In My Backyard

My clinical and scientific education helped me tackle the social ills that come with owning farmland in South Africa. My wine farm was granted to my predecessors in title in 1690, and the granting of these farms is really where the trouble began. There were good reasons for the Dutch government to settle farms: they basically wanted a waystation for their ships, a sort of halfway house on their way to and from the East; they needed fresh produce and they needed wine. Wine kept better than water on ships on those long trips. It is also profoundly true that this Dutch settlement was a catastrophe for the local inhabitants. This valley provided hunting grounds for the first people of this area, called the Bushmen, also known as the San. They were hunter-gatherers, so the settlement of these farms was pretty much the end of their economy. And the valley also provided the nomadic grazing grounds for pastural people called the Khoe-Khoe. They moved seasonally with their cattle and their sheep through these parts. In 1690, they came down the valley with their sheep and their cattle only to be told: You can’t graze here, this land belongs to me. Neither of those two groups of indigenous people had any concept of private ownership of land. It was like, What do you mean, it belongs to you? And the Dutch said, I’ll show you what it means to belong to me. So, there was a genocide here. The Bushmen and the Khoe-Khoe were killed in droves. It was literally the annihilation of a people, not only of their economies and their cultures. The few who remained became farmworkers, and—in addition—slaves were brought from the East. My farm was literally built on the back of several crimes against humanity. It’s one thing to say, This house we’re sitting in now was built by slaves; these walls, the roof, every brick and rock that goes into the fabric of this building was put there by slaves; it’s another thing to know what that means. It means that people were brought here against their will, they were paid nothing, and they were compelled to work. But what makes it ten times worse is that their descendants are still here. They still live on this farm, and they still work for me. The current social fabric of my farm is a direct product of that history, and we’re living that history today. They live on my land in little houses that belong to me, with jobs which I choose to give them or not, and they own nothing.

 

 

I wanted to give them all a piece of this farm, something that they would be able to say was theirs. But, I’m sorry to say, it’s not common for white landowners to decide I want to make it possible for the historically disadvantaged people on the farm to also become landowners. So, because I did that, I attracted quite a bit of attention. What I did was mortgage my farm, as did my neighbor and friend, the late Richard Astor, in order to buy the farm next door to mine and his for the farmworkers. This changed their lives. Not only in a material way but also in terms of their sense of who they are and what their relationship is to me and to our shared history. Eventually, we worked with the government to improve their landholding. The government in a sense took over the role that we had played, in terms of relieving us of the debt we had incurred on behalf of the workers. But that relationship was complicated. More recently, an African American businessman named Tommy Hall has stepped in to help us, and he has effectively replaced the government. Luckily for us, he decided to help us because he wanted to shift his assets out of Donald Trump’s America and invest in the future of Africa instead.

 

 

However, returning to my initial relationship with the farmworkers, you can’t just say,  “Now we’re on the same side.” We’re not on the same side.  My clinical work influenced what I did here, so I’ll tell you the first thing I did before buying the farm next door for the farmworkers. I relied upon my psychoanalytical experience and knowledge to realize this was bad; this was a horrible situation, and I just needed to stick with it.  I relied upon that bit of psychoanalytic wisdom: don’t do something because you can’t stand the feeling. If you don’t understand the feeling, then better to do nothing and just stick with it.

 

 

I realized that the first thing is not to act impulsively, to concretely enact something, but rather just sit with it and let it be the ugly thing that it is, until you start to see what the nature of the thing is. And it became clear that what was being repeated was this abusive, mistrustful pattern that has characterized this piece of land for 330 years. You can’t just say it’s gone; it’s not gone. That’s when I had the idea that we needed to take a history. You need to understand where something comes from; that’s general medical wisdom, that you take a history to make a diagnosis. In a way, in psychoanalysis, the taking of the history is the treatment itself. You could say that psychoanalysis is just a very big history-taking. And I hasten to point out that when I say I had the idea to take a history, I didn’t mean I must take their history. I’m not their doctor and they my patient. The patient was the relationship between the landowner and the tenant-workers. We needed professional help. I brought in archaeologists and historians to take our history and we dug this place up. Literally, but, in a way, you could say it was like analysis of the transference in that it wasn’t an intellectual exercise of learning about Oh, so, once upon a time, there were settlers who stole the land, and once upon a time, there were settlers who brought slaves here. It was lived. Fifty meters from my front door we found a settlement site where Bushmen had lived six thousand years ago. This had the most incredible sort of mutative impact. For example, one of the farmworkers involved in that excavation, who is of Bushmen descent himself, holding those beautiful stone tools, looked me in the eye and said, “You see, professor, my people were here before yours.” It was like a personal discovery of this fact, an actual personal realization.

