Gauteng Smallholder December/ January 2018 | Page 51

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Outwitting a wily worker
L
iving on a smallholding and employing rural workers often
requires some unusual labour relations skills, combined
on occasion with a little voodoo magic and some sleight
of hand.
Once upon a time there was a lady smallholder and her family
who kept a few chickens. Like so often happens, the little flock
came to be treated as pets rather than livestock, and they in
turn provided the family with a few eggs daily, rather than
gracing the table as roast dinner.
It must be said that this took place at a time before the
imposition of national minimum wages on farmworkers and
other labour legislation aimed at bettering the financial lot of
the rural work force. In fact it took place at a time when farm
workers were paid pitifully and thus took every opportunity
they could to keep themselves fed at their employers' expense.
Thus it was that, one day at breakfast time, the smallholder's
garden worker appeared at the kitchen door carrying a patently
dead member of the flock.
“I found the chicken dead in the hen-house,” he announced
with a look of perfect innocence upon his face, presenting the
lifeless corpse to the smallholder.
“That's puzzling,” she exclaimed, “the chickens were all fine
last evening when locked away.”
And, taking the chicken from the worker she said, “Well, we'd
better send this away to the vet so that he can examine it and
tell us what killed it, so that we may prevent the spread of any
disease to the others.”
The garden worker, realising that he'd been blindsided by his
employer, walked off muttering while the assembled family
collapsed into fits of giggles.
“Can't you see, Ma,” said the eldest, “that he wrung the
chicken's neck because he wants to eat it, and he thought you'd
give him the corpse!”
“No, no,” said the mother, “ he would never do that. It must
have contracted some fatal disease,” she insisted.
So, later that morning she carefully wrapped the chicken in
newspaper and set off to the local vet to have a post-mortem
examination performed.
“Leave it with us,” said the vet, trying hard to stifle his laughter
when the smallholder told her tale.
After a couple of days the smallholder phoned the vet to ask
about the results of the post-mortem, to be told, “we could find
no trace of parasites or disease, but we were able to conclude
that the cause of death of your chicken was in fact that its neck
had been wrung.”
When the smallholder reported this sad verdict to the family
she was met with cries of “I told you so!”
And so the scoreboard read Smallholder 1, Worker 0.
But the saga had an unexpected benefit to this episode in that
the periodic neck-wringing of the family's chickens ceased
forthwith as the worker came to realise that his daft employer
would take the chicken from him and despatch it to the vet for
an examination, rather than
hand it back to be disposed of
in whatever manner he chose.
This experience happened to a
friend of ours.
But on our own plot we have
sometimes had to resort to
unusual measures when
tackling staff relations.
In one instance we had to
employ the services of a
sangoma to quell the deranged
ravings of the wife of one of our
workers whose diet comprised
nothing more than CocaCola
and white bread, a diet that is
nutritionally unsound.
On the appointed day the sangoma, whose day job was as a
council meter reader, arrived in his smart khaki uniform. After
the requisite payment had been made he quickly diagnosed
the ailment and recommended a cure, which was that she be
immersed into a bath of cold water to which he would add
some black powder which, to the untrained western eye
looked very much like coal dust.
Needless to say she did not take kindly to being immersed in a
cold bath and her struggles to keep herself out of the water
were not unlike the struggles of a cat at bathtime.
Eventually, her husband and the sangoma had her satisfactorily
“dunked,” whereupon she grabbed the sangoma firmly by the
lapels and hauled him in to the water, too.
And so we were able to observe that a bath of cold water
infused with coal dust does nothing to cure lunacy caused by a
poor diet, but it certainly does everything to ruin a smart khaki
uniform.
WRITTEN BY SMALLHOLDERS, FOR SMALLHOLDERS