We South Africans are very good at coining fancy terms to help us avoid dealing with the issues that stand in the way of creating shared prosperity. Pretending that we are a "rainbow nation" delayed us from dealing with the fact that we are not a South African nation. We are simply groups of Africans, coloureds, Indians, whites and many other shades of colour, sharing a territory. Some victims of apartheid and some beneficiaries of it. Now terms such as "smallholder" and "emerging farmer" are floating around, meant solely to label and box in the beneficiaries of the government’s land-reform programme. Can someone tell me who is a "smallholder" or "emerging farmer" and who is not? Black farmers? If so, which black farmers? Communal? Mid-scale? Commercial? When do these farmers stop being "emerging" farmers? In the rest of the African continent, there is a clear definition of a smallholder farmer based on scale. In SA, why should the definition be based on race? Why should a veteran b...
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