Children of a bitter harvest: child labour in the Cape winelands

Abstract

Children of a Bitter Harvest: Child Labour in the Cape Winelands is made up of over 100 interconnected short stories that document moments in the lives of children who worked in the heart of South Africa's wine industry between 1998 and 2010, and are framed further by the farm uprisings of 2012. The stories are framed by the more recent 'farm strikes' in the Western Cape. The children in the book not all of whom managed to survive AIDS are now young adults in a new South Africa that ostensibly offers them certain freedoms to overcome the shackles of race and class domination. However, without the kind of radical economic restructuring that would make this possible, all of the children remain extremely poor adults. As documented by the author, child labour of the 1990s inevitably gave way to adult labour, with the breath between childhood and adulthood as tender as it is tenuous. We are a nation that has managed to end the brutality of apartheid, but not one that has managed to replace brutality itself.