Prickly Pear

A Social History of a Plant in the Eastern Cape

William Beinart

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781776141173
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

While there are many studies of the global influence of crops and plants, this is perhaps the first social history based around a plant in South Africa. Plants are not quite historical actors in their own right, but their properties and potential help to shape human history. Plants such as prickly pear tend to be invisible to those who do not use them, or at least on the peripheries of people's consciousness. This book explains why they were not peripheral to many people in the Eastern Cape and why a wild and sometimes invasive cactus from Mexico, that found its way around the world over 200 years ago, remains important to African women in shacks and small towns. The central tension at the heart of this history concerns different and sometimes conflicting human views of prickly pear. Some accepted or enjoyed its presence; others wished to eradicate it. While commercial livestock farmers initially found the plant enormously valuable, they came to see it as a scourge in the early twentieth century as it invaded farms and commonages. But for impoverished rural and small town communities of the Eastern Cape it was a godsend. In some places it still provides a significant income for poor black families. Debates about prickly pear – and its cultivated spineless variety – have played out in unexpected ways over the last century and more. Some scientists, once eradicationists, now see varieties of spineless cactus as plants for the future, eminently suited to a world beset by climate change and global warming. The book also addresses central problems around concepts of biodiversity. How do we balance, on the one hand, biodiversity conservation with, on the other, a recognition that plant transfers – and species transfers more generally – have been part of dynamic production systems that have historically underpinned human civilizations. American plants such as maize, cassava and prickly pear have been used to create incalculable value in Africa. Transferred plants are at the heart of many agricultural systems, as well as hybrid botanical and cultural landscapes, sometimes treasured, that are unlikely to be entirely reversed. Some of these plants displace local species, but are invaluable for local livelihoods. Prickly Pear explores this dilemma over the long term and suggests that there must be a significant cultural dimension to ideas about biodiversity. The content of Prickly Pear is based on intensive archival research, on interviews conducted in the Eastern Cape by the authors, as well as on their observations of how people in the area use and consume the plant.

1

PRICKLY PEAR

BREWING AND LOCAL KNOWLEDGE IN THE EASTERN CAPE, 2000-2006

Our history starts in the recent past, in Nowinile Ngcengele’s shack near Fort Beaufort’s dusty football stadium. Despite her obvious poverty, her shack was neat inside with sitting room furniture and a glass-fronted display cupboard. The road alongside her plot is tarred but cattle and goats sometimes roam the verges and stray into the stadium. Nowinile had access to water from a standpipe in her yard. A prickly pear bush stood at the front of the plot. When we first visited in 2004 she was waiting for an RDP house which was built in 2006. Thousands of these structures have spread over the hills around the town.

As it is difficult to find deep historical material on the everyday use of prickly pear, we explore this through contemporary eyes by describing fruit sales and brewing in the eastern Cape in the early years of the twenty-first century. Our core arguments in this chapter are, firstly, that although the population has increasingly moved away from rural areas and agricultural pursuits, knowledge about opuntia is widespread in the Eastern Cape. Old rural skills have been adapted to new urban contexts and local strategies built around such skills and knowledge remain inventive. This spiny plant is a good coloniser and survivor, but it requires careful handling. Secondly, although prickly pear is no longer very important in the area, it remains a significant source of fruit for many people, and provides an income for poor African women.

Fort Beaufort is a town of about 70,000 people in the heart of the province.¹ Its population is overwhelmingly African and most people live in the large township called Bhofolo by the locals (the Xhosa name for Fort Beaufort), which lies on its eastern outskirts. The town and its commonage are surrounded by white-owned farms and by a portion of the former Ciskei.

Nowinile Ngcengele and Nositile Lungisa with the authors outside the former’s shack in Fort Beaufort, 2004

In March 2005 we accompanied one group of women through all phases of picking fruit and processing it into beer. Nowinile Ngcengele was our main contact. She was a lively and confident woman in her late seventies, who was happy to talk to us for hours about her life and prickly pear.² She also organised demonstrations of prickly pear usage for us. She and the others pronounced itolofiya, the Xhosa word for both the plant and its fruit, as ‘trofia’, sometimes suppressing the ‘a’, a closer fit to the Afrikaans original.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF IQHILIKA BREWING

