Is there a way to talk calmly about land?
In 1982, when he became president of Spain, a goodlooking young socialist lawyer called Felipe Gonzalez was asked how he was going to change the country.
It had been through the mill. In 1975 Gen Francisco Franco died, having ruled as a dictator since winning the Spanish civil war almost 40 years earlier. The republicans on the losing side of the war were brutally repressed by Franco and tens of thousands had died in detention.
Republican families were treated as second-class citizens by Franco, denied basic rights in health, education and even housing, for as long a time as black South Africans were subject to the rules of apartheid by Afrikaner nationalists.
Two years earlier, Franco’s prime minister, Luis Carrero Blanco, had been killed by a car bomb that blew his vehicle completely over the buildings in Madrid’s swanky Calle Claudio Coello, a flick of a cigarette butt from the SA embassy.
Spain held its first democratic elections in 1977, and under the consequent government of Adolfo Suarez talks between all the parties began on a new constitution. That was nearly ruined when a policeman, Col Antonio Tejero, marched into parliament waving a gun in what was an attempted coup.
It was King Juan Carlos who forever won Spanish hearts by denouncing the coup and rendering it a failure.
So when Gonzalez became prime minister in 1982 the country was exhausted: “What will you do to change Spain?”a reporter asked him on the night of his victory.
“I don’t want to change Spain,” Gonzalez replied, “I want to calm it down.”
I was reminded of that during a debate I anchored in Parkview, Johannesburg, this week. Wits University vicechancellor Adam Habib had reminded the audience how Nelson Mandela offered SA an opportunity to calm down, and the country ignored him. Perhaps Cyril Ramaphosa might do the same, in his own way. “Do we let the opportunity go again?” he asked.
Sitting next to him was a fiery advocate, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, trying to tell his polite middle-class and largely white audience that somehow, whether they liked it or not, land was a huge issue in SA and that its expropriation or transfer to dispossessed black people was going to take place whether they liked it or not; and would it not be the sensible thing to do to wrest the debate from politicians and, as South Africans, show each other some empathy and try to find a way to restore justice in this country?
Make no mistake, we do not have a good story to tell here. The wealth of SA, such as it is, was built on the savage exploitation of Africans by colonial capital. Do yourself a favour and read Charles van Onselen’s new book, The Night Trains, for more evidence than you’ll care to know.
Van Onselen is arguably our finest living historian. His descriptions of the ordeal that virtual slave labour from Mozambique was put through on trains owned by the Chamber of Mines as they slunk like a dirty secret into Johannesburg in the night is both nauseating and riveting.
Van Onselen is no apologist for the ANC government. Just the opposite. But the rage that comes through his writing about the human rights abuses heaped on imported black mine labour is as authentic as Ngcukaitobi’s is about the dispossession of the land.
I wasn’t taking notes, but what Ngcukaitobi seemed to me to be saying was that as the government fails, again and again, to redistribute land efficiently, it becomes harder for constitutionalists like himself to hold the middle ground.
Of course, there are many middle grounds in our politics. It may be cultural as well as political, but the biggest one is black. That’s the one he stands in. If you’re in the white middle ground you’re worrying about whether the constitution really does need to change at all. Perhaps Ngcukaitobi also thinks that, but he’s not as patient as you are.
As a white South African, you have to appreciate the value of a man like Ngcukaitobi. Sure, he appears with uncomfortable regularity as counsel for the EFF. But he also secured for me, and then all journalists, harassment interdicts against Black First Land First.
He wants to live the constitution, and that has to be the right thing when the politics all around you are insane.
Sadly, it brings us back to our chronic inability as South Africans to talk to each other across our prejudices and fears.
Is there not a way, a place, a manner to talk sanely about this? No-one is going to take your home away, but is there a win-win way to give effect to the long-forgotten and not even controversial ANC target that 30% of agricultural land should be in black hands by sort of now? We’ve managed 9%. While the ANC is to blame, it’s our problem to solve.
You can’t expropriate a working farm and put 500 families on it and expect it to continue working as a farm. So how do we do this? It’s all very well lining up behind your favourite politicians on the land question. But if we want that calm Mandela offered us, or that Gonzalez wanted for Spain, then might we ordinary citizens not profitably look for a way to talk about it about more? Among ourselves?