Whose land is it anyway?

The concept of land and land ownership is a particularly foreign one to a large percentage of the Coloured population. For years, we have excluded ourselves from the debate that has raged in various quarters with regards to land ownership and have sadly (albeit not surprisingly) assumed our customary role of disaffected spectator rather than active participant in what is arguably, the most important issue in post-apartheid South Africa. The land issue is far too complex and intricate to be conclusively dealt with in this article. I will however, attempt to highlight some of the many problems surrounding the land debate and how they relate to Coloured people in South Africa.

Throughout the ages, land has been at the epicenter of man’s conflicts and lust for power. Nations continually rise against each other to fight over land and territories for various reasons; strategic location; mineral resources; religious importance or just for the sake of expanding their borders. With colonialism, European powers saw fit to grab land in Africa at an unprecedented rate, pillage the continent for its resources and use these ill-gotten gains to build their economies back-home to superpower status, giving them the means to further pillage and plunder.

While Europe had the benefit of seeing its political borders develop organically through a more “natural” process of assimilation and expansion (and of course conflict) over many thousands of years; the forging of the political borders in Africa were more rapidly imposed and not nearly as democratically created. European powers landed on our African shores, traveled into the interior and allocated themselves large swathes of land as they saw fit. Scant regard was given to the existing order of things; tribal allegiances or tensions took second place to the cartographer’s sweeping strokes as they whimsically allocated themselves vast tracts of land to further their imperial interests.

With the end of colonial rule in Africa, political borders now existed where they had not existed before. Nations were divided, tribes separated and governments left to forge a sense of national unity in these newly formed countries, often without the benefit of there being any kind of commonality (language; religion; ethnicity; shared history) amongst the constituents. Is it any wonder that the African reality is typified by civil strife as tribes now vie for power in countries whose borders they played little part in creating? In the wake of frenzied, crazed colonialism, the world seems to have drawn a line in the sand in as far as recognizing any territory as being a legal country. People cannot just lobby the United Nations and use the argument of the right to self-determination as the pretext to which they demand access to a region to claim as their country. It seems that only in truly exceptional instances and ones which serve to avert intractable ethnic conflict is the United Nations prepared to recognise the emergence or creation of a new country. Examples of this reality in action can be seen in the conflicts raging between Israel and Palestine and Ethiopia and Eritrea. Redrawing borders and recognizing new nation-states seems the only solution in these particular cases.

In Zimbabwe (as in South Africa), the land crisis has reached critical proportions as a large percentage of the land is still owned by the white minority. Land ownership is such a key and psychologically important aspect of nation building that its value and significance cannot be underestimated. People need to own part of the land in order to feel a sense of belonging and denying them this right is denying them the opportunity to build their futures and take control of their destinies.

To think that the land ownership issue is something which only affects farmers in far-off corners of the country is naïve and silly. Land ownership is at the very center of our utterly economically unequal South African society. Houses in previously white owned areas have more than quadrupled in value in the past few years, leaving the owners smiling and new entrants to the housing market left paying through the nose. This sudden boon in property prices has only served to widen the chasm between the “haves” and the “have nots”. What really grates me though is the fact that in this capitalist society, white privilege is further entrenched in the new South Africa as the social beneficiaries under apartheid are now once again the undisputed economic beneficiaries under democracy. The mere increase in value of “their” (white folk) apartheid acquired property means they have access to significantly more capital than the average non-white Charles/Sipho. This just further contributes to the growing economic divide. Yes, I know South Africa is in principle an equal opportunity country, but the burden of competing with people that have access to large sums of generational, legacy wealth leaves me feeling somewhat bitter.

The land issue has brought up many questions which have been burning inside me as a young, Coloured South African. The fact that under apartheid, my group was crammed into urban wastelands while other groups were given large swathes of land through apartheid’s Bantustan/Homeland system makes me feel that I’ve been given a bit of a raw deal in the country of my birth. The reality of the matter is that almost all rural Blacks own the land on which they live while the 80% of Coloureds who live in cities probably don’t even own the council houses in which they’ve lived for generations. Does the enduring illegitimacy of my Coloured identity preclude me from having ambitions of land ownership in post-apartheid South Africa? Am I less indigenous to this land than Black South Africans, even though my entire community and I were “created” in these parts? Is the transfer of land ownership rights yet another power move on the black/white chequered playing field, designed to appease the masses (while remaining farcical in nature like BEE in its current form)? Am I meant to just grin and bear obvious injustices perpetrated against me for the sake of maintaining the status quo?

I find it strange that throughout South Africa’s transition to democracy, the media has made very little mention of reparations and restitution as a means of rectifying the wrongs of apartheid and to put people on more of an equal footing. Recently I’ve begun questioning the very nature of my patriotism and what it is I am patriotic to South Africa for. As much as I love this country and if push came to shove, I would probably take up arms if our borders were threatened (you never know with a geriatric lunatic to the north), I think the Coloured community and indeed broader South African society needs to ask itself some tough questions. Why should I be patriotic to a country in which I have no history of land ownership; no hope of future land ownership; no leadership to advance my minority rights; utterly inadequate representation in the media and not even a sliver of electromagnetic radio spectrum that my community can call its own? What I find instead, is my every effort to try to self-identify for the sake of my community’s bloc advancement is met with vociferous opposition from various quarters who see fit to pour their twisted non-racial rhetoric and scornful, smug, self-righteous indignation on me and my efforts. All this in a futile attempt to prevent or delay the inevitable realization that Coloured people are perfectly within their rights to demand something that continues to elude us even in post-apartheid South Africa: EQUALITY!

In the United States, soon after the emancipation of the slaves, slaves were given 40 acres and a mule in order that they have land to work (40 acres) and the means to work the land (a mule); effectively enabling them to be productive members of a society that was attempting to be equal. The term “40 acres and a mule” has since become synonymous with reparations and with a fresh start. While I know it would be particularly naïve of me to expect government to allocate the Coloured community any sizable tract of terra-firma as reparations for enduring the sins of apartheid, at the very least, they can give us media. The fact that the SABC still does not have a radio station which targets the Coloured community is testament to the fact that the Coloured community and indeed people who CHOOSE to embrace the term “Coloured” as their term of reference are still considered personae non grata; non-entities. Unless the status quo is changed; unless the Coloured community is given equal recognition and status as a bona fide social group within South Africa; unless the Coloured community is given equal access to state media, you will have a resentful 9% of the South African population bitter; frustrated; distant; angry and despondent. Let equal access to state funded media be the Coloured community’s “40 acres and a mule”, something which would allow us for the first time to speak to each other and have a sense of agency on a continent in which it appears we are still disdainfully disregarded as some kind of unworthy social anomaly.

To deny the Coloured community access to its own state funded media is to deny us the opportunity to share in the South African dream. Even Max Du Preez’s famed article on Coloureds’ being South Africa’s most authentic citizens add up to naught if this does not translate into meaningful, visible, audible agency in our own state funded media. The consequences of not providing the Coloured community with its own state funded media is that we will continue having 9% of the population feeling like foreigners and outcasts in the land of their birth. This country is ours as much as it belongs to any other South African who lives here. Not only because we say it is, but because we have earned our place here through surviving the insurmountable apex of human tragedy, toil and suffering as wrought by generations of slavery, colonialism and apartheid.

As you close your eyes at night and see in your minds eye a foot being drawn in the sand to signify that enough is enough and no more, ask yourself this: if this land is not ours to enjoy as equal South Africans, then just whose land is it anyway?

Charles Ash © 2007
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