- BENONI, South Africa -- Daan
Duvenage shook his head as he gazed over the wood-and-tin shacks where
40,000 squatters have established homes on a 140-acre swath of his farm.
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- "I can't go in there," he said of the warren
of homes, streets and shops where he once grew hay for his cattle. "Too
dangerous for me. They know who I am."
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- Mr. Duvenage, a white farmer, still holds legal title
to the land but has been unable to get the government of President Thabo
Mbeki to remove the squatters.
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- The Witwatersrand High Court ordered the removal of 6,000
squatters in April 2001, but the order was never enforced, and financially
strapped local authorities want Mr. Duvenage personally to pay the estimated
$262,000 cost of housing them elsewhere.
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- The Pretoria High Court again sided with Mr. Duvenage
last month, but it remains to be seen whether anything will happen.
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- The farmer said he doesn't mind seeing white-owned land
redistributed to poor blacks as long as it is done legally and equitably.
And he understands the government's concerns about setting a precedent
that will encourage more illegal land grabs.
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- But he also argues that the government must respect and
enforce property rights or risk scaring off foreign investment in a nation
where black unemployment is estimated to run as high as 50 percent.
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- The shantytown on his land is surprisingly well-kept,
with wide dirt avenues, flower gardens and immaculately groomed lawns.
Each shack is numbered to receive mail.
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- The government delivers water daily and set up voting
stations during last month's national elections, in which the camp voted
about 90 percent for the ruling African National Congress.
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- One squatter, who refused to give his name, said he wished
the government would act more aggressively to expropriate white-owned farms
as has been done in neighboring Zimbabwe.
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- But Mr. Duvenage said he doesn't think it will. "I
don't think they are as stupid as [Zimbabwe President Robert] Mugabe,"
he said.
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- Other white South Africans fear he is wrong.
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- Mr. Mugabe, who came to power with the end of white rule
in the former Rhodesia in 1980, initially promised that blacks and whites
would live harmoniously in a "rainbow nation" and, in fact, respected
white rights for two decades.
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- But facing likely electoral defeat in 2002, he permitted
his armed followers to seize white-owned farms, causing numerous deaths
and a plunge in agricultural production that has left the country unable
to feed itself.
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- White South Africans talk constantly about their fears
that the same could happen here.
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- Making progress
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- Ten years after apartheid, the black-led government has
made remarkable strides. It has built 1.6 million new houses for the poor.
Eighty percent of South Africans now have electricity, and 30 million of
them now have access to clean tap water - up from 21 million a decade ago.
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- But there are also huge challenges, including massive
unemployment and HIV, the AIDS virus, which infects nearly 5 million people.
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- The ANC, which had long enjoyed communist backing, came
to power after the end of the Cold War and so wisely adopted capitalism
as its economic model.
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- It has reached out to the international business community
and eked out an average 2.5 percent economic growth rate. But that is far
below the 6 percent growth rate needed to keep pace with growth in the
working-age population.
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- There is a growing black middle class who buy luxury
automobiles, send their children to private schools and shop in fancy malls.
But most blacks, who make up 70 percent of the population, still live in
poverty.
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- "The [gross domestic product] per capita is actually
going down, and unemployment is going up. Unemployment is now around 35
[percent] to 40 percent," said Marian Tupy, a South African economist
at Washington's Cato Institute.
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- Eliminating poverty
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- The ANC consequently campaigned last month on a promise
to eliminate poverty and create jobs, leaving some white South Africans
to worry that the promise may be fulfilled at their expense.
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- Those fears were exacerbated by the reception given the
Zimbabwean president when he arrived in Pretoria for Mr. Mbeki's April
27 inauguration. Mr. Mugabe received a thunderous ovation from the overwhelmingly
black crowd, only slightly less raucous than for Mr. Mbeki or his predecessor,
Nelson Mandela.
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- That reception, along with Mr. Mbeke's refusal to publicly
condemn the land seizures in Zimbabwe, were taken by many white South Africans
as a tacit endorsement of Mr. Mugabe's race-baiting policies.
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- Mr. Mbeki's government says it is simply pursuing what
it calls "quiet diplomacy" with a former comrade-in-arms.
