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Hello, and welcome to the History of Potatoes, Part two with ren A Rye. I'm your host Margaret Kiljoy, who always talks in this voice or it's just the voice I have because I have a cold. This is cool people who did cool stuff. I'm your host Margaret Kiljoy, but I'm not the host today because Ren's the host today. Hi, Ren, how are you doing good?
I really appreciated that, like intense serious Margaret voice. Yeah, it's definitely like a mix up from your usually you know, your usual friendly demeanor.
Yeah. Yeah, potatoes are serious business.
They are serious business.
Much like serious business. Is Rory our audio engineer who Hi Rory Hi Rory, an unwoman who wrote our theme music. And Sophie, who is our producer, who is not here today, so we can do whatever we want and that I mean we can try and do our job without Sophie around. But where we last left off? Wait, I got so distracted at the end of last episode. I'm talking about other stuff. Where did we last leave off? Where's our cliffhanger?
We actually left off talking about Ireland. So our cliffhanger was that there was this Scottish guy McCullough who claimed that the Irish had been prevented from rising up because they were, you know, so tied to their little plots of land and their potatoes. They didn't even know that their lives.
Were hard, right, and we're going to learn he's wrong. Yeah, yeah, hell yeah.
And I should say that there is a lot of information about potatoes in Ireland, in fact, an overwhelming amount of information.
What uh huh so much?
I uh yeah, it was both wonderful and sort of deeply I guess I'm just going to repeat the word overwhelming here, overwhelming to dig through. So I do want to say I don't actually know enough to make a sweeping generalization about whether or not these sort of self sufficient life ways of Irish presidents negatively impacted their ability to organize with one another. I like can't say overall.
I'm guessing that's wrong. I'm guessing that's some usual like Marx shit totally.
So I don't know enough to make a whole sleeping generalization about you know, self sufficiency and how it impacted organizing in rural Ireland. But there was a ton of resistance to British colonization. The Irish rose up again and again over eight hundred plus years, and in fact they sometimes even rose up in directly potato related ways.
Oh hell yeah.
So most notably among these were food riots. So food riots were common in Ireland, as they also were in other parts of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
They were typically in response to sudden price surges and other concerns about food and security, and they took different They took the form of blockades to prevent food from being exported, as well as your classic plundering and looting, and less common but still notable were price riots, which is when protesters would exppropriate a store of food and then sell it for what they saw as a fair price.
That is so interesting you mentioned that last time.
It is.
Yeah, that's such a like robinhood, but like it's like kind of almost like a liberally robinhood, but not like in a bad way, just to like, I don't know, it's interesting to me.
Yeah, it's funny, isn't it. I would like to learn more about, like some of the dynamics behind why people were choosing this Instead of choosing just to like give away the potatoes.
They probably saw it as like this is well, this is what the world should be is that things should be fairly priced as compared to like, whereas I'm like, well, everything should be free. That's the fair price for everything, you know. Yeah, but you know, I don't know they were willing to throw down for it, So I'm not going to nitpick, you know, totally.
Yeah, And it does seem like they were selling it at what was affordable for the peasantry. So it did. It did people's lives easier. And many of these riots targeted grain, oats, and meal, but they also very often targeted potatoes, which, as we discussed previously, were becoming an
increasingly important food stuff at this time. And historian James Kelly, who drew on newspaper reports and registers of correspondents to write a book about food rights in Ireland during this time, offer some examples of potato riots that took place between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It would be an entire project in and of itself to go into all of these riots. There were so many.
Okay, good because I might do an episode later sometime.
Yeah, So I'm going to keep it pretty basic and just mention a few. Okay, So while carts full of potatoes were intercepted, and mills and stores of potatoes were plundered. In coastal areas, writers often block shipments of potatoes from leaving the ports. So here's a snippet from a newspaper article about one such incident in the town of Clonakilty
in May seventeen eighty three. A few days ago. The inhabitants of Klonakilty have had intelligence that several sloops then in that harbor were freighted with potatoes at a time when a most dreadful jarth of that useful necessity prevailed, assembled in large bodies, and in the first transports of their resentment, tore away the rigging, demolished the mast yards,
et cetera, and cast their anchors overboard. They afterwards unloaded several vessels and obliged such masters as informed them of their destination for Quark Market, solemnly to swear that they would dispose of their cargo there and nowhere else.
Oh, so they would be like, oh, we're not going to mess up your ship because you're going to Ireland, like you're staying in Ireland.
In this case. Yes, that wasn't actually always the case.
Oh but that's interesting. That's kind of like you get this again, like these like rioters who are like, well, it's about an ethic and not just like I went wild, you know, yes.
Yeah, totally, And like there's this idea that food riots are spontaneous uprisings and they're often caused by crises, but also they're often the result of like a lot of careful thinking and planning about access to food. Yeah, and since city dwellers had to purchase most of the provisions, they couldn't grow them. Food riots in Dublin often took the form of riotous mobs that plundered and redistributed food.
