Ntsiki Biyela - Wine maker
The NYtimes profiles Ntsiki Biyela:While still a student, Ms. Biyela was given a part-time job at Delheim, a large winery, and this led to her oenological conversion. She not only worked in the vineyards and the cellar but also served wine to visitors in the tasting room and was consequently obliged to discuss what she poured. So she too tasted. She developed her palate.After graduation, Stellekaya, a boutique winery in Stellenbosch, hired her as its winemaker. It was a big leap, and the winery was taking a big chance on someone so inexperienced. A consultant helped her in the beginning, but soon she was on her own. Her very first red blend won a gold medal at the country’s prestigious Michelangelo awards.
More here
The South African government has admitted it will not reach its redistribution target by 2014
Apartheid land reforms
in chaos as blacks
sell farms back to whites
Saturday, 3 September 2011
The South African government has conceded that 30 per cent of land it has bought since the end of apartheid for redistribution to black farmers has been resold by the beneficiaries, often to the original owners.
The admission by Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti came as his long-delayed green paper on the controversial issue was met with scepticism, both by commercial farmers and pro-poor campaigners.
All, however, agree that the exploitative agricultural system that was put in place under apartheid earns valuable export income for the country, but that it risks imploding if it is not tackled. The various groups worry that the situation could eventually replicate that of Zimbabwe several years ago, when the implementation of land reform policy was met with widespread violence and economic meltdown.
Eighty per cent of South African produce still comes from 15 per cent of its farms, most of them large-scale and white-owned.
"The basic problem is that the government has never treated land reform and agriculture as two sides of the same coin," said Theo de Jager, the deputy president of Agri SA, the main commercial farmers' union. "The government does not want black farmers to join us as members. They want them to remain beholden."
Clear figures are not available showing how much land is owned by different groups in South Africa. The government claims 7 per cent has passed to black farmers but Agri SA puts the figure at 15 per cent, claiming that the government itself owns up to a third.
The 12-page green paper on land reform, released on Wednesday, proposes replacing the existing Land Claims Commission with two new bodies that would have the controversial power to invalidate deeds and set values. This would abolish the willing-buyer, willing- seller principle, which requires the government to pay market rates.
Mr Nkwinti said that principle "distorts the markets", adding that the government has already spent 40bn rands (£3.4bn) on land purchases. In future, he said, it would buy land at fair rates and lease it to black farmers.
Commercial farmers and the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) claim abolishing the existing system would violate the constitutional principle of property rights. "Appointing a non-independent body to determine compensation is open to abuse," said DA spokeswoman Lindiwe Mazibuko.
But the government faces powerful internal and grassroots pressures to redress racial and economic imbalances in farming and land ownership. Ever since the founding of the African National Congress in 1912, the land question has been at the core of the South African liberation struggle.
The system put in place after the first all-race elections in 1994 has moved too slowly to redress the imbalances in land ownership in South Africa. Mr Nkwinti admitted the government no longer expected to reach its target of redistributing 30 per cent of farmland to black farmers by 2014. After several big resettlement failures it thenstopped handing out any acquired land in 2008.
But Mr de Jager said the framework proposed in the green paper – under which the government would lease land to black farmers – was unlikely to succeed either. "We have 70,000 black members and they do not like the proposal either. It would mean whites would remain landowners while blacks could only be leaseholders. That is wrong."
Pro-poor activist Andile Mngxitama said the green paper's proposal to create two new bodies to administer land distribution just appeared to replace one layer of ineffective bureaucracy with another.
"The heart of the issue is that the land was taken by force and must be redistributed. It is a matter of ending apartheid," he said.
"However, the process need not be as chaotic as in Zimbabwe if you redistribute according to need and skill to people who still have a relationship with the land, and who show due regard for the environment," he added.
>via: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/apartheid-land-reforms-in-chao...
__________________________
Second generation trauma
by Pheladi Sethusa
24/08/2011 # 7:25 am # Impressions - my diary # 4 Comments
I attended an amazing seminar at the University of the Witwatersrand on Thursday 18th of August. The speaker at the seminar was Eva Hoffman, who is both a writer and an academic. The topic of the seminar was “Lost and Found in Transition: Contested memories and moving on from difficult pasts” , and more specifically second generation trauma. A phenomenon I have recently come to learn about and find very intriguing.
