Wheat crisis: Can weather become the Hand of God?

THE YEAR 1964 is the most significant in my life. I can remember many of the events as though they had happened yesterday.

I was seven. The crisis of food supplies, especially wheat, as a result of the war in Russia invokes my memories of surpluses in wheat supply in that year. As the saying goes: one man’s bread is another man’s poison.

The year had exciting moments, such as when my father bought a car – a Rambler Super. It cost him £400.

Related to the car was a visit to Baragwanath Hospital in Gauteng, where we went from Lesotho to visit my ailing mother. The main reason my father bought a car was to get my mother to medical care and visit her.

What fascinated me was the amount of Lifebuoy soap strewn outside the cancer ward. Knowing only of blue soap that had no lather, Lifebuoy with its good scent was the ultimate. I started collecting the soap, only to be terribly disappointed when my aunt, Mamamello Mamoletsane, who taught at Merryvale in Nigel and our host, stopped me with a tongue-lashing. They said the soap was contaminated and was not to be reused.

Within months of our return from our visit, my mother passed on in October. During the funeral, my uncles showered me with coins and, in no time, I had a steady supply of fat cakes.

Back to the wheat harvest of 1964, at times, circumstances connive in one’s favour and a mistake or a tragedy is turned into a fortune.

Diego Maradona won the football game between Argentina and England on June 22, 1986 at the Aztec Stadium in Mexico City with what was to be known as the Hand of God.

In June of 1964, the Hand of God caused it to snow heavily. There had not been that amount of snow before or to date. For the first time, I had the opportunity to touch snow. The period remains in the Guinness records as one that witnessed the heaviest snow.

In Lesotho, it is referred to as Lehloa la Bonya O Eme, which in English is loosely translates to defecating wile standing. There was no possibility of squatting in that weather.

The amount of wheat harvested in Lesotho in December of 1964 filled houses to the roof. The harvest lasted four years and bridged the drought year of 1966 when then-prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd was assassinated.

In South Africa, the tonnage tells the same tale that 1964 spiked by 20 percent compared to the previous year and relative to the following year. Everywhere, it was the ever-normal granary. The reason for this was the amount of moisture that was spawned by the record snowfall in the lowlands of Lesotho and the Free State, which led to the bounty.

For the first time, the thrashing of the wheat was centralised and the chaff reached sky high. We would jump and roll on the chaff. It was bounty for cattle in the following winter and fuel for baking bread by mothers.

But misfortune struck. A cousin of mine, who was using the chaff near the mountain of chaff to roast his stolen mealies, burnt down the mountain in August of 1965. He then fled Lesotho.

Perhaps the crisis of the Russia-ukraine War, tragic as it is, looks to be burning down the energy supply, animal fodder and gaming for children in its disruption in the supply of wheat.

The recent heavy rains South Africa and Lesotho have had, including snow this year, should invoke the memory of the wheat harvest of 1964 and spur us to make every inch of South Africa and Lesotho the wheat land, thus constituting our Hand of God in this crisis of bread and food prices.