Alfreda Mars has been in love with farming since she was a child. Today, she farms with grain and sheep on the Middelpos farm in the Swartland district of the Western Cape. She is one of the extraordinary farmers featured in For the love of the land, a book by Food For Mzansi co-founders Kobus Louwrens and Ivor Price. Mars relayed her story to Louwrens.
Saron has two Khoisan groups. One is called the Blood Khoisan and the other the Water Khoisan.
One fights for the blood that fell on the land in those days. And the Water Khoisan – our Mars family actually started this movement. We now have a claim for 36 farms in the Ceres area.
Many of these farms originated around the availability of water, and now I am talking about a long way back, in the 1700s and 1800s. Many of the farmers came because there was water on the farms. It wasn’t really about the land alone. They understood that the water and the land together would help them get somewhere.
What we did, especially our younger generation, was go to Ceres to find more of the older people’s children who had stayed behind and still work on those farms. We went to talk, and we went to listen. There we got the information from the field-cornet, the person in charge of the farms in those days, right through to some of the old guard.
My father was born in the Ceres-Karoo area, and he was 12 years old when the field-cornet signed off their farm. The farm was handed over. They got nothing out of it.
It was probably also about colour, even then – it was in about 1930. So that is when he arrived in Saron with his father and siblings. They had to travel over the mountain to Saron with 1500 sheep. He was the eldest child, with one sister and two brothers. The other children were all born in Saron. Today there are about 800 of us Marses. This is also why the Khoisan movement is so big.
And yes, my father also left school. They decided to start farming in Saron and lived in a rented house belonging to the mission station.
That’s how they all ended up in Saron and stayed there. They had to leave everything behind. Last year, we went to visit the Ceres-Karoo to visit the graves and things, to see on which farms some of their uncles were buried – my father’s uncles and his grandparents, people we never knew.
My grandfather married a Khoisan woman
My grandfather was German. They were four brothers. One moved out and married a white woman and they lived in the Strand. There are a lot of Marses there, and it’s a whole mix of all types. That’s how that lot started.
Then, another brother married a black woman. The Villiersdorp area. Now we all laugh when we get together, the 800 of us, because there’s a dark group, and we know they are that brother’s children who come from Villiersdorp, Caledon, Bredasdorp.
And the Ceres group, they are still some of the original people from when my grandfather married a Khoisan woman. We have no photographs of her. We have looked hard for photos and other things because we don’t know her at all.
Everyone gets on quite well today, but some of the older people – those who are now 90 – don’t want to know anything about how diverse we are. They don’t want to be included in that, but the younger generation has accepted this more easily. I think it’s probably also because the country changed.
But the old people don’t want to hear it. They believe that white is white, and we are part of that. Black does not belong here, and we do not mix with black. But we understand each other well when it comes to the Khoisan part. We all understand that our great-great-great-grandmother was Khoisan. There is nothing we can do about that, so this was our point of departure for the movement.
My grandfather farmed on the common land that was rented out by the Rhenish Church in those days. Later, when Saron got its managing council, my father was a young man, and he took over my grandfather’s land and started farming peas.
My father had 150 hectares at that stage, and he supplied peas to the factory in Tulbagh. He worked huge fields of peas in those days. I grew up in a farming home. That is all I knew.
My father was almost 60 when I was born. He had almost a lifetime of farming behind him by then. My mother was his third wife, and my sister and I were his only children. There were no brothers and that’s where the incentive came in. He decided I would be a farmer.
And he drove me. There was no time to look back. I was quite willing, and half enjoyed it, but my sister had no interest at all.
In those days they still used to shell the peas. From when I was six years old, we would shell them and help to fill the sacks. And we would help plant the peas in planting season. It was intensive labour all done by hand. Now, I can’t imagine how we managed without machines!
There wasn’t a lot of time for playing. My mother would always come fetch me and say that it was time for me to come home. We played in the leivore that channeled the water from the mountain for irrigation. When the tarred roads came in later years, we fought for them to build concrete furrows so that the leiwater would continue to run.
My father was a good vegetable farmer. He did farm with animals, sheep, and cattle, but he really believed in his vegetables. Yes, he was definitely a vegetable man.
He made a good living out of his farming. I can still remember how, from his livestock, he was able to buy a brand-new Hilux, straight out of the box. We had the first telephone line in Saron.
Yes, we stood out to some degree in the town as a result of our farming there.
