Women must be part of the land debate

Before I’m simply dismissed as an angry feminist or another woman that wants attention because of the lack of a healthy love life. It is probably fitting to clarify that feminism isn’t a word used to describe a group of angry women with failed love lives but rather it is a political theory and practice that seeks to free all women, nomatter their backgrounds.

With the discussions on land expropriation without compensation that have been part of an important discourse in our country I have been compelled to pen down my thoughts and in doing so posit the gendered implications of land dispossession. While strong arguments have been made on the implications of land dispossession on the black majority, very little has been said about what implications land dispossession has had on black women in particular. This is an important dimension that the public has not entertained enough.

We cannot sit back and stay calm while assuming the gendered implications of land dispossession will be considered when land expropriation without compensation is implemented. We must ensure that these realities form part of this discourse to ensure that policy is specific, explicit and deliberate in this regard. Here, I refer to the English enclosures of the 1800s; this is a period that is said to have stretched from the 15th to the 19th centuries, where commons were privatised and enclosed for ‘improved agriculture’’. I then bring it back home to the work of Jeff Guy in the Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom in the 1800s. Even though context and socioeconomic conditions resulted in differing patterns of gendered division of labour, both accounts do however, give adequate evidence as to how land dispossession led to gender division of labour and a female gender that became increasingly devalued and dependent on the man.

The aim here is to agree that land dispossession was a transgression that ought to be corrected. However, it would be an injustice to deny how land dispossession played a fundamental role in structural inequality in so far as gender is concerned and how this then requires a specific, explicit and deliberate land policy that takes these realities into account.

I contend that land dispossession was a process that alienated women, rendered them hostage to the home and made them increasingly dependent on the man. Women were further forced by land dispossession into a subordinate position in a deepening gendered division of labour. It is true, part of attaining absolute freedom is in getting back the land but women need to be prioritised as a section of society that has been marginalised and still suffer the consequences of land dispossession and the triple yoke of oppression by race, class and gender in their daily lives.

Michael Levien, an assistant professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, teaches us that the English enclosures had tremendous consequences for the gendered division of labour. In the English commons, women played as much an important role as men did. Women were centrally involved in most of the livelihood activities. Women participated in work that would nowadays be said to be men’s work, from cultivation to gathering fuel, wild produce and raw materials for household production. It was easier to combine child rearing and self-employment than waged labour. The loss of Commons entailed an unprecedented transformation in the gendered division of labour. Enclosing commons took away women’s real income, placed them precariously in the labour market, and made them increasingly dependent on the man. Not only did the enclosures play a fundamental role in transforming the English peasantry into the English working class, Levien quotes Federici who concluded that the enclosure was the key historical moment through productive and reproductive work became divorced, the first became male and socially valued, the latter female and devalued. I agree with those that say that there is an intersection between land dispossession and patriarchy, thus specific and explicit policy is required to prevent male control and superiority. Another example from the English enclosures is that the few that received compensation often went and drank it away, as men were likely to control any monetary compensation that existed.

There are similarities that can be found between the English enclosures and South African Land dispossession. We learn from Jeff Guy that these were communities that worked for the King or the Zulu State, and even though this was the case, these communities were not alienated from production because this work was also directly for their livelihoods. Jeff Guy described this period as the history of the diversion of surplus labour from the service of the Zulu state to the service of developing capitalist production in South Africa. Not only was this the case, as in the English enclosures, here we witnessed a separation and gendered division of labour, between productive and reproductive labour while the former became male and valued and the latter female and devalued. One of the key elements in Zulu society was the introduction of the Hut-tax. This was a mechanism used to enforce workers to go out and sell their labour. The Hut-tax enforced the migrant labour system, where women were left in the homelands and became increasingly dependent on their husbands’ wages, making the agency of women tied to the man. The collection of the hut-tax presupposed the existence of homestead production. Not only was tax imposed on every hut but on every wife, whether she had a hut of her own or not. This system was also central in dispossession of property, and as each year passed, more homesteads lost control and their self-sufficiency as productive units. The other element introduced by the colonial state was in the payment of lobolo. The colonial state introduced changes that would allow lobolo to be interpreted as a form of sale, the state created a target towards which the migrant worker laboured. While the fixed sum ranged from 3-6 cattle, after the annexation this number increased to

10. These changes were laid down in the Natal Code and transaction were no longer settled between families but rather by the Zululand courts. All these elements mentioned above transformed the social whole structure.

Both men and women suffered grave consequences from land dispossession. What both the examples of the English enclosures and the Zulu society show us however, is the intersection of land dispossession and patriarchy. It is for this reason that I contend that the discussion of land expropriation without compensation has to include this important dimension, that being the gendered effects of land dispossession. This is an essential element as we strive for justice in so far as the land dispossession question is concerned. There needs to be explicit policy that prevents the persistence of patriarchal norms and one that is also a form of acknowledgement of how land dispossession has had a fundamental hand in the many centuries of women’s struggle. Land expropriation without compensation can be another means to gender equality.

● Ndwayana is an activist and former national spokesperson of the African Democratic Change.