Josephine Witbooi

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Josephine Witbooi ©Howard Davies

Background

Josephine Witbooi is a strong and independent woman. Married with a baby and a house full of relatives, she has plenty to keep herself busy. Compared to the conditions she was born into Josephine has done very well for herself. However, she hasn’t forgotten where she came from and the poverty her family endured.

In the interview setting Josephine seems reserved, though her warmth and hospitality show through. Her fleeting smiles don’t last long enough to challenge the permanent furrows on her forehead.

Josephine is a team leader on Keboes Fruit Farms, situated in Raap en Skraap on the South African side of the Orange River.

She and her husband have recently applied to become shareholders in Keboes Fruit Farms. This is an empowerment farm project – a government-supported initiative to increase landownership and economic participation among black people. The progressive Karsten Group set up Keboes Fruit Farms with this purpose in mind. The farm recently started to sell some of its fruit to the Fairtrade market.

Setting

Josephine’s hometown is 50km from the farm in the sprawling border town of Onseepkans, also on the Orange River. With her husband Frans and youngest son Angelo she returns there to be close to her two older children one weekend a month.

There isn’t a school near the farm so 13-year-old Geraldo and 11-year-old Luwyado have to stay behind to attend class. They live with their aunt, Josephine’s sister, across the road from their parent’s home. Even when their parents are in town the children stay put as there isn’t enough room in the family home to accommodate them all.

When visiting at weekends, Josephine, Frans and Angelo stay in their small two-room house made of reed and slats of wood, with a roof of dried grass. Outside the house the land is dry and bare apart from a few clumps of vegetation at the back. The road and land all around is dry, dusty earth, though other houses have some plants and flowers, which they manage to keep moist through the endless dry months. A low reed fence surrounds Josephine’s house and there is a metal chemical toilet nearby.

You enter the house through a flimsy door leading straight into the small kitchen where there are white painted cupboards, a two-ring table-top gas cooker, a broom and a bucket for collecting water.  A few feet away is the curtained opening to the bedroom, which only just accommodates a double bed.

Because there is no regular transport it is not possible for Josephine and Frans to commute to work. So they live in a house provided by the farm and their two older children come to visit every other weekend. Reflecting on the problems this poses for her children Josephine says,

‘It is difficult; they are divided. When they are at the farm they miss their cousins and when they are at home they miss their parents.’

Because Frans is a foreman and Josephine a team leader, they have comparatively plush accommodation on the farm. Apart from two bedrooms, the bungalow has a small living room, kitchen, bathroom, patio and gardens front and back. The majority of workers have either cramped dormitory rooms shared with five to seven other workmates, or small studio apartments with two rooms, a kitchen and shared bathrooms.

Staying on the farm with them at the moment are Josephine’s parents-in-law, her aunt and two cousins, some of whom have come for the harvest. It wasn’t certain if they would secure work so in the meantime they make themselves useful by doing odd gardening jobs. The aunt sleeps in the living room, the in-laws outside on the patio and the cousins in the second bedroom.

Her Past

Josephine was born in Onseepkans in a small, dark, makeshift house near to her current home.

Her father died when she was only two years old, leaving her mother on her own to bring up their six children. Josephine was the youngest of her three sisters and two brothers. They were very poor. They didn’t have shoes and frequently went without meals.

Josephine is immediately distressed as she thinks of how her mother must have struggled to bring them up. She died last February, aged 72, after a prolonged period of illness.

Josephine explains: ‘It is like an open wound not yet healed. The pain is still there whenever I think about her. I know it was very hard for her. I have come to terms with her death but the thing that is most hard is remembering those difficult times - that my mum was left on her own with all of us to look after’. [Josephine had to excuse herself from the interview returning a short while later subdued, cautious and less animated than before.]

Josephine completed secondary school at 18 and just a year later she met her future husband, Frans, at a dance hall. Outside the hall under the moonlight they pledged their future together. They eventually got married 10 years later in July 1999, shortly before they had their third child. Josephine talks of Frans affectionately and, using a local expression, says: ‘He carries my worries on his shoulders and my troubles in his pockets.’

In the late 1980s Josephine started working on a grape farm in Onderstepoort, 150km away. ‘The work was OK. The trucks would return us to our villages every fortnight.’ Reflecting back though, Josephine recognises there was no opportunity to progress there: ‘There were no supervisors or foreman on the other farms, just seasonal workers and managers. We were all seasonal so we had no security. At Karsten we could become permanent which would mean that the company would contribute towards unemployment benefit.’

The Karsten Group also contributes toward a retirement fund for workers and they invest heavily in training, even providing an education in basics like maths and language skills. They believe a well-educated workforce is more motivated and productive.

Other farms employ workers on a ‘seasonal’ basis even though they keep them on throughout the year. This means they can avoid legal obligations to contribute to unemployment and other social benefits.

Frans started working at Keboes Farm in April 1997 and Josephine a few months later when the farm was still being set up. Both Josephine and Frans already had experience planting young vines so were quickly promoted. Josephine became team leader supervising general workers and Frans went onto become assistant foreman and then foreman, instructing and supervising team leaders.

