These Potatoes Look Like Humans

"These Potatoes Look Like Humans offers a unique understanding of the intersection of land, labour, dispossession and violence experienced by Black South Africans from the apartheid period to the present. Critiquing the narrow materialist and legalistic arguments about the land question, uMbuso weNkosi recognises that, for most Black South Africans, the meaning of land cannot be separated from one's spiritual and ancestral connection to it. Taking the historic 1959 potato boycott in South Africa as a starting point, weNkosi turns an unflinching gaze on how past and present continue to inform the future. He argues that the violence to which Black farmworkers have been subjected is more than brutal exploitation of cheap labour. It stems from the anxiety white society feels about its oppression of the majority, its claims to land ownership and its fears of the future. The cycle of violence will persist until there is a recognition of the dead and restless spirits of the land and a spiritual return to home for Black people's ancestors. uMbuso weNkosi offers a deeper understanding of the meaning of dispossession, the struggle for land reform and the remedies for social justice in today's South Africa. uMbuso weNkosi is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pretoria" --