uMbuso weNkosi (2023) PDF

### THESE POTATOES LOOK LIKE HUMANS #### Whose eyes are looking at history? **Chapter 2 | Whose eyes are looking at history?** Mrs Kgobadi carried a sick baby when the eviction took place ... Two days out the little one began to sink as the result of privation and exposure on the road ... its lit...

### THESE POTATOES LOOK LIKE HUMANS #### Whose eyes are looking at history? **Chapter 2 | Whose eyes are looking at history?** Mrs Kgobadi carried a sick baby when the eviction took place ... Two days out the little one began to sink as the result of privation and exposure on the road ... its little soul was released from its earthly bonds ... They [Kgobadi family] had no right or title to the farm lands through which they trekked: they must keep to the public roads – the only places in the country open to the outcasts if they are possessed of a travelling permit. The deceased child had to be buried, but where, when, and how? This young wandering family decided to dig a grave under cover of the darkness of that night, when no one was looking, and in that crude manner the dead child was interred – and interred amid fear and trembling, as well as the throbs of a torturing anguish, in a stolen grave, lest the proprietor of the spot, or any of his servants, should surprise them in the act. – Solomon Plaatje¹ The anguish of dispossession in South Africa is neither the untold truths nor the many spoken truths of how a family, in the place of their birth, ended up stealing a grave. The anguish comes from the eyes of the ones who had to steal the grave and bury their own in a hurry. As if that is not enough, the moment of dispossession is thought of today as part of a vile past that is no longer relevant to us. The history of dispossession in South Africa should instead be seen as part of our historical present. Our history is forever present in our social order. To locate it, we need to look deeply into South Africa's vast hectares of land. What we might excavate will be ugly, but it will also reveal the deeper meaning of dispossession – that once people are removed from the land, not only do they become slaves, they also become 'criminals' whose entire existence is a journey to nowhere. This is a condition of ontological nowhereness as exemplified in Solomon Plaatje's *Native Life in South Africa*, where he documents how the 1913 Land Act made criminals of all those Black people (labour tenants) who refused to abide by the law which stipulated that they would become servants of the farmer and work the land along with their cattle. Plaatje encountered families in Bloemhof, Transvaal, who had become criminals as a consequence of this resistance. These families had trekked into land unknown to them, risking capture and the charge of trespassing. They travelled with stock, and their ownership of that stock might be questioned. Many had thought that the law was applicable only in the Orange Free State and ignored warnings that it also applied in other parts of the Union of South Africa. All natives without land were turned into servants. Those who resisted were, in the words of Solomon Plaatje, 'wandering [to] somewhere'. The Kgobadi family was one such group. Not only had they lost their cattle in the trek, but they had also lost their offspring in the cold night and had to steal a grave to bury their child. The Kgobadi family were staring at their future through the child's death, a future in which they did not know where they would die and be buried. This story of dispossession aptly expresses ontological nowhereness. Deep within the story is a revelation of how dispossession creates the burden of not belonging to the land, not having a place called home, being forced to make ends meet in the city and potentially being criminalised for not producing a pass. When the dispossessed Kgobadi family looked at the vast landscape of South Africa, their eyes were looking into a past, the present and their future. It was a past snatched violently from them and a present that they refused to accept. The future was filled with hope that despite the loss in the past, there would surely be a place where they would make a home and would ultimately be buried. If they did not keep moving, they too would be without a grave. If they had no hope for the future, they could easily have returned to their past in the Orange Free State, to an environment they were familiar with – yet they continued to trek, losing possessions, losing life, losing their future through the death of their livestock and their offspring. Who knows what promises they made as they interred their seed? The Kgobadi family were also looking at the land with an eschatological gaze. This was a spiritual look at the land, which they saw as the first and last destiny for their spirit. To create a home and be buried in the land is a spiritual activity. This eschatological gaze was not limited to how the dispossessed saw their fate. In Bethal, when people looked at the potatoes and said, "These potatoes look like humans", theirs was an eschatological gaze. The statement is not coming from a person betrayed by their eye who ends up seeing the impossible, but is about an eye that already sees the truth in what is perceived – a human potato. Here I am mapping the eye as a prejudiced organ and bringing forth a puzzle. The conundrum lies in the difficulty of appreciating