There were also demonstrations, including one in seventeen ninety six in which protesters gathered at the Dublin Quays near the potato boats to voice their anger at the price of potatoes. They chanted bread or potatoes, we are starving.
That goes hard.
Yeah. In his book, Kelly talks about food scarcity leading to an intense localism and othering of people from elsewhere, even of other Irish people. So in Skibboreine, a town and County Cork, in eighteen twelve, potato cargo from a sloop bound for Dublin was expropriated and then sold locally
at a cheaper rate. Several decades later, residents of Sligo Town barred people from a neighboring county from buying potatoes at their market, and the eighteen forty two Claire massacre, rooted in a similar impulse, left five people, including three
protesters dead. Interestingly, while food protesters were certainly met with violence and arrest, as was the case in Claire, Kelly mentions that the authorities were inconsistent in their responses, that they were sort of softer on food riots and other forms of revolts and protest. Only a fraction of participants in food riots were prosecuted, and Kelly argues that this is because food was seen as a necessity, so participants had a moral right to riot in the eyes of the ruling class.
That that makes some sense.
Yeah.
I remember reading a while ago about I don't want to say what country it was, because I'm not sure if it was true or not. I never looked it up. I was reading about a country that it wasn't illegal to try to break out of prison. They would catch you, they would stop you, and they put you back in prison. And if you hurt people in the process, that was
a separate crime. But the actual physical act of trying to leave prison was seen as like a human like not right, but like natural instinct that is like, well, well, yeah, I locked you in a cage, you tried to get out. I could get mad at you about that, you know, and I feel like that.
Yeah.
The idea that like, well, whatever, you were starving, and I'm still going to stop you from stealing this.
Yeah, I'm still not going to go out and distribute food to you. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I see why you're mad, and I'm not going to change anything, is what they're saying. Yeah, just still somehow still more human than like the US system totally.
Yeah. Yeah, slightly more human for sure. And it wasn't every single case, but that was sort of like in general, And from about eighteen fifteen until eighteen forty five there was an uptick in social protest and rebellion in Ireland in general, and it included in some of those years a dramatic increase in food riots. They were particularly widespread in the counties of North Munster, including Claire and Limerick.
In an article that looks at these two counties, Andres Erickson reports on food related unrest and protests that occurred in the eighteen thirties and forties, many of which had to do with potatoes. So beginning in the eighteen twenties, the price of potatoes rose steeply, which Ericson argues related to greater consumption in Ireland rather than because they were being exported. I think there's a little bit like a lot of these things have like tensions between different historians
about what some of the causes were right. The population boom, coupled with the unjust distribution of land, probably caused a rising demand for potatoes that couldn't be met. In the late eighteen thirties and early eighteen forties, potato harvest made the situation even more acute. In those years, June and July were referred to as the hungry weeks because it was common for the World War to run out of potatoes by that time and depend on purchased spuds and
other purchased food. In an effort to make sure potato prices remained affordable for the poor, groups of men organized attacks on wealthy farmers and posted threatening notices demanding ceilings on potato prices. And so those actions would typically get carried out between March and early June, before or right as the hungry weeks began and the cost of potatoes started to rise. And this really points to the fact
what we were talking about before. These weren't taneous uprisings, but well planned operations that were based on knowledge of the potato harvest and the market. Yeah. And they were often, although not always, carried out by secret societies and militant rebels who were referred to as the White Boys, the Rock Heights, the Terry Alts, or the Men of Lady Claire.
And I know you talked about the White Boys, which have a very weird name and complicated history on your show before right the Molly Maguire episode.
Yeah, there's a bunch of different Ireland got stuff done through secret societies while England got stuff done through unions. Is like kind of a rough It's an unfair dichotomy to draw, but like Ireland was all about the like you get together in the pub with your friends, you decide to go cross dress and fuck some stuff up totally. Yeah, And I hadn't heard about it specifically as relates to
the food riots. I only read about it as relates to like killing landlords and stuff, but it makes sense that the same groups would also go and do food riots.
Make sure that potato prices weren't getting too high.
Yeah, it's like kind of like an Yeah, it's funny because it's like sort of an organized crime, you know. But it's also I don't know, Yeah, it's interesting, and it's not like I'm not even like saying like, and that's the correct organizing method, you know, but I don't have a this is a different one.
You know, totally. Yeah, Yeah, and it's really interesting and I'd like it. I read about it in this one article and that's enough. Like all of these things are just things I want to know so much more about.
But well, and even the like one of the things that I can't remember enough, and so I'm like afraid I'll be wrong. So if you're listening, don't take this as necessarily the truth. But you're saying about how the
like land distribution was getting worse. I'm under the impression that traditionally Irish land would be divided amongst all of the kids, and then the Protestant method was like, no, you have to only give it to one kid, So you start having these like disenfranchised people, and you have this like rise in landless people, and that's like where some of the uh where a lot of the diaspora comes from. But I don't know the timing of that.
