Help My Father Buy the Land He's Farmed for 18 yrs

Born in 1964 to farm worker parents, my father never had the chance at a formal education. He built a life, and eventually a herd of nearly 600 animals, from nothing. Now, after transforming a rundown Eastern Cape farm into a thriving operation, he risks losing it all. Help us buy Mooivlei outright.

This is my father, Simosakhe Hleko.

He was born in 1964 to farm worker parents, into poverty so deep that, like many black South Africans in rural areas at the time, he never got the chance at a formal education. He started working on farms at fourteen. By twenty, he'd saved enough from his wages to buy his very first cow. It was 1984. He could never have known that this single cow could be the foundation of a lifetime's work.

In 2003, he made his first attempt to acquire land through the Department of Land Reform and Rural Development, but buying it outright was never within his reach. His application to acquire the land was unsuccessful.

He kept working and kept building his herd, moving his animals from plac...