A BACKWARD LAW ON THE LAND
By signing the Traditional & Khoi-san Leadership Bill into law, President Cyril Ramaphosa has grabbed the land rights of 18-million people who live in communal areas, particularly in the former Bantustans, and handed them to a bunch of rarely accountable men. It continues the tradition made infamous by the tradition of apartheid and colonial governments of bribing the chiefs to act as their stooges. With this backward law, Ramaphosa has missed an opportunity to secure land tenure for the people who need it most by transferring title deeds to citizens who live in rural areas.
This law will not pass the constitutional test of fairness, equality and dignity. Abuses of the past meted out to peasants by chiefs will escalate. Conflicts over land and resources, similar to the deadly decades-old Xolobeni strife in the Eastern Cape, will become an everyday occurrence. There have been many others.
For as long as I have been alive, Chief Gobizitwana Gwadiso’s family has ruled with a strong fist over the people who live on the scenic seaside land stretching from the Mthatha river mouth in the south, incorporating Ngqeleni and parts of Libode, bordered by the Umngazi river mouth to the north. This family had untrammelled power over the 300,000-strong Khonjwayo community of the amampondo people, taking and giving land as it pleased.
Agents of the Bantustan government led by apartheid stooge Kaiser Matanzima, this chieftainship enforced all the nasty laws and collected taxes levied by the corrupt regime. Gwadiso also imposed his own taxes and was accountable to nobody. The worst of his taxes was forcing members of the community to till his vast lands and tend his crops. Some would inspan their own oxen to plough the hundreds of hectares of the chief’s land in the Mtakatye valley, while others would later weed the fields. The whole village would harvest and transport the maize to the chief’s palace in their ox carts. Some of this land had been expropriated from the people. Woe betide anyone who declined to send their sons or oxen to work the chief’s land. This was not only forced labour for the benefit of Gwadiso and his family, it was unpaid labour.
But the chief always prepared well for this thirsty work: you could drink as much as you wanted from the barrels of umqombothi he provided — for a price.
The chief defied
This exploitation only came to an end in 1988, when a young villager defied the chief. Hauled before the chief’s court, the sturdy rock drill operator told the chief he had earned his livestock through hard work in the mines 1,000km away. “Mhlekazi, I see no reason for my oxen and for me to work for another man,” he said, clutching his knobkerrie, fashioned out of the indigenous umsimbithi tree (Millettia grandis).
When the chief threatened to expel the family “from my land”, the man said the chief would have to kill him before he could be evicted from his birthplace on the banks of the Mdumbi River. The chief was obliged to make other plans to tend to his mealie crop, as the village followed the young man’s lead. That was the last time the large farm was cultivated.
Abathembu king Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo is still serving a jail term for assaulting some of his subjects in not dissimilar circumstances in the 1990s.
The Gwadisos became head of the Khonjwayo people when the real chief, Sithelo, their relative, asked his nephew, Gwadiso’s father, to act as chief when he signed up to serve Britain in World War 2. Sithelo returned to find his chieftainship usurped. The court battle over this has not stopped since 1945. These are the kind of people Ramaphosa’s ANC government has entrusted with power in the 21st century.
This law grabs rural land rights, will not pass constitutional muster and will lead to greater conflict