And then part of me is like, wait, what if I haven't inverted right, because I know that there's the oh lord, I just don't have my notes in front of me. There's like the system by which traditionally Irish people would like elect their ruler after one ruler died, right, and you know, the way that things would get divvied up is just like different than the western capitalist system.
It's not totally.
Inherently better, but it was certainly worked better in Ireland. And when it got disrupted, then you started having all these landless people and stuff. That's my Yeah, don't take my details on that, but the overall thrust of it I feel confident about.
And I do know by the time that we're talking about I don't know the exact reasons, but there were a ton of landless labors in Ireland. So there definitely was like a vast landlessness that was happening, Like people that didn't even have like a tiny little plot of land to grow potatoes. Yeah, so I wanted to share one instance of this sort of secret society Potato organized
crime patrol. In eighteen thirty seven, twenty men in County Limerick broke into the homes of seven farmers, smashing their doors and windows, and ordered those farmers to sell potatoes at an affordable price and rent out their land to cottiers on the Konaker system. And so that's that system where laborers could rent a plot of land for the season to grow potatoes, and for some of them that
was the only way to survive. Two years later, in nearby County Claire, a farmer was dragged outside and forced to swear an oath that he would have the price of his potatoes, and he actually was forced to refund
money to the people he had already overcharged. And these roping bands also sent letters to the homes of targeted farmers and posted notices in public places, and one notice posted in the town of Fakeal and County Clare read, all persons are hereby required to take due notice that any person or persons having the assurance to charge over three pence for white potatoes three and a half pence per cups his coffe will be his doom if he
goes beyond the rule of the terry alts. As for strangers, they are welcome here so long as they won't go beyond the rules of the country. If they do, their cars will be cut. And then it signed corffin boys with the PS. Any person that takes this down will be sorry.
Hell yeah. It just don't make fucking threatening letters like they used to. Totally yeah. Also, I love the like shout out that being like, look, hey, this isn't a this isn't a nationalist thing. If you're not from here, it's fine. You just still can't sell potatoes for a lot.
Respect the rules of the country. Yeah, totally yeah. And this all becomes far more acute with the onset of the Great Hunger. So the Great Hunger, which is also referred to as the Irish Potato Famine, was caused by a potato blight that originated in North America and spread across Europe starting the summer of eighteen forty five, and thousands of people actually died in other countries, including the Netherlands, Prussia and Belgium, but no place was quite as effected
as Ireland. And this is partially because of how hea the Irish poor depended on the potato. Between forty and sixty percent of the population subsisted almost entirely on the potato by the eighteen forties, and the lumper, the primary variety of potato grown in Ireland around the time of the famine, was chosen to be grown so widely because it produced huge crops, but it wasn't very blight resistant. The famine was also really bad in Ireland because of
Britain's response to the situation. By eighteen forty six, the Irish were in a desperate situation, but the English ruling class stock cries for help is classic Irish exaggeration.
Yeah.
Charles Treveillyon, the Assistant Secretary to the Treasury who oversaw the British response to the famine, viewed it as a wage to reduce the surplus Irish population. The Irish who survived would, he hoped, join the ranks of the proletariat instead of eking out subsistence on the conager system and lazy beds. They would become wage laborers who primarily ate purchase grain and then, even like half hearted English attempts
to ameliorate the famine, didn't work. The English refused to send grain because it might mess with the free market. I tried to figure out exactly, like map out exactly what they're thinking was around this, and I couldn't. People have written about it, and I couldn't quite figure it out.
I know, I had always read that they were subsisting off potatoes because they were more or less economically forced to export all of their other crops, and so yeah, that was why when the crop that they actually ate for themselves at home, when that one failed, and England didn't let them like throw up some trade protectionism or whatever, you know, totally yeah, and didn't limit exports.
But it also seemed like the English could have sent additional food and decided not to, And that had to do with some like thinking around free market capitalism.
Yeah. And they sent like weird corn that you couldn't really eaten. Yeah.
Yeah, they sent the hard flint corn that the Irish didn't have the rightquipment to mill.
Yeah.
And another English suggestion was to strain rutting potatoes and bake them, so the rotten part was baked off, which sounds disgusting.
Yeah, these the potatoes. I grew some rotten I grew blite potatoes this year, as we're saying, and yeah, they're one of the nastiest things in this world I've ever seen, like little I don't even like a little whatever I might even describe as too gross.
Well, there were like gross little bugs on them, right, were the bugs good? Well?
And like I pulled, there was bugs in my stupid and the bugs were nasty. Anyway, it was all bad and I starved to death. That's what happened.
Wait, no, as you're eating your your takeout.
Yeah huh, yeah that someone delivered to me. Yeah no, yeah, totally.
