Reuters / Peter Somakhephu’s life has followed a pattern familiar to many black South African miners: he exchanged a marginal existence of peasant farming in his home village for low-paid labour underground before being forced back onto the land.
His life has come full circle but he has broken the cycle of grinding subsistence by moving from staple crops for family consumption to small-scale fruit production for commercial sale, a business that was, until recently, far out of reach.
His example may hold promise for some of the tens of thousands of miners set to lose their jobs in coming years, a new wave of unemployment that will fuel tensions in the countryside and in the grim shantytowns that ring the mines.
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Anglo American Platinum’s (Amplats) move to cut 3,300 jobs to restore profits sparked a 13-day strike by miners desperate for work in a country where four out of 10 adults, and more than half of the youth, have none.
It ended Oct. 10 after Amplats agreed to give the workers voluntary severance packages instead of laying them off.
This means they will get more compensation, though the amounts were not immediately specified. The company had already rowed back from a target of 14,000 jobs under pressure from the government and unions, underscoring the gravity of the issue.
The social consequences of mine job losses are widespread because the typical worker in the industry has eight dependants often in two separate families, one near the mines and the other back in their rural villages.
The African National Congress (ANC), in power for almost two decades, is likely to win next year’s election, but more radical political forces are circling and Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe has called youth unemployment a “ticking time bomb.”
Resentment runs deep. Somakhephu, an ex-platinum miner, says the fruits of his labour owe nothing to the industry, which has not lived up to public expectations for a wider redistribution of wealth since white minority rule ended in 1994.
“I built these from farming, not from mining,” said Somakhephu, a sprightly 61-year-old, as he gestured to the set of five small but sturdy houses that crown his rural homestead in the rugged hills of South Africa’s Eastern Cape province.
Behind him to the east neat rows of orange trees sloped to the valley floor, to the west stood lush banana plants.
Somakhephu’s neighbour Elliot Belem, 56, standing among his orange trees, said farming his 2.5-hectare plot was better than life in the gold mines, where he was a first aid worker.
“It’s better to be a farmer than a miner. I have no supervisor, I am self-employed,” he said.
They are part of a project that has seen 5,200 households plant more than 110,000 crop trees since 1999, according to South Africa’s Agricultural Research Council, a state agency, and Is’Baya Development Trust, the NGO behind the initiative.
The project, which has received no funding from the mining industry, aims ultimately to form co-ops to help with marketing and distribution in a sector still dominated by white commercial farmers whose industrial-scale operations have made South Africa the world’s second-largest citrus exporter after Spain.
The fledgling fruit farmers still face many obstacles — not least a perception in the region that agriculture here is still largely a peasant and not commercial activity, unlike in other regions, where white farmers predominate.
In the town of Lusikisiki, about 50 kms (30 miles) from Somakhephu’s groves, Monica Nduli, a middle-aged woman selling fruit on the roadside, said she sourced her produce from KwaZulu-Natal, 150 km (90 miles) away.
“In Transkei? Never! It’s only in KwaZulu-Natal that we get such fruit,” she told Reuters.