Saron-based agricultural union
I didn’t study after finishing matric. There was a very strong agricultural union in Saron, with 120 members, and there were a number of small projects on the go after the 1994 transition. In those days it was called the LDU – Land Development Unit – and it was very involved with land reform. I became involved with the agricultural union and served as its secretary for 12 years.
I was also quite involved at school. But maybe I should just mention that I dropped out of school when I was 16. Pregnancy. Now that was a huge story.
But I suppose wasn’t really a dropout. I only told my parents about it in November, and I still wrote exams. And then the baby was born in January. I returned to school in February. So, it was only for a month and my parents were very supportive.
My mother still says to me, you know, I don’t know how you have achieved all these things. But it was good leadership skills that did it.
That was also one of the reasons why I decided not to study further – there was a little girl for me to take care of, and I realised I had to get involved in a business or start doing something that generated an income, for myself, and so that I could support my child and help my parents.
My daughter, Fallon, is now 29 years old and has just completed her LLB. I have no other children. She is in the Cape, an office person. Farming holds no interest for her.
In any case, through the agricultural union I also got involved with the ANC. In those days, everyone was hungry for land. The farmers around us were very supportive and many of them wanted to sell their farms, some of them had three, four farms.
We filed applications with the Agricultural Credit Board, but only one of the 24 farms made it through. The bonds could not be registered because the people had no security. Remember, the Saron people rented from the Rhenish Church and their houses did not belong to them. Only the odd businessperson qualified for a bond. My father had a shop in the scheme area of Porterville that did very well, and it was one of the things I could use as security.
The name of that single farm was La Gratitude. The people it was given to knew nothing about administration. They had no farming knowledge. Their networking just wasn’t there. They needed people who could help them, because we could see that they simply weren’t going to make it. And we wanted it to work, because, hell, what else had we been fighting for? And here we were sitting with a farm the state had helped with, and they had put these people on the land…?
One night in a meeting, I said, right, I’m going to get in there with you. I still don’t know where the idea came from.
I was 20, and it was then that I felt the land fill my head.
That project ran for a long time, 12 years. It was a farm of about 1300 hectares at Gouda. It was a mountain farm, but it was also good for livestock farming, some crops, and it had water.
But then issues arose between the six members of the CC. Some of them felt they worked very hard but when the money came in at the end of the year, it had to be divided up. And how could this go on?
I still believe that you can’t combine business and pleasure. You can’t take the money and have fun with it. Your business is your business, and it must be separate.
The farm was sold, the debt had to be paid to the Agricultural Credit Board, and the rest was divided. We didn’t get much out.
Then I moved to a sawmill in Tulbagh because I wasn’t able to get a farm on my own. I spent nine years managing that sawmill and continued with my father’s farm on the side. It wasn’t very successful because you can’t work and run a farm with no one to do the work. My father was deceased by this stage. And I had a child who needed looking after. My mother needed looking after.
I had a partner, or a life partner really, but we were never married. Evan was one of my partners at La Gratitude and he had a big interest in agriculture. One day he told me the state had a number of new projects and we should put our names down. We put in an application for a farm, but it fell through.
In 2011, we heard about a farm in Moorreesburg that was on the market, and we put our names down for it. We went for so many interviews. You have to sort of provide a business plan, and you have to prove where you have farmed previously. The state is looking, as far as possible, for people with experience, but I think they mostly just want to put numbers on the land.
In 2013, we heard that we had the farm Middelpos in Moorreesburg. The money from the state didn’t come through immediately but we decided not to wait for it. I had tractors and Evan had tractors. We knew nothing about crop farming, because we are vegetable and livestock people, but we started farming on that farm.
The state’s money only came through two years later. They initially gave us a five-year loan agreement and then a 30-year one kicked in. Unfortunately, my partner died last year. Kidney failure. And now I am alone on that farm.
About good neighbours
Today I get a lot of support from the commercial farmers in the area. They help a lot with implements and start-up things. But in the beginning it really felt like the people didn’t want us here. The men don’t greet you; they drive at you so that you are in a cloud of dust and can’t even see out of your windscreen. That was one of the hardest things to make peace with.
They were all worried about who the state was putting in there. Middelpos was one of the first farms in the area to be bought by the state. My neighbour Loffie said straight out that the state was making a mess, and that they were bringing the mess in here. That type of thing. It was terrible.
