South Africans protest abuse of farm worker

[struggle4progress]

Source: AFP

JOHANNESBURG (AFP) — Nearly 3,000 people rallied Saturday in the northern South African town of Mafikeng to demand that the country's overwhelmingly black farm labourers are not ill-treated, the organisers said.

The rally follows a threat by the country's land minister to expropriate land from farmers who mistreat their workers.

The demonstrators came from the rural areas of the mainly agricultural North West province, said Solly Phetoe, in charge of the provincial chapter of COSATU, South Africa's leading trade union federation.

Hostility is rife in South Africa's farming sector, where farmland still lies mainly in white hands despite reforms undertaken after the demise of apartheid in 1994 ...

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