Msinga: People shaped by land

Culture for Bruce and Norma

We read My Traitor’s Heart by Rian Malan, for Seminar.  I learned about a place called Msinga which is a paradigm illustration behind my support of principles of sustainability—conserving water, top soil, indigenous plants, and the relationships to facilitate respect for natural resources and respectful cultivation of agricultural products.  Msinga illustrates in the very stark and extreme way in which people can be shaped by land. 

In 1849, Zulu’s were sent to Msinga, KwaZulu  to serve as a magisterial district meant for Zulu’s to govern themselves in a designated “homeland” much like the American Indians were put on reservations when white people encroached on their land.  Zulus were taken off of “white” farmland and put in the homeland, resulting in twice the amount of stock and people than the land could support.  The first reports of desertification, or erosion of top soil, from over-grazing of cows and goats, was in 1878.  In 1990, when Malan visited, it was a bleaker picture yet.  There was no top soil, “just sheets of gray slate and clayey subsoil baked hard as concrete by the sun” (340).  The people of Msinga were as hard as the land.  One could not feed a family on subsistence farming and there were no jobs, so men traveled to Johannesburg for work in the mines and sent checks home for their absence.  Men from different isigodi, neighborhoods, fight retribution wars dating back to battles in 1956 when so-and-so killed someone’s relative over something no one can remember.  Murders committed in broad day light in a crowd have no witnesses.  The news of murders reaches the barracks in Johannesburg, and fights flare up there, or the men come home to settle disputes in home territory, bury their friends, and go back to work to wait for the next sign of war.

Msinga Zulu’s also fight border battles with white farmers.  “Whenever the rains failed, old antagonisms rose to the surface.  The Zulus cut white farmers’ fences, rustled their stock, stole their crops, hamstrung their cattle, and set fire to their grazing land” (360).  White farmers scare the Zulus off of their farms by unusual punishment or shooting people (even children stealing fire wood) or livestock on sight.  One farmer claimed, “This had nothing to do with racism.  ’I like blacks.”… He just didn’t have enough water or grazing land to share with them.  So he took up his gun and secured his boundary” (364).  Because of the constant vying for resources, “Nothing has been forgiven, nothing forgotten, nothing settled” (365). 

Neil and Creina  Alcock came to Msinga to start a land rehabilitation project called Mdukatshani, Place of Lost Grasses, after some attempts at agricultural reform.  Neil’s first project was buying farmer’s surplus milk and selling it to black farmers at cost rather than let it be dumped into the sea to keep milk prices high for white farmers.  He went a bit crazy; he lost everything and lived in his station wagon after realizing the truth of how people really lived.  His eventual recovery and personal growth that came with his new knowledge set the stage for his integration into Zulu life upon entering Msinga. 

They planned a dream for Msinga with methane burners to save the last trees, step farming to accrue top soil, fish ponds, poultry runs, rotation grazing to bring grass back, and solar cookers (366).  After many years of effort towards their goals, they realized that although solving land hunger was a step in the right direction, but not the only problem to solve.  The wars between isigodi were detrimental to the project’s success.  “As soon as the first shot was fired, men disappeared, and their wives stopped working, too—they had to carry food and water to their husbands’ secret lairs.  A war could last months, even years, and while it raced there was little the Alcocks could do save ferry the dead and wounded to the mission hospital” (378).  Eventually the lack of rain caused famine, other herds demolished the rotational grazing plan, and the high tech cookers and converters went to rust when no one had the tools or expertise to fix them.  The development strategies were not African ideas supported by Africans, so they were doomed to failure. 

Now, Neil is dead.  He was eliminated by one of the isigodi gangs, impis, and after his death, Creina, his wife, was robbed of everything from young boys she saved from starvation by sheltering them in her own home and raising them alongside her sons.  But, the red grasses, which take the longest to grow back, are on the hills and plains of Msinga.  She holds that, “The path of love is not a path of comfort.  It means going forward into the unknown, with no guarantees of safety, even though you’re afraid.  Trusting is dangerous, but without trust there is no hope for love, and love is all we ever have to hold against the dark” (423).  She is a wise woman who describes her life in Msinga as ecstasy, lives with the least material possessions, and loves when, to some, it would make no sense to love.  She finds the precious in each day, and draws comfort and encouragement, or maybe just contentment, from T. S. Elliot’s quote, “Be satisfied that ye have enough light to secure another foothold” (423).

Malan does a much better job of illustrating what he saw and heard in Msinga, but for my purposes, the Alcock’s experience shows the power of love which is not self-seeking.  It shows the power of respecting the natural world to restore resources.  I have a new urgency in bringing other’s to understanding about sustainability after living in PE whose water sheds are 1/3 what they usually are.  Each resident is restricted to 500mL of water per day.  There are landfills of plastic collecting in the oceans (check out the Great Pacific Garbage Patch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch ) and more species of plants and animals become extinct each day.  Msinga is an unfortunate example of the realities which accompany lack of fertile soil and ample water, education, job opportunities, and space.  In the Midwest we don’t feel it, but the US experiences severe drought as well.  In the Southwest, trucks bring water in from water-rich areas.  There have even been plans drawn up for a pipeline from Lake Superior to the Southwest US, which thankfully haven’t gone through at this time.  If money continues to be the bottom line in farming, and bigger and bigger farms continue to produce the bulk of US food supply, putting increased strain on the land for production, we may have a challenging future pointing to more and more pressure on importing food with the looming soil exhaustion.  Thank you for sticking with this narrative and soap box speech.   If you’d like to know ways that you can help to conserve in your area, please ask and I can provide you with resources.  

 Last thought:  the world’s natural resources are not here for the purpose of our consumption.  We were meant to be stewards of nature, rather than rape the land of all it’s worth.  

Peace.

PS. You can borrow that book when I get home if you want =D  Just let me know.