African people brewed beer using a range of techniques from honey, indigenous fruit and grains for millennia. The Xhosa term iqhilika, and Afrikaans karee, was used for honey beer, a drink and a word that both Africans and Afrikaners adopted from the Khoikhoi !kharib or !xari. (It is sometimes written or pronounced as kirrie, kerrie, t’kiri or kili.) It was then applied to beer brewed from the fruit of prickly pear. We do not know when such brewing began. Sparrman, the entertaining and alert Swedish traveller, was told in the 1770s that alcohol was made from a ‘cactus of considerable size’ in the Camdeboo, near Graaff-Reinet.³ He was probably referring to distilling by settlers rather than beer-making by Africans, but brewing seems to have been established in Graaff-Reinet’s location by the 1870s.⁴ In the 1890s, farm owners and employers complained that:

the native servants make use of the fruits in the manufacture of pernicious intoxicants which they consume in large quantities, totally unfitting them for their ordinary duties, and in all parts of the country where these liquors are prepared, the assembling of natives during the night for drunken orgies is carried on to such an extent that the matter is becoming really serious.⁵

Prickly pear featured in evidence from farmers to the 1894 Labour Commission in the Cape Colony. As the Member of the Legislative Assembly for Graaff-Reinet noted, ‘our difficulty commences directly [as] the prickly pear gets ripe. Then the natives make beer and cause us annoyance’.⁶ In Somerset East, a witness said ‘in the summer time, the men brew beer and karee with prickly pears. I have seen all the farm hands drunk in the morning with this’.⁷ While their view of the beer’s impact was clouded by a haze of colonial prejudice, the scale of brewing may not have been exaggerated.

Charles Juritz, the Cape government chemist, was sent samples of beer for analysis of alcoholic content in legal cases arising from prosecutions under the Liquor Law of 1898.⁸ This gave landowners the right to control brewing and possession of beer on their private land – and the issue arose as to the strength of ‘intoxicating liquor’ that fell under the Act. In 1906 Juritz produced an informative survey from the material sent by magistrates. African beer was produced everywhere but he heard specifically of prickly pear beer in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth and in Stockenstrom, Steytlerville and the Midlands more generally. The techniques of brewing, briefly recorded, differed little from those we saw a century later. Residents of New Brighton used a similar method for beer called idanti made from hops and sugar – this could also contain prickly pear. Kropf and Godfrey (1915) define it as ‘a kind of very intoxicating beer, made from prickly pear and other ingredients’.⁹ A version was also made in Ndabeni, Cape Town. The alcoholic content of all these variations was generally low from less than one per cent alcohol by volume to about seven per cent.

Nowinile Ngcengele was born and lived much of her life on white-owned farms in districts surrounding Fort Beaufort. Many people in Bhofolo township come from the farms. It was there that she learnt to handle prickly pear. She was born near the Fish River, around 1927, and then lived on the farm Grenoble in Bedford district. She remembers eating prickly pear fruit of three kinds as a child, white, yellow and sweet red. The fruit was used for brewing on the farms in her youth. She recalls that old men mainly made iqhilika in those days, while women brewed mgqombothi from sorghum (amazimba or amabele). Men also made honey beer, which used a similar process to prickly pear beer. Nowinile explained men’s involvement as a result of the dangers of brewing at that time. Farm owners and police attempted to prevent brewing and old men were more prepared to take chances. They would hide the beer in iikani – big tins used for milk – at some distance from their homesteads. Farmers, she remembered, would pour away (chitha) any beer that they found. They thought that iqhilika was more intoxicating than mqombothi – that it would make people ‘wild’ and steal sheep. Beer was nevertheless widely brewed although not generally sold on the farms. When it was ready they announced ‘we have mixed it’ (sidubile) and everyone could come to drink.¹⁰

Nowinile clearly lived on a farm where suppression was the rule and some others confirmed her recollections. Nevertheless, prohibition was very uneven. In 1932, Monica Wilson, the anthropologist, conducted interviews on a number of farms in Bedford and the neighbouring districts of Adelaide and Albany during her research for Reaction to Conquest.¹¹ At four farms, no brewing was allowed at all, although one of these landowners told her that ‘a good deal’ of honey beer was made. On one farm the workers were Christian and claimed not to be interested in beer. Two landowners allowed brewing once a month, and another two weekly. At one farm brewing was reputed to take place two or three times a week and it was regarded as a centre for sheep theft. This may have been the farm in a ‘prickly pear area’ where the owner, unusually, allowed Africans to remain as labour tenants rather than labourers: ‘in return for building plots and grazing rights [they] cleared a patch of prickly pear each year for the farmer on whose land they lived. No cash passed between them and the farmer.’¹² Thus according to Hunter’s records, brewing was permitted on at least half the farms she investigated. Twenty-five years later Margaret Roberts, surveying farm labour in the eastern Cape, also noted that farmers varied in their determination to suppress brewing and very few could enforce this: ‘it is generally recognised that workers on most farms brew very much more beer than they are allowed’.¹³

