South African wine

Press, 19 May 1984, Page 16

South African wine

Sir,—A black person coming to Harewood, seeing Bumside, Ham, Fendalton, Cashmere, and selected shops, and lunching with the Chamber of Commerce at the Town Hall would see Christchurch very differently from one arriving at Lyttelton, driving through selected parts of Woolston and Sydenham to lunch at Aranui’s Activity Centre with windows metalled over against the few local vandals. Bert Walker (May 14) sees only South Africa’s

small, rising black middle class — ignoring their disenfranchisement — not the majority of blacks who suffer enforced family dislocation, inadequate welfare, and on the often barren, muddy Homelands, endemic malnutrition (kwashiorkor damages brains) and deadly epidemics. He still does not give the range and distribution of Stellenbosch’s blacks’ salaries. Blacks are intelligent. Why are they educationally restricted under the Bantu Education Act? Employer-induced alcoholism of black farmhands is thoroughly docu-

mented in South Africa, and a discredit to white farmers, not to blacks. — Yours, etc., SUSAN TAYLOR. May 14, 1984.

Sir,—lt has dawned on me why there is such a huge difference in the claims made by Bert Walker and all other writers on the subject of wages paid to black wine workers. Mr Walker refers to a head office located perhaps beside a modern bottling plant. Black workers in the commercial field have historically enjoyed a less unfair wage because of the skill and education involved in such work. The wine workers I refer to are those involved in the raw material end of things, and Mr Walker had better believe wages are minute and often paid in kind, housing conditions are often primitive, the tot system is alive and well and above all, blacks are at the mercy of individual white farmers because labour laws, pitiful as they are, are rarely enforced.—Yours, etc., GRAEME YARDLEY. May 15, 1984.