OPINION | ANC must support black farming graduates
One of the reasons the ANC has struggled with land and agricultural reform is because, as a liberation movement, it lacked a rural imagination.
This is unsurprising because the ANC’s greatest campaigns were largely urban-driven.
This is not to say there was no resistance to white oppression on farms and in rural areas, but simply to point out that its liberatory imagination was dominated by its campaigns based in the cities.
A more radical critique of the ANC argues that its fundamental weakness was its failure to accept the Pan-Africanist slogan that “Africa belongs to Africans”, thus rejecting the basis for the return of land to form the basis of liberation.
Related to this, another weakness within the liberation imagination was its over-emphasis on “workers” and urban masses and not peasants and land workers as the motor force of struggle.
While the migrant labour system and its links to the ever declining native reserves was core to the function of apartheid, the political conception of the migrant was almost always as an “industrial worker”.In this conception, the displaced worker is hardly understood as a marginalised peasant. It is clear the divide between the rural and the urban was never stark. Yet black South Africans lived in both worlds, moving between the two at any point of necessity.
These marginalised peasants, even while they worked in urban areas, tried to support forms of agriculture such as livestock herding for example, investing in their rural family cattle herds.
The skill of raising cattle-herds formed part of a valuable knowledge set held by Africans for thousands of years.
With the rapid rise of industrial capitalism and the erosion of black land ownership, black people urbanised at a very rapid rate throughout the 20th century.
This led over time to the corrosion of intergenerational agricultural skills within the black population.
In the 1980s and 1990s, South Africa experienced very high rates of urbanisation as spatial segregation fell apart leading to 60% of South Africans residing in towns and cities.
It is unsurprising then that a large part of the ANC’s social redress policies has been targeted at urban areas with the priority being the provision of housing, electrification, water and sanitation.
More interesting however, is that this development tendency led to a de facto imposition of an “urbanising” framework for the development of rural areas.
This is what I call “electrification-led” development.
Understandably then, a key success of the ANC in the development of rural areas has been electrification.
Of course, this was a step forward for many people. Electrification is key to integrating rural populations into economic and social development.
However, as we lose our agricultural skills, electricity has led to the penetration of a commodity-dependency in rural areas. In rural areas we now buy things and store them in fridges, more than we produce for ourselves. This is why the “electrification-led” development paradigm has put the final nail in the coffin of the rural skills base.
Worse, what the government calls rural development in SA is really just a project-by-project incoherent approach. There is a lack of a simple, compelling vision.
Part of the problem I think, lies in that original inability to see that the urban worker oppressed by apartheid was part of a highly skilled peasant world.
Restoring African capacity is thus about rebuilding intergenerational agricultural capacity amongst black people.
What is happening to black students and graduates from our agricultural colleges in South Africa? The land reform budget must focus on these graduates in a very decisive and visionary way.
At the very least, even within the exiting land reform framework, the ANC must institute well run, rural-based training projects to train black graduates. Further, universities offering agriculture must partner with the state to support land reform training.
Ultimately, the state must commit to remunerate these graduates and not leave them to beg for limited jobs in the white-dominated agricultural sector...
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