the story of dispossession when the eye is an organ of prejudice. The question of whose eyes are looking at history becomes important if we are to ascertain the meaning of the history of dispossession. I follow the eyes of the people who no longer had a home in the country of their birth to understand the meaning of this uncertainty and their relationship with this new state of existence. I invite the reader to look at dispossession with me, through the discredited eye, the eye of the dispossessed one, who steals a grave, who works the land, who is killed in this land and is then concealed. In so doing, I take a different look at the nature of farming in South Africa and its potential to create jobs, to boost the economy and to feed the nation, whose turbulence in recent times is seen as resulting from a decline in employment and is exacerbated by white farm killings and the calls for expropriation without compensation. In my PhD thesis I argued against the narrow view of seeing the land through an economic lens. In that narrow view, the farm killings and the debate of expropriation without compensation are linked together – because they build into the economic view of the land question. The expropriation without compensation is seen as condoning the killing of farmers and killing farmers will destroy the agricultural economy. This reduces the land question to an economic question without looking at questions of belonging to the land. Today our eyes must appropriate the look that is given to the land by those who have been discredited. Through these eyes, we will conclude that our present is steeped in a past that entailed death in the making of the South African farm, and we will see what dispossession is and how it relates to the future and our current temporality. Our eyes will meet other eyes also looking at the land: the eyes of the white farmer and the European settler, who came to legislate the theft of land and normalise the violence of dispossession under law. Violence and law became partners to ameliorate the anxiety about the future felt by the minority governing the land. The law rationalised the discrediting of land ownership by Black people by recognising that the minority were justified owners because they were adept at large-scale farming. To show how this history of death and dispossession is revealed in the present (beyond the focus of Bethal and in conversation with Bethal), I look first through the eyes of a sangoma (a traditional healer or diviner) in eMsinga, KwaZulu-Natal, to focus on the demand made by the dead whose graves were concealed for many years on Glenroy farm, Dududu. This is the first eye, the spiritual or the eschatological eye, which relates to death and to the demand of the dead for freedom. The biopolitical power of the state is insufficient to explain what happened to those who died at Glenroy farm and the forensic eye is brought in to 'freeze time' with the aim of giving a scientific (chronological and genealogical) account – yet this eye still cannot give a material account of the past. The narrative then shifts to the past, to the prison cells in Fordsburg, Johannesburg, in 1949, two years after P.J. de Beer, the Native Commissioner, piloted what became the notorious petty offenders' scheme. In this prison I look at the history of dispossession through the eyes of De Beer and how he argued that farm work was good for the prisoners (this despite rumours that farmers were murdering their workers). The paternalism of the commissioner was shared by white liberals, who believed that there were ways of improving the farmworkers' working conditions and that they were not equally bad on all farms. This eye ignores the nature of dispossession in South Africa and its making of ontological nowhereness. Another set of eyes is those of the farmers in Bethal who felt that the state did not understand their position. These eyes saw the critical articles in the press by the Reverend Michael Scott and others, and claimed that such sensationalism showed no understanding of what was good for the natives working on the farms. For the farmers, the issue was that the workers were prison labourers or criminals and were always trying to escape from the farms. For the farmers, the reported deaths of workers were a distortion of what was happening on the farms. After looking through these eyes, I return to why the eye is crucial when revisiting the history of dispossession. The eye of the farmer is the eye of authority on the farm; the eye of the farm labourer sees the farm as ontological nowhereness; the eye of the state includes the forensic eye that freezes time; the spiritual eye can see the spirits of the dead. In theorising the history of dispossession, we must see not only with the material or physical eye but also with the spiritual eye. The case of the Kgobadi family, for example, requires the spiritual eye to see the theft of the grave as an act that signals the coming future for the dispossessed. This future shapes the relations that Black people are to have with the land and gives a new meaning to the land that was dispossessed; as criminals, the dispossessed will not be returned to the land and their death will not be a spiritual passing to the other world to be welcomed by their ancestors. The death of the dispossessed was meaningless, their future futureless, since they did not belong