The Next Frontier (The Last Bit)

A Case of a Derailed South African Rainbow Nation

“I will always admire FDR for his courageous leadership and wisdom that freed Americans from the misery of “widespread unemployment, famine, and homelessness” visited upon them by of the Great Depression. But I will forever be saddened by the exclusion of certain members of the human family from experiencing the relief that the New Deal program delivered.” I was motivated to write the scholarship paper upon reading, in Alfred Emile Cornebise’s The CCC Chronicles: Camp Newspapers of the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942 about how the CCC “employed 300,000 young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps improving national and state parks, maintaining forest roads and trails, planting trees to prevent soil erosion and building levees and dams for flood control.” In Baraboo, Wisconsin, the Devil’s Lake State Park, where I walked almost 1 kilometer on frozen ice (for the first time), the green infrastructure was built by the CCC. In the process and contrary to the popular capitalist notions, “the program proved that the government must be meaningful actors in how the economy runs.” Last Sunday, South Africa celebrated 31 years of partial freedom from the stranglehold of apartheid. I say ‘partial’ because as Mandla J. Radebe correctly observed in his opinion piece in the Sunday Times (20 April 2025), “Apartheid didn’t die, it adapted.” In his book, The New Apartheid, author, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh also emphatically posits that “apartheid did not die, it was privatized.” Sunday’s celebrations, if we can even call them that, took place at a critical moment in the history of our country. Accountability is dying a slow death. The ruction about the approval of the national budget by parliament continues. Since 2017, South Africa has been led by a tainted president whom some have rightly called “a diesel locomotive that takes time to warm up” and to live up to his ‘thuma mina’ promise. Meanwhile, our citizens are literally drowning from negative impacts of a changing climate: devastating rainfalls and forest fires. On 10 February 1990, a day before Nelson Mandela was unconditionally released from prison, where he had been for 27 years, a woman named Helen Bradford, presented a paper at the History Workshop at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The title of the paper was “Getting Away with Slavery: Capitalist Farmers, Foreigners and Forced Labour in the Transvaal. C1920 – 1950.” Somewhere on page 12 of that paper, Bradford’s words captured a pending moment that would momentarily define South Africa after the Freedom Day of 27 April 1994: Our stillborn “Rainbow Nation,” that with the benefit of hindsight appears to have been a gambit that, in Bradford’s lexicon, was “mothered by myopia, fathered by compromise, and delivered by coercion”. Since the sudden death of that erstwhile fairytale “rainbow nation,” a ruse that was coined by former Anglican Archbishop Tutu, the way we, South Africans, now live, work and raise our families has become a burden on the mental health on our national population. Because of our wobbling mental fitness, since the advent of our ‘disguised plutocracy’, we’ve consistently allowed politicians and the organizations they represent to abuse, with impunity, our so-called inalienable rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. Time and again, voters have allowed themselves to be used as voting fodder to sustain a system that treats them as second-class citizens in animal farm where all the citizens are equal, but some citizens are more equal than others. Ask any sober-minded South African and they will tell you, ours is a country where corruption is on complete autopilot despite our country spending more than R1 billion rands to create the façade of doing something. Even some of the heavy feeders at the trough also know, as well as the rest of us do, that our lived experiences of freedom are far removed from our expectations. Our parliament is full of questionable people with serious cases of corruption to answer. As we purportedly celebrated 31 years of freedom, many of the vital systems for our human survival and prosperity are unsustainable. Our educational system is dismally failing the majority of our children. The basic things that our citizens need to live productive lives—food, water, shelter, work and energy—are teetering on the brink of a complete collapse. Our obesity-producing food systems, road infrastructure systems, energy systems and health care systems are crumbling. Each and every one of these systems is failing and unsustainable. More importantly, each and every one of these failing systems sustain the inequality that is the rootstock on which our disguised plutocracy was grafted. In a so-called democracy that is governed by the rule of law, how can crime, gender-based violence, kidnapping and fraud be all considered normal? In a country where the president recently signed the Preservation and Development of Agricultural Land Bill into law, why is fertile agricultural land in the Eastern being allowed to be eroded into ‘dongas’ or overtaken by alien vegetation whilst scores of local youths are idling without employment? When will our government realize that “the movement towards Economic Democracy — a system of governance that puts capital and resources under democratic control and ownership — cannot happen without the people most impacted by the current economic paradigm.” In our case the poor on the urban edges and our vast rural communities. Most importantly, when will our rural citizens realize that the situations in which many find themselves is a clarion call for self-reliance. Because as Ralph Waldo Emerson warned, “When linguist Daniel Everett was learning from a hunter-gatherer community in the Brazilian rainforest, he observed a hunter that had brought home a sizable kill, too big to be eaten by just one family. Everett asked how he would store the excess. Smoking and drying techniques were well known; storing was possible. The hunter was puzzled by the question—store my meat? Why would he do that? Instead, he sent out an invitation to a feast, and soon the neighboring families were gathered around his fire. This seemed inefficient to Everett, who asked again: why didn’t the hunter store the