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- "We will not stand on the rooftops and mountaintops
and issue invectives against the government of Zimbabwe," government
spokesman Joel Netshitenzhe said in an interview.
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- "President Mbeki has said many, many times that
we don't encourage illegal actions. We encourage dialogue. Both sides need
to meet."
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- 'Reverse apartheid' One of the toughest indictments of
Mr. Mbeke's policies comes from Pretoria lawyer Philip Du Toit, who recently
self-published "The Great South African Land Scandal" - a 271-page
catalogue of land invasions, murders and other crimes in rural South Africa.
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- Accusing the government of "reverse apartheid,"
Mr. Du Toit says its policies scare off foreign investment and mark the
beginning of the end of South African democracy.
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- "Botswana, where I grew up, is successful because
they respect the right to the title to the land. They support entrepreneurs
and welcome development. And there is legislation to protect employers,"
he said during an interview in his Pretoria office.
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- "In South Africa, that does not exist anymore. South
Africa is on the track to becoming a Zimbabwe. I'm trying to stop the train.
All we want is for South Africa to come to its senses."
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- Mr. Netshitenzhe described the book as "based on
fiction and prejudice, not on fact" - a view that is shared by Farmer's
Weekly, the nation's leading farm magazine with a hefty white Afrikaans
subscription base.
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- The book "is not good investigative journalism,"
said Chris Burgess, the white editor of Farmer's Weekly. "It is one-dimensional,"
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- "The farmers in South Africa are facing very serious
problems - crime, the land-redistribution program - which we cover extensively
in our magazine," Mr. Burgess said.
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- "But we are at a crucial moment in South African
history, just 10 years after democracy, trying to rectify some of the inequities
of the past. How do we resolve those issues? Du Toit is the wrong man at
the wrong time to write this book. It is inflammatory. The book is not
helpful."
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- Farmland lost
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- Still, several of the book's basic points cannot be denied.
White farmers are suffering from an enormous amount of rural crime, and
the government's land-redistribution program - which turns productive farmland
over to black cooperatives, often people with no farming background - has
resulted in the loss of good farmland and of jobs.
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- "I think the book has the ring of truth on at least
one of his key points," said John Kane-Berman, chief executive of
the South African Institute of Race Relations in Johannesburg.
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- "A lot of black people have been resettled on previously
white-owned farms and have not been able to make a go and [the farms] are
now vast rural shanty towns that are no longer producing" either food
or jobs.
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- The Agricultural Employers Organization (AEO), which
represents farmers in labor disputes, estimates that 500,000 jobs have
been lost since 1993, mostly by unskilled black farm laborers.
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- "The unskilled farmworkers who were supposed to
be lifted up are being hurt the most," said Willie Vorster of AEO.
"If the land issue is not handled correctly, it will be Zimbabwe.
The chances are very big."
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- But Mike Davies, South Africa analyst for the London-based
Control Risks Group, disagrees.
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- "South Africa is not like Zimbabwe," he said.
"There are a lot of differences. South Africa has an independent judiciary,
a constitution.
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- "Our position is that there are risks of investing
in a country like South Africa, but there is fundamental political stability
and that is likely to continue into the future. South Africa's economy
is very sound at the moment."
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- Land distribution
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- There are three parts to the land-redistribution program.
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- The first is "land restitution," in which blacks
who were forcibly removed from their land under apartheid can make a claim
on the land, no matter who owns it today.
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- Second is "land redistribution," in which the
government will subsidize blacks seeking to purchase land from willing
white owners. The program's goal is 30 percent black ownership of commercial
farmland.
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- Finally, there is a "land tenure" system, which
states that if a laborer lives and works on the land for a period of time,
he cannot be evicted unless the farmer provides alternative housing.
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- At Montina Farm near Mooketsi, in Limpopo, the nation's
poorest region, Kaspaas Pohl and his brothers operate a dozen tomato and
citrus farms, employing 35 family members and more than 2,000 black workers.
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- One of his farms has land claims against it - ironically,
by two competing tribes, both of which claim it as their ancestral land.
