closer and obnoxious brush unlike the innocuous relationship when I counted the population in 1985 and 1991 in these Ten Morgens.
It happens that under apartheid’s grand scheme of forced resettlement, people were assigned farms in Winterveld, hence the name Ten Morgens. But because of proximity to work opportunities the Ten Morgens were soon to be turned into rental stock where tenants erected movable shacks. The Ten Morgens belong predominantly to the Baloyi and Mahlangu surnames and these surnames are now place names.
The stalwart Dr Sam Motsuenyane retained his Ten Morgens as a farm and practised what is to be seen as urban farming up to his last days on earth. A tale for another day.
The dynamics on the ground were interesting as alliances at a political level created strange bedfellows one moment and parted ways the next. They reflected the power of alignment of interests. No permanent friends or permanent enemies, only alignments of interest — politics.
The people who held the title to the Ten Morgens were supposed to pay a levy to the central government in Pretoria. They did not. The tenants on the Ten Morgens needed services and for those to be rendered they had to provide proof of residence. They could not provide proof of residence because the landlords had defaulted on their payments and their right to occupy was revoked by Pretoria, yet the now illegal landlords still siphoned rental from the tenants. Tenants could not get IDs, among other crucial services, because they could not prove residence.
So when the Bophuthatswana government decided to have a pipeline, the ownership of the Ten Morgens was invoked. The tenants’ hope was that at last they would have an opportunity to face their faceless landlords, who according to the tenants “vanished into the flashy life of Soweto” and left them high and dry.
So they supported the drive for the mooted construction of the pipeline that would possibly grant them new rights to tenure — throwing their weight behind government but pitting themselves against the landlords. But they wanted access to the water from the pipeline otherwise they would block the pipeline — their interests aligning with the landlords’ and pitting themselves against the government. An impasse emerged.
In the meantime, the 1994 breakthrough was about to happen and within months in 1992/93 Winterveld became depopulated as neighbouring lands were invaded towards Temba. The student population in Winterveld halved and the modern double-storey schools Mangope had built went empty, yet at the point of destination there were no schools.
These are some of the sins of apartheid whose effects continue to cause trauma among their victims — the blacks, coloureds and Indians. Little is remembered about these when white farmers hear the hailer from across the Atlantic.
• Dr Pali Lehohla is a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a Research Associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former Statistician-General of South Africa
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