Martinique philosopher and revolutionary, Franz Fanon, argues that "For a colonised people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity" (Fanon, 1963). This argument is at the heart of the recognition that the resolution of the land question is fundamental to colonised people not only because of its economic attributes, its capacity to provide food security and other livelihood necessities, but because it is at the core of the essence of their humanity. Land is a source of dignity precisely because it is a source of heritage and of belonging.
The land question shaped our resistance and liberation struggles. Since the advent of colonialism, indigenous people of our land have been at war in a quest to reclaim their dispossessed land from colonisers to whom the value of the land is largely commercial. While the Natives Land Act, 1913 (No. 27 of 1913) cemented the dispossession of land from the native majority, the reality of the situation is that land dispossession had begun much earlier. But the Natives Land Act, 1913 (No. 27 of 1913) is an important point of reference for our analysis into the ways in which contemporary struggles and the legacy of socio-economic injustice is inherited from our colonial and apartheid past. Of this, the first General Secretary of the South African Native National Congress (Predecessor to the African National Congress), Plaatje (2007), had this to say: "Awakening on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth".
Modise and Mtshiselwa (2013), employing a historico-ecclesiastical approach, contend that the Natives Land Act, 1913 (No. 27 of 1913) engineered the generational poverty afflicting Black people that persists in the post apartheid dispensation. This was achieved through a systematic process of simultaneous de-agrarianisation and proletarianisation.
According to Kepe and Ntsebeza (2012), while the retribalisation process that the apartheid government engineered through laws such as the Bantu Authorities Act, 1951 (No. 68 of 1951) and the Self-Government Act, 1959 (No. 46 of 1959) reduced the importance of land in the livelihood of villagers in the Bantustans as intended, it also created a need for the bureaucracy to be administered by Black people belonging to the Bantustans. And so, to replace the White human resource that had administered services to the Bantustans prior to the denaturalisation of Black people, Blacks had to be skilled to become clerks and professionals such as nurses, police officers and teachers.
This development resulted in the growth of schools meant to produce Black bureaucrats for Bantustans, and so parents started sending their children to schools where they would learn non-agricultural activities, leading to the disappearance of agriculture from the school curricula (Southall, 1982). Furthermore, having lost their source of income because of the dispossession of land and now also compelled to pay rent, Black people were forced into the labour market to accumulate money. Thus, the de-agrarianisation and proletarianisation of Black people was architected.
The Native Land Act, 1913 (No. 27 of 1913) is demonstrative of the ways in which landlessness and disenfranchisement have historically acted as mechanisms of exclusion. Black people were not only excluded from the economy, their very way of life was interrupted. Prior to the colonial and apartheid project of land dispossession and disenfranchisement, Black people in South Africa could be regarded as semi-nomadic pastoralists who moved primarily to occupy new grazing areas for their livestock. But under the impact of global industrialisation and the colonialist and apartheid process of transforming the peasantry into wage workers, and to meet the insatiable requirements of the mining, manufacturing and agricultural industries, Black people were forced into the labour market.
It is imperative to understand that the economies of Bantustans were never developed by the apartheid regime. Bantustans relied almost entirely on the strong economy of White South Africa – an economy that had been built on the backs of Black labour, including migrant labour from neighbouring countries, particularly in the mining sector. Bantustans could not even maintain food sovereignty because land into which Black people had been restricted by the Native Land Act, 1913 (No. 27 of 1913) was not arable and thus was poor for agriculture. Soil erosion and overgrazing because of a disproportionate population on a small land area worsened the condition of the already poor land. This was done in order that millions of Black people would be compelled to provide the labour needed in White South Africa to survive. And today, because of these pervasive structural inequalities that confront former Bantustan areas, many are seeking to escape rural poverty by migrating to the cities where industry offers them better scope for employment.
The apartheid regime, through legislation and other mechanisms, cemented the idea that Black people are not truly part of South Africa. But it was not only through violent means and draconian laws that this exclusion was achieved, but in the use of appeal to authority through scholarship. Land dispossession and economic disenfranchisement were the logical conclusion to a historical assault on Black people’s claims to belonging. The erasure of Black people from South Africa was aided by colonial scholars and historians such as William Curry Holden who propagated the unscientific and discredited Vacant Land Theory2 that sought to legitimise European settlers’ claims to South African land.
It is not an accident of history that the colonial and apartheid regimes propagated this narrative that is supported by no historical or archaeological evidence. It was important, in order to make sense of dispossession, to subject Black people to systematic erasure. Historical erasure has always been used as a strategy for colonial imposition, because violently expropriating people of their land and economy demands first the violent and systematic erasure of their humanity, their sense of belonging and ultimately, their very claims to citizenship. Wolfe (2006) demonstrates this in his argument that settler colonial ism in the United States of America not only had elements of native genocide, but that such erasure employed the organising grammar of race to legitimise the encoding and reproduction of the unequal relationships into which the White European settlers violently coerced the colonised natives who would ultimately be rendered landless.
Landlessness, in radically altering the way of life of Black people, impedes on their identity and therefore, their legitimate claims to truly belonging, their stake in the South African nation. The relationship between landownership and belonging has been profoundly articulated by the residents of Xolobeni in the Amadiba Tribal Authority in the Eastern Cape Province, where an ongoing anti-mining struggle between the people and the democratic government is laying bare the ways in which the state and capital play a collaborationist role in undermining the land rights of rural communities. Mahlatsi (2018) contends that the unconstitutionality of the state’s actions in Xolobeni is a violation of their constitutionally enshrined rights to environmental protection and land security. This takes us back to the definition of citizenship as defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, which defines it as "the state of being a member of a particular country and having rights because of it". If the rights of a people to land justice are violated by the state itself, what of their citizenship that ought to be a guarantee of their rights?