browseBitter Harvest
David Lurie (Photographer)
Original Side Gallery exhibition text, 1989:
These photographs were taken in January and February 1989, during the Harvest, on fruit farms in the Western Cape.
Squalor, chronic poverty, a general lack of alternative employment opportunities, dependency for jobs and housing on local farmers and isolation from any radicalism in working class culture are the customary expectations of the average farm worker. Bill Nasson, Historian, University of Cape Town
The treatment of South African farm workers is a national disgrace. They are powerless against exploitation by their employers. Professor Francis Wilson, Economist, University of Cape Town
The only limit on how low South African farm workers’ wages can go is physical starvation. Drum, September 1982 (report on farm service conditions)
South Africa’s 1.5 million farm labourers are particularly vulnerable to exploitation under Apartheid; they are explicitly excluded from all recent gains in statutory protection, which have painstakingly been won by their industrial counterparts. Any attempt to reform this situation has been fiercely resisted by farm owners. Industrial relations in agriculture are more akin to the paternalistic slave-owning era, expressed in the servant’s need for such diverse benefits as access to housing, schooling for children, land for private cultivation, provision of food and permission to remain on the farm once they are old. In particular, termination of employment - even in the case of unfair dismissal - may also mean immediate eviction resulting in loss of housing and land where a family has lived for generations, as well as loss of schooling for their children.