Right in the beginning, Evan and I were on the farm one day with two guys from Land Affairs when along came Loffie. He thought that Evan and I worked for Land Affairs and that the two black guys were the beneficiaries. Did he go off at us! About two or three years ago he was standing chatting to us on the farm, and he said: you know, I could have been in big trouble over that, you could have had me charged. And I said, yes…
But look at what good neighbours we are now.
One guy on the opposite side of the road drove past one day when we were busy planting wheat, in our very first year. He stopped, looked us up and down, and he said: You can pack up here – sorry for using the word – but fuck-all is going to come of that wheat.
I just looked at Frans and I didn’t even reply. And he wound up his window and drove off.
Now Frans is my adviser and we braai together. We visit each other, watch rugby together.
But you know he was quite right about that wheat. When we harvested, that first harvest, it wasn’t what we had expected. Planted too late, everything wasn’t in place, the spraying programme wasn’t right, so the yield wasn’t very good.
Then, the next year, I decided to drive to Frans. Evan wanted nothing to do with it. He said that farmer could go to hell. But I said, no man, today I am going to talk to him.
So, I went and introduced myself. I said: Frans, this is who I am, I come from Saron, where you pick up workers. That’s where I live. Come and see where I live, find out where I am coming from by asking the people of Saron. Can’t we please get on with each other?
Best buddies at the end of the day.
And then it emerged that Frans had lost his farm in Riversdale. And that is where the hate and envy and all of that came from, because he had lost everything there, and then he had to come here, and he was struggling to build everything up. So, yes, every person has a story.
Everyone is talking about the success of Middelpos now because the previous owner didn’t farm here. He was a pesticide representative, and his wife was a nurse. They are impressed with how Middelpos has grown. But it took time to reach that point, to build those relationships.
I have no time these days for politics. I was elected to the management committee of Grain SA, and they wanted to make me deputy chairperson, but I don’t have the time. I still like to help when I hear about new farmers who are battling. We have a WhatsApp group. There is always some level of politics involved with these things, because of our history.
If you want to be – and remain – positive on the land, you have to look beyond the politics. Otherwise, you are going to get absolutely nowhere. I have learnt this over time. I think I have learnt more by being a businessperson on the land than by focusing on these things.
You know, I didn’t even vote in the last election, and it sounds to me as if many of our farmers also didn’t cast their ballots.
If I think about where it started for me: There was a time when land expropriation applied to all the farms. In 2017 we were called in by Land Affairs and told: you must just remember, the farms are going to be taken back, there’s no other way, we must put black people on the farms. Because, they said, there were too many coloured people in the Western Cape. We fought, we sent in documents to tell them that the demographics of the Western Cape are coloured, so how else could it be done?
And it all mounted up. Where do you really fit in? We had put so much effort into the farms, but at the end of the day, what would become of us? I mean, you don’t farm because it’s so great on the land. You farm because you are running a business. It’s not just about having land, because anyone can have land, we can give land to everyone. It’s how you are going to manage it.
That is how I feel about politics. There is no place for us under the sun. There simply isn’t. No one is going to create it for us.
I have stopped depending on and waiting for the state to give start-up help. Because we used our own money and things in the beginning, I had a headstart. I could plant my own wheat last year; I could plant my own wheat this year. I just made that decision.
And if it weren’t for my white neighbours! They told me not to wait. We see it at night when we watch kykNET Aktueel. That money is drying up. Don’t wait for it. Rather talk to us in the area so that we can help you get on your feet.
And that is what I did. This is my second year. I can’t wait for the state. I weaned myself, if I can put it like that.
I am in the process of buying a farm because I don’t want to wait for the state any longer. I am so hungry for it; I want land of my own.
I can’t grow with Middelpos. The state just wants to place more people on the land, but they don’t want to grow businesses. Middelpos is a loan farm, and I really want my own land now.
The land lies very close to my heart because I also belong to the Khoisan movement. We fight like hell for land. We were born with it; we grew up with it.
I know nothing but my feet on the land. It lies deep in my heart. Nothing separates the two.
I feel that when I retire, I must have my own land. Then, this hunger of mine will be over.
- “I know nothing but my feet on the land” by Alfreda Mars is one of the chapters in For the love of the land by Kobus Louwrens and Ivor Price. The book, published by NB, is available at bookstores and Takealot. Signed copies can also be ordered via info@foodformzansi.co.za.
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