Why a radical land solution is whites’ surest guarantee
The ’miracle’ of 1994 is crumbling brick by brick because black people in South Africa are trapped in a state of landlessness that has to be remedied, writes Mbuyiseni Ndlozi
THE colonial question is first and foremost the question of land. This question is: who does South Africa’s land belong to?
The colonial answer to this question is that it belongs to white Europeans who discovered it in the 1600s. The first generation of colonial settlers believed in conquering the land precisely because those found living on it already did not have title deeds. Thus, it was “discovered”. Central to the lack of title deeds was precisely the idea of the commodification of land. Title deed was really the proof, not of belonging as such, but of ownership, which means our people could not show that they owned the land through a piece of paper. Thus, they did not own it. If they did not own it, it is possible that they were deemed either to have stolen it or — precisely because they did not establish a system of commodification of the land — that they were not fully human.
This accounts for the basis of their brutal slaughter by the Europeans and, ultimately, their socialisation as inferior beings to white people.
This is what made colonisation a crime against humanity in its land dispossession of native populations: not only did it deny others their claim to the land, it was also a denial of other people’s ways of existence.
Even if the way of life of the native populations was to move around (east, south, west and north) for cattle grazing, they had used these lands for centuries, even millenniums, for their sustenance and how they came to think of their own identity.
The anticolonial answer to the question of colonisation of land was therefore fundamentally different: the land belongs to those who live on it.
This is not a question of ownership (title deed), but of belonging. The colonial crime is therefore not only one of land dispossession through genocide, massacre and war, but also of commodification — the possession of land as a means of trade and profit.
Through commodification, white people guaranteed their hold on the land, and the normalisation of violence against the native populations, who thereafter lived in perpetual dispossession.
Native populations could trade with livestock and vegetables that came from the land, but what makes a people is that they do not trade with their own land, for that would be selling their identity.
Their land is the only thing that makes their identity possible.
This is the logic which colonisation violated and to which our people chose to limit themselves when they dealt with the transition to democracy.
In fully appreciating why the world called South Africa’s transition to democracy a miracle, it is imperative to comprehend that it was precisely because of how violent, long and dehumanising white minority rule was.
Black people should have asked for justice — for the expulsion of an entire white race which benefited from the brutal slaughter of an entire black race.
They should have asked for revenge for all who participated in the forefront of that system to either be killed or be expelled from South Africa. Killing them would not have been a foreign concept because apartheid itself hanged all who committed hideous crimes.
Yet, our people did not. The whole world looked in awe as black South Africans closed a chapter of so brutal and so barbaric a past as ours in favour of a transformative agenda based on unity, equality, freedom and nonracialism.
This was the triumph of the human spirit, never seen anywhere in the world before.
Today, this triumph of the human spirit is breaking apart, crumbling brick by brick. This is because materially, black people remain in a situation of landlessness.
Many of the informal settlements that grew after 1994 were out of occupations of vacant land. Never in the past 22 years since 1994 have black people ever taken occupied land. Never have they pushed anyone or any community out of their homes or properties by force.
This is because the successive democratic governments have never found genuine partners in the adopted “willing buyer, willing seller” policy of land redistribution. No one sells land with an understanding of the past. In fact, most of the time, there are no willing sellers.
The possessors of land rely on the argument of “title deed” — the land belongs to them because they have the title deed to show for it. This logic of “title deeds” is at the forefront of frustrating land redistribution, even 20 years after democracy.
It is worth it to note that the policy of “willing buyer, willing seller” is consistent with the Van Riebeeck logic of dispossession; that South Africa did not belong to black people because they cannot produce title deeds for it.
The insistence on this logic is why we are still in a colonial deadlock, which always threatens to undo our 1994 settlement.
This is also the reason why EFF Commander-in-Chief Julius Malema spoke of white slaughter: it was to highlight the violence sustained by “title deed” logic.
The EFF does not have to call for white slaughter, despite the fact that in order for whites to attain a claim to “title deeds” they relied on the slaughter of black people.
Instead, the EFF calls for land expropriation through a democratic and accountable state, without compensation for equal redistribution. If we do not do this, a racial slaughter is simply asphyxiated and postponed, but not resolved.
Why are white people afraid of hearing that, given the history of this country, they actually should be slaughtered? That their actions as a race, and the fact that those actions continue to keep blacks today in dispossession, warrant them to be slaughtered, yet no one is asking for such. Why are white people afraid to hear this truth, that black people have forgiven them for the slaughter they themselves suf- fered for centuries at the hands of white minority rule?
This fear amongst whites is not caused by those who are speaking and reiterating the past and its continued meaning, like Malema. It is caused by the fact that white people continue to live out of the crime of colonial and apartheid land dispossession.
They are afraid because they know they have abused the generosity of the 1994 human spirit that was shown through Nelson Mandela and his generation.
This fear would persist even if no one said anything in public about the past: we would simply all wake up one day and the poor landless masses of our people will be slaughtering whites and taking the land on their own.
Our solution is to do a tabula rasa — democratically and constitutionally — and to resolve, once and for all, the colonial suffocation that makes the 1994 dream live in a perpetual death sentence.
Ndlozi is the national spokesman of the EFF
They are afraid because they know they have abused the generosity of the 1994 human spirit