Second generation trauma has to do with the aftershocks that the children of survivors of gratuitous violence experience. The expression was first used to describe the children of Holocaust survivors. I came across this term when reading Maus, a great graphic novel by Art Spiegelman. He not only tells his father’s story of living through the genocide but also tells his personal story of trying to deal with that ‘passed on’ trauma. Eva Hoffman’s autobiography Lost in Translation does the same. She too is a second hand trauma victim.
Eva Hoffman described second hand trauma as encapsulating contested memories and transitions after great wrongs have been committed. This can prove problematic when trying to achieve reconciliation, especially because the afterlife of atrocity is long. She went on to say that democracy and freedom are difficult to negotiate after such a traumatic experience and that this initiation is necessary. Not from the victims’ side but from the perpetrators’. In Jewish consciousness, the Polish were and are seen as being conspirators with the Nazi’s in contributing to Jewish suffering. In the same breath, she said that Polish descendants cannot be blamed or punished for their forefathers, but they need to acknowledge what happened. “After such wrongs have been done, they can’t be undone… Recognition, not forgiveness needs to be the starting point of reconciliation.”
The whole time she was speaking I was thinking of the South African example of the above. As the seminar went on Ms Hoffman delved deeper into the nature of second generation trauma. She said that it has to do with the transmission of memories but not exclusively; memory coupled with the after-effects of parental experience. This transmission often leads to the second generation being frozen in time, in so doing perpetuating the cycle of revenge within their generation. The children of survivors speak of despondency, depression and anger which all arise from trying to locate their parents’ context in history. None of the above can be resolved unless a second generation dialogue is initiated.
Second generation dialogue refers to the conversations that need to take place between the children of the victims and those of the perpetrators. We need to recognise that children of the perpetrators are also going through some form of trauma. They are traumatised by the silence of their parents, their inability to admit they were wrong. As a result they try to reject their parents but cannot do that because it is easier said than done. The fact that both sides are trying to deal with inherited trauma should be the condition that allows for a dialogue to take place. Trust and understanding are imperative for this dialogue to work. This dialogue is the only means of getting on a reconciliatory path and leading to an expansion of minds.
I brought all of the above into a proximal context, a personal context. I consider myself as a victim of second generation trauma. I often wrestle with the issues that Ms Hoffman raised. I am angry and despondent about apartheid, and so are a lot of my peers. It is particularly difficult for us to ‘move on’ because the lived reality of inequality is still very real to us. What I mean by this is that South Africa inherited a structure of violence and immense inequality. Today we refer to it as the legacy of apartheid. How can we even begin to let go when the effects of that totalitarian system are still rife in our society? The racial disparities in our society are very obvious and this is something that needs to be addressed. However, when one starts to speak about such issues we are met with contestations of being too racialist. I find that a lot of liberal whites and blacks want us to repress the past. This would be folly; the past needs to be acknowledged and addressed. “Wrong doers cannot get forgiveness until they admit to crimes and are willing to repent for them”, said Hoffman.
This brought up questions from the audience about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). One gentleman said it was highly idyllic and aimed to quickly cover up the past. He went on to say it failed because forgiveness is a Christian doctrine and forced people to adhere along those lines. To counter this, a young lady said we cannot look at the TRC as a defining moment but a mere example of things that can be done to help the nation move on. Hoffman answered this by saying: “The side most responsible for atrocities needs to make the first step”. This is where the TRC failed. To add on to this point, another young lady said it is astonishing to her that “those who weren’t allowed to vote before 1994 are now responsible for reconciling a nation that was destroyed by those who were allowed to vote”. Surely it should be the inverse.
I must say this seminar did help me in negotiating my position as a young black person. Along with this I had a defining “aha moment”. I never thought about the equally complex psychological disposition of my white peers. Both ‘sides’ cannot reject or abandon their parental history but we need to remember it is not our own. The second generation dialogue resonated with me; it is the first step we can all take on this journey of reconciliation. It will not happen overnight; it will be a process. We need to create our own history that will reflect our willingness to try and amend the past.
Pheladi Sethusa is a second year BA student in Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand
>via: http://www.expressimpress.org/2011/08/24/second-generation-trauma/