Whose land it is anyway?
| 18:00 UK time, Thursday, 11 October 2007
We're OFF AIR now, but keep posting your comments here on the blog.
WHOSE LAND IS IT ANYWAY?
Kilmeny and John are hosting WHYS today. They run a farm just outside Ladysmith which was run by John’s parents in turn before them. Rain allowing they are going to be getting a braii going (barbeque to the rest of us), and have invited everyone who works on their farms, as well as farmers and farm workers from the area to join them.
Kilmeny has told us that the issues of land reform and the sharing of farming knowledge has come so politicised in SA that it is very difficult to discuss them without people simply dividing according to the political allegiance.
Today we’ll try and get away from that. We’ll hear what land reform means in practice for all the people it affects, how knowledge is shared in this part of South Africa and whether other countries – Australia, USA, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Namibia spring to mind – have positive or negative lessons about land reform to share with or take from South Africa.
And of course we’ll ask the question at the heart of it all – who should their land, and the farm land of South Africa, belong to?
If you have any questions for Kilmeny and John about their life as farmers here in Ladysmith email worldhaveyoursay@bbc.co.uk, and put your phone number if you’d like to talk with them.
We arrived in Ladysmith in Kwa-Zulu Natal after five hours on the road. The countryside immediately south of Johannesburg is frankly pretty dull. All around is and the occasional cow, workman or farm outbuilding are the only signs of life. But it soon got more interesting.
As you come into Kwa-Zulu Natal’s midlands area though the land begins to undulate, the grass becomes green, the trees more common and then huge rocky mountains start to rise up, with lose slung clouds mixing with the smoke from the fires that seem to be burning every mile or two. (The fires are apparently often started deliberately and sometimes maliciously.) It’s at the bottom of one these gentle hills that you find Ladysmith.
Here’s a recent in the Mail and Guardian.
IS IT THAT LADYSMITH?
If you’re wondering whether the acapella group Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the town of Ladysmith are related the answer is yes. This whole area has a rich history of singing (I’ve a record at home which I treasure by the Bergville Golden Voices and we passed a sign to Bergville a few miles before we arrived) and we’re going to be joined by a group called the Red Lions.
We’ve toyed with the idea of having them singing the text and phone numbers but thought that may be a little distracting from the discussion. But we’ll certainly hear them singing (with slightly more interesting lyrics than country 44 20…) at the end of the show.
WHOSE NAME IS IT ANYWAY?
Name changing has been going on from the end of apartheid and continues to divide South Africans. When driving to Musina earlier in the week we passed through a town called Makhado. It used to be called Louis Trichardt (after a voortrekker leader in the early 19th century) and there remain no shortage of signs and people who still use the name. In fact there was a march in support of the new name just the day after we drove back through Makhado.
Miles away down on the coast is a famous South African city called Grahamstown – you may have heard of its festival. There the mayor is determined to name regardless of cost and the fact a replacement has not been chosen. "If it takes money to transform our country, let it be. We can't stop, we won't stop," he’s quoted as saying in a local paper.
There seems little prospect the names changes are going to stop, much to the dismay of many white South Africans who feel all their history is treated as if it only contains wrong-doing.
There’s an angry column in one of the papers which rails against the habit of some black South Africans and in particulars its international football players of not singing the Afrikaans section of the national anthem. It’s worth saying the columnist is black. Look at the rugby players he says, they sing all four parts in the four different languages.
The column reminded me of a conversation I had last night with a guest at our show, who said ‘look by all means add an extra name but why delete the existing one? Just have two’. There aren’t many places in the world that willing chose two names (I don’t think Burma/Myanmar for instance falls into this category), but as another guest said last night, South Africa has a track record of doing things first. Plenty of food for thought….
We’ll be in Cape Town tomorrow for the last of your programmes here. We’ve no subjects chosen at all so do email worldhaveyoursay@bbc.co.uk if you have any ideas.
Cheers, Ros
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