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South African Land Issues Remain Unfinished Business

South African Land Issues Remain Unfinished Business

For South Africa to become a unitary state, it is important to resolve the thorny land issue which largely remains unsolved.

These were some of the arguments made during last week’s seminar – Biko and The Land Issue: A Centenary Commemoration Seminar of the 1913 Land Act – which marked 36 years since the death of struggle icon and South African Black Consciousness founder Stephen Bantu Biko.

The seven-hour event, which was a collaboration between DUT and Umtapo Centre, was held on Friday at the DUT Hotel School Conference Centre, DUT Ritson Campus. Notable presenters, namely Essy Letsoalo, author of several books on Land Reform in South Africa; Professor Lungisile Ntsebeza, AC Jordan Chair in African Studies at the University of Cape Town; Susan Nkomo, Leader of the UNISA research project: South African Women in 2015: Towards 20 years of freedom and Pandelani Nefolovhodwe, Chairperson of the Isibaya Development Trust and a former member of national parliament as well as the Pan African Parliament, gave different perspectives about South Africa’s land issues which largely remain thorny.

June 19, 2013 marked 100 years of the promulgation of the South African Natives Land Act, a law that decreed that only 7 percent of land in South Africa could be owned by black people. Laws passed in 1936 later increased that figure to 13 percent. To date, 14 percent of land in South Africa is government owned, 79 percent is owned by private individuals, trusts and private companies while the remaining 7 percent, which is mainly in the Transkei, Eastern Cape, is unregistered or unrecorded in the deeds office.

Prof Ntsebenza said the 1913 Natives Land Act was not the beginning of the dispossession of black people in SA. He said the Act was the culmination of efforts by the SA Native Affairs Commission, 1903-1905, which urged for the reservation of land for exclusively African occupation. The Commission proposed that the principle of territorial segregation should become the basis of native polity in the country.

“The 1913 Natives Land Act legalised and formalised the dispossession of black people; it wasn’t the beginning of that process. Apart from dividing the South African landscape into rural and urban areas, colonialism further divided rural areas into commercial farms and reserves and some (reserves) were granted independence by their South African apartheid masters. Colonialists established these reserves for occupation by indigenous people and this followed massive and often violent dispossession of the latter’s land. With respect to agriculture, while massive amounts of subsidy were poured in by the state to prop up white dominated agriculture, very little was invested in the development of agriculture and rural development in the former reserves. Active steps were taken to discourage the rise of a class of black farmers that was emerging in the 19th century and early part of the 20th century. Efforts on the part of these aspirant farmers to get freehold title deeds were thwarted in the run-up to the establishment of the union of South Africa in 1910. By this time, colonialists had resolved that the role of the reserves would primarily be a source of cheap labour to boost commercial agriculture and the development of their racialised form of capitalism,” said Prof Ntsebenza.

He said unequal division of land between blacks and whites remains a problem, adding that post democracy plans to deal with this problem have been “spectacularly unsuccessful”.

“All the efforts of state policy in the almost two decades since the demise of apartheid are either inappropriate or inadequate. This is despite the mounting challenges facing the country in respect of land in the broader sense of the term,” he said.

Giving the female perspective in the country’s unresolved land issue, Nkomo’s address evoked emotion. She based her address on her article – Looking for Maria, her sisters,

daughters and sons – which was inspired by Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa, an angry denunciation of the 1913 Natives Land Act.

Maria, the only female reference in Plaatje’s seminal work on the 1913 Natives Land Act, was a widow, who until 1913’s fateful winter had lived on a farm with her children. She had continued to live on the farm after the death of her husband. “Back then, the primary mode of working the land was share cropping. Basically, you hired your family labour to the farmer. You owned all the tools that you used to plant, the labour was yours, the seed was yours and only the land belonged to the farmer. When you harvest, 60 percent went to the owner of the land and you got 40 percent,” said Nkomo.

When Maria’s husband died, she and her children continued to work on that basis. Later, the farmer would inform her about the new legislation that would leave her and her children, one of them a toddler, homeless. Under the law, Maria and her children now worked for the farmer.

