Perseverance despite communal challenges

Zolani Tsheko, the second vice-chairperson of the National Wool Growers' Association, is a wool producer in the communal area of Thornhill near Queenstown in the Eastern Cape. Mike Burgess recently visited him to gain a better understanding of the production challenges faced by communal farmers, who Tsheko is obligated to lead in terms of his mandate.

- Mike Burgess

“Communal farming is a struggle, says Zolani Tsheko. “You are dependent on others, and therefore, you can drown with them.”

Tsheko, an educator by training, has been a part-time livestock farmer since 1980 and a full-time farmer since retiring as an accomplished principal in 2015.

“I am trying to apply commercial farming methods as best as I can under challenging communal circumstances. It is very challenging,” he says about his approach to running his 178 Merino sheep and seven cattle in Thornhill near Queenstown in the Eastern Cape. Tsheko was born in the former Transkei region of the Eastern Cape near the town of Herschel. The first born of seven children, he primarily recalls a life of grinding poverty.

“We had nothing,” he says. “My mother raised some chickens, and my father grew up herding livestock for other people.” Nevertheless, his father was hard-working, taking on various jobs as a farmworker, road construction worker, fencer, and shearer during his life.

Tsheko completed primary school, but faced a dilemma: he did not have enough money to pay the school fees needed to matriculate. Consequently, he signed up to work in the platinum mines of Rustenburg, North West, for a year to earn the necessary funds to matriculate.

Immediately after school, he took on a job as an unqualified teacher near Herschel. However, in 1976, the family was relocated by the Nationalist government to Thornhill in the former Ciskei, and in 1978, Tsheko enrolled at Whittlesea Teachers Training College.