The land is our heritage, let’s share it

IT WAS ON A chilly Saturday morning that I arrived for my regular monthend visit to find my grandmother’s house burning. It was in 1983.

This hard-working old woman worked the land for decades to build a decent rural homestead.

She had used proceeds from the surplus of the farm produce to send her children and grandchildren to school, while also taking care of countless relatives.

Her husband had died in 1951, leaving her with a small piece of relatively productive land. It was a couple of sloppy hectares but the soil was reasonable; so were the rains – at least until 1986, when drought struck, subjecting us to much despised bhokide (yellow maize) and mealie rice.

My grandmother’s cousins never really liked her resilience. She had decades earlier politely objected to their suggestion that she remarry.

Instead, she chose to work the land and look after her family herself. So one day my grandmother’s cousins plotted to burn her house, for the second time in a decade. They burnt the house themselves, not via proxies. They wanted her out of the land so they could grab it and extend their mealie fields and grazing land.

In 2018 the homestead still stands. Most neighbours remain the same relatives who torched her house twice.

Relationships have normalised and they even recently tried some forgiveness-cum-cleansing ceremony, which was inconsequential.

In retrospect, there has never been a major factional fight between the families. Grandfathers were the only ones fighting because they understood the value of an extra hectare to their subsistence farming. Had it not been for land scarcity, I doubt they would have committed such terrible crimes.

All of this is to illustrate the point that black people have always fought land tenure struggles. My grandmother was caught in a smaller battle of the broader national struggle for national liberation

Many people continue to die in provinces like KwaZulu-Natal, where families and clans massacre each other over grazing land.

So my grandmother’s issues were not just a low-intensity family feud. They were a manifestation and a direct consequence of dispossession which continues to turn families and citizens against each other.

White South Africans (at least those violently opposed to land reform) need to recognise that the centuries-old struggle for the return of the land will liberate them, too. It will set this country on a path of unprecedented healing and forgiveness.

Land shapes identity. It is a major part of our spirituality and a source of hope about a future free of inequality.

It is the nationalisation of land that farmers should fear, not a targeted expropriation that will affect very few landowners.

And so, as we mark another Heritage Day in democratic South Africa, we should recognise that we inherited racialised poverty whose main programme was land dispossession of the African majority. King Shaka fought for unity and nationhood. The return of the land would be a fitting tribute to him and countless others whose land struggles kept the Struggle alive.

My children know we would fight to preserve our grandmother’s property. It is our heritage, our identity, a shrine.

Their wish is for every black family in South Africa to have the same. They are prepared to share the land with their neighbours, as they appreciate the concept of sharing resources to achieve economies of scale.