Making Their Own Miracles

A year ago this time, Nelson Mandela was standing amid a roar of adulation in Oslo as he received the Nobel Peace Prize, symbolizing the triumph of black African rights in his native land. Last week he had only words of hard truth for 2,000 blacks, many of them barefoot and clad in tatters, gathered at a soccer field among the shacks of Orange Farm, a township in the southern Transvaal. Seven months into his term as President of South Africa, the good times he promised have barely begun. “Don’t expect us to do miracles,” he told the crowd. “Before the election I went around telling all our people that we wanted to ensure a better life for everybody. I bring you no good news.”

Even so, a revolution is quietly under way in this vast land. Here and there, in inventive and encouraging ways, individuals and groups of South Africans, white and black, are profoundly altering the way things were.

Beside a dusty, rural road in the eastern Transvaal, six families of black farmers gathered two weeks ago under a thorn tree to celebrate their return to their ancestral lands. A hand-lettered cardboard sign hanging on a frayed tent nearby read Ra Boile Gae in Pedi, a language spoken in the north of the country, and Home Sweet Home in English. Pedis are the largest of the northern Sotho groups, and these jubilant returnees were members of a community that had lived and farmed there in Doornkop for more than 70 years. They tilled the fertile soil and earned renown for the juicy peaches they sold. In 1974 their homes, schools and churches were bulldozed by the National Party government, and they were driven into the wilderness, victims of the country’s apartheid laws, which reserved 87% of the land for whites. Today the Pedis are among the first black South Africans to regain legal title to land so callously seized. It is a path thousands of others will soon follow.

Nine hundred miles away in the Western Cape, white farmer Henry Hall, who was uprooted by a quirk of the same apartheid regime, is helping his black workers become shareholders in his thriving $10 million fruit-exporting business. The 170 laborers on his farm, some descended from slaves of the original Dutch settlers, have for the first time in their lives a financial asset to pass on to their children.

Although Hall was ousted from his farm in Ciskei 13 years ago, when the so- called black homeland became “independent,” he is now solidly re- established on rich terrain 60 miles from Cape Town. He looks back on apartheid as “a dreadful fiasco” for everyone concerned. “We’re doing well again,” he says. “I reckoned it was time I started giving something back.” He is one of an increasing number of whites who are trying to help penniless black workers become property owners.

Of all the transformations Mandela’s government of national unity has tried so far, the return of blacks to the land, and of land to the blacks, is potentially the most volatile. Between 1960 and 1990 the government forced 3.5 million people from their homes, in most cases clearing the way for whites to move in.

Now the grossly unbalanced partitioning of the country is being reversed. Last month Mandela signed the Restitution of Land Rights Bill, which invites displaced blacks to file for the return of their former holdings. It also establishes a Land Claims Court to sort out the disputes that will inevitably arise. The bill, predicted Minister of Land Affairs Derek Hanekom, will help heal some of the country’s wounds. More than that, he says, “it answers the cry for justice.” Mandela and his ministers have tentatively set a goal of redistributing up to 30% of the nation’s agricultural land over the next five years.

Though many of the uprooted are firmly resettled in new homes around the country, the government estimates that 1 million South Africans could be involved in the planned redistribution, including blacks who would like to own land but have never been able to do so. If a program of such magnitude is to succeed, the government will have to find ways to advance the rights of the disinherited blacks without touching off the latent anger of die-hard whites. Officials say they hope to avoid giving the impression that they are doing to the whites what whites did to blacks under apartheid: Mandela has pledged publicly that the new law will “do nothing of the sort.” While many claims for land taken by the government, and then leased or sold to whites, will be easy to settle, the government insists that in no case will there be expropriations of land without proper compensation.

Afrikaners have traditionally defined themselves with the word boer, meaning farmer; many are wealthy and accustomed to wielding political power. They might be expected to fight any claim to the land they have been farming for decades, no matter how they obtained it. In fact officials say they have been surprised at how ready some whites are to cooperate. Farmers are becoming receptive to negotiations on restitution claims.

Hall is one of the early innovators. In the years since he was expelled from Ciskei, he has built his new farm, Whitehall, into one of the leading export operations in the Western Cape’s fruit belt. This year he put a third of his holdings into a trust for his 170 permanent employees.

The workers set up a representative committee that, with loans from two government-backed development banks, is buying a 33% share of Whitehall. The bank loans will be paid off with profits from farm sales, and the workers calculate that in 10 years each of their shares should be worth about $28,000. For any South African worker, that is a sizable nest egg — and a rarity in the traditional master-servant world of South African farming.

While the scheme does not actually transfer land, it gives workers part ownership of a very profitable venture. Wilhelmina Visser, whose three sisters and husband also work on the farm, says, “The past gave us nothing. Now we have something to put into our future.” Farmer Hall calls it a “win-win situation. The workers have a sense of security, and the farm benefits by loyalty, job satisfaction and greater productivity.” In the orchards, women pickers affectionately call him oupa — grandfather — behind his back.

Hopeful as such experiments are, the struggle of the Pedi people of Doornkop is more typical. As early as 1964, the white government was pressing them to move to their designated homeland of Lebowa. When the last holdouts were forcibly ejected by police 20 years ago, the government took over the orchards of Doornkop as a training ground for riot squads. The Pedi owners received compensation of about $10 each.

Aided by human-rights organizations, in 1989 the Pedis began legal action to reclaim their land. Mandela’s government broke through years of wrangling, and early this month the first Doornkop families returned to their traditional home. More are going back every day, and Kalushi Kalushi, who is in charge of homecoming arrangements, predicts they will number 20,000 by early next year. He also expects the settlement to have electricity by then. “You can’t believe what it was like to come home,” says Kalushi, a librarian at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. “When we stood under the thorn trees we could hear the bush singing. What a Christmas Day we are going to have.”

The dispossession of the country’s black farmers and the near elimination of black agriculture began long before the National Party turned apartheid into a legal code. Mandela’s government will almost certainly need more than its planned five years to make significant progress in reversing this historic injustice, much less bring all blacks the jobs, houses, schools and hospitals he vowed to provide a year ago. Yet the early indications of goodwill toward men are providing a glimmer of cheer for many South Africans this year.