In My Backyard

My clinical and scientific education helped me tackle the social ills that come with owning farmland in South Africa. My wine farm was granted to my predecessors in title in 1690, and the granting of these farms is really where the trouble began. There were good reasons for the Dutch government to settle farms: they basically wanted a way-station for their ships, a sort of halfway house on their way to and from the East; they needed fresh produce and they needed wine. Wine kept better than water on ships on those long trips. It is also profoundly true that this Dutch settlement was a catastrophe for the local inhabitants. This valley provided hunting grounds for the first people of this area, called the Bushmen, also known as the San. They were hunter-gatherers, so the settlement of these farms was pretty much the end of their economy. And the valley also provided the nomadic grazing grounds for pastural people called the Khoe-Khoe. They moved seasonally with their cattle and their sheep through these parts. In 1690, they came down the valley with their sheep and their cattle only to be told: You can't graze here, this land belongs to me. Neither of those two groups of indigenous people had any concept of private ownership of land. It was like, What do you mean, it belongs to you? And the Dutch said, I'll show you what it means to belong to me. So, there was a genocide here. The Bushmen and the Khoe-Khoe were killed in droves. It was literally the annihilation of a people, not only of their economies and their cultures. The few who remained became farmworkers, and—in addition—slaves were brought from the East. My farm was literally built on the back of several crimes against humanity. It's one thing to say, This house we're sitting in now was built by slaves; these walls, the roof, every brick and rock that goes into the fabric of this building was put there by slaves; it's another thing to know what that means. It means that people were brought here against the