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12/22/2004:

"Ghost of apartheid returns to farmlands"

A hunting boom driven by wealthy tourists is pushing black South Africans off the land to make way for game, generating anger that, a decade after apartheid, whites still own most of the countryside.

Hundreds of commercial farms have evicted their labourers and converted into game parks, turning swaths of arable land into fenced wilderness for trophy animals such as lions and antelopes.

Many farmers admit that switching to hunting is a pretext to get rid of black workers whom they blame for a surge of theft and violent crime in rural areas since white minority rule ended in 1994.

Groups representing labourers say the evictions are a continuation of colonial and apartheid-era dispossession, and that the time has come to expropriate white-owned land.

"Game parks are mushrooming too much. They bring hunger to the people. People are becoming angry," said Mangaliso Kubheka, a national organiser for an activist group, the Landless People's Movement. Mr Kubheka is himself facing eviction from a farm in Ingogo, in KwaZulu-Natal province, where his family has tilled maize and pumpkin over three generations for white owners.

In return, the labourers were given a plot of land of their own to cultivate rent-free, but that arrangement is threatened by the farmer's plan to replace them with wildlife, which wealthy foreigners pay handsomely to shoot.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk