Rumours: The Bloemhof Portfolio

Let me preface what is to follow by saying something about myself.   I am finding it difficult to represent, in any meaningful way, people who have ceased to be just tenant labourers, farm workers, or farm labourers to me; people who have adopted me as one of their own.

We carry within us images of tenant families or yokels as we sometimes refer to them. We think we know their plight: low wages, long working hours and inadequate living conditions to mention a few of the less contentious laments. Their life of hardship passes heedlessly away from the glare of television and the print media.

Bloemhof is a small town on the banks of the Vaal River, and it forms part of the wedge-shaped southwestern Transvaal. I have been going there for the Institute for Advanced Social Research, University of the Witwatersrand, intermittently since 1988, to document something of their lives.

The hut in which I live when shooting photographs of the farms is made of daub, dung and sheets of corrugated iron for roof. September Maine, grandson of the tenant labourer on whose hut I live. He addresses me by the respectful moniker 'abuti' (older brother), he defers to my opinions. I sometime wonder if I deserve his respect. I was never an activist, not in the popular sense. When he told me about his altercations with the police

when he tried to attend an ANC rally after it was unbanned, I could not applaud him for his activism.

In April of 1994 I went to Bloemhof to observe and record the elections and the ushering in of democracy, courtesy of the History Workshop at Wits University. What struck me on this visit was the mixture of confidence and apprehension. This I gathered from discussions with people who had gathered in town to vote for the first time in their life.

Excitement and fear was everywhere. Paranoia, rumour and disbelief passed for normal conversation. Fear that election results will be rigged. There were wild stories of passengers being bundled from taxis and sjamboked in Boitumelong. I had just come from there. And, of bombs going off in distant Boer strongholds such as De Deur.

I had traveled 340 km to a remote place where on my first arrival I thought it was beyond hope. It is a landscape that is bleak, the weather and soil, inclement to farming. A land where by my own light, the Verwoedian dream was in place. Well, almost. But for the township, which is a blight on the landscape and lies just beyond the horizon. Ironically it is called Boitumelong, which means place of happiness in the vernacular. September Maine lives in Boitumelong Township.