Farmworker Francina Maluleke is still haunted by the injuries she suffered when she was struck by a rubber bullet on her eye during a protest for a minimum wage.
“The level of racism in the farming sector is of grave concern because black people are treated like animals. We are used to being insulted and likened to ugly animals. We are being humiliated every day, but due to poverty, we just can’t abandon our jobs. It is demeaning to be a farmworker,” Maluleke told Sunday World this week.
Maluleke was speaking in Polokwane, Limpopo on the sidelines of a conference organised by the SA Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) into human rights violations and social cohesion in the farming sector.
Delegates at the conference heard harrowing accounts of abuse of farmworkers.
The province has been in the spotlight after two women, Maria Makgato, 45, and Lucia Ndlovu, 34, were allegedly shot and their bodies fed to pigs by a white farmer and two of his workers.
Three men, Zachariah Johannes Olivier, 60, and his employees Adrian de Wet, 19, and William Musora, 50, have been charged with the murders.
Silence Mabunda, a farmworker, escaped death by the skin of his teeth when Mark Scott-Crossley knocked him down with a four-wheel drive vehicle several years ago.
Mabunda, who was working at a wildlife rehabilitation centre at the time of the attack, said the gruesome incident has left him traumatised.
“Even though Scott-Crossley attacked me eight years ago, the gruesome images of that day are still lingering in my mind. Reality is that there will never be any harmony between whites and blacks in the farming communities,” he said.
In 2005 Scott-Crossley was found guilty of the murder of his employee Nelson Chisale.
Farmworkers’ rights activist Sydney Babeile said the conditions farmworkers are subjected to are degrading.
“They live in squalid conditions and are often denied basic services like water and electricity while children are subjected to child labour,” Babeile said.
“The usage of the k-word is not even regarded as a swear word and farmworkers are used to being addressed like that. Human rights are being trampled on while society seems oblivious of the plight of farmworkers.”
Gideon Seleka, a representative of the Food and Allied Workers Union, said residents of Marapong were still reeling with shock after a woman was shot with a rifle when she accompanied her boyfriend to fishing near a farm in Lephalale. When the white farmer was arrested, he allegedly told the police that he had mistaken the woman for a hippopotamus.
“When you talk about human rights in Lephalale, you are talking about something we have never heard of. We are constantly harassed by white farmers and residents have accepted that as a way of life,” Seleka said.
The SAHRC, however, bemoaned the conspicuous absence of white farmers at the conference. The commission’s provincial head Victor Mavhidula confirmed that farmers had also been invited to the indaba.
“We invited them and some confirmed [they would attend] while others did not,” he said.
Pat Molepo, the CEO of Community Advise and Law Centre in Seshego, said: “The inhumanity farmworkers are forced to endure is a sad reminder of the cruelty of apartheid.
“Farms have become prisons where inhumanity and gross human rights violation are a way of life.”
