Ngubeza Mahlangu's statement, which he made in an interview with Tshepo Moloi that took place in eMzinoni, Bethal (Mpumalanga), on 4 August 2008, speaks to a particular time in South African history.

When a human head was found amid a potato crop in 1959, it sparked a rallying call for political action: to boycott the buying and consumption of potatoes. At the time, many claimed to see potatoes that looked like ‘human beings’ sold in markets across South Africa. The sacks of potatoes were traced back to farms around Bethal. On 31 May of that year, the last day of the two-day national conference of the African National Congress (ANC), the activist Robert Resha ‘called for a boycott of potatoes to begin at midnight as a new protest against bestial treatment of African farm laborers’. The call was supported by the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU). Moses Mabhida, the acting president of the ANC in Natal, argued that ‘[t] he potato boycott was the first direct attack on one of the main pillars of reactionary policies in our country, namely, the feudal farming interests. The main economic base of the South African cheap labour structure, with its pass laws, migratory labour, low wages, is the twin pillar of mining and farming interests.’

The ‘human potato’ haunted the South African landscape in the 1940s and 1950s. Newspapers reported how farmers in Bethal were brutally killing farmworkers, secretly burying them in unmarked graves on the farms. One worker told of seeing a plough dig up skulls and bones when he and others were working the land.