Sandy Grant
21 April 2008
column
Last week I went to have a look at the old Brigade plantation at Morwa. I hadn't been there for years and it took two false starts even to hit the correct road. And even then I arrived at what seemed to be a wrong, certainly unfamiliar, angle.
But then it wasn't just the angle of approach that was wrong. The entire place was a total disaster. Fortunately I had been warned what to expect but it was nevertheless incredibly sad to see what had become of a once thriving project. For a start, the trees had nearly all gone which, in a plantation, would seem to be the last thing that could have happened because when chopped they simply burst into renewed life. But here they had been chopped and died leaving a few scattered trees as evidence of what once had been. The old staff houses were ruined shells; all of them having had their roofs, doors and window and door frames systematically looted. The bush had encroached and it was hard to imagine that this had ever been a vibrant project with life, and hope. What on earth had happened to bring about such sad change?
When my own involvement with the Brigades in Mochudi (the Kgatleng Development Board) came to an end many years ago I lost touch with what it was doing. I was unaware therefore that at some stage, a decision had been taken to let the Morwa plantation go, in effect to abandon it. Perhaps it had been decided that KDB no longer had the capacity to run a forestry nursery in Mochudi as well as a substantial out reach programme in Morwa. Whether or not the project was formally handed over to Morwa, perhaps to its VDC, the people there were clearly of the opinion that the plantation was of no real value to them and that whatever had been left by KDB was theirs for the taking, trees and all. I am unsure whether that process occurred over night or was spread out over a period of time. But it seems like only yesterday when I last drove through Morwa and looked at the dense mass of trees in the middle distance. How come that I hadn't even noticed that the dense mass had been replaced by a few isolated tree remnants?
A friend recently commented to me that it is rare for an NGO project here to last as long as 30 years so the Morwa forestry project, born in the early 1970s, seems to fit that pattern. But then so many of Mochudi's projects, NGO and otherwise, have an extraordinary track record. The old Bakgatla National School became Isang Primary School, was then abandoned but resuscitated as the Phuthadikobo Museum. The house of the Principal of the National School became first a Homecraft Centre and then a hostel for blind children. Nearby Lentswe Primary School has been abandoned and a new site has been identified for the old DRM Hospital which will presumably be abandoned one day or converted into something else. But what? The Show ground was first in the Iketlo area, then at Phaphane and now in the back of beyond. The Brigades were located in the centre of Mochudi but, bar the forestry nursery, have been shifted to the new Mochudi-Molotwana axis. The District Council, having consumed half of the old Rovers football field then decided that it was still out of space, and split itself into two by moving to an entirely new site, the recently vacated Phaphane Show Ground at Phaphane. Metlhaetsile came and went. People were compensated and moved out of the kgotla area and their old houses demolished in order to make way for a major new tribal office which will never have enough parking space or suitable access roads. And a vast new building - the largest ever commercial investment in the place - remains locked and unused, years after it was completed. Overall, it is a very strange pattern.
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