Zuma should not delve too deeply into history

IT IS ALWAYS interesting when President Jacob Zuma shares with us his vision of the past. He is, it must be said, as entertaining holding forth on history as he is with geography and mathematics.

And so it was with his address on Thursday to the National House of Traditional Leaders in which he again raised the issue of land reform – but with a suggestion the 1913 cut-off date for land claims be rolled back to some undisclosed moment in the 19th century.

His audience reportedly expressed their approval, perhaps because many of them – members of royal houses, wastrel chiefs and other tribal nobs – were after all themselves relics of the colonial and apartheid eras.

June 19, 1913 is constitutionally enshrined as the date after which any person or community deprived of property through racist and discriminatory laws and practices could claim restitution and whenever it raises the issue, the ANC often quotes its founding secretary-general, the writer Sol Plaatje: “Awakening on Friday morning, 20 June 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.”

Zuma did so too, but merely to imply that Plaatje was very much mistaken, and that the South African native had in fact been a pariah in the land of his birth for decades before 1913. Most of the land, he said, had been already taken by then, and the Land Act was merely about white colonialists grabbing whatever remaining bits and pieces they hadn’t yet snatched up. Consequently, the constitution was “lopsided against the black people”.

“What are we reclaiming?” he asked. “I believe... percentage-wise, the land taken after 1913 is very insignificant... Eighteen-something, that’s when the biggest chunk of the land was taken.” Eighteen-something? Here at the Mahogany Ridge we believe that, should there be a 19th century land claims cut-off date, the president would be well advised to argue for one well after July 4, 1879.

The Anglo-Zulu War effectively ended on that day, when British forces gained control of Ulundi and torched it. The defeated Zulu chief, Cetshwayo, was deposed and exiled, first to Cape Town and then London before being allowed to return to Zululand in 1883.

To defeat the Zulus the British had relied not only on sophisticated weapons and disciplined troops, but also Zulu collaborators – and there were plenty of those, including the ancestors of Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma.

As the author, historian Jacob Dlamini, put it: “Far from helping build and protect the Zulu kingdom, the Zumas helped the British destroy it.”

Their treachery did not go unrewarded. The kingdom was broken into parcels of land and handed over to collaborators. In their 2014 book, Ekhaya: The Politics of Home in KwaZulu-Natal, historian Meghan Healy-Clancy and anthropologist Jason Hickel declare that Nkandla, the president’s country home, is just such a spoil.

According to Dlamini, to make their case, Healy-Clancy and Hickel drew on the research of John Wright and the late Jeff Guy, both eminent scholars of precolonial and colonial Zulu history. Guy, in particular, was doing further research into Zuma’s collaborationist roots when he died in December 2014. Who knows what interesting insights that would have thrown up?

Were it not for the 1913 cut-off date, there would, we believe, be a strong restitution case to be made regarding Nkandla. Was a community deprived of this land through a discriminatory practice? You bet. Practices do not get much more discriminatory than armed conflicts and the Anglo-Zulu War was definitely such a conflict.

Meanwhile, it would appear the president was only too aware of the long-term consequences of the dismantling of the Zulu kingdom. “The dispossession of land,” he told the traditional leaders, “is the source of poverty and inequality which have become the ugly hallmark of our nation and an impediment to the future of shared prosperity.”

Perhaps Zuma should do the right thing and just give Nkandla away. The place really does seem much more trouble than its worth. It has infected the ANC with a corruptible seed and the grumbling over which faction of the ruling party really honestly always wanted the president to repay a portion of the gargantuan costs of those ridiculous security upgrades grows more inane with each passing day.

Ditch the place. As it is, it really does belong to the rest of us, Zulu or otherwise, seeing as we’ve paid for it many times over.