to the land. In living and in death, the dispossessed were turned into wanderers seeking freedom, but they were chasing an unreachable horizon as they did not belong to the land. That is why the apparitions of the dispossessed demanded to be freed when they appeared in Gogo Mshanelo's visions. **To see with a spiritual eye** In 2015, Gogo Bongekile Nonhlanhla 'Mshanelo' Nkomo, a sangoma from eMsinga, detailed how, in the previous year, she was haunted in her visions and her sleep by ghosts demanding to be set free 'as you have freed others or to have their spirits released. In isiZulu this is called *freuboniswa*, a spiritual moment when ancestors bring visions to the sight of the diviner. These visions relate to the present or the future. Thus, *ukuboniswa* is to see with a spiritual eye. In her visions, Gogo Mshanelo would see scores of people without limbs or who were burned, stretching their arms towards her and demanding their freedom. She tried ignoring their calls but they began to manifest through her body, tormenting her to the point where she became sick, had unexplained bruises and lost her teeth. Who were these people who were so vicious in their demand for freedom? The response was that they were souls 'wandering, searching for peace and freedom. Gogo Mshanelo would later discover that the bodies she had seen were buried on Glenroy farm in Dududu, on the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal and now owned by Illovo Sugar (eMsinga, where Gogo Mshanelo is from, is approximately 250 kilometres away from Dududu). The sangoma tried to alert the government; she went to the MEC's office to relay this encounter with spectres, but to no avail. With the assistance of a chaplain from Pietermaritzburg, together with her initiate and a friend, she visited Glenroy farm and asked for permission to see the gravesite, claiming that she had a relative buried there. 'She was taken to a burial site, but she insisted it was not the one she had seen in her dreams. She was eventually led to the site she had seen in the dreams.” Her traditional healer colleagues later advised her to approach the provincial Department of Arts and Culture and the matter was handled by the MEC, Ntombikayise Sibhidla-Saphetha. In March 2015, it was reported that 100 dead bodies were discovered, buried on that farm. This discovery led the MEC to call for the documentation of 'the untold stories of KZN's history. The suspicion was that the bodies were those of prison labourers transported from Umzinto, near Newcastle, to Dududu. The owner of the farm had died in 1985 and the farm was sold around that time. The community attested to the farmer being an evil man known for torturing and killing prison labourers on the farm between the late 1950s and the early 1980s. Therefore, the bones were likely to belong to prison labourers sent to work on the farm through the petty offenders' scheme. Those buried on the farm were classified as criminals. Willie Ndlovu, who worked on Glenroy farm and resides in the area, indicated that those who worked on the farm 'were buried like dogs ... there are many prisoners who died there. Once a prisoner had died, the workers would just dig a hole and bury them in an unmarked grave… We called the place where they were buried *ezintandaneni* [the place of orphans]." This name is appropriate because those who died there were treated – and buried – as if they did not belong or have parents, but also because many of them left orphans behind. The pain of being buried like a dog is one that many prison labourers feared. They were reminded of the brutality of being homeless, of not belonging. What we are discovering through these unmarked graves is that when we look at the case of Bethal and, now, the discovery of Dududu, burying people on the land and concealing their graves was not a rare phenomenon. In the archive of Bethal materials, we also uncover how the dead were accounted for once the farmer had killed them. Timothy Moloke wrote of the plight of his four friends who, when the farmer discovered that they were paid-up members of the SAIRR, were chased from one farm in the Belfast area to go work for the same farmer in Bethal: "[T]heir master or farmer's chief idea of ordering them to go to Bethal is to kill them by means of his plan because since he has known that they are members of the organisation [SAIRR], he is more against them." The way in which he does when he wants to kill an African, they say, is ... "[h]e digs up a hole in his cornfield and takes his victim gently to it and orders him to get into it and then shoot at him and fills the hole with the sand goes to his local authorities and tells that the person left his farm without letting him know." 10 It seems that on the farms in Bethal the time-honoured tradition was to conceal the violated dead bodies by burying them in the fields. "[M]any Cases are concealed by means of burying the bodies of those who have been flogged and giving out that they have run away from the compound. These matters were brought before the courts and those who committed these atrocious acts were to be prosecuted. However, the spectres of Dududu remind us of the inadequacy of the language of legality to account for those who were landless, homeless and nameless, and tortured in body and soul. The officials in Dududu were digging up the past but needed tools to understand whether the dead were indeed victims of an unjust past. The eye of Gogo Mshanelo was doubted because it was a spiritual eye that saw the spirits of the dead before any evidence had surfaced. Through Gogo Mshanelo, we learn that the eye is an organ that can see things not only in the physical state but in the spiritual state as well. What kind of freedom is demanded by the dead, so much so that in their death they can still extend their arms to the living? The problem is clear to see: dispossession as a condition of denying Black people freedom also means that even in death they will not rest peacefully. Some sceptics viewed Gogo Mshanelo's visions or her ability to see the dead through a spiritual eye as chicanery because on the day of the visits to Glenroy with the MEC, she was wearing ANC regalia. 