Actually, most Southern farmers DID work their own land, in order to produce food! If they happened to have a larger farm and owned a few slaves, they worked side by side with them.
It was just those big plantations that produced cash crops—cotton, tobacco, etc. that used all that slave labor.
When it came time to fight the Yankees, it was the small farmers and others who owned no slaves who did most of the fighting.
As for South Africa, the REAL history is that the whites (Dutch and British) and Bantu were both expanding into the country at the same time. The original inhabitants were the Khoisan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa
It was mining—not farming—that led to exploitation and additional migration of the Bantu.
Given what happened to the once-lovely Rhodesia, it was inevitable what would happen to South Africa. It’s too bad—South Africa, now a rising BRICS power, will degenerate into another Zimbabwe (NOT Baltimore or Detroit) in a few years.
Thus the saying then "A rich man's war and a poor man's fight".
One of the myths spread by the ANC and its liberal allies around the world is the claim that Afrikaaners "stole" land from "native" Xhosa. In reality, most of South Africa proper was almost completely uninhabited apart from scattered populations of Khoisan (hunter-gatherer Bushmen). The Bantu ancestors of the Xhosa only started to move into South Africa in any numbers after European colonization. So if anything, the Xhosa have displaced Europeans rather than the reverse.