Exiled tribe's long journey home

By Fergal Keane BBC, South Africa

The Baphiring tribe in South Africa, driven from their land by apartheid to endure 30 years of poverty and exile, are now returning to claim what was theirs.

Getting land back is seen as a vital step to regaining independence

We got lost outside Groot Marico.

The directions had seemed straightforward enough. Take the right, turn onto the dirt road just after the town and keep going until the T-junction and then...oh the memory is too painful.

We did as instructed, and were promptly swallowed up by Africa.

Over the rutted track we bounced across the T-junction and on to another junction and another...

The car thermometer recorded the outside temperature as 30C. The rains had been sparse in these parts, so the bush was not as thick as it should have been for this time of year.

The trees and plants along the roadside were coated in a thick layer of dust. We passed farm dams where the water level looked perilously low.

The Baphiring had been lost in this bush too. For 30 years.

After all, that had been the precise intention of the apartheid government.

'Grand apartheid'

The Baphiring were what is known as "surplus" people. That is to say, they were not needed as cheap labour on the farms or in the factories of white South Africa.

So in 1972, the government of John Balthazar Vorster decided that the farmland on which they had lived for generations should be reserved exclusively for whites.

This was "grand apartheid" in action.

People like the Baphiring, along with the Zulu, the Xhosa, the Sotho and all the rest of South Africa's black tribes would be consigned to homelands. As the apartheid ministers liked to say, these homelands would be granted "independence" in the "fullness of time".

It had meant poverty and the long ache of exile

The white state would hold onto the best land and take in enough blacks to meet its need for cheap labour. All of this would be dressed up - with spectacular cynicism - as "separate development".

Under "separate development", the job of oppressing the black population was handed over to the locals. They were generally conservative-minded figures, chiefs or policemen, and many were content to feather their own nests while their people languished in misery.

It took us about three hours to track down the Baphiring settlement and see what "separate development" had meant for the tribe.

Learning to survive

It had meant poverty and the long ache of exile.

The scrubland near the Botswana border had never become home.

Cynthia Mabelane remembered the day they arrived here. Several hundred people and their belongings, on trucks, dumped in the middle of nowhere.

She remembered how they slept in tents at the beginning and how the snakes terrified the children and the adults.

Many young tribespeople have never seen their homeland

Cynthia remembers too how despair fastened around the hearts of the Baphiring. She had grown up longing for a landscape whose precise contours grew more faint with every year that passed.

But the older people would talk about that lost country.

They would mythologise it. No place was ever greener, had sweeter water, richer soil. No place was so much like home.

But the Baphiring are now people of a new South Africa.

And in that new country, change has made its way along the dirt roads to their settlement and announced itself with a bright, beckoning voice. And this voice is calling them home.

The tribe, after years in the courts, have won the right to go back to their own land.

Cynthia was happy.

She took me to the graveyard where her grandmother was buried. The old woman was born in the Union of South Africa under British rule and she died in the age of apartheid, an exile within her own country.

All around her are the graves of exiles, but Cynthia is determined that she will see her last sunset back in the place she was born.

Interim guardians

On the way back I stopped in to see the white farmers who had bought the land a year or so after the Baphiring were evicted.

We are the victims of history Hendrik Niemand

Hendrik Niemand and his sons were kind and welcoming, not at all the Afrikaner ogres of the popular imagination.

They took me out into the fields. And such fields they were! There were sunflowers to touch the heavens, maize fields in which you could hide several armies, well-fed cattle, the occasional Blesbok, antelopes raised for hunting and biltong, the dried meat of the veld.

Old Hendrik, who is in his seventies, told me that his father, a farmer's son, had fought the British in the Boer War. He had been arrested, aged 12, and deported to St Helena.

I then asked Hendrik what he would feel about moving from this land. His eyes filled up with tears.

"Out here, we are free," he said.

For such a man the city would be an unimaginable prison. He spoke about the land, about the veld flowers and animals, about an Africa he loved and would likely soon lose.

Officials say land redistribution will not lead to the problems seen in neighbouring Zimbabwe

The sons looked on, embarrassed by the display of emotion I thought at first, but then nodding vigorously. They felt exactly the same way. "We are victims of history," said old Hendrik.

The Niemands believed the Baphiring had been fairly compensated with other land back in 1972.

It did not seem to occur to them that the same passionate love of place might also be felt by the black people who had been driven out of here. And that was the failure of empathy from which the tragedy of the past had been created.

The idea that the other - the black, the Asian, the coloured - might feel as you do, was a possibility still unrecognised in these sacred fields.

Driving back through the ripe, open landscape of the platteland, I reminded myself: this is still a new country, such a new country.

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From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 14 February, 2004 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.