Maravi

(NOSEWEEK) DU TOIT TOYI

DU TOIT TOYI
Issue # 58 - July 2004 Reader's comments Print this article

It was perhaps inevitable that Dr Philip du Toit’s privately-published lambast of government’s land reform programme, The Great South African Land Scandal, would be selling briskly among the nation’s white farming community. Du Toit tells noseweek that, of the 9000 copies of the English and Afrikaans editions printed since February, only a few hundred remain unsold.

Du Toit makes many valid points about land reform, which is why noseweek kicked off a 2002 debate on the governmment’s land reform programme with extracts from a paper he had hoped to deliver at the National Land Tenure Conference in November 2001. (He was barred from doing so.)

But Du Toit’s book is flawed by its obsession with example after example of failure following the passing of white-owned farms to the previously disadvantaged. A critical review in Farmer’s Weekly observed:

“Many examples of failures are based on hearsay, on the evidence of unnamed sources and they are unashamedly told from a purely white perspective. There is hardly a single instance of interviews conducted with black people, apart from quotes from newspapers – mostly intended to stereotype blacks as not able to farm productively.”

It was also noted in the review that Du Toit’s approach ignores history, and has scant regard for the devastation wreaked by land dispossessions under apartheid. Land claims commissioner Tozi Gwanya described the book as “a piece of racist literature that would surely anger any black reader”. But what are we to make of that, when the government does have such a bad record of mismanaging agricultural land transfers?

Well then, how sound are the book’s pronouncements? It’s difficult for those of us not schooled in the field to say. But we thought we could, for a start, investigate the veracity of the blurb on the book’s back cover.

“Attorney Dr Philip du Toit completed his doctorate on Labour Law in South Africa, with emphasis on the agricultural sector, at Pacific Western University in California, USA,” the blurb commences.

Very impressive – but Pacific Western University is actually based in Hawaii, not in California. It offers doctorate courses on the internet for $5400 – very cheap by US standards – but then, its academic curriculum is not accredited by any agency recognized by the US Secretary of Education. (Its degrees and diplomas are also not accepted by South Africa’s education watchdog, SAQA.)

Why should anyone want a doctorate from an internet university in Hawaii, rather than from, say, Free State University, or our own Unisa? Pacific Western’s website suggests several reasons: “A good candidate for a doctorate degree would be someone who needs the qualification to facilitate foreign travel, obtain a work visa, publish a book or professional articles, join professional associations or to elevate his or her standing in professional circles, particularly in the consulting field.”

Du Toit’s cover blurb continues: “Lectures at the University of South Africa, Pretoria on industrial and commercial law.” But Professor Pieter Havenga, director of Unisa’s school of law, says he has never heard of Dr Du Toit.

Other snippets dug up by Chris Louw, a freelance journalist who regularly writes for the Farmers’ Weekly:

- Du Toit was assisted in research by Gaye Graser, who is better known as the wife of right-winger Clive Derby-Lewis, presently serving a life sentence for assassinating Chris Hani.

- In February Du Toit was one of the speakers at an American Renaissance conference in Washingtion DC. The American Renaissance is a virulent anti-black hate group classified in the US as akin to the Ku Klux Klan.

Topics at a typical American Renaissance gathering: blacks are bigger in bone, smaller in brain; black marathon runners are biologically adapted cattle thieves because they come from a Kenyan tribe specialising in cattle theft; the inverse relationship between brain and penis size ... The list is endless.

The American Renaissance’s own website holds a collection of cause-serving newspaper clippings: Liberian cannibal to be expelled from New Zealand; Black brothers admit to murdering eight whites in Toledo; White teacher slain by black student in Florida etc. etc.


Du Toit, 52, works as director of legal services at the Pretoria-based Agricultural Employers’ Association. He tells noseweek that The Great South African Land Scandal is now selling briskly in the UK and US, and is being translated into Dutch and German. He claims that in South Africa the Department of Land Affairs is trying to keep it off the shelves. “A bookshop in Pietersburg received 50 copies. An hour later someone from Land Affairs walked in with a cardboard box and bought the lot,” he says.

Gaye Derby-Lewis? “She was one of my researchers. She’s a very proper, astute lady and she’s done good work for me.”

That Pacific Western doctorate? “The university is properly registered. I worked on my doctorate for five years and I have my thesis. It was very hard work.”

Lectures at Unisa? “That was a spelling mistake. It should have said ‘lectured’. I was there for a year in 1974.”

His speech at the American Renaissance conference? “They invited me to address them and I did. I spoke on the land reform issue and farm murders. I would never classify the American Renaissance as a hate group. Hating what?”

Concludes Du Toit: “People are trying to discredit me and the book. It seems to me it’s a sin if you put the truth on the table. In the book I did not refer to anything between black and white.”

Comments journalist Chris Louw, who frequently travels 2000km a week visiting farms all over South Africa: “There are problematic farmers – black and white. Yet there are hundreds of black farmers who are extremely successful.”

Why, for example, didn’t Du Toit think to mention Stephen Matsididi, now a millionaire from his two Free State farms at Khumu-Flet and Rusoord (maize, wheat, sunflowers, oats, dairy, cattle, pigs and chickens)? Or the neatly-cultivated maize and sunflower fields of Jeremiah Tsatsimpe at Verdwaal near Mafikeng? (This year, Tsatsimpe harvested 74 tons of sunflower seed.) Or Job Metswamere, who grows maize, sunflowers, peanuts and rears cattle at Gannalaagte, near Lichtenburg? Metswamere’s income from cash crops last year was R218,000.

Maybe it’s time Minister Thoko Didiza – and Dr Du Toit – had a chat with some of them and got to hear how they succeeded when so many others have failed. n

Labels: LAND REFORM, SOUTH AFRICA

posted by MrK @ 8:11 PM