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The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper, 1894-1985
Winner of the Sunday Times (South Africa) Alan Paton Award for Nonfiction
Winner of the Herskovitz Award from the African Studies Association.
'The seed is mine. The ploughshares are mine. The span of oxen is mine. Everything is mine. Only the land is their's.'--Kas Maine
A bold and innovative social history, The Seed Is Mine concerns the disenfranchised blacks who did so much to shape the destiny of South Africa. After years of interviews with Kas Maine and his neighbors, employers, friends, and family--a rare triumph of collaborative courage and dedication--Charles van Onselen has re-created the entire life of a man who struggled to maintain his family in a world dedicated to enriching whites and impoverishing blacks, while South Africa was tearing them apart.
Winner of The Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for Nonfiction
Winner of the Herskovitz Award from the African Studies Association
"The seed is mine. The ploughshares are mine. The span of oxen is mine. Everything is mine. Only the land is theirs."— Kas Maine
A bold and innovative social history, The Seed Is Mine concerns the disenfranchised blacks who did so much to shape the destiny of South Africa. After years of interviews with Kas Maine and his neighbors, employers, friends, and family—a rare triumph of collaborative courage and dedication—Charles van Onselen has recreated the entire life of a man who struggled to maintain his family in a world dedicated to enriching whites and impoverishing blacks, while South Africa was tearing them apart.
"If ever one wondered whether the life of a single man could illuminate a century, [this] brilliant biography . . . proves the point."— Carmel Schrire, The Boston Globe
"An epic . . . [that] tells of the loss of human potential generated by a politics that surrendered generosity and openness to self-interest and bigotry. It reveals the way an ordinary man can survive with dignity in such a world."— Vincent Crapanzano, The New York Times Book Review
"A magnificent book [with] implications beyond its modest claims . . . This remarkable story compels foreboding but also kindles hope, for it shows the extraordinary courage of 'ordinary' men under severe difficulties."— Eugene Genovese, Emory University
"[Van Onselen] teases out the subtleties of the paternalistic relationships between rural whites and blacks which gave rise to real friendships but also to much betrayal, anger, and humiliation . . . It is a monumental masterpiece of research, and a poetic evocation of the human spirit to survive . . . "— Linda Ensor, Business Day (South Africa)
Winner of the Herskovitz Award from the African Studies Association.
'The seed is mine. The ploughshares are mine. The span of oxen is mine. Everything is mine. Only the land is their's.'--Kas Maine
A bold and innovative social history, The Seed Is Mine concerns the disenfranchised blacks who did so much to shape the destiny of South Africa. After years of interviews with Kas Maine and his neighbors, employers, friends, and family--a rare triumph of collaborative courage and dedication--Charles van Onselen has re-created the entire life of a man who struggled to maintain his family in a world dedicated to enriching whites and impoverishing blacks, while South Africa was tearing them apart.
Winner of The Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for Nonfiction
Winner of the Herskovitz Award from the African Studies Association
"The seed is mine. The ploughshares are mine. The span of oxen is mine. Everything is mine. Only the land is theirs."— Kas Maine
A bold and innovative social history, The Seed Is Mine concerns the disenfranchised blacks who did so much to shape the destiny of South Africa. After years of interviews with Kas Maine and his neighbors, employers, friends, and family—a rare triumph of collaborative courage and dedication—Charles van Onselen has recreated the entire life of a man who struggled to maintain his family in a world dedicated to enriching whites and impoverishing blacks, while South Africa was tearing them apart.
"If ever one wondered whether the life of a single man could illuminate a century, [this] brilliant biography . . . proves the point."— Carmel Schrire, The Boston Globe
"An epic . . . [that] tells of the loss of human potential generated by a politics that surrendered generosity and openness to self-interest and bigotry. It reveals the way an ordinary man can survive with dignity in such a world."— Vincent Crapanzano, The New York Times Book Review
"A magnificent book [with] implications beyond its modest claims . . . This remarkable story compels foreboding but also kindles hope, for it shows the extraordinary courage of 'ordinary' men under severe difficulties."— Eugene Genovese, Emory University
"[Van Onselen] teases out the subtleties of the paternalistic relationships between rural whites and blacks which gave rise to real friendships but also to much betrayal, anger, and humiliation . . . It is a monumental masterpiece of research, and a poetic evocation of the human spirit to survive . . . "— Linda Ensor, Business Day (South Africa)
672 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
11 people are currently reading
222 people want to read
About the author
Charles van Onselen
24 books11 followersCharles van Onselen was educated at the Universities of Rhodes and Oxford. He has written extensively on 19th and 20th century South Africa. In 1983, his work on the social and economic history of the Witwatersrand won the Trevor Reese Memorial Prize for outstanding achievement in Commonwealth and Imperial history.
He is a well-known critic of Afrikaner nationalism whose earlier works include Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1914 and The Small Matter of a Horse: the Life of Nongoloza Mathebula, 1869-1948 and New Babylon, New Nineveh. In 1995, his biography of the life and times of Kas Maine, a black sharecropper, The Seed is Mine, won the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction.
In 2012 he was Research Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria.
He is a well-known critic of Afrikaner nationalism whose earlier works include Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1914 and The Small Matter of a Horse: the Life of Nongoloza Mathebula, 1869-1948 and New Babylon, New Nineveh. In 1995, his biography of the life and times of Kas Maine, a black sharecropper, The Seed is Mine, won the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction.
