The terror of white society

If one follows the thesis put forward in the epigraph by Ndi Sibiya's white lecturer in Lewis Nkosi's 1983 novel Mating Birds – that African history is about vulnerable white men who had to survive in an unknown territory – then the use of violence to protect oneself becomes justifiable.

In South African history, the vulnerability of white society played out as the ‘native problem’. The native problem was not only about the conquering of the unknown Other; it was also about the making of social relations to ensure that the future of the white society would be secure in this foreign land. This meant securing land and transforming the native whose land was stolen into a docile labourer. Nowhere was this so clear as on the farm, where the white farmer and his family created a home side by side with those who worked the land and who saw the land they worked on as their home, and as the place where, after death, they would be laid to rest.

Although this book is written primarily through the eyes of the farmworkers, it is worth considering for a moment what the world looked like through the eyes of the white farmers who criminalised the workers, who saw them as non-human and akin to the potatoes they farmed, and who even killed them when their terror erupted into violence.

The question for this chapter revolves around the levels of violence that went beyond labour and racism into the heart of the meaning of ‘owning’ the land. To unravel this violence, I look at state intervention in the agricultural sector and how it was linked to the way white society perceived the Black person, as a labourer as well as a potential criminal. I offer an overview of the political-economic interventions in agriculture to show the anxiety of white society.