And as you were talking about, Ireland was actually producing enough grain to feed the entire population, but most of it, alongside barley, oats and other crops, were exported to England while the Irish people start. So in eighteen forty six and eighteen forty seven you have this wave of riots that are related to securing food and famine relief, and there was also an increase in this tradition of plundering
of provisions of just taking food that was needed. Of course, these food riots weren't centered on the potato because the potatoes were rotting in the fields, right, so they were focused on meal and grain and later on influencing how soup kitchens were run. In April eighteen forty six, in the southern part of County Tipperary and adjacent areas of County Waterford and Cork Town, dwellers and the rural poor rated cart convoys, cargo boats, meal stores, mills and bakeries
for food. Food riots and next proporations spread across the country in eighteen forty six and forty seven, and there was a real emphasis on the western half of the island, which is where famine hit the hardest. County Cork alone saw one hundred and forty one food riots in eighteen forty seven, while Galway, Tipperary and Limerick all had over
one hundred. There were also marches, including one in County May in which ten thousand to forty thousand, which is a huge range of numbers, but that's what I got. Starving peasants walked to the town of Castle Bar to protest that there is not a stone of sound potatoes among the whole of us.
What they should have done is that they should have marched to these deals services that advertise and asked to purchase here's ads and we're back.
So from March to May eighteen forty seven, protesters fought against the closure of the public works and the indignity of soup kitchens.
What is that? What is the public works?
Like, that's a great question. The public works is like people getting hired to maintain roads and stuff.
Oh yeah, it made me think of.
Like works progress administration stuff during the Great Depression. Yeah yeah, just like you know, digging ditches and building roads, doing like work for the state that would get folks who are otherwise unemployed paid. Cool, but they did it. Seems like sometime in eighteen forty seven most of the public
works were closed. They were also protesting against the indignity of soup kitchens, but then sort of shifted to being like, let's make these soup kitchens better, demanding bigger and better rations as well as uncooked meals that they could prepare
in the privacy of their own homes. There was a very strong stigma against things like having to beg for food or show up and ask for aid, at least within the parts of Ireland that were really hard hit by the famine, and so people really wanted to be able to take food and cook it in their own homes.
That makes sense, Yeah, I mean, there shouldn't be that stigma, but it doesn't surprise me that there is.
Yeah, totally. And so by the end of eighteen forty seven, these protests had largely waned. Ericson attributes this to an increased in hunger, disease, and fatigue.
Yeah.
But also after the conic or system lapses, the public works close, there's no longer jobs, wages, or even potato growing land to fight for. So even the famine evictions of eighteen forty eight met with little resistance, which followed on the footsteps of other mass evictions that had happened over the previous decade. More than one hundred thousand families lost their homes because they couldn't pay rent, or because their landlords wanted to use the land for grazing and
other large scale agricultural activities. I know. Yeah, that's how at least some of my ancestors ended up turning into settlers in this country. So yeah.
Yeah.
While a lot of genuine solidarity poured in from around the world, the results of the famine were devastating. In the end, over one million Irish people died from hunger and disease, and one point twenty five million emigrated.
Which is like a together, that's like a quarter of their population.
Yes, yeah, it's a huge number. And many of these emigrees, of course came to the United States, where they became the settlers and colonizers, and according to Earle, the Italian economist Francesco Nitty believed that a shift from potatoes to meet likewise explained why the Irish workers, who in their homeland were idle, week and whimsical, were transformed into energetic and productive workers on emigration to the United States, which leads into my terrible, terrible joke, which is does eating
meat turn people into cops? Oh?
Sh I mean, it's one of the sadder things in history is watching the political shift from the Irish person in Ireland to the second generation Irish diaspora in the United States in the nineteenth century, because, I mean a ton of the Irish nationalists lived in the United States for a while, but like, yeah, overall, pretty quickly, one of the most politically annoying groups in history is the Irish American So.
Yeah, totally yeah, And I think, I don't know, it makes me sad. I feel like I have a personal relationship to it, and it makes me sad, and that's all I can really say about it at this moment. So yeah, So now we're going to leave Ireland and we're going to jump ahead in time. We're going to talk about the world wars and the years in between them. And there were times when potatoes played a role in
both perseverance and revolts. During World War One, Sweden, which was a neutral country, exported goods, including potatoes and other food stuff to Germany, and while this made wealthy traders and farmers even richer, it led first to food rationing for working people, and then to these rations being cut
and to widespread food shortages. At the end of April nineteen seventeen, riots and protests spread across Sweden, starting in the small towns, where women rallied to demand more rations as well as a fair price for potatoes and milk. In both rural and urban places, these protests often included the plundering of provisions. For example, women would force their way into a grocery store and if they found food hoarded, they would demand the grocer sell it at the posted prices.
Conscriptive soldiers joined the protests, which really alarmed the authorities, but their officers did disarm them before they hit the street, so they weren't quite as that's funny. Their potential for rebellion wasn't quite as strong as it could have been.
But it's like the officers didn't stop them from going. They was like, all right, you can go, but you gotta leave your rifle at home.
That seems to be, yeah, what the case was.
Which makes some sense honestly, like, yeah, there's many situations where having a gun around makes everything worse, and riots are among those situations.