Josephine took time out when Angelo was born, otherwise she thinks she would have been promoted to the role of foreman too.

Daily activities

Josephine and Frans wake up at 5am when they say a short prayer together in their bedroom. They take coffee around 5.30am after they have showered and dressed. Four-year-old Angelo would normally be dropped off at the farm crèche at this time, but as his grandmother is staying he is left with her. While Frans is drinking his coffee Josephine normally dashes around trying to get the place in order before the trailer collects them for work at 5.40am.

They are on the farm by 6am ready to start a twelve-hour day. Before Josephine gets started the foreman from her block comes to give instructions about the activity for the day. Afterwards she must show her team of eight, three women and five men, how to carry out the tasks. She then works alongside the team doing the same work and occasionally stopping to supervise.

The activity today was removing grapes from the tight bunches, leaving them loose and cutting the bunches into shape. This is done to ensure the energy from the vine is concentrated into the remaining grapes and that they have room to grow.

At 8.45am Josephine and Frans travel back home in the crowded trailers where they have breakfast together. Josephine’s mother-in-law prepares a hearty breakfast of meat stew and bread. When there is nobody at home to cook they simply have dry bread and coffee.

The trailers return just before 9.30am to get them back to the field where they will continue to work. At 11am they have a fifteen-minute break which they can use to go to the toilet or rest in the shade of the vines. Josephine often uses her breaks to indulge in the latest farm gossip or to catch up with the previous night’s episode of her favourite TV soap.

They go back home for lunch from 12.30pm to 2pm. As they have their own kitchen they can prepare their meal at home whilst many of the other workers living in dormitory-style rooms have to get their lunch from a canteen near their rooms.

At 4pm there is another fifteen-minute break and after work they are collected and taken back home for about 6pm. If Angelo is at the crèche, the first one home goes to collect him. Josephine is always hungry when she gets back so she is keen to get dinner going. Frans frequently helps to cook, especially if Josephine is cleaning or needs to go to the farm-owned shop. Other wives frequently complain about their husbands, especially when they see Frans out on the porch sweeping the floor. The other day, on seeing Frans cleaning the windows, neighbour Lydia popped her head around the corner and asked if he would come and clean her windows too.

For supper they may eat chicken or other meat and peas with bread. They prefer bread to the more traditional mealy pap, a corn based porridge. Generally they eat around 9pm, shortly after which they go to bed.

At the moment, as they approach the busy harvest time, Josephine and Frans work Saturdays for which they are paid one and half times their normal rate. This is good for their income but means they can’t visit home so often.

When she is not working Josephine likes to sing. She leads her bible study group in hymns and other religious songs.

Fairtrade and table grapes

Keboes Farm was recently certified to supply grapes to the Fairtrade market and is now preparing to harvest and send the first shipment. The first consignment is destined for Waitrose and Co-op supermarkets in the UK. The farm was Fairtrade certified because, apart from meeting the standards in terms of working conditions, there is a progressive system of management in place. Also Keboes Farm is part of the empowerment farms initiative in which the government makes grants available for workers to acquire shares in their employer’s farm.

From what Josephine has heard at this early stage she is impressed with Fairtrade. She thinks it is very good that Keboes Farm can qualify because they have social provisions in place for the workers. She says: ‘If the grapes sell well and it generates enough income, I would like the premium to be used to help people cope with the huge cost of funerals.’ Her uncle died recently and he was eight months behind on the insurance payments that would have covered the cost of his funeral. Josephine had to pay almost £200 (three months’ wages) for transport to the mortuary and the costs of feeding the mourners.

She would also like the premium to be used in her village to help people build themselves brick houses to replace the less permanent homes made out of wood and reed. She recently inherited her uncle’s small brick house (though they are yet to move in) so this proposal wouldn’t benefit her directly. She thinks the first priority should be electricity and running water in the villages of her fellow workers. She is very happy that the government have been investing in her hometown, which now has both electricity and water.

Today and the future

Josephine is ambitious and she wants to be promoted to the position of assistant foreman and then foreman, just like Frans. She certainly believes she is up to the job and would have been promoted earlier if she hadn’t taken time out to have Angelo.

She has great hopes for her son Geraldo who is doing very well at school. He is interested in the church and Josephine thinks he may become a priest or brother.

Both Josephine and Frans have applied to become shareholders in Keboes Farm. If successful it means they will have their own stake in the farm from which they will ultimately receive dividends. Supporting government land reform policy, the scheme is intended to increase land ownership among the black population in an attempt to address deeply entrenched inequalities resulting from decades of apartheid. The 23% of shares has been warehoused for the workers though it still needs to be paid for. The Karsten Group is applying on behalf of its employees for government grants that have been set aside for this purpose. It is also possible that some of the dividends will be used to pay back the initial loan.

If either Josephine or Frans are successful they will be able to elect a fellow worker to represent them on the Keboes Farm Board. Apart from the financial benefit it will give them a concrete stake in the fortunes of the company and a greater sense of commitment to ‘their’ farm.

Julia Powell interviewed Josephine Witbooi in November 2003.