Dam to Flood Valley Farms : Black South African Town Fighting Its Relocation

DRIEFONTEIN, South Africa —  In the small hillside cemetery on her family’s farm here, Lizzy Gwebu is keeping a bizarre vigil by her husband’s grave, watching each day to make sure that government officials do not remove his remains.

Workers came earlier this week to move the grave along with several hundred others in Driefontein, a farming community of almost 15,000 blacks, but local leaders refused to permit the reburial.

Now, relatives keep a watch on all the family burial plots, fearing that removal of their relatives’ remains, which are sacred to Africans, will be a prelude to their own forced resettlement.

‘This Is Our Land’

“With our ancestors buried here in Christian graves, there is no doubt that this is our land,” Luke Madonsela, 63, said as he worked in the cornfield around the graveyard where Gwebu was keeping watch. “With the graves gone--if the government moves them--then who knows what will happen to us?”

This little scene in a remote valley 175 miles southeast of Johannesburg is part of a much larger drama in which South Africa’s white-minority regime is seeking to uproot black communities like Driefontein and resettle their residents in tribal homelands.

“They say that we are a ‘black spot’ in a white area and must be removed,” said Mordecai Maseko, a leader of Driefontein’s community council. “But our fathers and grandfathers settled here more than 70 years ago, bought this land and farmed it all their lives, as we have also done, and we do not want to move.”

Predated South Africa

For 20 years, Driefontein has fought its removal as a “black spot.” Its residents have argued that their 1912 freehold titles to the farms are older than South African laws barring blacks from buying land or from living in areas reserved for whites.

They have noted that their community is self-financing; that it provides its own schools, clinics and roads; that it has a democratically elected community council, and that it gets along with its white neighbors. And despite repeated government efforts to divide them, most of its people have stood together to resist resettlement.

“Since I was a boy, we have lived under this threat of resettlement, which is a fancy way of saying we will be stripped of our land, made homeless and banished to some faraway wasteland,” said Joseph Nkonyane, 34, a schoolteacher and part-time farmer. “While we have lived for two decades knowing that our whole community could disappear any day, that day now might be tomorrow.”

The new peril to Driefontein is a $40-million dam that the government recently completed on the nearby Assegai River. In perhaps a matter of weeks, according to engineers, the dam will flood the valley where the community’s best fields lie--about 30% of its nearly 6,000 acres.

Preventing Rebellion

Buried on the sides of that valley are many of the men and women who founded Driefontein; and, before the living can be resettled, the remains of the dead must be moved to higher ground if a major rebellion is to be prevented. That is the reason for the watch being kept over the small family graveyards amid the cornfields here.

“When the water comes, if it does, some of us will probably have to move--we know that,” said Maseko, 56, one of Driefontein’s most prosperous farmers. “What we want is land for the land we will lose, homes for the homes we will lose, fair compensation for all our losses. So far, however, we have nothing.”

The community is uncertain how many of its 15,000 residents will be immediately affected by the rising water in the reservoir. The 83 extended families owning the land to be flooded, and their tenant farmers, will presumably be moved to the new plots that the government has promised but has not yet assigned. The total number of people involved could be as much as one-third of the community.

Driefontein people, who have watched hundreds of other black communities forcibly resettled over the last two decades, not only doubt the government’s promises of new land but are worried that the move of so many residents and the loss of their prime fields in the valley will inevitably mean the community’s destruction.

They also question the government’s choice of their valley for the small Heyshope Dam--which will supply water for industries east of Johannesburg--rather than neighboring valleys where there are white-owned farms, and they suspect that the water in the reservoir is being made to rise faster in order to force them out.

Compensatory Land

For 18 months, they have sought, so far unsuccessfully, a meeting with senior government officials to ensure that they get nearby land of comparable value and to clarify Driefontein’s future. A meeting scheduled for earlier this month with a deputy minister for cooperation and development was abruptly canceled as “inopportune.”

“They talk of new plots (of land) for us, but so far we have not seen any,” Maseko said. “They have stopped talking about relocating us all, but that does not mean they have given up the idea.”

Johann Oosthuizen, a spokesman for the Ministry of Cooperation and Development, which deals with black affairs, said in Pretoria, the South African capital, that basic government policy remains unchanged: “They must all go.” After the valley is flooded, he said, “there will be no room for a community to exist there.”

But Oosthuizen said no decision had been made on when the Driefontein residents will all be resettled. There are now 306 landowners in all, and they will be compensated at market prices for their land and homes, Oosthuizen said, and will be given title to the same size plots at resettlement areas, either in the Zulu tribal homeland, Kwazulu, or the Swazi homeland, Kangwane.

Driefontein’s tenant farmers will be allocated government-owned land in those areas, he added.

The last official word Driefontein received directly from the government, however, came nearly two years ago in a letter from the then-minister for cooperation and development, Piet W. Koornhof, who told residents that they must move because “every one of us has to make sacrifices in some way or other to further peace and prosperity in this beautiful country of ours.”

