10). The historical truth of this declaration is borne out by the mass migration of black and white South Africans from rural to urban areas in the 1930s and 1940s. Black farmers, bound by such legislation as the Natives Land Act (1913)—which prohibited them from purchasing or leasing land from non-Africans outside of the colonial reserves set aside for blacks—were most affected by drought and soil erosion. Unlike white farmers, black farmers had no access to the advanced technology and irrigation techniques that would revitalize their land and make it productive again:
By the 1920s, some of [the reserve land] was already carrying such a heavy concentration of people and livestock that the original vegetation was disappearing, streams and waterholes were drying up, and soil erosion was spreading. In the years that followed, the African reserves continued to deteriorate. (Thompson, p. 164)
In the novel, the Zulu farmers in Ndotsheni village struggle to eke out an existence in the midst of a crippling drought and too many cattle. However, the plantation of white farmer James Jarvis, which is located above Ndotsheni, flourishes because of his knowledge of irrigation and production techniques, a knowledge that he later shares with the black farmers.
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