 

 

That discovery carries with it implicit questions like Just explain to me again how come I work for you? And Why do you own the land? So, I think to see it like an analysis of transference and countertransference is not such a stretch, actually. They were concretely going through the history, seeing the physical evidence of this farm having been taken from their ancestors, and those of slave ancestry, to see the physical evidence of who their ancestors were, and where they were brought from and the conditions under which they were compelled to work here, and what happened to them. We went through detailed stories from the records of the “Slave Protector’s” office in which the slaves’ point of view is only recorded when there were legal proceedings, and it’s just one nightmare after another.

 

 

Since going through the process on my farm using those psychoanalytical tools, I have seen all around me in this country opportunities for what we learned to be applied to psychoanalysis. There’s a special role for psychoanalysis in South Africa, and it’s a little different from other places. What we did on my farm is similar to what Archbishop Tutu did on a national scale at the time of the transition. He was in charge of a thing called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). And that was a deeply psychoanalytical project. Rather than have Nuremberg-type trials to punish the perpetrators of apartheid, the TRC created forums in which the perpetrators had to confess fully to the victims of those crimes and what they had done while those victims were literally present in the room. If the commission felt it was a full and frank admission, with an opportunity for the victims to question the perpetrators, they would be given amnesty. If they sought to hide what they’d done, they were subject to criminal proceedings. The opportunity to look them in the eye and confess what had been done led to very moving episodes of forgiveness and remorse. The country went through a massive cathartic process.

 

 

One of the roles that psychoanalysis has to play now in this country is to try to continue that sort of process for ordinary people. Every one of us who lived through the apartheid years, on either side of the racial divide, was deeply affected by it. The ways we related to each other, the ways in which we subtly or not so subtly took advantage of our privileged position, and the ways in which we were subtly or not so subtly humiliated and degraded on an everyday scale—this needs to be confronted in the analytic setting very specifically.

 

 

Everywhere in the world, psychoanalysis suffers from being a relatively elite treatment and profession. And we’re not exempt from that here in South Africa, but it does have a special meaning here, which is actually twofold. One is that wealth in South Africa pretty much goes with whiteness, and poverty goes with Blackness, so if you have an elite treatment and an elite profession, they will pretty much all be white. What I mean is that elitism in South Africa is racialized. You can’t offer something for the privileged without it having a meaning and relation to our apartheid past.

The other implicit thing is that not only is it elitist, it’s also European. The colonizing of this country was the Europeanizing of this country, and psychoanalysis can easily be experienced as some further sort of colonial imposition. Those are some of the ways in which psychoanalysis has a special status here. We’ve made all sorts of efforts to try to address it, but we don’t have a proper national health insurance and we only have free health care for the indigent. In the hospital where I work, my patients are all poor, but there’s also a private health care system, and there’s a gigantic gap between the two. And again, it’s racialized. So, almost all my patients in the hospital are Black, and almost all the private patients are white.

 

 

We have gone to great lengths to break this cycle in the South African Psychoanalytical Association. I do not have time to describe it all here, but the upshot is that—as of now—30 percent of our members and candidates are Black. Hopefully, we will do still better than that in the future.

 

 

It’s all too easy in a country like ours to think only of what is needed materially, that physical health counts for much more than mental health. But we have a very sick society, and it’s expressed in all sorts of ways. We have out-of-control crime, substance abuse, domestic violence, and the abuse of women and children is second to none. So, our pitch to the National Department of Health is that we need to build into this national health insurance scheme basic psychotherapeutic services and programs that are psychologically mindful. For example, just having somebody visit new mothers in their home to see how they’re coping and talk to them about their relationship to their baby would be beneficial.

 

 

We’ve engaged with the government, showing them the “not-for-profit” things that we were doing ourselves. We’ve gotten serious, and our psychoanalytic society applies psychoanalytical ideas in various ways, in various communities. We don’t sit in our ivory towers waiting for people to come and ask for help.  We offer supervision in the state hospitals, to the psychiatrists and psychologists and social workers dealing with these overwhelming problems. We show them psychoanalytical ways of thinking, not only about the patients but also about themselves and their institutions, and how they are functioning; because they are all overwhelmed, they’re burnt out. Interestingly, when we spoke to the minister of health about the role of psychoanalysis, he said, Well, what about us, in government!? We need your help too!

 

 

These are some of the lessons we have learned. But there have been setbacks. Our government is deeply corrupt and progress has, therefore, been complicated at times. But, as they say, a luta continua!

 

 

 

 

An earlier version of this essay was first published by Global Perspectives in an interview conducted by Jill Choder-Goldman, LCSW, in 2018.