Toil and hardship in impenetrable Gantsi farms
Gothataone Moeng | Friday March 7, 2014 16:34
As one of the thousands of workers who eke out a living on the sprawling farms located just outside the Gantsi township, Qhuam readily admits that he struggles from month-to-month to provide for his children.
His two eldest live with their aunts, while he shares his one-roomed house with his wife and youngest daughter.
On the farm he currently works, Qhuam looks after sheep and helps cut the grass for feeding the farmer’s cattle. Even though his salary is P850 per month, he says at the end of each month he receives around P500, with the rest of his money going back to the farm owners for goods he has bought from them on credit during the month.
It is a cycle: mid-month his groceries run out, so he buys food items like sugar, tea and mealie-meal from the shop on the farm on credit, at the end of the month he has to pay for the items, which ensures that the money he receives is not enough for the month’s supplies, leading him back to getting more food on credit. The rest of the money he has to divide between his family in Gantsi and those in D’Kar.
“It’s never enough,” he tells Mmegi, “I get a phone call from my oldest daughter wanting shoes, and while I try to buy those, my other daughter will say she needs a school bag.”
Qhuam’s father, who also worked on the farms as a labourer, used to help with extra money. But since he passed away, he has no other help. Despite his troubles, Qhuam acknowledges he is one of the better farm workers.
Like him, many other farm workers are forced to spend all their time on the farms. There they live in shelters with their wives and children. As most of these farms are removed from Gantsi, farm workers have to depend on the magnanimous farm owners for transport into the town.
When some of the farm workers get too old for work, they have to leave the farms. Most of them end up squatting with relatives in Gantsi or D’Kar or in nearby settlements.
Although there are attempts by some parents to send their children to schools, it becomes hard on both parties to remain separated for long. As a result, many students in this area drop out of school.
Qhuam himself left school in Form 2, although he says it was as a result of an eye infection during his examinations. Some workers have been working on the farms from generation to generation, with a son working for the son of the man his father worked for.
Many are subjected to abusive language from their bosses. According to Qhuam, farm labourers in the area have no options for alternative employment, except to flock to white-owned farms to seek employment. Qhuam said if they complain or confront the owners about the standard of living on the farms they are met with vulgar language.
The story of the exploitation of Gantsi farm workers is not a new one. It is a story that flares up and is packaged anew when some new outrage is revealed. Recently, the town has come under the spotlight for the murder of a farmer by two of her farm workers.
Not new either is the indifference that seems to meet the periodic complaints of exploitation by the labourers. Sometimes, this indifference comes from the officials whose duty it is to protect the farm workers.
Kebonye Thabi, 51, a retired farm worker from Gantsi accuses labour officials of neglecting complaints by farm workers, saying that they give in to bribes from white farm owners.
Thabi, who worked on different farms for 12 years, cited an incident in which one of her former colleagues reported a case to the labour offices complaining that he was not given his leave days and monthly wages, before being fired.
“Labour officials would register the case and visit the farm owner to carry out an inspection and conduct mediation. Surprisingly the officials would be bribed with goat meat. It actually happened in my presence more than twice as some officials would be offered drinks and goat meat and then drive back with a promise that they would return, only for them to never do so,” explained Thabi.
A questionnaire sent to the Ministry of Labour and Home Affairs regarding the conditions of work and inspections by labour officials had not been responded to by the time of going to press.
At the root of the indifference is the peculiarity of Gantsi as a town. Located in the western part of the country, the town recorded a population of 12,267 during the 2011 population census.
Today the town is home to Afrikaners, Basarwa, Bakgalagadi and Baherero. But before the advent of the British rule over the then Bechuanaland Protectorate, Basarwa and Bakgalagadi almost exclusively occupied the Gantsi area.
According to the report Examining Constitutional, Legislative and Administrative Provisions Concerning Indigenous Peoples in Botswana, as part of their desire to guard against the expansion of the German and the Afrikaans, the British settled a number of Boer families in the area to act as a buffer against the Germans.
The report says Afrikaner families were granted freehold leases over the land in the area, as if the land was previously unoccupied.
“This was in line with the British policy of indirect rule in terms of which local traditional political institutions were used to rule over native populations. As a result, only native populations which were in political control were recognised as tribes and as having distinct political territories,” the report states.
But the British were merely endorsing a political organisation that was already in existence, in which militarily weaker tribes such as the Basarwa and Bakgalagadi were often assimilitated into bigger tribes or pushed into the harsher areas of the country.
This reinforced the concept of the principal and so-called minority tribes in the country. While the government, at independence, pushed for a homogenous, non-tribal society, at least in theory, the concept of the majority and minority tribe prevails to this day, with tribes such as the Basarwa and Bakgalagadi at the bottom of the totem pole.
Another factor is the impenetrability of Gantsi as a town, and the inaccessibility of the farms themselves. Some of the farms are big enough to function as small communities, with shops and in some cases, according to sources, schools.
But access to the farms is not easy for government officers to reach because of rough terrain, which mostly requires a 4x4 vehicle.
As private property the farms are out of bounds, and even labour inspection officers would require a permit to get inside the farms. As a result of this inaccessibility, some residents of Gantsi are convinced that more goes on inside the farms than meets the eye, with few daring or even caring to investigate.
*Not his real name