A post-mortem on the four Mmupele children, whose bodies were found under a scorching North West sun, has revealed that they died of hunger and dehydration, but the real killer was grinding poverty.
Making matters worse is that many of the former farm dwellers have no official documentation.
They have no birth certificates or identity documents and cannot access social grants meant to benefit people in their situation.
Poverty is rife in the community of Verdwaal, Itsoseng, just outside Lichtenburg.
Here many people survive on a daily bowl of porridge.
The three boys – Onkarabile, 2, Nkune, 6, and Sebengu, 9, Mmupele – and little girl Mapule, 7, set out after Kedibone, their sister and mother. Kedibone had left home early one Monday morning to go to a farm where her mother was visiting in the hope of getting food.
The youngsters did not arrive, dying on the way.
The post-mortem also found that the four children had not had a full meal in weeks.
But they are not the only children in Verdwaal trapped in a cycle of poverty and hunger.
“Poverty is rife in this community,” Itsoseng social worker Nomvezo Ngesi said.
“The former farm dwellers have no… birth certificates or identity documents and cannot access social grants.”
The people came from an existence where food was always guaranteed.
“They therefore struggled cope in a situation where they have to fend for themselves.”
Ngesi said the area was steeped in poverty, children learnt to survive on as little food as possible and the women tended to have children all the time.
“No amount of talking to them persuades them (from) having babies,” she said. “They seem not to grasp or accept the concept of contraception.”
Cape Town human resources researcher Annabelle Prince described the tendency by such communities to wait until food arrived and their inability to go out and look for economic activity as the “learned helplessness psyche”.
“Farm life requires no education, so farms schools normally teach them only to read, write their names and count.”
The adjustment was not made when they left the farm, so children were not encouraged to get an education, Prince said.
“It becomes a vicious cycle into which they are all drawn, passing poverty down the generation lines,” Prince said.
Research by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre describes poverty as the single most important issue facing South Africa more than 15 years into democracy.
“There is a consensus among most economic and political analysts that approximately 40 percent of South Africans are living in poverty – with the poorest 15 percent in a desperate struggle to survive,” the centre said in its 2010 research document.
“Job creation should be put at the centre of global efforts to halve extreme poverty by 2015.”
Failure to provide people with jobs would only trap communities in a cycle of chronic poverty that they would experience over many years, “often over entire lifetimes, and (passing) the poverty on to their children”, the Chronic Poverty Research Centre’s document said. Calling communities like Verdwaal “forgotten citizens”, a KwaZulu-Natal NGO, Rights for Rural Development, said they represented one of the most vulnerable and marginalised groups in South Africa.
“They are abused by the system of farm life, which does not encourage them to get educated,” a spokesman for the NGO, Mangaliso Sibeko, said.
“It also exploits them by allowing them to get skilled in ways that only benefit the farms.”
There were hundreds of thousands of former farm dwellers, across many generations, living in poverty across the country, a cycle whose roots were on the farm.
“On the farm they are deprived of everything (beyond) merely existing,” Sibeko said.
“They rarely, if ever, own livestock or even property, leave with nothing when they have to, and (move) right into the next phase of a harsh existence.”
Prince said: “A massive, well-planned and well-funded set of interventions would need to be formulated to teach such people how to enhance their lives and how to get the best of out them.”
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