The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper, 1894-1985.

By Charles Van Onselen (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. xvi plus 649pp.).

This brilliant, maddening and peculiar tome tells "the story of an independent man." Born during South Africa's industrial revolution, Kas Maine died in the violent waning years of apartheid. In between lay years of struggle working on land he did not own in a world of capitalist development and state-sponsored racial oppression. The Seed is Mine is a remarkable story, one of the very few life stories available of the illiterate and the poor.

Van Onselen learned of Kas Maine mostly through the arduous fourteen yearlong labors of a black research assistant, Thomas Nkadimeng, who worked in the institute Van Onselen headed at the University of the Witwatersrand. (What little we learn of Nkadimeng is confined to a mere ten lines of text. One is left wondering if The Seed is Mine is also a product of an exploitative academic institution.) The book itself took many years to complete and was written in a period that saw extraordinary violence, political repression, the collapse of apartheid and the beginning of a new political era in South Africa. It was also written during a time when social history reigned triumphant in history departments across the country. Devoted to uncovering South Africa's history of capitalism and class formation, historians such as Van Onselen wrote of the ways in which Africans struggled to control their lives in a hostile world. Unfortunately by the late 1980s these concerns had collapsed into a series of mantras. A particularly powerful mantra, one that organizes the narrative of The Seed is Mine, centered on the rise of a black peasantry and its seemingly inevitably fall into proletarianization and poverty.

Van Onselen begins in the Lesotho highlands, Kas Maine's natal home. He all too briefly describes the political and social context before the expansion of an African peasantry. While he never really defines the word, Van Onselen means by peasantry a social class, existing in a world of capitalist development, that used family labor and sold part of their agricultural surplus on the colonial market. Maine's father shared in the "prosperity" that capitalism made possible but also participated in the privations that came when markets turned downward and white commercial farmers enviously eyed black land and labor.

This early picture of class formation and economic change - the frequently circuitous roads from promise to disappointment and, ultimately, to immiseration - becomes the template upon which Van Onselen reconstructs his subject's biography. We follow Kas Maine on journeys from Lesotho to the Orange Free State and, finally, to a triangle of marginal land in the Transvaal west of Johannesburg's city of gold. Van Onselen excruciatingly details Maine's life as a sharecropper and the landscape he inhabited. Much of the writing is splendid and evocative. We learn intimate details of his marriages, his relationship to kith and kin and, centrally, Maine's exceptional talents of farming and livestock raising and speculating. These talents would scarcely have been realized if not for Maine's control of family labor. Van Onselen details how this patriarch exploited his children and wives and how, once this control waned, Maine's economic fortunes became ever more fleeting.

Among the most important parts of the book are Van Onselen's renditions of the relationships between Kas Maine and the various whites who owned the land upon which this black sharecropper and his family toiled. More than any other historian Van Onselen reveals the extraordinary complexities of rural race and class relations, the grammars of deference and domination and the interdependencies and ironies of sharecropping in an economy that was becoming increasingly capitalized and mechanized. These sections of the book are a tour de force. Van Onselen argues that an "old-world paternalism," a world of incomplete capitalism, of "quasi-feudal relationships," gave way to more vicious forms of racial oppression that accompanied capitalist development and the mechanization of agriculture. Capitalism thus dissolved relationships of reciprocity and redistribution between landlord and tenant, relationships that entailed "close social proximity," just as it also ultimately dissolved Kas Maine's control over his own family.

The latter years of Kas Maine's life find his control over adequate land and labor increasingly tenuous. The labor power of his wives declines with their rising ages and growing infirmities. Finally they pass away, leaving Maine increasingly alone. Children move to the city and thus deprive him of precious labor. Kas Maine's attempts to mechanize his world, to keep up with the pace of capitalist development, fail. Neither truck nor tractor drives Kas Maine out of penury. His last years are spent in one of apartheid's impoverished homelands, just near to the casinos and bacchanalian delights of Sun City.

A brilliant and remarkable book, The Seed is Mine has received many accolades and has helped secure Van Onselen's commanding position as the premier historian of South African history. Anyone interested in understanding rural race relations in South Africa will begin, and perhaps end, with The Seed is Mine. Yet neither Van Onselen's dominant position in the academy nor his book's many evident achievements obviate recognition of the problems that lay buried in The Seed is Mine And they are many. One problem centers on the relationship between a conceptual schema and vocabulary rooted in the social history of the 1970s and Van Onselen's rendition of Kas Maine. Kas Maine becomes the local representative of two ostensibly universal subjects. Kas is a peasant and, simultaneously, also a possessive individual. The first category is articulated, the second assumed. The book is peppered with statements that locate Kas Maine as one of the world's peasants, whether in feudal Europe, India, or in the Reconstruction American South. Simultaneously Kas Maine is an individual, quintessentially so. The passage of almost a century of historical change never complicates Maine's individualism. Indeed both categories, peasant and individual, remain doubly static: there is no need to historicize them locally or globally. Van Onselen never seems to subject either to any reflection even though, along with capitalism, peasant and individual become the entire book's organizing categories.

The problem is not simply that peasant and individual too often dissolve into cliches. Or that the categories, once broadened to cover most anything, explain nothing. More serious is the incapacity of Van Onselen's social history to address culture and alterity. Ultimately there is little that, to Western eyes, is strange about Kas Maine. The African past appears at once interesting and also at the same time strangely flattened, as if the local and the cultural become the mask of the universal (read Western) subject. According to Van Onselen, Kas Maine "tells us as much about ourselves as it does about Kas" because Kas, ultimately, is just like us. Kas Maine's life simply, and unproblematically, confirms the universal subject.

As the book progresses these conflations become more serious. And bizarre. Author and subject collapse. Biography becomes sublimated autobiography. Van Onselen becomes Kas Maine. And vice versa. The book ends not with Kas Maine's voice but with Lampedusa's The Leopard. But one is left feeling that Van Onselen is writing autobiographically, indeed confessionally, about a white and embattled academic living in a democraticizing South Africa, whose once iron control has begun to falter.

There are two additional problems. In a book weighing in at more than six hundred pages, it is striking how seldom the reader hears Kas Maine's voice. Ultimately Kas Maine becomes too easily packaged, his past too neatly controlled by the author. Finally, the voice of the researcher who collected most of the oral testimony is completely absent. How might he have written the biography of Kas Maine? Van Onselen recognizes that The Seed is Mine is a collaborative creation, yet we learn nothing of someone who for fourteen years spoke to Kas Maine.

Clifton Crais

Kenyon College