A harvest of failure and bitterness (the failure of black farmers in South Africa)

[XemaSab]

The South African government's efforts to redress the wrongs of apartheid by buying farms from willing white owners and giving them to blacks has been a failure, with many of the new owners having little experience to make a success of it. The policy has also stirred racial tensions.

Reporting from Greylingstad, South Africa — Michael Zulu trundles a wheelbarrow along the track to his farm homestead, where chickens peck at the carpet and skinny cats curl sleeping amid the bird droppings.

He's the farmer now, not just a tractor driver for a white farmer named Engelbrecht, like he used to be.

But he has a shirt full of holes, the roofless ruins of a dairy and a stretch of farmland whose only crop is cow manure, bagged up and stacked against a wall as a substitute for firewood.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-south-africa-farms-20101121,0,5731538.story?page=1

[Hannah Bell]

1. why is this a "surprise"? surprise to *who*? what a lying article this is.

"like Zimbabwe's program, land was handed out to people who did not know how to farm."

bullshit. land was given to people who had no *capital* to pay for agricultural inputs in a money economy. the guy knows how to farm. he doesn't have enough money to pay for seeds, tractors, gasoline, labor, etc and to cover losses during bad years.

unlike the white farmer driving by in the suv.

both the people whose stories were told in that article had farming experience. they didn't have enough capital. they are failing for the same reasons the dust bowl farmers failed.

[Chulanowa]

2. And the underlying thread is being peddled, "they failed because they're black."

It's the same thing we see in the US, when the descendants of Irish or Italian or Jewish immigrants say "Yeah well, MY ancestors had it rough too! I don't know why slavery was such a big deal!" - the implication is that race had nothing to do with the success of whites, but everything to do with the failure of blacks.

White privilege; this is an article that attempts to reinforce it.

[Hannah Bell]

3. it's black people doing the actual *work* on those white farms. of *course* they know

how to farm. the guy in the article was a farm laborer, & the woman ran 150 chickens.

they may not know so much about tax & trade & political scams, though.

the difference in capitalisation required to keep 150 chickens v. 300,000 is rather large. nothing to do with farming knowledge, everything to do with money (& maybe knowledge of regulations, etc. -- but money can buy that too.)

i hate lying racist propaganda like this article. why is the la times running this crap?

[La Lioness Priyanka]

5. i agree. i am sure farm workers know how to run farms

[XemaSab]

4. .

:kick: