Creative solutions needed for past land injustice BY Z PALLO JORDAN, AWAKING on Friday morning, June 20 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth." With these words, Solomon Plaatje, the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) first secretary-general, begins his account of the effects of the Natives Land Act of 1913 on the rural Africans of the Free State and Transvaal. The law was piloted through Parliament by JW Sauer, once counted among the Cape liberals, who combined the ministries of justice and of native affairs. The law was promulgated to meet the mining industry’s demand for labour and to destroy highly competitive African peasant farmers who were outperforming white farmers on the open market. It created a number of "native reserves", totalling 7.3% of South Africa’s land area, to accommodate the 7-million Africans who then made up 75% of the population. It prohibited them from owning land or pursuing farming outside the reserves and made the breach of contracts by Africans a criminal offence. It expropriated thousands of African landowners and outlawed leasing or tenant-farming relationships between black and white. The law imposed 90 days of compulsory work a year on all Africans living on white farms. By legislative fiat, tenant farmers were reduced to tenant labourers and former sharecroppers were compelled to choose between becoming tenant labourers or migrating to a "native reserve". As these areas were already congested, in practice, this usually meant migration to the towns and cities, into new and arduous social relationships — as mine labourers and, later, in the least-skilled and worst-paid types of urban industrial and domestic jobs. When interviewed by the UK press on his visit to London as part of a delegation opposing the creation of the Union in 1909, WP Schreiner, a former prime minister of the Cape Colony, described the proposed union as "an act of separation between the minority and the majority of the people of SA". The act was one radical attempt to achieve precisely that by translating into law what European arms had achieved during the wars of the 19th century. The land formerly owned, controlled and farmed by the indigenous people had been seized as the spoils of war. They would be permitted on it only in the capacity of servants of the new owners. This month marks the centenary of this piece of racist legislation that laid the legal and moral basis for the hare-brained Bantu homeland schemes of the National Party. That land and land ownership is an extremely emotive issue even in our highly urbanised society should come as no surprise. Unlike the Americans, who celebrate the conquest and dispossession of the native people, especially on the screen, white South Africans deny it. After 1948, by way of denying the fact of conquest and dispossession, the South African narrative was rewritten to insert the myth that this was an empty land into which Europeans and Africans moved at about the same time. As both were migrant groups, neither had prior moral claim to the land. The centenary of the act is an opportunity to focus on one of the key challenges of the nation-building and reconciliation project. Land differs fundamentally from all other resources because it constitutes those portions of our planet on which we live, on which we grow our crops and from which we extract minerals. Consequently, land is a basic economic asset. Discourse on land tends to reduce it to an exclusively agrarian issue — who owns and controls farmland — forgetting that the act entailed the expropriation of land in rural and urban areas. The ministerial budget debate on land reform and rural development brought to light alarming underperformance in land restitution. None of the targets have been met and reclaimed land has not always been productively used. Under its present leadership, the Land Bank is not an instrument of transformation and the absence of the support services that helped emergent white farmers in the past sets new farmers up for failure. I doubt there are many former rural communities that are now urbanised and want to return to the land. Others that have had their land returned lack the funds and the agricultural skills to become successful farmers. Yet the constitution and common justice enjoin us to redress these past wrongs. This suggests the need for creative solutions that will compensate communities for past injustices and make economic sense. Communities should not be compelled to become farmers to earn an income from restored land. While the recapitalisation of land reform is vitally necessary, it is clear that new farmers urgently need the extension services of the past. The Land Bank should become a transformative institution by focusing on the smallholder and family farm. South Africa’s food security will not be jeopardised if we avoid reckless action while proceeding with a sustainable land-reform programme. • Jordan is a former arts and culture minister.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Jun 2013 14:42:29 +0000
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