The Seed Is Mine : The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper, 1894-1985
- Book Review,
by Charles Van Onselen
Amazon.com
History forgets the small and powerless. It is to South African historian and journalist Charles Van Onselen's credit that he has remembered one of them in a sprawling biography: an illiterate black South African tenant farmer who lived out his days under apartheid. The existence of Kas Maine (1894-1985) had hitherto been formally acknowledged only in official state records, and then only once, for having been arrested in 1931 for not having a license for his pet dog. From that sketchy base Van Onselen creates a powerful life study of a man who lived as best as he could under the most trying circumstances. But he does much more than that: he reinforces Maine's story with a long and fluent account of South African history in the last century.
From Publishers Weekly
A historian in South Africa, van Onselen has organized a prodigious amount of research-not only from the well-remembering Kas Maine, farmer, healer and patriarch, but also from other family members and those in his community-to tell "the story of a family who have no documentary existence." Yet the Maines, sharecroppers in Transvaal Province, lived through South African history while the "emerging South African state" clamped down on sharecroppers to provide white landlords a labor force under apartheid capitalism. The most interesting portions of the narrative recount how, especially before apartheid was enacted in 1948, racial lines were somewhat fluid, as Africans such as Maine could play banker to poor Afrikaners, and Kas, in a wise presage of South Africa's future, concluded that individual behavior meant more than skin color. General readers may find this lengthy book too detailed; for those studying South African history, it is a vital contribution. Photos not seen by PW. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, Vincent Crapanzano
. . . reveals the way an ordinary man can survive with dignity in such a world.
From Booklist
According to the official South African record, Kas Maine never was. This groundbreaking social history tells of a black sharecropper and his family over the last century, people who were central to the shaping of South Africa but whose personal daily stories have been blurred and lost in the sweep of laws and events. Based on years of interviews with Maine, his friends and family, and his neighbors and employers, van Onselen (an academic at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg) traces the history of a strong, resilient Sotho patriarch in a white-dominated world who was driven off the land, first to a resettlement slum and then to the segregated poverty of an apartheid Bantustan. Looked at closely, it's an account not only of white oppressors and black victims, but also of shifting relationships between farmers, traders, and workers as mechanization drove thousands off the land. The documentation is detailed (nearly 100 pages of notes at the end), but it's unobtrusive. Like the image of the refugee family with household possessions piled on an ox wagon, the extraordinary particulars of one person's life tell us about displacement everywhere. Hazel Rochman
Carmel Schrire, The Boston Globe
"If ever one wondered whether the life of a single man could illuminate a century, [this] brilliant biography . . . proves the point."
Review
"If ever one wondered whether the life of a single man could illuminate a century, [this] brilliant biography...proves the point."--Carmel Schrire, The Boston Globe
"An epic...[that] tells of the loss of human potential generated by a politics that surrendered generosity and openness to self-interest and bigotry. It reveals the way an ordinary man can survive with dignity in such a world."--Vincent Crapanzano, The New York Times Book Review
"A magnificent book [with] implications beyond its modest claims...This remarkable story compels foreboding but also kindles hope, for it shows the extraordinary courage of 'ordinary' men under severe difficulties."--Eugene Genovese, Emory University
"[Van Onselen] teases out the subtleties of the paternalistic relationships between rural whites and blacks which gave rise to real friendships but also to much betrayal, anger, and humiliation...It is a monumental masterpiece of research, and a poetic evocation of the human spirit to survive..."--Linda Ensor, Business Day (South Africa)
Review
"If ever one wondered whether the life of a single man could illuminate a century, [this] brilliant biography...proves the point."--Carmel Schrire, The Boston Globe
"An epic...[that] tells of the loss of human potential generated by a politics that surrendered generosity and openness to self-interest and bigotry. It reveals the way an ordinary man can survive with dignity in such a world."--Vincent Crapanzano, The New York Times Book Review
"A magnificent book [with] implications beyond its modest claims...This remarkable story compels foreboding but also kindles hope, for it shows the extraordinary courage of 'ordinary' men under severe difficulties."--Eugene Genovese, Emory University
"[Van Onselen] teases out the subtleties of the paternalistic relationships between rural whites and blacks which gave rise to real friendships but also to much betrayal, anger, and humiliation...It is a monumental masterpiece of research, and a poetic evocation of the human spirit to survive..."--Linda Ensor, Business Day (South Africa)
Book Description
Winner of the Sunday Times (South Africa) Alan Paton Award for Nonfiction
Winner of the Herskovitz Award from the African Studies Association.
'The seed is mine. The ploughshares are mine. The span of oxen is mine. Everything is mine. Only the land is their's.'--Kas Maine
A bold and innovative social history, The Seed Is Mine concerns the disenfranchised blacks who did so much to shape the destiny of South Africa. After years of interviews with Kas Maine and his neighbors, employers, friends, and family--a rare triumph of collaborative courage and dedication--Charles van Onselen has re-created the entire life of a man who struggled to maintain his family in a world dedicated to enriching whites and impoverishing blacks, while South Africa was tearing them apart.
Card catalog description
"Traces the psycholosocial development of one black sharecropping family over a one-hundred-year cycle, and tells of the triumphs and the tears of a black patriarch struggling to prosper ... a black man's manual of survival in what was apartheid South Africa" --Jacket.
About the Author
Charles van Onselen is research professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria. He is the recipient of The Sunday Times/Alan Paton Award and the Herkovitz Award.
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