MEMORIES OF JAM IN HEWU

In the mid-1990s, when we were both working for the Border Rural Committee research group on land reform and popular politics, we got to know Hewu and Nthabathemba districts, south-west of Queenstown, in the northern part of the former Ciskei. It was a fascinating but troubled and impoverished area. In the nineteenth century this locality was the centre of thriving mission stations and Christian communities such as Kamastone and Shiloh. Radical and millennial Christianity took root in the difficult, early decades of segregation and in 1922 the Israelites were massacred at nearby Bulhoek where a monument has recently been erected. In the homeland era tens of thousands of people were removed to, or flocked into, these districts and one of the resettlement camps, Thornhill, became particularly notorious as an apartheid dumping ground. During the early 1990s activists had organised a mass occupation of state-owned land to form new communities, such as Tambo village. These districts were a central focus of Luvuyo Wotshela's doctoral thesis. We had seen prickly pear in the vicinity and on a later visit asked speculatively about it. As responses proved to be rich, we returned on a few occasions.

One of our most intriguing interviews was with Fezeka Thelma Mpendukana (b. 1944), wife of the former headman of Kamastone. The settlement around this former Methodist mission station, established in 1835, still retains some of its identity. The old stone church has been refurbished and the homes nearby are traditionally built bungalows with stoeps (verandahs). Some have unusual stone cattle kraals. Many of the older families had quitrent tenure. Mpendukana reminisced about her teenage years in the 1950s. She lived then, before marriage, in a nearby village where prickly pear was planted on many of the homestead sites: ‘those who started without it, would transplant it from the veld’.

While our interviews in Fort Beaufort focused on the risky activity of brewing, Mpendukana's memory of prickly pear was very different. Her mother did not brew because they were a respectable Christian family. She associated prickly pear with African church circles and agricultural associations. Self-help and self-organisation through Zenzele (do it yourself) were a central feature of the Methodist womens’ groups.