The March of Hope

By Qurratul-Ain-Tahmina

Far from the madding crowds of Sandton, landless people of Africa, Latin America, and Asia are getting ready for their showdown march to the main venue of the summit today.

The organisers of the gathering, Landless People’s Movement (LPM), National Land Committee (NLC) of South Africa and La Via Campesina, a global coalition of farmers, say that so far they have about 5,000 delegates and another 5,000 will be coming for the march.

Disillusioned with the intentions and efforts of the world leaders to end poverty and bring about sustainable development, the landless carry on with their networking in the dilapidated fortress of an old amusement centre in Shareworld, on the fringes of Johannesburg.

Yesterday, the third day of the landless people’s week, they celebrated their international assembly. The ramshackle castle came alive with people singing and marching round, voices and hands raised in solidarity and in strong demand for the return of their lands.

Dark-skinned peasant women stirring huge pots of millet porridge and tomato soup greeted the few WSSD delegates who took the trouble to go there. They were obviously enjoying themselves. As Lydia Matsaung and Anki from Limpopo told me in broken English: “We like here. We’re welcome and we are united.”

“We need more land,” they added. “We want to grow our millet, vegetable, fruits and also want to build our houses.”

Wilfred Molulsoane, a lanky black youth from a squatter settlement in Eikenh said: “We have no water, no land. I want to tell Mbeki – come to the people here, we gave you power, give us a better life.”

Israel Matebele, a black man from the north-west region of Mafikeng said: “I have no document for the land I live on. We are in strong poverty.”

The problem of landlessness in South Africa is exclusively of the black people, said Samantha Hargreaves, an organiser. “All their land had been stolen from them through the process of colonisation over a period of over three hundred years,” explained Hargreaves. “Apartheid further cornered them. When democracy was restored eight years ago, the black people who constitute nearly 90 percent of the population possessed only 13 percent of the land. And 85 percent of the land was in the hands of only 60,000 white farmers.”

The new government took a land reforms policy but that has some basic flaws, said Hargreaves. “Although we have been closely lobbying with the policy makers, it was the World Bank’s influence that won. By this policy people could only buy back their land with small grants from the government. The process now favours those who have money.”

So far only one percent of agricultural land has changed hands. Moreover, a South African constitutional provision protects the existing inequitable order, say activists. There are problems with the land tenure system and the legal frameworks of ownership too.

The two South African organisations are now lobbying the government to expropriate all unused, unproductive (game reserves) land, land of abusive farmers, absentee and indebted owners and “give it to the landless people for cultivation of food”.

Another aspect of the problem is the squatter camps of the rural migrants in the urban areas which the government periodically empties. The evictions increased, the activists say, so the government could present a clean face at the summit. The activists are calling for a moratorium on all such evictions. The rural population and the urban squatters together, around 18-20 million people, are effectively landless in South Africa, said organisers.

Declaring that there can be no developments without land, the representatives of the landless believe that the poor and the dispossessed have nothing to gain from the summit.

Jean-Mare Desfilhes, an organiser, said the summit was like a movie to him: “Funny or stupid, that, I don’t know, but a movie all right. It has the bad men and good men and all the elements. A movie cannot solve problems.”

“The world leaders began talking about the environment and poverty eradication in 1972 in Stockholm,” pointed out Hargreaves. “Today all we can find is 30 years of broken promises. We learnt that this summit would be dominated by the rich nations and the World Bank, big businesses and such. We do not believe that any good can come out of it for the poor.”

On Saturday they will go to Sandton not with any hope, but just to show world leaders what is happening in the real world, say the organisers.