Parliament had decided, Koornhof said, that “the people of Driefontein must be settled elsewhere,” and he added, “Only the terms under which the move will take place are negotiable.”

It is not yet clear to what extent the situation might be affected by President Pieter W. Botha’s announcement Friday that blacks are to be allowed to buy land where they live and farm and that compromise will be sought on the resettlement of black communities. In announcing that reforms are to be undertaken to give blacks a voice in the nation’s affairs, Botha also ordered government departments dealing with black communities to consult them fully on all measures affecting them.

Another black community, Kwangema, on the other side of the valley, is in a position similar to that of Driefontein. Its 4,000 residents trace ownership of their 10,750 acres to a 1905 decree by King Edward VII of England, granting their grandfathers the land for aiding the British in the Boer War.

Hermann Gililmee, a prominent political scientist, visited the two communities last month. “In a non-apartheid South Africa,” he wrote, referring to the country’s strict racial separation policies, “the solution would have been simple. The people of both Driefontein and Kwangema would have been compensated by land from the adjoining white farms, some of which have been expropriated.

“But there’s the rub. There can be no doubt that if any removal is carried out, the policy of (consolidating white areas and resettling blacks elsewhere) will be an inextricable part . . . . “

Pretoria’s resettlement policies, which have led to the uprooting of an estimated 3.5 million people since 1960, are drawing increasing criticism, both at home and abroad, and are reportedly under Cabinet review.

Last month, President Reagan denounced forced South African resettlement, and two weeks ago, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) visited Mathopestad, another “black spot” as well as a resettlement camp, during a tour of this country.

Yet more than 2 million blacks live under the threat of mass removal--roughly 1.2 million in “black spots” such as Driefontein, according to South African groups that monitor the government’s human rights practices.

“The only explanation as to why the (members of the) relatively conservative, very stable agricultural community need to be deprived of their land, which they struggled and saved to buy, is a neatening up of the apartheid map,” said Black Sash, a predominantly white women’s group that works for greater observance of human rights in South Africa.

“The logic of apartheid cannot tolerate these little pockets of black land among the white farms,” the organization continued, “even when the people concerned have been peaceable neighbors for over 100 years.”

Driefontein, which takes its Afrikaans-language name from the three large springs that assure it water even during severe droughts, was founded in 1912. Black sharecroppers in the area arranged to buy several large farms in the name of the Native Farmers’ Assn. of Africa. They correctly anticipated that blacks would soon be barred by law from buying any land in South Africa’s white regions, which today constitute more than 80% of the country.

“My father bought a plot here because he wanted to live peacefully with his children, without worrying about the whites,” recalled Victor Manqele, a gray-haired grandfather who still farms his land at the age of 70. “People who came here were tired of being kicked off their land by whites, tired of being told by the white landowners to leave fields that they had cleared and plowed and planted, tired of being at the mercy of the whites.

“They wanted land they could call their own, that would be theirs and their children’s to live on and to work on and to die on. And for the most part, we have been able to live quietly and peacefully. We have no problems with our (white) neighbors, and we have posed no problems for the government.”

When the white authorities first told the community in 1965 that it had to move, and officials came to register residents and to paint numbers on each house, designating the family for relocation, Driefontein’s leaders firmly but quietly resisted resettlement. Several hundred people have been moved over the years, about 500 of them accepting resettlement and others being forcibly sent to tribal homelands. Most families have remained, however.

“We are not a rich community, but most families do all right,” Nkonyane, the teacher-farmer, commented. “The majority of young men go to Johannesburg or the mines to work and send money back. The land here is fertile enough so that their families have enough to eat, even as tenant farmers. Those with their own land to farm do well. Certainly, what we have is better than the so-called homelands, those Bantustans where the land is barren and the people are starving.”

Even when the government began to build the Heyshope Dam, Driefontein asked only for land in compensation for the fields that it would lose.

“We do not wish to be rebellious in any way, but only to live our lives in our own environment,” the community’s leader, Saul Mkhize, wrote in April, 1983, to President Botha, who was then prime minister.

Two days later, on Easter weekend, Mkhize was shot to death at a community meeting by a white policeman. The officer testified at his trial that he felt threatened by “the crowd of angry black men” and fired his weapon, even though local residents and independent observers said there had been no serious disturbance. The policeman was acquitted of any wrongdoing.

In November, Driefontein’s community council had to go to court in Pretoria for permission to hold further public meetings on what decision it should make on the government’s resettlement proposals. The local magistrate had banned such gatherings, barring residents, in effect, from discussing their own future.

“We are not fighting types,” Mkhize’s widow, Buti, said this week as she sat with the community council in the shade of a tree, waiting for government officials to come and discuss the removal of the threatened gravesites and the start of the resettlement process.

“In Driefontein, we are very good, God-fearing, peace-loving people . . . . All we want is peace, but there is no peace at all.”