Power is control over land
AT THE beginning of a new year, the inclination is to look to the future. It is of course a new start, an opportunity to part with the past, particularly those aspects of it that do not represent good.
It is in this spirit that we make new year’s resolutions. Our aim is to distance ourselves from the failures of the past year and to focus our energies and efforts on that which would spell prosperity.
But we cannot break with the past, nor improve upon it by burying it or glossing over it.
This is why 23 years down the line, the content of the ANC’s January 8 statement seems all too familiar. The analysis of the challenges that beset this country, as presented by the ANC’s declaration, highlights stagnancy, a country stuck in a vicious circle of perpetual poverty, unemployment and inequality – the so-called triple challenge.
“If you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong.” These words of author Terry Pratchett aptly characterise South African society.
The way we remember the past informs our future. If our historical memory is shallow, superficial or dishonest and selective then so too will the foundation of our future be faulty and shaky.
In his book Sampie Terreblanche emphasises that contemporary South Africa cannot be understood without understanding and evaluating the “special relationship between power, land and labour”.
“This is particularly important for the argument that South Africa’s modern history has been shaped by a special relationship between power, land, and labour. Because labour was scarcer – and therefore potentially more valuable – than land, there was a continuing tendency to force black labourers into slavery, serfdom, and other forms of labour.
“In many cases it was only possible for the white landowning class to acquire the required unfree black labour by depriving indigenous people of more of their land in a deliberate attempt to promote their proleterianisation and impoverishment, thereby increasing the supply of unfree black labour.”
From this perspective South Africa is to enter a future that departs from the past, we cannot continue to pay lip service to the land question.
As a society we have also fallen into the trap of conceptualising the land question as merely a question of agrarian reform and have been bogged down in a debate about food security – as important as that is – that we have glossed over the crux of the matter. The control of land is synonymous with and cannot be divorced from the question of power. It is an historical fact in South Africa that he/she who holds the land holds the power.
Racism and racist attitudes of white superiority and white privilege as well as the indignity of poverty and inequality that the majority of black people are subjected to in this country is owing to the failure thus far to rectify power relations in this society by decisively addressing the land question.
Terreblanche continues to observe: “We cannot properly interpret the special relationship between power, land and labour in South African history without focusing on the power of colonial masters vis-avis the powerlessness of indigenous people.
“It would not have been possible for white colonists to become landowners if they did not have the power to turn the Khoisan and the Africans into a subservient labour force.”
Given the transfer of power from a white minority government to a black majority government, black South Africans were justified to expect that the new government would use its power to integrate Africans into an economy that has excluded them by making the landowning class subservient to its agenda of deep socio-economic transformation.
Sadly, subsequent black-led governments and their bureaucracy have not been an effective “countervailing forces to the overpowering corporate sector”.
Although the ANC in rhetoric in its January 8 statement is committing to fast track land reform, this task will require a political courage to antagonise the national and international neo-liberal capitalist order in favour of a more just social order. But the past has proven that this is a courage and political will that the ANC-led government sorely lacks.
“We must rectify power relations in this society by addressing the land question