Apartheid lives on Limpopo farms 25-03-08

 

Apartheid lives on Limpopo farms

The Congress of South African Trade Unions is angered by two events which reveal the extent to which life in many South African rural communities has changed little since the days of apartheid.

In Hoedspruit, Limpopo, the family of the late Seniors Mokoena could not bury their grandfather on Good Friday because of a dispute with a local farmer over a piece of land on his Welverdient farm.

When the family, and hundreds of mourners from as far as Mpumalanga, Gauteng and Mozambique, arrived at the farm, security guards had barricaded the gates to the graveyard and prevented the funeral from taking place.

They were acting on the orders of the farm manager, Pieter Erasmus, who said that the funeral would not take place because the name of the dead man did not appear on the list of people who lived on the land.

This was despite the fact that Seniors Mokoena was born on the farm in 1936 and lived there with his mother, Aria Mokoena, who was born there in 1909. In August 2007, however the farmer evicted the Mokoena and Bango families from the farm and allegedly forced them to sell their livestock so he could use the land for game farming.

But the family insist that their grandfather's name was still on the list of families who had been living on the farm. Family spokesman, Beers Bango, told the Sowetan that the family would continue with the funeral with or without the permission of the farmer, and asked: "Who does he think he is to deny us the right to bury our father on our ancestral land?"

This case highlights the urgent need to speed up land redistribution, so that farms are transferred to the people who have spent their lives living and working on them. They must be able to enjoy security of tenure, share the profits from farming and use their ancestral land for community activities like funerals, without interference from apartheid-era land owners. In the meantime COSATU demands that the family be given full and immediate access to this land.

In the other case, also in Limpopo, the Supreme Court of Appeal has set aside the murder conviction of Jewell Crossberg, a Musina farmer and game lodge owner who shot dead a worker he claims he mistook for a baboon. The court changed the conviction from murder and attempted murder to culpable homicide and cut his jail sentence from 20 years' to five, two of them suspended.

The court ruled that the state had failed to prove that he intentionally shot and killed farm worker, Jealous Dube. The main reason given was that the police had either lost or destroyed 13 witness statements in the docket, and had not disclosed these statements to the prosecutor or to Crossberg. The Court accepted his lawyers' claim that he therefore did not have a fair trial and that the state had failed to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

The police conduct has fuelled suspicion, yet again, that the police and courts have been acting in collusion to favour of a wealthy white farmer. Appeal Court judge, Mahomed Navsa, admitted that, "It appeared that the racial overtones the case seemed to be assuming had caused tensions between the police investigating the incident and their superiors. Unfortunately, as this case shows, race continues to divide and bedevil our society".

COSATU demands a full investigation of the conduct of the police and prosecutors in Crossberg's case, to establish what happened to the 13 witness statements and to their mishandling of the case.

This judgement comes just six months after the Appeal Court also upheld an appeal by another white employer, Mark Scott-Crossley, against his conviction for murdering Nelson Chisale in January 2004. They found the prosecution had not proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Chisale was alive when he was thrown into a lions' enclosure.

They overturned Scott-Crossley's conviction of murder and convicted him on the lesser offence of being an accessory after the fact to murder, and cut his life sentence to one of only five years, backdated to September 2005.

This means that both Crossberg and Scott-Crossley could be free within months, despite being implicated in actions which led to the death of two workers.

There is a clear need or a broader investigation into allegations of collusion between the state, prosecutors and rich white employers who seem to have the money and influence to be able to escape responsibility for horrendous crimes against poor black workers