Totally. Yeah, I feel like in a lot of cases that is absolutely true. And there were these workers committees that often included a Narcho, synaclists and socialists that formed in about forty Swedish cities and towns. In the city of Ostervik, the Workers Committee released a manifesto that called for, in addition to an eight Tom day, the release of all those arrested during hunger protests, and of course food,
the distribution of land to grow potatoes. And although it was eventually quell due to infighting, repression and a decline and leftist organizing, all the things that we see time and time again over two hundred and fifty thousand people participated in Sweden's Potato Revolution.
And I think one of the things that it's interesting about that is again, like I know we kind of mentioned it earlier, but you know this idea that the right wing worries about like lawless looting, right, and that happens sometimes and people, you know, and there's times when crowds like lose their mind and hurt people and all of this. But it's like you're bringing up time after time where they're like, look, we just want the food to be sold at not price gouged prices. You know.
It's not like, oh, we want everything for free, although I mean again I have no problem with everyone getting everything for free, but like, it's not about entitlement. It's just literally about hey, you can't just keep jacking up the prices while we're all starving.
Totally, it's about survival.
Yeah.
Yeah. That same year, in early July, there were also potato rides in Amsterdam, and I had trouble finding too much information about them in English, but this is what he did find. When hungry women and children tried to ride a potato ship, they were assured a new shipment of potatoes for sale was coming in soon, but the potatoes in that shipment were priced too high, and on
July second, crowd started plundering shops and warehouses. On July four, three hundred women armed with bayonets, revolvers, and stones tried to expropriate a stored potatoes that were being guarded by troops, and on July five, a clash with the army resulted in nine people kills and one hundred and fourteen injured.
I feel like since we currently live in a country where the price of basic goods not only went up a lot in the past few years, but ye, if Trump gets its way his way, then they are going to go up way more real soon, totally with tariffs, you know, I feel like this is relatable content.
Oh for sure.
Yeah, keep the food prices reasonable or otherwise people will find bayonets.
Yes, although it might be hard to like literally find a bayonet in this day and age, but you know equivalence.
Well, I mean, you know there's bayonets up through the world Wars and yeah, totally, my dad has a bayonet, you know, So if.
Anyone needs to expropriate potatoes, Margaret's dad has a bayonet. Yeah, yeah, totally. During World War Two, potatoes help people across Europe survive. They were the single most important food in aiding survival during the Siege of Leningrad, which lasted for almost two and a half years and killed over eight hundred thousand Soviet civilians.
Thank god.
Yeah, really really really sad in a move that I mean, so much of this is all just actually so sad. In a move that harkens back to James Scott, at least one poor family outside Rome replanted their entire garden with potatoes is a way to prevent the German military from taking their crops. Back to that underground food thing. And also Jewish children living in the Warsaw Ghetto would sneak past the guards on a daily basis, an incredibly brave and dangerous endeavor to find food outside of the
ghetto's walls. In addition to begging, this included digging up potatoes that grew on the outskirts of the city.
Wow.
So earlier we talked about state evating potatoes in early modern Europe, and interestingly, potatoes played a similar role in China many centuries later. Potatoes likely arrived in China in the seventeenth century and were first grown by peasants eking out a living on marginal mountainous land in the north of the country, like in so many other places, a way to survive, you know, kind of on the fringes.
And that Chang dynasty, which ruled China at the time, was interested in preventing famine, but thought the path to doing so is through growing rice and other grains, not potatoes. Three centuries later, under Mao, potatoes became a method of survival and communities where they were grown. During the Great Leap Forward of nineteen fifty eight to nineteen sixty two, the state appropriated grains, but they didn't appropriate potatoes well. The famine that resulted is considered by submetrics to be
the largest famine of all time. Entire villages survived on potatoes, and there was also another state evating element at play in MAOIs China, in which there was a certain quota of wheat that farmers were required to grow, and instead of switching to wheat, farmers would convert the number of potatoes they grew into what they believed would be an equivalent amount of wheat and report that to the authorities.
Instead Okay, So there's this interesting history of potato growing areas continuing to grow potatoes and just saying they were growing wheat.
Yeah. Yeah, no, they're like, no, we were quite happy with this thing that it's harder for you to tax and this, yeah, takes less work and feeds us better.
Yeah, totally. So I want to end by talking about the South Africa potato boycott of nineteen fifty nine.
Well, before we talk about that, boy, what you shouldn't boycott is these goods and services unless they're for bad things, in which case you should boycott them. We have no legions to advertisers. Ye. Yeah, we just have to do it in order to eat potatoes. You're the ads and we're back. Yeah.