Prickly pear was also widespread for many years on Fort Beaufort commonage and around the two old locations called Tini’s and Drayini or Apiesdraai. The latter was on the south-western side of town, to the west of the old Grahamstown road. It was destroyed under the Group Areas Act in the 1960s and the new road built through part of it. Currently, some of this land is occupied by the Winterberg High School, originally for whites but now desegregated. Nothobile Ludziya was born there and she recalled that in the 1940s ‘we grew up with itolofiya around us’ (sikulele kuyo).¹⁴ Neither this old township nor the prickly pear that surrounded it is there any longer.

PICKING AND SELLING

Nowinile and most of the women involved in brewing pick the fruit themselves and also sell some of it. She and her group estimated that there were about 50 brewers operating in the town. Others pick and sell fruit but do not brew. Their fruit of choice is the wild O. ficus-indica. In Xhosa this is called itolofiya yasendle emhlope – the white-fruited prickly pear of the veld. The fruit comes into season during the summer, from early January to mid-March. (This is a summer rainfall area.) While there is a large commonage adjacent to Bhofolo, hardly any of the appropriate prickly pear plants grow there any longer. Many of the women used to pick on white-owned farms surrounding the town, but in recent years access has largely been denied.

Nowinile and her group remember one farm in particular close to Fort Beaufort as a favoured spot for picking. They called it Mandreya’s and it clearly had rich stocks. None of the women we interviewed knew the English name of the farm owner, but Nowinile took us to the farm which is a few kilometres south-west of town. We later discovered that the farm was owned by Andre Danckwerts, and the Xhosa version of the farm’s name was an adaptation of his first name. They also called this farm KwaMinoli, but its registered name is Kluklu (after the river Xuxuwa).¹⁵ The farmer used to charge nothing for access to his land by pickers. His foreman recorded their names and identity numbers. Some township women were actually employed on the farm to help clear jointed cactus (ukatyi, see Chapter 2) and by picking large quantities of fruit, the women helped to protect livestock from damaging themselves by eating it after it had fallen.

Mandreya’s was closed to picking around the year 2000. We heard explanations both from the women and from the farmers; they largely concur as to the reasons although they do not share the same opinions about such restrictions. Nothobile Ludziya recalled that ‘some people messed up (bamosha)’ their relationship with Mandreya.¹⁶ She added:

On one occasion, around the year 2000, sheep were stolen and some were discovered still alive in a shack in the township. From that day on they closed entry. There was no warning. Mandreya said that the bakkies were moving in and men came with them. Even though the sheep were discovered, no one was ever caught, because the owner of the shack was already in prison (etrongweni).

Others thought that ‘Mandreya stopped it because a group of hunters went on the rampage, entered the farm and hunted kudu (amaqude).’¹⁷ Farmers said that when they gave women access to pick on their land, intruders came with them, and they suffered from the perennial problems of livestock theft, veld fires, hunting and honey collection: ‘fences cut, gates left open, cattle scattered, and vandalism so they closed ranks and said that’s it’.¹⁸

Danckwerts, who was well-informed about these issues, lives in a lovely, old, nineteenth-century farmhouse along the Adelaide road. He concurred that there was a ‘criminal element’, that ‘caused so much trouble’, and even threatened his family. In his eyes, a limited number of women pickers was manageable but ‘if you let in one person, 500 people will come in tomorrow’. He noted that there was competition for fruit between the outside pickers and his farm workers; so he also ‘stopped [outsiders] from picking because they chased his staff away and that caused fights’.¹⁹ Danckwerts, ironically, was sure that the wild prickly pear on his farm, and around Fort Beaufort, was better than the Grahamstown product because it grew on gravel soils in a hotter climate, which produced sweeter, tastier fruit with an excellent texture. He joked that when frie...