12 To them, this suggested that her eye was driven by her political views. But what about her body? Were they suggesting that the torture she suffered was self-inflicted? The aim of looking through the eye of Gogo Mshanelo is to show that dispossession entails a spiritual problem and the demand for freedom by the dead. During apartheid, the land that the prisoners worked on was to lead to their deaths, but at the same time there was hope that their spirits would be freed. In the current period of our democracy, the dead return, demanding freedom, demonstrating that freedom has not yet been attained. **To see with the frozen forensic eye** The eye of Gogo Mshanelo was not enough. On 14 March 2015, the state requested forensic expert David Klatzow to aid them in making the past speak truth and justice. Klatzow indicated that 'the scene – and the wider area around it (the farm] will now need to be sealed off and frozen in time. There must be no disturbance of it with a front-loader or shovel. It must be excavated as one would an archaeological site. 13 This site of archaeological interest, frozen in time, was to speak about unknown injustices of the past. The ghosts (for the sangoma) and the bones (for the forensic expert) were to speak of their condition and allow us, in the present, to understand the past. The name of the sangoma, Mshanelo, which translates as 'broom', is significant, for as a broom she had the ability, which was recognised by the dead, to sweep below and even beyond what could be seen. The unearthing power of the broom allows it to go beneath the surface and reveal things we have forgotten or never imagined existed. Gogo Mshanelo could not only sweep and reveal. She could also allow the wandering spirits to receive their freedom and find some solace. For the forensic expert, the bones were an archival source that spoke of the violence inflicted on the dead before they could finally rest and find their freedom. The problem was that these dead bodies were nameless and faceless, and it was difficult to find and notify their families. The burden fell on the living members of the families (if located) to come and claim their deceased with the assistance of forensics. In a sense, this archive in the form of spectres spoke for itself. Using the body of the sangoma as a medium, the ghosts' discontent and pain, and the violence against them, could be personified, made manifest through her body. The ghosts demanded freedom and could not be ignored until the bodies were excavated. Unfortunately, the process of excavation may have served the purpose of archiving, which encourages the remembrance of the dead only for those dead to be forgotten ones again. The bones revealed the horror in the history of South African farms, but with apparently no follow-up undertaken, the case seems to have gone nowhere.14 As we move to the farming fields in Bethal, we should see the story in this small town in Mpumalanga not as an aberration but as forming part of the story of dispossession that rendered many Black people homeless, nameless, faceless and graveless. **To see with the eye of the state** When the matter of farmers killing workers in Bethal was revealed in the media, there was a need to understand how such a system had come about. The SAIRR carried out an investigation of the Native Commissioner's office in Fordsburg to ascertain whether P.J. de Beer, the Native Commissioner, was coercing the natives to work on the farms. The subsequent report was written by Frederick van Wyk, assistant director at the SAIRR, as the main author; William Ngakane, who served as a fieldworker, was the second author: "Mr de Beer, who has been in the employment of the Department of Native Affairs for approximately 45 years and who has been at Fordsburg for 7 years, …knows the Africans very well and seems to be highly respected by them. Those Africans who know him well – and there are many – call him ‘Oom Piet' [Uncle Piet]. His whole attitude towards the Africans is very friendly and sympathetic, and both Mr. Ngakane and I were impressed by the friendly atmosphere which prevails in the hall in which he usually addresses the Africans." 