Musician, performer, and television and radio presenter Frazer Barry used five words from the Khoekhoe language Khoekhoegowab to explore interconnectedness, roots, changing seasons and what it means to live with an open hand during his address at the Partners in Agri Land Solutions (PALS) annual general meeting in Ceres.
By Talitha Janse van Vuuren, multimedia editor at African Farming
Frazer Barry began counting… And one, two, three, four and five became a discussion about people, ancestry, seasons, giving and our relationship with the land.
He began by looking beyond the farms and orchards of the Ceres valley to the people who lived on this land a long time ago. The rock art found across the region remains one record of that history.
Barry then turned to Khoekhoegowab, and in particular, its counting system. In his telling, counting from one to five does considerably more than establish quantity. He used each word to explore a different aspect of the Khoekhoe world view, and then asked what those ideas might mean for people living on and caring for the same land today.
One: Nothing exists entirely on its own
One is /Gui.
Barry explained /Gui as carrying the idea that “all is one”. “Because all is one, it implies being part of everything – meaning that every single event impacts something else, whether positively or negatively.”
For anyone working in agriculture, interconnectedness is hardly an abstract concept. What happens to soil affects what grows from it. Water management reaches beyond a farm boundary. Decisions about labour affect households. What happens to a farming business affects its employees, suppliers and surrounding community.
Also read: ‘We want to do the right thing better’: The roots of Partners in Agri Land Solutions
Two: We exist in relation to others
Two is //Gam.
Barry described it as recognition that one’s existence depends on something else: “I see you, therefore you exist” and “You see me, therefore I exist.”
The concept, he said, is about being aware of one’s environment, other people and “how everything is interconnected”.
Three: Know your roots
Three is !Nona, which Barry described as the word for the taproot.
For a farming audience, the image needed little explanation. A strong taproot anchors a plant and allows it to withstand difficult conditions.
He applied the same image to people. “Without our roots, we are nothing; furthermore, we are unstable without a firm, deep taproot to help us withstand the strong winds and storms of adversity.”
His own roots illustrate why he regards the subject as complicated. His ancestry includes Khoekhoe, Scottish, Dutch, Sri Lankan, Jewish and Indo-Javanese lines. His family history includes slavery, apartheid and the loss of agricultural land, but also marriages across racial lines, music, faith and hospitality.
Honouring those roots, in Barry’s argument, does not require pretending every part of the history was good.
Later in his address he asked a harder question: “How do we listen to the stories of one another’s roots without feeling that one person is attacking another, or that one person’s roots are more or less important than another’s?”
Also read: The land question is not black and white
Four: Seasons change
Four is Haga – the four seasons.
Barry described winter, spring, summer and autumn not simply as weather patterns, but as a cycle of constant change.
For farmers, living according to the seasons is ordinary life. There are periods of establishment and harvest, but also years in which conditions change quickly and plans have to change with them.
Barry used the cycle to describe the necessity of adapting. Winter is followed by spring, maturity comes in summer, and autumn brings preparation for the winter that will eventually return. In other words, change is not an interruption of the cycle but part of it.
Five: Keep an open hand
Gore, meaning five, Barry explained, is also the word used for the quiver tree. He described its branches reaching upwards and its leaves resembling an open palm.
The image carried another principle: Live with an open hand, “ready to receive but also ready to give”.
That may be the most immediately practical of Barry’s five ideas for agriculture.
Farmers inherit constantly. Sometimes it is land. Sometimes it is genetics, knowledge, infrastructure, relationships or lessons learnt at considerable expense by the generation before them.
Agriculture also depends on people being willing to pass those things on.
A farmer mentors another farmer. An experienced worker teaches a younger employee. One generation hands responsibility to the next. Knowledge accumulated through decades of seasons remains useful because somebody was prepared to share it.
Barry eventually brought his counting lesson back to custodianship. Prosperity cannot be separated into completely independent pieces, he said. He connected economic growth and job creation with food security, social harmony and custodianship – different parts that have to coexist.
His five Khoekhoegowab words are not an agricultural blueprint, and he did not present them as one. They do, however, provide an unusual lens through which to consider a familiar agricultural question: What does it mean to care well for something that will eventually belong to those who come after you?
Barry’s answer began with roots and ended with an open hand.
Also read: Land reform must be measured by its productive impact
