SOUTH AFRICA: THE LAND SHALL BELONG TO THOSE WHO WORK IT

By Thabo Mbeki and - - Reprint | | Print |

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PRETORIA, Jul 1 2003 (IPS) - It has been 90 years since the government of the newly-formed Union of South Africa passed the infamous Native Land Act, which gave legislative effect to a process of land seizure by white settlers that had been going on since 1652, writes Thabo Mbeki, president of South Africa. Adoption of this law has brought untold suffering to generations of black people, the author writes in this article for IPS. Through this and other racist legislation, millions of our people were uprooted from their land, their homes bulldozed, and their dignity destroyed. Recognising the importance of the land question to many of our people, the democratically-elected post-Apartheid government passed the Restitution of Land Rights Act 22 of 1994, which provided a legal framework to address and resolve land claims through negotiations. Land acquisition and its productive use are critical to the success we must achieve in pushing back the frontiers of poverty. We are on the way towards meeting the demand contained in the Freedom Charter, drafted by the ANC in 1955: that the land shall belong to those who work it.

It has been 90 years since the government of the newly-formed Union of South Africa passed the infamous Native Land Act, which gave legislative effect to a process of land seizure by white settlers that had been going on since Jan van Riebeeck set foot on the shores of the Cape of Good Hope in 1652.

Adoption of this law has brought untold suffering to generations of black people. Through this and other racist legislation, millions of our people were uprooted from their land, their homes bulldozed, and their dignity destroyed.

The history of land dispossession in our country is inseparable from the brutal system of colonialism and apartheid. Three years before passage of the Land Act, in 1910, Britain had formed a whites-only government that combined the whites-only republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State, as well as the Natal and Cape colonies.

The formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 represented the political consolidation of the military defeat of the African kingdoms and the legalisation of white minority rule by British imperialism. The new Union government was a government by white people for white people. There was not even a pretence that any of the rights of the black majority would be respected.

In 1912 representatives of the African people formed the African National Congress (ANC) to fight for the freedom of the black people and reverse the negative consequences of the colonialism and apartheid pursued by successive white regimes.

The next important step in consolidating the military victory of the settlers regarded land. In 1913 the new government passed the Land Act, designed to reserve most of the territory of South Africa for exclusive ownership and use by the white minority. Other laws, including the Group Areas Act, further restricted the possibility of blacks to own land and denied them freedom of movement.

In the post-World War II period, in yet another round of the process of land dispossession, an estimated 3.5 million people were forcibly removed. Most of the dispossessed were dumped in the Bantustans, the labour reservoirs originally called native reserves. Though they comprised at least 80 percent of the population, the Africans ended up occupying at best 13 percent of their motherland.

The loss of land led to among other things widespread homelessness, the absence of security of tenure, overcrowding, unstable families, rural-urban migration, the degradation of the soil, and severe limitations on the possibility of Africans to pursue meaningful agricultural and agro-industrial activities. The denial of Africans the right to own land in urban areas, coupled with the migratory labour system, led to family break-down and dysfunction and the spread of slums.

Because Africans were regarded as temporary migrants, no essential services were provided for them in the residential areas designated for blacks within the white areas, and no property rights were accorded to them. This was because it was decreed that their permanent homes were in the Bantustans.

However, our people did not meekly submit to these inhuman practices. Under the leadership of the ANC they mounted many heroic struggles to resist forced removal and the imposition of the various laws that sought to make blacks foreigners in their own country.

The more repressive the laws the white minority governments passed and enforced, the more resistance they encountered.

In 1994 our people, who had placed their confidence in the ANC from its foundation, crowned their heroic struggles with an overwhelming victory in the elections that brought to an end centuries of colonialism and apartheid, beginning a new era of transformation and the undoing of the damage caused by the racist policies of the past.

One of the main challenges facing the new democratic government was and remains the urgent redress of the centuries-old legacy of land dispossession.

Recognising the importance of the land question to many of our people, the government passed the Restitution of Land Rights Act 22 of 1994, which provided a legal framework to address and resolve land claims through negotiations.

Today, through the restitution, redistribution, and land tenure reform programmes, more than 1.3 million hectares have been transferred to the formerly dispossessed, including the more than 590,000 hectares under the land restitution programme.

Since 1994, the government has built more than a million houses for the poor, mainly black, and handed over to the people the houses that they rented for many years but were denied the right to own because it was said that these properties were in ”white South Africa”. The new owners of both new and old houses also own the land on which these houses stand. Many others have been given tenure rights in places in which they were born and had worked for all their lives.

Land acquisition and its productive use are critical to the success we must achieve in pushing back the frontiers of poverty.

Ninety years after the passage of the 1913 Land Act, we are on the way towards meeting the demand contained in the Freedom Charter, drafted by the ANC in 1955: that the land shall belong to those who work it. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)