15 The report conveys a different account of how prison labourers worked on the farms. Eyes such as Van Wyk's would never find anything amiss in what De Beer was saying because it confirmed his belief in the need for a white person to look after the Black person. Let us hear the voice of De Beer as he speaks to the prisoners housed at Fordsburg, linking himself to them because he was also born on a farm: "I have come to talk to you, not as an official but as one of your own… In my young days I was never taught not to play with you and I was frequently naughty with you. My father always said "The Africans are our people. We (you and my father's people) were never poor. We had our land and our cattle. You and I know that life, but we cannot live that life in Johannesburg. We cannot keep cattle, and life is expensive here. What you should do is to go to places where you can work and save money. Here in Johannesburg you earn money and spend it all immediately. Here you never save money. Now I want to offer those of you who have no work and no passes an opportunity to work in our biggest national factory, by which I mean the farms …the factories which your fathers and my fathers built and where you and I grew up. You can learn more today on the farms than before and become skilled workers as drivers of tractors or workers on threshing machines. If you can drive a tractor you are a full-fledged driver of practically every vehicle and will obtain a licence which is valid in any part of the country. In addition, you will get comparatively high wages. In order to live you must learn different kinds of work. It is experience that counts. I don't want to discourage you but you must remember that machinery is fast ousting you for employment. I know of work previously done by 500 Native boys. The same work is now done by one machine and 8 boys. But you need not suffer as we have our own factories turning out goods which we cannot import owing to import restrictions. So we are building our own factories and in two or three years' time I am sure you will be able to choose your own employment. With the money which you can now save, you will help you, if you save the money. We should not stay in town merely because of the bioscope… A man walking about Johannesburg is no good to anybody. You must remember the law which we call Section 29 (Act 25, 1945) applies to black and white alike. The Africans who won't work at all are sent to Leeuwkop [jail] and the Europeans to Swartfontein [jail]. We also have men who won't work amongst white people. If we do not work we walk about idly, get into mischief and eventually even cut other people's throats. The conditions on the farms are good and our Union Africans never run away from them. It is the extra Union Africans who run away. I think you are all good enough for our farms. You have now heard what I said and I thank you for listening to me. I now leave it to you to decide what is in your best interests." 16 This time travel through the eye of De Beer is an effort to evoke in the minds of the prisoners memories of those days when natives were happy on the farm and had cattle. De Beer is calling to mind a different side of dispossession: in the present state, the prisoners desire those long-gone days when they had land and cattle, but life in the city will not earn them that. This search for happiness as described by De Beer could also present itself to the prisoners as a question: where will we die? This question made many detest the farm, for they had to work the land without belonging to it. De Beer's vision was that in the past the native had been happy, and a glorified past could be realised again in the future if the prisoners went to work on the farms as prison labourers. De Beer did not know that the happiness that existed in the past, now stolen by the present, could not exist again in the coming future. The renewal and rehabilitation project De Beer spoke of as a project of justice – namely, to escape a prison cell – was to backfire. Those prison labourers came back as ghosts of those buried on unknown farms – as in the case of the spectres from Dududu - possibly violently killed, demanding freedom from the present future. De Beer treats the present as if the present is not the future of the past; as if in that past and in that state of happiness those who found themselves in prison cells were not running away from the happiness that he thinks existed on the farms. In this he deflates the horror on the farms by laying the desertion from them on those he sees as 'extra Union Africans', meaning immigrants who worked on the farms. The conditions on the farms were as horrendous for the prison labourers as they were for the immigrants. It was those conditions that forced many to run away – or to want to run away. **To see with the paternalistic eye of the white liberal** During the period of media coverage of farm killings in Bethal, a letter was addressed to Frederick van Wyk by a Mrs A. Hoedemaker (from Bathurst in the Eastern Cape) in which she expressed her concern about how other farmers treated farmworkers as labourers. She indicated that she was trying to find ways to help the farmworkers she had employed to deal with social, economic and health problems.17 She stated that she had tried to secure the services of a social worker, but the cost would be 20 pounds per month, which she could not afford. She was concerned about the state of being of the workers: "Surely the Bantoe [sic] WERE a happy people, but don't you think, they have lost a lot of their natural happiness in the last years? More in the towns than on the farms, I think but even here: is there not a bitterness in the young people's hearts, when they see, how the old ones get old? Not in all of them, but some seem fanatic." 