A Bioregional Economy to Feed Neighbours

It is not only the birthplace of the former liberation struggle icons like former President Nelson Mandela, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But also, other lesser-known legends, like the Dohne Merino sheep and the famous Boer goat. Back in 1938, researchers at the Dohne Research Facility in Stutterheim crossed a Peppin-type Merino with the German Mutton Merino to produce a proudly Eastern Cape original: the Dohne Merino sheep, a dual-purpose breed for premium quality red meat and fine wool. The Boer goat was developed by Dutch farmers in the Eastern Cape in the early 1900s. It is a meat goat breed that was developed from a mix of indigenous African and introduced European goats. Nowadays, the Boer goat is a trusted source of premium chevon, worldwide. This brief history makes the Eastern Cape the Boer Goat Nation of the world When I visited the Chris Hani District Municipality, where Cacadu is located, in November 2023, I was very impressed by the natural beauty of the bioregion. I thought that there was so much to love about the regional Montana-like landscape. Endless skies teeming with all kinds of beautiful birds. Native landscapes where livestock roamed stress-free. to the landscape. Soaring mountains like Nonesi, Lukhanji and the Drakensberg at a distance. Living waters that run along the Qhugqwarhu River into a large manmade reservoir called the Xonxa Dam, which provides supplementary drinking water to the town of Komani. History that dates back to the pre-colonial times when sorghum and millet were local staple foods. Rich communal cultures that beat in the hearts of the local amaQwathi and amaCwerha people. A diverse heritage of amaXhosa people and the European settlers upon which the future agricultural economy of the bioregion was firmly grounded. But something was also amiss, and I didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to spot it. Everywhere I went, I noticed that communal land-based agriculture, which once characterized the bioregion, had come to a complete halt. Whilst agriculture in the region’s commercial farms was moving forward, the farmland in the villages of Cacadu is mostly lying fallow. Rangelands are overgrazed because livestock is no longer herded by humans and it grazes closer to home. Once productive arable land is being eroded because of the general lack of ground cover. The once pristine landscapes have been taken over by the rapid spread of the indigenous Acacia Karoo and the alien Euryops Floribundus (Lapesi to the local people). Poverty was self-evident everywhere that I cared to look.

Farmland, Farming and Community

“If you have no land, you have nothing: no food, no shelter, no warmth, no freedom, no life. If we remember this, we know that all economies begin to lie as soon as they assign a fixed value to land. People who have been landless know that the land is invaluable; it is WORTH EVERYTHING. Pre-agricultural humans, of course, knew this too. And so, evidently, do the animals. It is a fearful thing to be without a “territory.” Whatever the market may say, the worth of the land is what it always was: It is worth what food, clothing, shelter, and freedom are worth; it is worth WHAT LIFE IS WORTH. This perception moved the settlers from the Old World into the New. Most of our [European] ancestors (The ‘European’ emphasis is mine. Berry used ‘American’) came here because they knew what it was to be landless; to be landless was to be threatened by want and also by enslavement. Coming here, they bore the ancestral memory of serfdom. Under feudalism, the few who owned the land owned also, by an inescapable political logic, the people who worked the land.” “Are these two things connected?” almost without any second thoughts, he quickly responded, “Of course they’re connected.” Then, he asked the interviewer, “What two things?” Thank you for reading, liking, commenting, restacking and sharing this dialogue with your friends. You’re helping to spread fresh thinking to create abundance, prosperity and resilience. Before you leave, I have a question for you: After listening to Cory Carman, what hidden connections of your own (if any) do you notice between farmland, farming and community?