The Seed is Mine (1996)

- PICKED BY HANNEKE -
February 2021

In conversations I’ve had with colleagues about this monumental work, people seemed to be on the fence about whether it should be called an ethnography, a novel, a biography, or perhaps a history of how Apartheid touched the very ground of rural social and economic life in the Triangle between Bloemhof, Schweizer-Reneke and Wolamransstad in the Transvaal.

Van Onselen and his team narrate the story of Kas Maine and his family, a man who lived a life so resourceful one would not think it possible within the rigid confines of Apartheid. Share cropping, on which a large part of Kas’ livelihood and the social and economic structure of the region depended, was against the law by the time Kas reaches adulthood, but people had to survive there and they found ways to  raise crops, work in the mines and tend cattle. Most of all, this book relates how those who were forced into continuous migration due to the Native Land Act from 1913 formed families and friendships and how they moved with the Transvaal - as a profoundly mixed if divided society, a hostile and challenging landscape and a home to many on the move - through the twentieth century.