SOUTH AFRICA: Retired farm labourer Nicolas Shirinda is considered a local hero for the manner in which he has withstood attempts to evict him from the arid patch of farmland he calls home.
For the past three years, the 75-year-old South African's former boss has been trying to clear him off the scrubland near Pretoria on which he has lived for 47 years, while working the farmer's land, even though he is legally entitled to remain there.
After his refusal to move, Mr Shirinda decided to take action through the courts to protect his rights.
"The farmer who owns the land has turned the water off, so we have to go 10 miles every day to get it. He has dumped all the cow dung beside my house and he has fenced off my plot, trying to cage me," he says. "I am too old to start again, so I will wait to hear what the court has to say."
A survey compiled by the Nkuzi Development Association claims that almost 950,000 black South Africans have been illegally evicted from their homes on white-owned farms since the end of apartheid.
Although South Africa's new constitution, adopted in 1996, states that "no one may be evicted from their home or have their home demolished without an order from the court", only 1 per cent of all evictions involved a legal process.
What is most worrying about the findings of the survey is that 200,000 more farm labourers and their families have been illegally evicted since the end of the apartheid era in 1994 than were evicted from land in the final 10 years the racist regime was in power.
Nkuzi's programme manager Marc Wegerif said that the people being targeted for eviction were society's most vulnerable: 77 per cent of those forced to vacate land were women and children related to deceased or retired farm labourers.
"The people most affected by the evictions are very poor and have little education. So, even though new laws were brought in to protect their rights, they rarely avail of them," Mr Wegerif said.
Nkuzi says that the reasons behind such large-scale evictions by white land-owners are both economic and security-based.
A rise in labour costs due to the introduction of a minimum wage and increased international competition has led to farmers reducing their workforces.
Other farmers have sought to change the nature of their businesses, for example, by turning their farms into game reserves, because of a fear that HIV/Aids will result in a scarcity of workers in the years ahead.
The survey, which took two years to complete, quantifies for the first time in South Africa the scale of illegal evictions of farm labourers and their families.
Of the almost one million who have been evicted, most ended up in poor townships or squatter camps. "The people are living in terrible conditions in squatter camps, where a lot of unrest occurs . . . The land issue is sensitive, and these people have no reason to have confidence in our democracy, as they get nothing out of it," Mr Wegerif concluded.