Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5: Arrival in Johannesburg and
dinner with friends:
After arriving at our hotel late Saturday afternoon we went down to the bar for a drink
before meeting my friend Chris, his wife Bev and another good friend we trained with Martin
and his wife Michelle, for dinner.
Farming:
During dinner, Chris and I discussed farming in South Africa. He once had a fairly
reasonable size farm with an irrigation system, but progressively more and more of equipment
was stolen from the farm and he decided it just wasn't worth carrying on farming, Martin had
also sold his game farm under land claims for a "fair" price under the principal of "willing
seller, willing buyer" for less than he had paid for it. These land claims are based on the June
16 (another infamous day like the Soweto riots, which in my estimation is the day of the year
apartheid began and ended, see later) of 1913 Natives (Bantu) Lands Act passed with Royal
Approval after South Africa was made the Union of South Africa by the British. Furthermore,
some 3,500 farmers have been murdered on their farms in South Africa. At one time he related
that there were 130,000 odd commercial farmers in South Africa but today the number is down
to 38,000. Similarly, pari passu, the white population has also declined as a proportion from
one quarter in 1972 (5 million of 21 million) to one tenth now (5 million of 50 million) and
between the 1994 till 2000 officially 1.5 million emigrated from the country. An article in the
Star Newspaper confirmed that 10 years earlier in 2001 there were 60,000 commercial
farmers, but that number had dropped to 36,000. The article emphasized the need for
increasing the size of commercial farms to make them viable apart from the dangers of being
alone on isolated farms. This also raises the issue of farm size and what has happened to
farming in Southern Africa, the United States and Scandinavia. In the United States the
Homestead Act of 1862 basically stated that if a person farmed and cleared the land for one
square mile, 640 acres, that would become their land. As early farmers moved further and
further west they ran into problems with the Plains Indians. In the Black Hills there were
conflicts between the miners who had discovered gold, and the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne,
and other Native American Indian tribes who used this area for harvesting berries and hunting
for meat. It has been calculated that at the time of the Battle of Big Horn, each Native
American required approximately 6 buffalo per person per year for both food clothing and
construction of teepees. At the same time the number of bison was progressively declining.
There were extensive hunting expeditions, including one in which Custer rode up alongside to
a buffalo bull and just before trying to shoot, the buffalo rammed his horse, tripped it and by
accident Custer accidently shot his horse instead. Although the Homestead Act resulted in
multiple small farms, most of them were difficult to make viable, particularly when later on
after the drought and dust bowl.
In Sweden, farms were often divided up between sons to be farmed and they became
progressively smaller. In the case of our own family farms, they became fairly small and not
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