17 April 1986: Visits with Afrikaner Farmers

Monday, 21 April 1986, 6:30 PM, Hillcrest Community, Halfway House (Approximately 30 km north of Johannesburg)  

This past Saturday, April 19, Tony MacGreggor picked me up at the Urmson home and drove me up to this semi-rural commune on a hill overlooking Johannesburg.  There are currently five members of the community here plus several kids, several maids and workers, and a menagerie of cats, dogs, chickens, geese, and goats.  I made contact with Hillcrest through the Denver Open Network, the same organization that helped me get in touch with Mavis Urmson.  More about the Hillcrest group after I’ve been here for a while.  I’ve still some catching up to do on the events of last week. 

During my trip last week to the Magaliesburg Range with university geography students, we visited two Afrikaner farms in the area.  For those that haven’t read all my letters and are not familiar with South African history, I should clarify that the Afrikaners (also called Boers), are people of Dutch, German, and French descent who first began arriving in South Africa in 1652.  They have a long and troubled history which reached its low point in the Second Boer War with the British from 1899 to 1902.  Although defeated by Great Britain in that war, they have gradually emerged as the most powerful ethnic group in South Africa – three million people who essentially control the political lives of 33 million South Africans (there are also about two million English-speaking whites).  Although the Afrikaners were traditionally a rural people, they are now found in abundance in the major cities.  However, they still dominate South African agriculture.   

My visit to the Magaliesburg farms was my first significant contact with Afrikanerdom.  And it was a contrast of the old and the new as exemplified by two farms no more than two kms apart.  The first farm is owned by Anton Fritz and his wealthy father.  The Fritz farm represents a large capital investment and diversification.  They most significant project is breeding Brahma cattle, an expensive proposition which will take time and patience to bring a return.  Anton Fritz studied agriculture at a university before doing his two-year national service.  He looks to be around 30, and was sporting a dark, day-old beard on the day we met.  He employs 20 laborers (most, if not all, black, it appeared).  He has been building housing on the property for them.  Fritz points out that if you let African laborers build their own housing, it will be of inferior quality.  This farm exemplifies a shift from subsistence to market farming.  As Fritz notes, however, he is a decided minority in the area.  “Most farmers here don’t know what they’re doing, or they don’t have the money or necessary interest to do modern farming.  They aren’t all fools, but there are a lot of fools around me,” he claimed. 

                                                                                           Anton Fritz’s Brahma bulls.

After this visit, we drove down the road to the Van Rensburg farm.  The Van Rensburgs are at least 70 and speak almost no English.  That was no problem for anyone but me.  While all the students on this trip speak English as their first language, all have a good command of Afrikaans which they have studied since primary school.  John Earle, the professor who invited me along on this trip, translated for me.  The Van Rensburgs were pleased to have an American visitor and Meneer (Mr.) Van Rensburg kept referring to me as the “Reagan Man”.  They were impressed with my few Afrikaans words and phrases which I tried out on them with terrible pronunciation (Words for: Good afternoon, sir.  Tea, please.  Thank you ma’am.  The tea was good.  See you later.)  When we left, they invited me to come back again…after I have learned more Afrikaans!

Mevrou (Mrs.) Van Rensburg’s father bought this property (25 morgen or roughly 60 acres) in 1910.  The family initially grew potatoes and mealies (corn).  The land is now primarily used for grazing.  Mr. V.R. still grows corn but this year’s crop was a disaster.  They also grow some vegetables.  He tried growing tobacco years ago but found it too demanding – an 18-month cycle that keeps one up all hours of the day and night.  He doesn’t actually do much of the work himself anymore.  He admits that the small farmer can’t survive these days.  Even with a good year, his mealie crop would only bring in 1000 rand ($500).  Still, he feels farming is a good life if you’re healthy – his health has been poor lately.

Mr. V.R. talked about the old days.  There used to be no roads in this area.  As a result, getting fuel was no easy task.  The railroads were nervous about carrying it because of the fire hazard.  Therefore, fuel was shipped in steel drums on donkey carts from Pretoria to Rustenburg.  Then it was another 1½ days journey from Rustenburg to here by ox cart. 

Born on his grandfather’s farm, Mr. V.R. has been a farmer all his life and has never traveled out of the country.  His son is a lawyer and has no interest in farming.  I was told that he will never come back here except to visit on weekends.  His young grandson, however, seems to be taking an interest in the place.  In addition to their son, the Van Rensburgs have a daughter who works for the Department of Health.  A nephew is a leading architect.  Mr. V.R. said that it’s important for the white man to study or he gets left behind.

I asked if they had any full-time laborers on the farm.  Mr. V.R. answered that he had “one kaffir – oops, nowadays I must call him a black man.”  His family lives on the grounds in a stone house with an iron corrugated roof.  I was interested to learn that Mr. V.R. had played with this man when they were kids.

The Van Rensburg property is very neat and tidy.  A small brick house adjoins a patio which, in turn, is next to a rondoval, a cute, round African-style building with a pointed roof.  I got some pictures of the property but Mr. V.R. didn’t want me taking their picture.  He didn’t want it going back to America, he said.  He seemed to have no such objections to the students taking his picture.  

Mrs. V.R. served us coffee, tea, and rusks on the patio.  A rusk is a hard chunk of bread which is meant for coffee-dunking.  There were white lace paper doilies on the saucers.   Several of the female students and I took a tour of the house.  The interior seemed similar to a typical American farm house of 20+ years ago.  It reminded me somewhat of the home of my Uncle Ralph and Aunt Eva Brown (prosperous northwestern Ohio farmers).  Mrs. V.R. had baked the rusks in an ancient coal-burning Dutch oven because her modern oven wasn’t working.  We met her 97-year-old mother who smiled, greeted us in Afrikaans, and seemed very happy to shake our hands.  I don’t think she could see us very well, but we seem to have made her day. 

These two farms seemed almost American in appearance right down to the T.V. antennas and Anton Fritz’s new farm implements.  The people struck me as friendly and well-meaning.  I was surprised to hear that Mr. Van Rensburg is pleased that his grandson is learning Sotho (the most common African tribal language in this area) in school.  He said that today’s children will have to interact with blacks more.

It’s hard for me to dislike these people.  Yet I know it is their culture and traditions which have held down black people in this country for more than three centuries.  It is the Afrikaner culture which gave this country apartheid in 1948, a time when most of the Western world was realizing the need to bring black people into mainstream society.  When blacks in South Africa tried to peacefully resist racism in the 50s and 60s, they were met with bullets as well as more severe racist legislation than they had known in the past.  In 1948, the U.S. and South Africa weren’t all that different in their levels of racism.  Since then, the U.S. has moved in a better direction while South Africa has regressed.  And South Africans have gotten themselves in one hell of a mess as a result.  God help ‘em!