Decades before the exploits of the #FeesMustFall movement became the centre of the public conversation in SA, a young student who lived with migrant workers in Langa placed the South African situation before the eyes of the world. Last Wednesday we commemorated the role the young Philip Kgosana played, and what lessons it provides for our debate on land.
In 1960, when he was a 23-year-old University of Cape Town economics student, he led a 30,000-strong crowd from the Langa Flats to the police headquarters at Caledon Square. The men and women he led, he would recount before his passing, were people with whom he lived and shared bread as he could not get a place in a university residence: "I had to find my place among the migrant labourers as a university student… I was allocated a room in Block C with one Mr Roto, who could only speak Xhosa. He was nevertheless a very kind man and shared his food with me."
He proved to us young people that it doesn’t matter how old you are, work with what you have. When you have a piece of land, be it communal land or land that you’ve bought, work with it
Kgosana would later join the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) which, with its message of liberation focused on the return of the land, appealed to him and the rural men of the Langa Flats. He would, after the events of March 21 1960, head into an exile that would take him to many corners of the world. What he did with his latter years on returning contains numerous lessons for SA as it grapples with the questions of land and agrarian reform.
As a farmer in Winterveld, northwest of Tshwane, Kgosana gave practical application to the passion for the land and its return to the African people, which he had learnt at the feet of semiliterate men in Langa.
I spoke to a young farmer, Leeko Makoene, from Winterveld. She recalled that Kgosana considered it essential to stress to young farmers the importance of using whatever they had at their disposal to materially change their lives.
The land was at the centre of this: "He used farming as a tool to build his community in Winterveld. At the time he was farming moringa [a leaf powder with medical uses], oyster mushrooms and some other crops. He [would be] driving around Winterveld picking marula growing wild along the road, to make jam, which he packaged. He wanted to supply it to the likes of Pick n Pay, [but] unfortunately he never got the chance to do so."
He didn’t speak about land rhetorically, but saw it as an integral part of the economic liberation of black people. As Makoene reflected, Kgosana also understood that the indigenous knowledge of our people was important to use the land optimally.
"He didn’t have the sophisticated equipment to do the mushroom operation. He used three-legged pots to disinfect the hay and the spores that he used to grow the mushrooms."
The produce, developed through this method, competed with some of the best in the market, with none of the retailers citing safety concerns. In doing this work Kgosana gave practical expression to the political promise of the organisation and struggle to which he had given his life.
It is, as Makoene observed, a lesson that the land issue is not about the creation of black commercial farmers who wear pin-stripe suits while others work the land.
"He proved to us young people that it doesn’t matter how old you are, work with what you have. When you have a piece of land, be it communal land or land that you’ve bought, work with it. Don’t leave any of it untouched. That’s what he did. You walked through his farm and you saw that every corner of it was occupied, moringa orchards growing on one side, chilli and spinach on the other, the worm farm on the other, and the mushroom plant on the other side."
It is a historic injustice that Kgosana wasn’t able to start farming earlier in his life. Our country and its history didn’t allow for that. However, his life gives us contemporary lessons — the land is the start of a journey of hard toil towards ensuring that the descendants of the men Kgosana encountered at the Langa Flats take ownership of their lives and not wait for the arrival of "milk and honey". It is a lesson worth remembering.
• Cawe (@aycawe), a development economist who sat on the national minimum wage advisory panel, hosts Power Business on Power FM.
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