“So she says ‘no’ and leaves. The way Sol Plaatje writes is very descriptive because you can see Maria walking off with her livestock. The one child is a toddler and they are walking with everything they own out of that farm. This is what this meant (1913 Natives Land Act). As she’s leaving, this farmer starts burning their home, which they had built. The farmer tells Maria that (he hopes) by the time she gets to the next farm, she would have found a husband because no farmer will hire a woman who is on her own. But we will never be able to know what happened to Maria. Did the children die on the road? Did her livestock live? Did she ever find another place to work? Maria is totally lost to us, to history as were many women that we didn’t even get to glimpse. So when Sol Plaatje says that on June 19, 1913, the African man found himself a pariah in his own land, you ask yourself what happened to the African woman. Looking for Maria is my attempt to show you the injustice to women; that in fact the story of gender becomes erased even in the narrative of what happened during that dispossession,” said Nkomo.

She said the Natives Land Act impoverished people, destroyed ways of life and resulted in broken families. “People that had produced and lived healthily off the produce of their land now did not have access to food. They had to have money and be part of the commodified market when they did not have the means to do that. You start having documentation of hunger, disease and wasting away because people no longer had means to survive. A lot of children had to run away (from home) because if your father wanted to stay on a farm, he had to guarantee that you (his children) would work for the farmer. Young women and men ran away (from their homes) and families were broken. People would die on the road. Imagine you’re cold and hungry on the road. Your child dies but you have nowhere to bury them. You have to bury them on the road and continue. It (Natives Lands Act) was an instant impoverishment of people,” said Nkomo.

Nefolovhodwe said Black Consciousness “compels us to fight racial segregation, racism, poverty and inequality and as a result, land ownership patterns that favour whites thereby creating segregated ownership”. He said the present constitution should be changed because it safeguards the existence of these injustices with the property clause. “Black Consciousness wants a unitary state and the maturing of a national identity which we don’t have. National identity cannot be achieved with whites owning the majority of land and blacks alienated from it. For us to achieve one nation, it is important to resolve the land issue. Our fight against colonialism and apartheid, which created Bantustans (former reserves) as places of oppression, poverty and unemployment means that we are duty bound to free our people from hunger and poverty. We need to create economic opportunities in rural areas in order to integrate the rural poor into the country’s economic activities,” he said.

Also giving his resolutions to the land issue, Prof Ntsebenza said the starting point for radical land reform under current conditions should be the expropriation of unproductive land that is either in debt, unused and underutilised. Prof Ntsebenza said under this model, he would argue that land that is currently under production should not be targeted for land reform purposes as this will involve endless negotiations on compensation.

“This may not be popular, but this would be a provisional programme of sorts leading to something more. Rather than expropriate productive land, let us allow capitalism to do the job for us. In 1994, we had about 60 000 commercial farms registered. Today, we have about 37 000, and I am told by farmers that I do research with and amongst that they think in the next 10 to 20 years, that number will be down to 20 000. If we wait for capitalism to do the job for us, and we have a condition that where farmers find it difficult to farm, they should sell the land to the state rather than give it to their friends and so on, then we’ll have a pool of land that we can draw from,” he said. Prof Ntsebenza said expropriated land would be used to address land hunger, primarily in the former reserves as well as for the benefit of farm workers and farm dwellers.

“With regard to the former reserves, priority should be given to those who have demonstrated commitment to a land-based lifestyle and are growing crops and fruit in the gardens of their residential plots and are keeping stock. We have research to show that despite all these laws and restriction of land, there are people who continued to produce under these difficult conditions,” he said.

Nkomo however disagreed with Prof Ntsebenza’s proposal, saying proposals and genuine engagements are needed to solve the land problem.

– Sinegugu Ndlovu

Pictured: Susan Nkomo (standing) addresses the audience during the q&a part of the seminar. Other speakers on the panel are (from left to right) Essy Letsoalo, Professor Lungisile Ntsebeza and Pandelani Nefolovhodwe.

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