Política de Ventas

The farm workers’ insecure land tenure which led to their eviction from the land they buried their forefathers has affected immensely their right to culture. As the Moore family evicted the farm workers from their property they no longer give free access to them to perform their traditional ceremonies there. Just as Brooks and Kjelstrup (2014: 244) assertion, the Radway Green farm workers believe that there is a great connection between land and their ancestors as they regard the farm as theirs in the belief that because their ancestors (amadlozi) stayed and were buried there is sufficient to their claim that they are the owners of that land against the title deed the Moore family hold. As such they feel it is within their rights to go there and

29 _{Makhumalo Mlambo, Farm Labourer, Radway Green, October 2016.} 30

Page | 57 conduct rituals at their graves if they are in need of anything for the betterment of their livelihoods.

When we were evicted from Aloe Ridge farm, we left behind graves of our forefathers, children and relatives buried there unattended. We are so pained because that white person does not want us to enter there. Ever since we were evicted from the farm, we have to go through Jason or his wife Mandy to ask for permission to visit or conduct our traditional rituals brewing our traditional beer (umqomboti) to communicate with our ancestors on the graves. As it is we are not in good books with them so it means the means the permission for now is closed. It affects us so much for it is difficult to perform our rituals away from them 31

In order to get a clear understanding of this whole matter, this researcher interviewed Mrs Moore as the owners of the farm that evicted the farm workers to listen to her position on granting them access to the graves issue:

By law yes, if they ask. They have to give me a written notification and I have to give them a written permission by law. You can’t come to my door at 3pm in the afternoon and say I have 50 family members and we are going visit our graves. You can’t just announce yourself. The law says that you must write me a note. And these days they accept maybe an sms or a whatsapp message that’s accepted by law. I can either write a note or write back a whatsapp message consenting and agreeing on dates and on the agreed date I may supervise the activities or I may just say go ahead and conduct your ceremony.32

After explaining the normal way things should be operating, she however brought out the bone of contention at hand between her family and the evicted farm workers over access to the graves. She gave her account as follows:

At the moment, there is only one grave that is marked but there are more graves. If they fix my boundary fence that they stole from me then we are going to put up new fence around and we are just going to abandon that piece of ground for them. A while ago we offered to give them 3 hectares of ground in exchange for access but when they were not happy with it anymore they just took my access gates away. These are very unreasonable people and we

31 _{Mandisa Dikela, Farm Labourer, Radway Green, October 2016.} 32

Page | 58 have stayed very civil and very reasonable but we are now up to here with them (hand gesture to mean we are fed up).33

However, ECARP official Mr. Sodladla had a different point of view as he emphasized the fact that farm owners have continuously disregarded security of tenure laws put in place by the government at the expense of the vulnerable farm workers:

I don’t think they have access because when you are being evicted from an area that will mean you have no access to go back and clean the graves and do whatever you want to do. So I think it is exactly what you are saying that even though there is ESTA farm owners are still disregarding ESTA and they are continuously evicting people even though they are over 60 years or more. For the Radway Green people, they have been staying there for a long time but even though ESTA had been put in place prior to that, they were still evicted. 34

From the outlook of things, this study managed to prove that once the farm workers lost the rights to land they thought was theirs, they got their cultural right disrupted. What the Yendall family did or is still doing violates Section 31 of the Constitution that asserts that farm workers like any other citizens belong to cultural community hence must enjoy their culture without anyone denying them of that right. The same with ESTA but however, if it was a stronger legislation their security of tenure would have been protected.