So, as I mentioned, I want to end by talking about the South Africa potato boycott, which happened in nineteen fifty nine. And I do want to say that in an episode about sad, hard things, this felt like one of the absolute hardest to research, and I want to give listeners a heads up about the intensity of violence involved. But it also feels like a really important sort of historical episode to talk about it. We're talking about potatoes
from a people's history perspective. So before I go into the boycott itself, it feels important to discuss the historical circumstances that gave brise to this. And to do this it depended pretty heavily on a book called These Potatoes Look Like Humans. The Contested Future of Land, Home and Death in South Africa by Umbuso Wacosi, which I definitely recommend folks check out to learn more about the political and spiritual components of black farm workers struggles from early
colonial South Africa to the present day. And I've also used several other sources, but I want to be sure to mention this book by name. Okay, So, the Potato boycott was a response to the South African apartheid state, in which segregation as well as political and economic discrimination were codified into law to uphold the power of the country's minority white population. While only given the name apartheid after is that if super racist laws were passed in
nineteen forty eight. Segregation and white supremacy had long been part and parcel of life and the legal system in South Africa since it's settlement by Dutch and English colonists starting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the history of South Africa apartheid and the whole scope of this decade's long anti apartheid movement are more than I can talk about in this episode, but I'll sort of be
touching on these topics here and there while discussing the boycott. So, the boycott centered on a town called Bethel, which is in a region that was then called the East trans Fall and that's now part of Malonga, where large white owned potato farms employed a black workforce comprised of locals who had been dispossessed by colonialism and white land ownership, contract workers from elsewhere in South Africa and neighboring countries,
and prisoners. Throughout the forties and fifties, these farms gained a reputation for brutality, which included owners for men and boss boys, which were kind of like local workers who were employed in intermediary physician murdering and beating to death workers and burying their bodies in the fields.
Jesus. Yeah.
While abuse and brutality weren't unique to Bethel, the town's potato farms were considered so violent that recruiters looking for workers along the border with Rhodesia, a former colonial state that bordered South Africa, regularly changed their vehicle registration plates so that workers didn't know that they'd be going to the East.
Trons Fall Jesus.
In the early fifties, three laborers found out that they were being taken to Bethel instead of the place they thought they were going, and they jumped off the train they were on, and at least one of them died in the act. Throughout the forties and fifties, exposes were
published that revealed conditions on Bethel potato farms. In nineteen forty seven, Anglican priest and anti apartheid activist Michael Scott and journalists Ruth First, working as a photographer, collaborated on an expose about the Bethel farms with help from investigative journalist Henry Nukmalo. They were horrified to find child laborers working in the fields alongside contract workers from Nyassaland, which
is now Malawi. These workers had signed contracts that promised poor pay and few protections, either because they were illiterate and were told deceitful information about what the contracts contained, or because they were so desperate for work that they knew they were terrible deals, but they signed them anyway.
Happens all over the world now, Yeah.
And other workers included prisoners who were sent to the farms for the duration of their sentences. On some farms, these prisoners had their clothes confiscated and were forced to wear potato sacks, a measure that the landowners believed would prevent them from running away.
Fuck.
In nineteen fifty two, Nukmalo built on first in Scott's work by publishing another expose and Drum magazine. Unlike Scott and First, who were white, Nucmalo was a Black African, which allowed him to go undercover for the assignment. Additionally, laborers spoke to Nucmala more freely than they had to Scott and articulated their fears of speaking up against the
farmers into the police. And This expose includes quotes from Bethel based organizer and African National Congress member Gert Sabandi, who may have also helped First in Scott and their reporting and is often considered to have played an organizing role in the boycott, although the scope of his contributions
stopped fully known. Nonetheless, to Bendi's work exposing the case, conditions of farms and Bethel and organizing labors there played an important role in laying the groundwork for the boycott. So while prison labor had long been used on South African farms, including in Bethel, in nineteen fifty three the
petty offender scheme landed on the books. As part of this scheme, black South Africans who are found guilty of petty apartheid crimes either had to serve a three month jail sentence or spend that time working on a farm for a pittance, a scheme device to ameliorate both overcrowding in jails and labor shortages on farms.
When you say like apartheid crimes, is this like I don't understand enough about a parteid South Africa's It's like, oh, you were in the wrong part of town where black people aren't allowed or something.
Essentially, yes, yeah, okay. Petty apartheid crimes were any of any crime that transgressed the laws that kept South Africans
of different racial groups apart. But one of those is breaking the past laws which required non white South Africans to carry documents that authorize them to travel through a work in white classified areas, and these his laws actually had a particular impact on black South Africans, and when the nineteen fifty two Natives Act instituted reference books in the place of passes, every black man sixteen years of age or older was required to have his on him at all times.
Jesus uh huh, So you.
Could, yeah, you could end up sent to one of these farms because you didn't have the proper documentation on you. And although theoretically offenders were given the choice to work on farms versus serving their sentences in jails, in reality they were often coerced. He j the Bear, the public prosecutor who put this scheme into motion, was known to have, at least in certain instances, sent to restues straight to
the farm without them appearing in court first. And he also told arrestees that if they didn't accept work on farms, they'd be punished by their ancestors, which is a threat that Ukosi describes as eschatological terror.
WHOA, that's yeah, I mean, it's funny because it's like this is the way that people are going to talk about the United States. It's hopefully soon. You know, the prison labor systems that exist within the United States of like you're more or less coerced into these jobs that pay basically nothing and all of these things.
