The Indentured Life of Blacks in Rural South Africa

THE GREAT KARROO, SOUTH AFRICA —  Ride beneath the big sky, pass parched scrub bushes and a certain dirt road curves close to a small hill. Nestled in the shade of the hill lies John Biggs’ 12,000-acre farm with palm trees, grapes, corn and 4,000 sheep.

Over Easter weekend, the senior black farmhand on Biggs’ farm drove around the workers’ quarters, taking nips of homemade brew and hobnobbing with his fellow workers. Then he weaved through the trees in the farmer’s car, parked it precisely near the farmer’s house and passed out 100 feet away.

Biggs fancies himself enlightened, so he didn’t fire the worker. Instead he enlisted the services of an itinerant black evangelist, Zachariah Timothy, master of six African languages and healer of souls. “These people have been living an ungodly life. They are blinded by evil things, drinking and staying together in an unmarried life,” Timothy said, sitting in his ironed white shirt and tie, sipping tea under the vines on Biggs’ patio. So in exchange for room and board and a healthy fee, he is trying “through the Holy Spirit, to set the workers free from being so much in the world.”

But the farmhands here say their problem isn’t spiritual, but physical. “We believe that drinking won’t be a problem when we have better living conditions and wages,” said Klaas Grobler, the farm’s “boss boy,” or senior black farmhand. According to Grobler, his problem wasn’t loose living. “We should have had Easter weekend off, but we didn’t. So we decided on our own not to work.”

More than a dozen farm workers interviewed on the farm displayed deep hostility towards Biggs and the itinerant evangelist, whom Biggs is paying the same as half a dozen of the farm laborers put together. Biggs treats the 20 families on his farm better than most South African farmers treat their employees, but each laborer still earns just 85 cents to $3 a day. Those that operate equipment are fined when the equipment breaks down. While Biggs has a swimming pool and tennis court next to his sprawling 18th Century house shaded by poplars and pines, the laborers live without electricity and share communal water taps. Some workers live in small, three-room houses; others cram families into single rooms in hostels down the road where vines of dark grapes stand row on row. To relieve the boredom and emptiness of their lives, the workers concoct a homemade brew made of King Korn home brew sorghum malt, pineapple, yeast, bread and water; for $2.50 they make enough to keep the whole work force in an inebriated haze for a weekend.

This farm isn’t unusual. Indeed, by the standards of South African farmers, Biggs is enlightened. In other areas, farm workers complain of being beaten. One laborer who worked for no remuneration other than the right to grow a little corn and graze five cattle, went to seek work elsewhere. He was shot and killed by a farmer for crossing the farmer’s property.

Some farmers pay as little as 10 cents a day. Often the laborers pay their meager salaries back to the farmers to supplement food rations. A rural-action group in Johannesburg says that in handling disability cases, it has never been able to convince the government compensation board that any farm worker has a total income of more than $25 a month, including wages, housing and food.

While labor unions have improved conditions for many black South African industrial workers, the 1.3 million black farm workers are trapped in what amounts to indentured servitude. The political influence of South Africa’s white farmers resulted in the exclusion of farm workers from the Basic Conditions of Employment Act. That means farm workers get no leaves of absence and no sick leave. They can be forced to work an unlimited number of hours without overtime pay and can be summarily dismissed without cause. One woman who was a cook on Biggs’ farm says she was fired for arriving late one day--after the 5:30 a.m. starting time. She had worked there for 19 years and was earning $30 a month.

If farm workers fall sick, they must transport themselves into town. While Mrs. Biggs’ white Mercedes stands parked near the house, laborers pay $10 or $20 for a taxi to town or walk 15 or 20 miles to a doctor. Once a month, Biggs drives the workers into town. They stay about three hours, then he drives them back.

The case of the boss boy illustrates how a worker is bound. He earns enough to keep alive but not enough to be free of his employer. Grobler, the best-paid worker on Biggs’ farm, says he earns $18.75 a week. The farmer says he gives each worker 7 1/2 pounds of meat a week, but workers say that they must buy other food from him at prices he fixes. Grobler says supplementing his family’s diet costs another $12.50 a week.

Grobler’s children attend the farm school, a neat three-room structure near Biggs’ house. The wives of three neighboring farmers teach there; one emerges to talk, carrying a stick she uses to instill discipline. The classrooms are lavish by standards of South African black education. However it only goes up to grade six, and Grobler’s oldest child is in grade seven. Biggs doesn’t contribute money toward the oldest child’s school fees or toward the cost of boarding the child in town. The fees leave Grobler unable to save any money. Indeed he says some of the drinking parties are held to raise money for school fees.

There is an apartheid twist to these tales of abuse. South African blacks didn’t always live in such destitute conditions. In the early 1900s, blacks were often sharecroppers, owned substantial amounts of their cattle and grew their own crops. Many owned land. But in response to the demands of white farmers, the government passed the Land Acts of 1913 and 1936, making it illegal for blacks to own more than 10% of the land in South Africa and making it easier for white farmers to evict black tenants. Thousands of blacks took to the roads, wandering with their cattle. In the end, they were forced to work for white farmers and give up their own crops and cattle. Some black tenant farmers remain today, but have no protection under the law; they are forced to work for white farmers in exchange for access to land. The number of cattle they can own is usually limited to 10 or less.

Farm laborers traditionally must obtain letters of permission from farmers to seek work elsewhere. One diplomat recalls picking up 30-year-old Molefi Monnakhale in the southern Orange Free State as he was walking 14 miles to the nearest Anglican Church. Monnakhale had obtained permission in 1979 to seek work in Johannesburg and had become a truck driver’s assistant earning $150 a month. When the company moved to a different town, he needed another letter from the farm where he was born in order to move with the company. But the farmer refused him the letter, forcing Monnakhale to work on the farm for a monthly wage of just $17.50 and 44 pounds of cornmeal.

Many farm laborers are unceremoniously dismissed when they grow old or when droughts hit; then they are left penniless in crowded black townships or become vagrants. Kaiser Kolelo, age 78, and his wife Maria are two such people. The couple receives a government pension, but they say they must borrow money in order to feed themselves and their family. They have nothing left from their years of farm labor. Kaiser Kolelo drove tractors, turned windmills and plowed fields. Yet after a lifetime of work, Kolelo was earning just $15 a month, plus rations of corn, sugar, coffee and tobacco.

Now the Kolelo family lives in a crumbling four-room house with 10 other people in the black township of Graaf Reinet. Outside in the gutted street, the couple has a clear view of the immaculate church steeple in the white part of town. Inside, the view isn’t so uplifting. The house has only two mangy beds; floors are earthen. Kolelo wears a dirty coat several sizes too large for his emaciated body. One room is no longer used because the roof caved in. In another, the wall is falling in. The sky shows through corrugated metal held up by wooden slats. “When it is raining, it is as though we are sleeping outside,” said Mrs. Kolelo. “It feels as though the whole house is a sea.”