In 2017 I was invited to the Senwes Jongboerkongres, an annual gathering of farmers and related stakeholders, attended by about 300 to 400 young farmers from Free State and North West. I was a speaker on a panel that explored how to establish closer co-operation in rural and suburban communities between different stakeholder groups, including local government, the business sector, agricultural sector, township residents and town residents.
I was impressed by the positive framing of the topic. It was billed as a conversation designed to get stakeholders to identify areas of common interest. The hope was that each sector would focus on what they could contribute to the achievement of a better quality of life for all residents and communities. Before the start of the discussion, the organisers flighted a series of short videos.
I was intrigued by the account of a partnership between a municipal manager, farmers and a local community. Working together they were able to uncover bottlenecks in the municipality’s functions and collaborated to improve its capacity to deliver services by sharing expertise and through effective communication to achieve developmental goals and meet community needs.
Against this backdrop, I proffered that disconnectedness and siloed living is a major obstacle to co-operation between sectors and communities, not only in rural SA, but across society. It is a perpetual dividedness. Whereas in the past this division was legislated, in contemporary SA, outside the force of spatial realities, this division is largely by choice.
And given that the historical division was premised on racial segregation — euphemised as the separate development of the races — the present division by choice is also racial in character. This isolated racial existence is the fertile ground for exceptionalism.
And this exceptionalism is most forceful when applied to adversity or misfortune of a certain group. It was not very long into the question-and-answer session that the question came: what should be done about the onslaught on farmers?
As the popular, but false, narrative goes, white farmers are being targeted and killed at a much higher rate than any other population group. This question and false notion are easily rebutted with statistics. But vessels of exceptionalism are rarely ever swayed by statistics. Statistics are important but they have the tendency of coming across as impersonal and insensitive, especially when they attack the very foundation of a person’s or a group’s strongly held view about themselves.
When you are a farmer, a white farmer at that, and you have had an experience or have witnessed other white farmers’ experiences of losing their lives to a gruesome murder, nobody can argue with that experience. The pain of loss is undeniable and the jarring effects of the trauma, incontrovertible. And that’s the point right there: Just as the pain of whiter farmers deserves acknowledgment, so does the painful reality of black people and other communities.
I made the point that many more black people than white farmers in surrounding communities experience the siege of violence and murder. I asked these farmers to step out of their golden cage of exceptionalism to realise that crime is a disease that does not discriminate.
The young farmer of the year then shared how in his experience, his workers face the terror of violent crime the moment his vans offload them to cross the road into their townships and informal settlements after a long day’s work.
He reported how many of them report being mugged and assaulted before they reach their homes and how their injuries are sometimes debilitating, keeping them away from work. This young farmer stepped out of the silo of white exceptionalism — of bad things only happen to us. White farmers are not the only ones who suffer. Instead of causing more harm, the angry white farmers in Senekal would do well to take a leaf out of this young man’s book and disabuse themselves of their false narrative premised on exceptionalism.
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