Yeah, and there was a whole there's a whole sort of thread to this story that in this book These Potatoes Look like Humans really goes into thinking about like the spiritual violence. And I don't get too much into that in this section, but if you are interested in that, there's like a lot more within the book talking about like sort of the yeah, eschatological terror that was wielded against people. So the potato boycott itself was catalyzed by
a few different factors. So by nineteen fifty nine, almost all other forms of political action had been outlawed by the government, so boycotts were among the only options that anti apartheid activists had, huh.
And so that probably ties into the broader like because one of the main things that thought apartheid global he was you know, sanctions or boycott's yes, boycott, devestment, sanction. That's interesting.
Yeah, and it really was spurred by this this moment where like everything else had basically been outlining criminalized. Yeah, and yeah, the exposs that had covered Bethel had put a spotlight on the plight of farm laborers there when Cosey argues that the death of Cornelius Mogoko, a twenty four year old farm laborer who died on the Lake Dar farm on March five, nineteen fifty nine, also played
a particularly decisive role. He was seen as a slow worker, which was unacceptable on the potato farms, and because of this, Mokogo was beaten dehydrated and he was made to keep working in the full sun until he collapsed and died. The boycott was initially called for by activists Robert Reisha at the African National Congress's annual Anti pass conference, which took place at the end of May nineteen fifty nine.
And the ANC is actually now the governing party of Africa, Yeah, but at the time it was an opposition party that was extremely instrumental in the fight against apartheid. So the call goes out at the end of May and the boycott begins on June twenty six, and according to historian
Cornelis Muller, it took some time to gain steam. Things picked up after several protest marches in which activists made their way to Johannesburg markets dressed in potato sacks and potato necklaces bearing banners with slogans like potatoes are produced as slave labor and donate potatoes don't buy chips, meaning of course chips in the British English.
Sense of funch fries.
I guess they're both actually made of potatoes. But yeah, it doesn't actually matter, but it totally yeah. And it was also effective because there was this belief that potatoes were taking on the shape of the humans that had been buried in the fields.
Oh shit, so this is where the book gets its name.
Yes, yeah, And for some this was a metaphor, while for others it was, according to Whenkosi, seen as the spiritual return of a dead worker, embodying that which was buried in the land. And according to trade unionist and ANTSI organizer Francis Bard, we used to contemn a potato when we see one that had a hole or of black mark. We used to tell the people in the public meetings, you see this mark here, it's where your child's blood went in. You see this mark here, it's
the blood of our children. That's why the potato is So the people started hating potatoes like anything, and even the whites when they heard that we are boycotting the potatoes and that we say that these potatoes are full of the blood of the African people, then they also began boycotting them. That boycott was very affective, you know, the farmers couldn't sell their potatoes anywhere, and that the market the workers wouldn't even carry the potatoes.
Were the white people boycotting because they were like, oh, this is a simple thing we can do against apartheid, or are they like I just don't want to eat African blood in my food.
I think it was the latter, is how I'm reading this.
There, No, that makes sense.
Yeah, there certainly were white anti apartheid activists, but I don't think they were the majority by an So yeah totally. And bard Ward about the economic success of the boycotts and the fact that it was called off in August nineteen fifty nine because the farmers gave up this business of making the boys work on the farms, The economic impacts of the boycott are debated. It seems like different
newspapers with different political viewpoints are reporting different things. Though I strongly sort of air on believing the anti apartheid and farm labor.
Activists who said it worked, who.
Said that it worked. Yeah, you just see this kind of like sort of semantic war in the press about
you know, how effective the boycott is. And even before the boycott began, farmers had started sending farm workers back to the labor bureaus driven by the negative media attention, and the South African government decided to end the petty offender scheme on June sixteenth, nineteen fifty nine, shortly before the boycott began, in the wake of mounting pressure and ongoing media attention, and a memo was issued that August requiring farmers to real workers covered by the scheme.
Cool.
Yeah, And one thing I found interesting was that the boycott also had an impact on the stabilization scheme of the South Africa Potato Board. In this scheme, the board would get rid of third rate potatoes by selling them for cheaper and black communities. And because of the boycott, these potatoes were piling up in markets, and one article published in the wake of the boycott mentioned that the Potato Board had started encouraging farmers to buy these potatoes
as feed. The research I found felt a little bit unclear, but it was suggested that the Potato Board also stopped selling these scratching potatoes on the market for human consumption in general, So that might have been another impact of the boycott, But for sure, the biggest impact of the boycott was the role that it played in catalyzing international support for the anti apartheid movement. So a British boycott of South African goods kicked off in the same day
June twenty sixth, nineteen fifty nine. It became a large scale mobilizing force for the next eight months, and it laid the groundwork for future British anti apartheid actions, and you see international solidarity, boycotts and sanctions that would grow over the coming years to become a major part of
the anti apartheid movement. Apartheid only ended in a formal political sense in the nineteen nineties, although of course the political, social, and other effects of racism and white supremacy linger on in South Africa. As of twenty nineteen, whites, who make up less than ten percent of the country's population, still own seventy two percent of individually owned land in South Africa.