18 The eyes of Hoedemaker see bitterness. She is concerned and her letter to Van Wyk is intended to find solutions. She wrote that she 'do[es] not look on them as labour but as people of South Africa. This line impressed Van Wyk, whose response was that such an attitude is a good starting point and if only your attitude could be generally accepted by South African farmers, farm labourers would, I am sure, benefit very greatly. I do think that the most important thing is that farmers should treat their labourers with courtesy, consideration and kindness and then the other things will follow naturally. At the same time, one must always bear in mind that these people are, generally speaking, very conservative, their views of what is important in life often differ very much from our own and I personally do not believe that we should aim at drastic changes and drastic reforms, provided our attitude to them is one of kindness and fairness. From a European point of view I think it is true to say that they are, generally speaking, backward, both educationally and in their way of living, but I am of the opinion if they are well housed, well fed and sympathetically treated, they are very happy people, something which, I am afraid, cannot always be said about the highly civilized and the well-to-do. Because they are backward they are not always able to grasp the full significance of reforms aimed at their own improvement and my experience has been that they often regard attempts to improve their conditions with the utmost suspicion and sometimes even with amusement at the peculiarities of the Europeans. One is, therefore, really forced to move slowly, the ideal being that reforms should take place without their being aware of them. This calls for the utmost patience and understanding and a willingness to carry on in spite of the lack of appreciation on their part. So often their attitude is one of UZUNGADINWA NANGOMSO (Please do not tire to-morrow) i.e. (Please continue giving us gifts, etc.)…"19 Van Wyk's language is as paternalistic as De Beer's. They were alike, both born and raised on the farm side by side with Black people. They perceived themselves as benign spirits interested in the development of the backward native. Van Wyk was of the view that reforms should happen slowly. Mrs Hoedemaker was dealing with an ungrateful bunch who always wanted gifts. This language seeks to show how backward Black people are and that the burden of the white nation in South Africa is to modernise them and assist them. This is an expert speaking here (also speaking on behalf of the knowledge gained by his friends), for he ‘grew up on a farm – in the Eastern Cape – and lived there for fourteen years, I have now lost touch with farm life. However, I shall try to give you the outline of a plan which I base on my knowledge of Xhosa farm labourers…’20 This eye was a prejudiced eye, which formed part of the society of white liberals who believed they had the best interests of the native at heart since they knew how the native behaved. It was a metaphysical eye, the view of those who believed that their actions were based on sound ethics, for the good of the lazy native. This eye reveals the metaphysics of representation. 21 In recognising their shared history with the dispossessed, they also misrecognise the people in front of them and suspect that their unhappiness might be based on their ungratefulness or laziness. The solution: continue to send them to the farms, but improve their working and living conditions. When confronted by the evidence that workers were dying on the farms, they claimed that only a few farmers were bad, not seeing the violence on the farms as part of the nature of South African agriculture and that the dispossessed were unhappy because they were dealing with the condition of ontological nowhereness. **The eye of the state and the farmer in Bethal** The media coverage of violent abuse in Bethal sparked a social furore. The Minister of Justice, H.G. Lawrence, gathered farmers in the area in July 1947, and at this meeting the farmers and government expressed how they saw the problems. The minister claimed that the problem was not one of violence but that, although the prison labour system ensured a supply of labour, workers deserted the farms because they were criminals. The farm was a route to their freedom and a means to avoid serving their sentences.22 **To the farmers, there was nothing wrong with what was happening in Bethal. One of the farmers at the gathering before the minister was open about the issue:** "The matter had got so bad that farmers did not trouble any more to report cases to the police. (Applause.) After all, if a farmer was lucky enough to catch natives who had deserted and who had cost him a lot of money, there was provocation for him to give them a cuff (klap). (Applause.) He was not condoning ill-treatment or certain serious assaults, however." 