Land is such a complex concept, especially in a country like South Africa. It is the origin of our national trauma as a country and continues to underpin our hopes for full liberation beyond the legal emancipation of 1994. It remains one of the biggest criticisms of Nelson Mandela's presidency – what was it all for if we do not have the land back?
Land is more than a physical resource or asset, it is important for the psychological and spiritual well-being of people – to be connected to the land of your ancestors and forebearers is of fundamental importance in considering the Land Question, as it has come to be known.
During the 2019 elections, land reform rhetoric became a tool to garner votes from Black South Africans who had the hopes of getting back their ancestral land that was stripped away because of land dispossession during colonisation and pieces of legislation such as the Glen Grey Act of 1894 and the Land Apportionment Act of 1930. Even as late as 1997, a year after the new Constitution was signed into law, there were reports of Black landowners in the Western Cape being evicted from their land by roving bands of men in bakkies at night, carrying guns and setting fire to large regions of Black-owned land.
With the benefit of hindsight, the laser focus on the Land Question ended up being little more than pretence by the government, characterised by surface-level discussions that yielded little to no results. “Land expropriation without compensation” was all everyone talked about, from academics, writers, politicians and economists to farmers. With steps and goals being quickly dismissed because of superficial reasons like “the economy will crumble,” ‘they do not have the skills to properly utilise this land,” “this policy is too radical,” and “the Constitution does not allow for expropriation without compensation.”
The failures of the 2019 ambitious call for “land expropriation without compensation” is reflective of the failures of the government to afford Black people a fundamental aspect of traditional identity back. Matters of land and the process of resolving issues of land are often held back by the lack of political will, specifically by the government. We had the minister of land reform and rural development argue that restitution is impossible specifically because our Constitution does not allow it. The very Constitution that is meant to save the interest of the majority of the people living within the country, credited as one of the best constitutions in the world, is said to simply not be able to resolve the Land Question, which was the basis of the Black struggle for liberation from colonialism and apartheid.
If the current state of the Land Question continues, we will be in the same space in the next century.
One of the main consequences that need to be taken into consideration and taken as a premise for land reform is what Professor Tshepo Madlingozi describes as “Pariahdom”. Madlingozi defines this as a constitutive and foundational settler-colonial condition that limits and confines indigenous people, who have been historically enslaved, for instance, Black people in South Africa and other oppressed groups who have lived experiences of "homelessness, unhomeliness, namelessness, rootlessness and ultimately wordlessness".
The revolution is incomplete without effective land reform. The state of extreme inequality will persist if the Land Question is not addressed in full. The struggle continues.
On 2 November 2023 the Nelson Mandela Foundation hosted a dialogue on the Land Question, titled “Does land still matter?”. The Foundation’s Head of Dialogue and Advocacy, Sumaya Hendricks, opened the dialogue as a space for us to reckon with the past.
Click on the link to engage with this conversation between advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi SC and director of the Land and Accountability Research Centre Nolundi Luwaya: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvH7CKvf09g