Yeah, I was expecting you to say, like fifty percent.
I don't know you know, yeah, and the struggle, you know, the struggle for liberation continues as well, and there's been I think a lot of tensions recently actually between like white landowners and like wealthy farmers and labors in the area. But yeah, so that's the South Africa potato boycott, and
that's sort of where we're ending for today. So we've talked about potatoes over a span of thousands of years and in more than a dozen cultures and resisted spoovements, and I'm wondering at the end of all this, what you think about the potato.
I still like the potato, although right now I'm like so sick that I'm like, food is I know, I just ate some, but that's because I need to in order to survive.
Totally.
Like right now I'm like, oh, I ate food, and I feel terrible, even though it's not the potato's fault. It's the cold virus's fault. But it's so fascinating, like I was saying at the end of the first episode, like the fact that it's like all of these different things, you know, the potato is being used for all of these different things. And then even like this last one with the you know, the potato boycott. It's like, well, that's not the potato's fault. And everyone knows that it's
not the potato's fault. Do you It's okay if you don't, But like, do you know how that affected like potato consumption and potato culture in South Africa after the boycott?
I don't. Okay, yeah, unfortunately not.
But it's just no, it's just interesting to me how all over the world this uh is very effective food.
You know. Yeah.
Yeah, It's just I don't know. That's all I got. That's all I got. I guess a lot of stuff I'm gonna be thinking about for a while. As potatoes. Maybe I'm gonna bring it back as a sponsor of the show. You know. I think part of the reason I kind of dropped that bit talking about this show is brought to you by Potatoes is because I was like,
is it just a tool of colonization? And now I know the answers is no, you know, yeah, and it's it's a complicated thing and we should embrace all of our weird complications, like just like being you know, white person in North America is complicated and we need to for sure accept that complication rather than like, you know, wallowing and guilty not doing anything. You know, we just need to like accept that it is complicated and continue on with it. And that's how I feel about potatoes.
It's the same as white people. No, this metaphor didn't really work, but I'm going to blame that on how sick I am.
Totally. I also asked your ridiculous question, which was to have the singular opinion about a really complicated thing.
So oh no, no, it's all right. Normally that's like my job, right, Yeah.
You know, what do you think about the potato?
Yeah, potato, Yeah, it's all right, that's how I feel.
Yeah, it's all kind of I want. Yeah, I want to live in a world where potatoes are in the service of everyday people in resisting states, and you know, may that be so as we move forward.
Totally, I love that they're are the anarchy vegetable that rules.
Yeah, potatoes canonically anarchist.
Yeah. Well, if people want to know more about your work or want to follow you on the internet or read your book, or what do you got for them?
Yeah? Right now, I'm mostly only on the internet on Instagram, just under my name at ren A Rye and I edited an anthology called Nourishing Resistance. I also work on a project called Living and Fighting out of Tucson.
Yeah awesome. And if you want to follow me, I'm trying to not be on Twitter anymore, and so you can yell at me if you see me there. Maybe I don't know. Probably I am on Blue Sky. I got on it early enough that my name is just Margaret on Blue Sky. I'm very proud of that. I don't know why I am because I'm sick and my brain doesn't work, that's why. But you can follow me there. You can follow me on Instagram at Margaret Kiljoy. You
can follow me on substack at Marter Kiljoy. And you can organize with your friends to build networks of mutual aid and solidarity, because that's all what good things are built on. Yeah, and you can take care of each other during bad times totally.
And I'll also say throughout this whole working on this episode, I've been thinking a lot about the people of Gaza who are facing huge like starvation in a huge way and lack of food access in a huge way. And I've given some money to this project called the Santabel Team, which does like food distribution in Gaza, so I kind of wanted to shout them out too, or like supporting in any way the folks over there, you know, as we're talking about famine, and that's not the only place,
right there are famines happening all over the world. Ye, but yeah, I have been thinking a lot about that while I've been writing and working through this, and I just wanted to mention.
It isn't there Some fiction book I just read has people of different religious faiths making the statement to save one person is to save all of humanity, and I don't know which religion said it first. That concept, I think is a good example of that. It's like, oh, you can't save everyone, so you shouldn't save anyone. That is the least sensical thing anyone has ever said. Totally, there's a lot of us. If everyone saves someone, then we've saved twice as many people as there are, you know, Yeah,
just find a way to help and start helping. What is the name of the place that you just said that?
What the Suna Belt Team. It's s A N A B E L. And you can find them on Instagram and I think they also have a website awesome.
So yeah, all right, and yeah and if you want, there's going to be show notes in with sources in the show notes. That's this is why Ren had to be the host today, is that my brain is totally Yeah.
But you're a great guest.
Thank you. I thanks. I watch a lot of guests on this show. So yeah, and we'll be back when my brain works soon. Take care of each other. Bye.
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