23 A bit of violence should be permitted because the farmers were dealing with a childlike criminal who needed their supervision and guidance. The farmers did not believe their problem needed any investigation for the solution was clear: when dealing with desertion, a tougher hand was required. Mr Lawrence said that while he agreed that there was a need for control where many natives were employed, ‘it was illegal for anyone to deprive another person of his elementary rights of freedom. In no circumstances could farmers lock up their natives or keep guards over them when they went to and from their work. He reassured them that they should '[f]orget Mr. SCOTT. Forget that gogga. Don't let one man be such a spook to you." 24 Reverend Scott had been invited to attend a meeting in the Bethal town hall, where the farming community showed him how they felt about him: "As Mr Scott rose to speak shouts and boos came from every part of the crowded hall. One man rose and appealed to the meeting to allow Mr Scott to speak, 'Do not be afraid, let him speak, we can fix him later, he shouted. 'We won't let him,' shouted the crowd. 'Let him go to his coolies.' Mr Smit [president of the Bethal branch of the Agricultural Union, who chaired the meeting] assured the audience that Mr Scott had promised not to be long, and pleaded with them to let him have his say. 'Not a word, shouted the crowd. A suggestion was made that the meeting should vote on whether Mr Scott should be allowed to speak. A man in the crowd called out: 'Let him speak in Afrikaans or not at all. 'If he can't speak in Afrikaans let him speak in Kr, called another voice, and another added a few moments later: 'Or in coolie." 25 Scott eventually spoke, but he was hardly heard because of the howling from the crowd. "He never did manage to reach his conclusion ... that dairy cows were far better protected by law in terms of living space and sustenance than were compound labourers. Before this insight could be imparted, the meeting had effectively been taken over by an Afrikaner woman in the audience who virulently insisted Scott had insulted Afrikaner motherhood, her own three sons, and the entire nation…" 26 Scott was condemned as someone who had insulted the entire white nation; he was a troublemaker, a spook, a communist. Such insults are interesting for they reveal the eye of power and how it perceived what was written about Bethal, even though there was evidence that farmers in Bethal were violent and were killing their workers. The entire white farming community in Bethal saw the scandal as an externalisation of their internal problems, an intervention into how things were on the farm. They continued to argue that their problem was that they were faced with natives who ran away from the farms and therefore they did not commit any murder. The natives who were unaccounted for were likely to have simply run away. In Scott's report he had indicated that most deaths on the farms were the result of indunas (foremen) or farmers beating people to death for trying to escape, as had been the case with Franz Marie and Phillip Lebovo in 1944 Regarding the cases of 1947, Mr B.H. Wooler in the Bethel magistrate's court stated: "Europeans because they were better educated should set an example. Instead many continually had sjamboks with them: if they carried sjamboks they get into the habit of using them and when they lost their tempers they used them indiscriminately and without justice, they punished excessively and without care and the time might come when such punishment would lead to loss of life and to the most serious consequences for the assailant." 27 To the judge, violence was the way of life for the farmers; it was how they solved the problems on their farms. The unjust usage of the sjambok was the law on the farm – and justified. This violence was again revealed in 1959 at the inquest of Cornelius Mokgoko, whose death sparked the potato boycott. 28 Cornelius had arrived on Legdaar farm on 2 March 1959 and died there three days later. (Legdaar was one of the farms I visited during my fieldwork.) His body was exhumed on 19 July 1959 by the Bethal magistrate for an inquest to determine whether he was a victim of violence on the farm. At the inquest, Simon Skosana took the stand as a witness. He said Cornelius was 'thrashed every day by the Boss boy because he was slow'. The boss-boy shouted at him: 'When an animal does not work we throw him out – this is Bethal. The workers were seen as animals, and if they were slow, beatings would make them improve. Cornelius was beaten over the head and body with a stick. Blood was coming out of his mouth and ears. The 'white boss of the farm' also joined in the beatings when he was told how lazy Cornelius was. Despite his wounds, Cornelius was forced to continue working, denied water and shade, 'and died on the ground where the other workers could see him'. 29 The death of Cornelius was to be an example to other workers: in Bethal, if you do not work, you die. Yet his body did not rest in peace, for it was to be subjected to the biopolitical power of the state through an inquest. Skosana's account of how the man had died was validated by the exhumed body, the wounds serving as evidence of the violence. Through Cornelius, we see how the farmers saw those workers who were not used to farm work; they saw such workers as needing a sjambok. Interestingly, the death of Cornelius made the activists in the country see Bethal differently. They saw the area as needing political action; this led to the boycott of the potatoes from this region to pressurize the farmers into treating their workers justly. **Theorising from the eye** The question of whose eyes are looking at the history of dispossession is about the pace and order of this world that one tries to theorise. To theorise from the eyes is to bring the question