Mr. Pohl says he'd be happy to sell, but the government has no money.
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- "How can I plan? How can I invest when I don't know
what will happen? I took the risk, buying and developing these farms, and
now I lay awake at night worrying about my family, my farms, our future,"
he said.
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- Mr. Pohl has built a four-room elementary school for
his workers' children (the government provides the teachers), and provides
farm housing, with water and electricity, that would be considered substandard
in suburban Washington but is luxurious in most of the developing world.
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- Mr. Pohl is a warm and hospitable host - if one can stomach
the incessant racist commentary and jokes.
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- 'They cannot farm'
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- "Why do they want the land if they cannot farm?
Black people cannot farm. They can buy and sell. They can fill a bakke
(small pickup) with vegetables and sell them on the side of the road. They
do that very well. Afrikaans people can't do that. We can farm. ...
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- "If Mbeki were clever, he could feed the whole of
Africa if he wanted. We don't mind them governing the country, but leave
us to farm."
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- From his helicopter, which he uses to move between farms,
Mr. Pohl buzzed several large tracts of land that had been bought by the
government and turned over to black cooperatives in the past three years.
Today, all are in weeds, bankrupt.
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- "This was a big tomato farm. Now it is [ruined],"
he said as he hovered over ransacked housing and tattered greenhouses,
where drip-line irrigation hoses lay scattered in the overgrowth. "This
was a high-producing farm that was giving 600 people work. Now they've
lost their jobs."
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- On the farm next door, owned and managed by whites, fields
filled with ripe tomatoes were being harvested by dozens of black workers.
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- Making a difference
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- One man who is trying to make a difference is Cois Harman,
a white professor of native African languages who began to mentor black
farmers after losing his job under the nation's "black economic empowerment"
or affirmative-action laws.
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- While he can rattle off dozens of black farming successes,
he was highly critical of the land-distribution program.
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- "Giving 200 people a farm that was farmed by one
white farmer is not a recipe for success," said Mr. Harman, who was
raised on a cattle farm. "The cooperatives haven't got the knowledge,
and they end up fighting each other."
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- He said that farming in South Africa is difficult - poor
soil, little rain, summer hail - and fewer than 10 percent of black farmers
he mentors make it.
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- "But the same would be true if you took white people
out of Johannesburg or New York with no farming experience," he said.
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- Making a success
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- One of the successful black farmers is Simon Makhutle,
a modest man with movie star good looks who could not suppress his laughter
at those who say black people can't farm.
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- "They haven't seen this," he said, as he drove
past acre after acre of sunflowers, sorghum and corn on his farm in Ga-Motlatla
in northwestern South Africa. "The white farmers in this area know
we can do it."
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- Mr. Makhutle, who planted 500 acres this year, returned
to Ga-Motlatla to work with his father after getting his bachelor's degree
in political science and criminology at the University of Cape Town.
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- "I didn't come back by choice. I couldn't find a
job in forensics, but now sometimes I just love it. I love farming. I have
no regrets," he said as he watched a combine harvest a sunflower field
for seeds that will be pressed for oil.
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- Like all farmers, he complained about the need for better
access to credit, cheaper gas and fertilizer prices. And as a farmer on
tribal-owned lands, he has no title, making it even harder to secure financing
because he has no collateral.
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- "My only problem is financing," he said. "Look
around you. We can do the farming."
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- Woes next door
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- As for Zimbabwe?
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- "Zimbabwe's problem will have to be resolved by
the Zimbabwe people," he said. "In South Africa, some people
have land claims. Those who were forcefully removed can go back. It is
being done legally and lawfully. ... So far, we are satisfied with the
way things are going."
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- Mr. Kane-Berman said that after 10 years of democracy,
the country is doing far better than most had predicted.
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- "The constitution is widely considered legitimate.
The country is basically stable. Crime is a problem, but the government
management of public finance has been politically courageous. It has brought
down inflation. If you look around the shopping centers, you see people
of all races happily interacting together.
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- "I don't think the country has a problem with racial
animosity. Race relations are basically sound. So far, we have done astonishingly
well. ... No, our government, at the moment, is not in the business of
orchestrating land invasions," he said.
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