We must listen to all voices in the land

SOMETIMES it seems we are living in a season of unravelling hope. We are off-centre from the road we found ourselves on when Madiba and The Arch led us towards each other; when we began to fall in love with the idea we were one beautiful family.

There would be – in any process of courting – the getting to know each other phase. And financial considerations such as the need to divvy up the inheritance and the neglected issue of the historical dowry. What would each member of the South African family contribute to the conjugal fund, beginning our new life together as a people?

In many patriarchal cultures the dowry was the recognition that the bride, through marriage, would leave her family bereft of a significant unit of labour.

We went our separate ways to our colour-coded schools, places of worship and, where we could afford the upgrade costs, our residential areas.

There were the boutique-gulags of the rich where some queried, as in the words of a patois-rich song of my childhood, if they could come to the wedding. The stinging response: “Nie! Want julle is the mosag, eentwie-drie”, ethno-classist prejudice as it may be, is not only about failing to meet certain standards of hygiene but about who has the power to include or not. And they do it because they can.

Ironically, the Zuma-Gupta complex of the state-in-the-serviceof-minority-capital has brought us – the divorced rainbow nationists – into an emerging alliance committed to chasing “those crazy bald heads out of town”.

But there is an aspect of a low intensive conversation, occasionally a shouting match, that I wish to touch on this week. It is the matter of who the land belongs to – as in long occupation and historic association – and, fundamentally, who owns it.

I will meander a bit off the road of nation-building but, inshallah, you might see it as a necessary and clarifying detour.

Folk who self-identify as Khoisan have, to my recall, raised the claim of first-nation status since the 1990s. I remember the late Father Bennie Witbooi randomly telling me: “I am happy that I am not a coloured.” Bennie was clear about his Khoisan ancestry and his was a prophetic and pioneering view about this aspect of South Africa’s history and the people who lived it.

I should declare at this point that swimming happily in my gene pool is the mitochondrial haplogroup, L0d of the Khoe-San people. This is in the matrilineal – as in ‘maBessie – branch of my DNA tree.

So we coloured people rightly assert our claim on the land and view ourselves as Mzantsi landlords. We are the real MaKhoisas, a First Nation people. Yet I am uncomfortable about a growing and divisive distinction between “us” first nation people versus the inkomers from up north aspect of the national discourse.

I suggest that we have embraced a North American understanding of the First Nation Native American and the Second Nations who sailed from Europe, stole the land and gradually, spiritually and socially, alienated the people of the land from that which had defined their sense of place and belonging.

How can any African not be First Nation to this continent? The Arabic word waqf, in the instance of property, is under the stewarding management of a Mosque committee. Ultimately everything belongs to God.

We all belong to the land and that sense should determine how we co-exist with others who share the land with us. Colonialism has emphasised the privatisation of land. That acquisitory past must be kept in critical focus when debating the land question and the accumulated wealth premised on dispossession.

The emphasis from some sectors of the coloured community that we arrived in the Greater Southern African region long before others must be seen for what it is – a response to an African chauvinism with its self-attributed right to decide who is an African and who is not. We must listen to those voices. We might not appreciate how things are said but we must listen to each other.