In 2012 he was Research Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 25, 2013
The most profound insights into our history tend to arise not from the deeds of famous leaders and the wars they foster, but from the so-called ‘peasants’ living under their rule. The Seed is Mine is a magisterial achievement of oral history and story-telling, in which author Charles van Onselen recounts the long and remarkable life of Kas Maine: part-Masotho, part-Motswana, part Afrikaner. His story is an epic tragedy which sheds much light on the changing political, social and economic climate of South Africa in the 20th Century. The book is not an easy read, but the courage to stick with it rewards one with great insight.
Born of a family which migrated north-west with the icy wind of Lesotho’s Maluti Mountains to escape the menace of Zulu conquest, Ramabonela “Kas” Maine was a complex man whose intelligence was matched only by his ambition and cruelty. Against the sage advice of his wives, he often used excessive violence to keep his children on the tracks he planned for them, and in the process purposefully preventing their proper education in order for them to help on the farm. Using his impressive array of skills, he led his large family through a land increasingly ravaged by a racist government, often finding great success in his farming and off-season endeavours. Despite the hostile climate, he still fostered many illegal partnerships with white land-owners; farming on their land and sharing the harvest.
Inspirational anecdotes of cooperation between the races abound in this book, but sadly they are outnumbered by the incidents of racism, the frequency of which increased into the Apartheid era. These events forced him to move his family to the Apartheid resettlement camp of Ledig. As he did so, his largely uneducated children scattered in search of work in the cities, and he was left with a broken shell of his paternalistic regime. Burdened with debt from many family funerals and a failed transition into mechanized farming, he continued to plan and experiment, even as age rendered him practically blind. Until the last, 91st, year of his life he never stopped striving for success: always planning a return to grace.
The amount of detail in this book is staggering and often overwhelming, but the beautiful use of language combined with the gripping story kept me coming back for more. The numerous names and places are hard to keep track of (more so than even War and Peace in my experience!), but as I got to know the Maine family I found it easier and easier to keep up with events in their lives. The author is an able narrator, but sometimes I found his enthusiasm mixed fiction into an otherwise factual account. His tendency to describe what the Maines were thinking certainly added depth to the story, but it came at the cost of blurred historical accuracy.
These criticisms are not sufficient to prevent my highest recommendation of this book. The tragedies in the Maines' life are heart-breaking, but through it all Kas and his extraordinarily courageous wives never lose their tenacity and hope. Through the story of one man, a whole era of a country is clearly illuminated in all its horror and complexity.
Born of a family which migrated north-west with the icy wind of Lesotho’s Maluti Mountains to escape the menace of Zulu conquest, Ramabonela “Kas” Maine was a complex man whose intelligence was matched only by his ambition and cruelty. Against the sage advice of his wives, he often used excessive violence to keep his children on the tracks he planned for them, and in the process purposefully preventing their proper education in order for them to help on the farm. Using his impressive array of skills, he led his large family through a land increasingly ravaged by a racist government, often finding great success in his farming and off-season endeavours. Despite the hostile climate, he still fostered many illegal partnerships with white land-owners; farming on their land and sharing the harvest.
Inspirational anecdotes of cooperation between the races abound in this book, but sadly they are outnumbered by the incidents of racism, the frequency of which increased into the Apartheid era. These events forced him to move his family to the Apartheid resettlement camp of Ledig. As he did so, his largely uneducated children scattered in search of work in the cities, and he was left with a broken shell of his paternalistic regime. Burdened with debt from many family funerals and a failed transition into mechanized farming, he continued to plan and experiment, even as age rendered him practically blind. Until the last, 91st, year of his life he never stopped striving for success: always planning a return to grace.
The amount of detail in this book is staggering and often overwhelming, but the beautiful use of language combined with the gripping story kept me coming back for more. The numerous names and places are hard to keep track of (more so than even War and Peace in my experience!), but as I got to know the Maine family I found it easier and easier to keep up with events in their lives. The author is an able narrator, but sometimes I found his enthusiasm mixed fiction into an otherwise factual account. His tendency to describe what the Maines were thinking certainly added depth to the story, but it came at the cost of blurred historical accuracy.
These criticisms are not sufficient to prevent my highest recommendation of this book. The tragedies in the Maines' life are heart-breaking, but through it all Kas and his extraordinarily courageous wives never lose their tenacity and hope. Through the story of one man, a whole era of a country is clearly illuminated in all its horror and complexity.
June 26, 2019
As an undergraduate student at Dalhousie University in the mid-1980s, Van Onselen's essays hugely shaped my views on South Africa when I took a course in the history of this fascinating land that I now call home. "The Seed Is Mine," published two decades ago but recently re-released (one suspects because of interest around the land issue) cements Van Onselen's rock-star status among social historians. It is social history and biography at their best, a task that social historians do not always rise to. His writing is simply superb, bringing the highveld to life with evocative descriptions of the weather and changing seasons - the rhythms of his subject's long life. But Kas Maine also had to follow the rhythm of white nationalist politics and an industrialising economy that forced him into and out of sharecropping arrangements. The seed was indeed his - but the land was not. And South Africa is still reaping a grim harvest from this tainted soil.
March 29, 2021
the book illustrates the painful realities of colonialism in africa-its effects are still being felt in 2021. the book evokes pain, resentment and hatred of the colonial masters the world over...it is a must read for all who advocate for the protection of human rights...
December 11, 2022
Ten stars!!!
July 15, 2010
Book is a bit dense but I found it to be very illuminating re: the history of apartheid and its impact on the disintegration of a people.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews