Friday, March 19, 2004
By Don Pinnock

As men beat a path to the cities to earn what they can, marginal farming has become women's business. And the donkey is a woman's best friend.
Since the agricultural boom which began in the 1950s, world food production has tripled. All hail the tractor.

But it hasn't been good news for draught animals — or peasants. A war suggests an opposition, so the events that took place in backwoods of Bophuthatswana in 1983 could more accurately described as a massacre.

Given that the shoot-up — in which more than 20,000 died — occurred only a few hundred kilometers from Johannesburg, South Africa, the virtual absence of reportage about it was remarkable. But then, depredations against dirt-poor peasants seldom make headlines anywhere in the world.

For one old man, the massacre began while he was on his way to collect building sand in his cart pulled by four donkeys. A troop carrier roared toward him and soldiers opened up with automatic weapons at his donkeys, killing them in their harnesses.

In the little village of Ncweng, people had gathered their donkeys together for counting. Soldiers arrived and shot the lot. They then fanned out across the veld, searching river valleys and grazing areas, pumping bullets into every donkey they found. People who resisted were bullied. A few, realizing the danger, hid donkeys in their houses. The soldiers then moved to the next village, then the next.
"They didn't take aim," one person told a history researcher, Nancy Jacobs. "They shot animals anywhere, as often as it took to kill them. They were not put to death, they were savaged. Others were shot in the eye, or different parts of the body and the feet. This made killing gruesome because they had to suffer too much pain."

The reasons for the Great Donkey Massacre are obscure. One story was that the South African sub-state's president, Lucas Mangope, once nearly collided with donkeys on a highway and had turned against the species. Others said that, given opposition to apartheid's Balkanization system, it was an attempt to terrorize people and pre-empt opposition.

Some speculated the slaughter was a move by the upper class of cattle-keepers to reduce pressure on grazing. The official decree simply announced that "surplus" donkeys were to be exterminated, but trigger-happy soldiers soon turned the cull into mass slaughter.

The estimate of 20,000 dead donkeys is probably conservative.

Coming across this story by chance, I began trawling for more donkey information and discovered that a world-wide jihad seems to have been declared against the humble ass. A report from Brazil spoke of donkey-catching units which round up thousands of the animals for deportation. In some regions donkeys have been banned entirely.

In Western Australia elimination is high-tech: "Judas" donkeys have radio collars attached to them and are released to find herds which "infest" the scrublands. They are then blasted from a helicopter.

Since 1978 the South African Department of Agriculture has killed more than a half-million this way. Given the Biblical reverence for the donkey — it's hardiness, longevity, intelligence, and gentleness — this is an odd war of human against beast.

I put the problem to Bruce Joubert, who runs the Animal Traction Unit at Fort Hare University, and discovered donkey wars were part of a much larger issue: the march of the Green Revolution.

The throbbing engine at the heart of this revolution — which was to feed the world's burgeoning population — was the tractor. This gawky machine was undoubtedly one of the most effective developments of the 20th century, allowing millions of hectares of land to be opened up for agriculture. It quadrupled production and underpinned the growth of megacities.

By about the 1930s, governments, agricultural educators, and extension officers had fallen in love with modernization. They told peasants that using oxen to plough was primitive. Cattle were for eating and not for traction. Donkeys, well ... they were good at feeding time in lion parks and crocodile farms. But, otherwise, they were a damn nuisance.

Moreover, they were a sign of poverty. There was another reason officials and industry distrusted animal traction. Back in the 19th century most transport not on rails was animal drawn. In the last decade of that century, however, the deadly bovine disease, rinderpest, followed by horse sickness and East Coast fever, decimated working animals. Commerce in Southern Africa was brought to a standstill.

Before the memory of that disaster had faded, there was a massive demand for equids — horses, mules, and donkeys — occasioned by the outbreak of World War I. In that conflict, more than 6 million equids perished on the battlefields. A worldwide shortage of working animals followed.

By the time the internal combustion engine went into mass production in the 1930s, it was hailed as the final solution to these woes. And so it was. After World War II, agricultural extension officers, trained in modern farming methods, encouraged peasants to sell their oxen, cull their donkeys, and stand by for the Massy Ferguson marvel. The Green Revolution was about to begin.

Bruce Joubert used to be into tractors. As a trained agricultural engineer, he knew a good deal about them and enjoyed working with them. When he graduated around 30 years ago, he landed a job with the government testing tractors for peasant ploughing schemes. He was in heaven. But it slowly dawned on him that something was very wrong. Tractors did the job, but the economy of their use was flawed.

While South Africa's 60,000 or so commercial farmers raised loans from an agreeable Land Bank, bought tractors and implements, and got on with the business of feeding the nation, the 500,000 small-scale and mainly black farmers weren't candidates for loans. The government, keen to increase production in the tribal areas in order to feed the masses cooped up there by decree (and to ensure they stayed there), created tractor schemes. But its officials forgot to ask small-scale farmers how they went about their business.

Bruce discovered the new method was throwing centuries of communal support systems out of kilter. Somehow, whenever a tractor was neded, it was elsewhere (maybe if a goat was offered it would arrive). Control over farming seeped out of the community and into the hands of tractor drivers.

If the tractor broke, that control shifted to mechanics in the towns, far away. If parts were needed it shifted even further, to city agents. For farmers who'd eaten their trek oxen and sold their donkeys (or had them shot), there was nothing to do but wait, watch the skies, and hope.

Some fields were ploughed, many weren't. Then the government, plagued by the mismanagement of the schemes, decided to lease tractors to their drivers, who were expected to run their own businesses. The plan spawned problems. Farmers paid the drivers to plough, but only what they could afford, and often in kind. The drivers weren't good at calculating overheads, so when implements broke or the tractor needed servicing they had no ready cash. You can't pay a mechanic in goats or donkeys.

Tractors were left in fields, quietly rusting. One after another, the tractor schemes collapsed. In many parts of South Africa, you can still see dead tractors all over the countryside: peeling monuments to questionable intentions.

The tractor debacle took around 20 years to play itself out. In that time a generation of newly "modern" farmers had learned to depend on machines. Vital animal-handling skills had been lost, along with the animals. Instead of booming, peasant agriculture was falling apart, with families depending on wages remitted from relatives in urban areas.

Followed the 1994 democratic elections which swept Nelson Mandela to power, legislation that had bottled people up in the tribal areas was eventually repealed, and people from these areas flooded the cities. The squatter camps around South Africa's towns bear testament to a failed agricultural policy. Bruce, watching all this rural decay, was horrified by the social and financial implications of animal-traction skills were being lost.

In poor areas, tractors just didn't make sense. For every $10 spent on tractor hire, he found, most of the money left the rural area. For every $10 spent on the hire of draft animals, however, most of the income remained in the community.

"I'm not a Luddite hearkening back to a machine-free world," he said, as we watched a perfectly matched team of oxen working a field. "But small farmers using tractors is a no-win situation. Animals appreciate but tractors depreciate. You can buy a young ox for $200, work it for three years, and sell it for $1,000. What are you going to get from an old tractor? Nothing but trouble."

In the early 1990s he created the Animal Traction Unit at Fort Hare University, which trains farmers in animal use and holds workshops for traction enthusiasts from all over the world. That's the place to see a team of eight drawing a hand-held plough, hear the crack of a driver's whip, or watch two snow-white Percherons drawing a harrow.

"If we can change perceptions," Bruce reflected, gazing at the rich soil curling off a plough shear, "we'll change the future of farming in this country."

And the humble ass? It's tempting to view the Bophuthatswana Donkey Massacre as a metaphor: the bootprint of the mechanical age in the face of its older, animal-using predecessor. Well here's a prediction, for what it's worth: the donkey will outlive modernism — and the postmodern age as well.

The rabbit-eared equine was probably the next creature to be domesticated after the dog, around 8,000 years ago. It would have been the first draught animal in human history, and there is good reason for its long and continuing association with our species.

We live in a world where population growth is outpacing the ability of governments to ensure overall human prosperity. Contrary to the dreams of modernism, living standards in marginalized countries are falling, while rain, increasingly often, isn't. Attempts to mechanize small-scale farming in these areas has failed. As men beat a path to the cities to earn what they can, marginal farming has become women's business. And the donkey is a woman's best friend.

Donkeys seem to like human company. They're small enough to handle easily, can survive in drought-stricken areas (they need little water), eat less food than oxen but can work as hard, and are remarkably long-lived (up to 50 years). They are inexpensive, produce drinkable milk, seldom become ill, make friends for life, and are remarkably intelligent. They can carry water and firewood all day, plough, and protect flocks (they have an ingrained dislike for dogs and jackals and will kill them if they threaten). Apart from its annoying tendency to ignore oncoming motor vehicles, the donkey remains, after 8,000 years, the perfect farming companion.

Don Pinnock lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and writes a regular column for Getaway magazine. He is also the author of African Journeys and Natural Selections: The African Wanderings of a Bemused Naturalist.

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