Promised Land. Karl Kemp
who was nursing her terminally ill mother. She broke down in tears when she read the message. Dlamini’s friend, Ntokozo Qwabe, published a description of the incident on Facebook, concluding:
Moral of the story: the time has come when no white person will be absolved. We are tired of ‘not all white people’ and all other bullshit. We are here, and we want the stolen land back. No white person will be out here living their best life while we are out here being a landless and dispossessed black mass. NO white person shall rest. It is irrelevant whether you personally have land/wealth or you don’t. Go to your fellow white people & mobilise for them to give us the land back. That will be the starting point of all our interactions from now. We will agitate all our spaces with the big question: WHERE IS THE LAND?
Qwabe had been at the forefront of the ‘Fallist’ campaigns that began with #RhodesMustFall in 2015. He was, ironically, a Rhodes Scholar and had been studying at Oxford University on the back of the famous study fund created by arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes when the incident occurred. His friends and peers are poets, graphic designers and PhD students – people who live in urban centres and write about intersectionality and queer theory as part of the land debate. As Qwabe indicated in his post, ‘land’ and ‘wealth’ are considered interchangeable – at least according to some. Much of this kind of rhetoric is derived from anti-colonial writers like Frantz Fanon, who wrote in his influential 1961 treatise, The Wretched of the Earth: ‘For a colonized 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.’ This line is ubiquitous in the new land debate, appearing in forums as varied as High Court judgments, political rallies and Facebook posts. The inherently flexible concept of ‘dignity’, in particular, has taken on a resonance that brooks no argument and is frequently invoked, to the ire of those who tend to think in more concrete and tangible terms. Incidents like this are a good summation of the new, fraught conversation about land in this country, where the goalposts are constantly shifted.
What exactly is meant when the EFF and individuals like Qwabe and his Fallist comrades demand that whites ‘return the land’? When it was first launched, the land reform programme had a very defined purpose, and much of it centred on agricultural land. Rough estimates of the number of commercial farmers in South Africa today range from 30 000 to 40 000. It doesn’t take an analyst to deduce that even if every single farmer were to be replaced by an emerging black farmer, it would hardly make a dent in the impoverished masses’ landownership statistics. Contemporary politics has transformed the cause’s esoteric aims, and the later stages of the land reform progamme are a far more general call for the redistribution of resources, with ‘land’ as a catch-all justification.
The most pressing aspect of the land debate is arguably in and around urban metros. Minister of human settlements Lindiwe Sisulu tacitly acknowledged this when she announced during the July 2019 budget vote that her department would be ‘the first expropriators’ – specifically that ‘with the new draft legislation for expropriation in the pipeline we will make sure that we are the first takers in the queue for expropriated land’. This was followed by various statements about state-owned land being released for housing, and an indefinite national moratorium on the release of any land owned by state entities for purposes other than that.
EWC appears to be a mechanism by which many of the biggest pressures on state coffers may be relieved, a hammer with which to smash every inequity of the past, all stemming from the great colonial land grab. The recent spate of reports and committees appointed by government as part of the process of amending the Constitution all focus on the very broad ‘land question’, which now encompasses everything from urban housing to economic opportunity.
The way that EWC has been framed and sold, with all the talk of ‘returning the land’ and colonial land-grabbing being put right, many people, white and black, often conceive of it as a specific and targeted plan. When it was first mooted, it was seen as a way to seize that most obvious sign of illegitimate white wealth and the base of Afrikaner identity – farms. This idea was due in part to a comparison with what happened across the border in Zimbabwe, but the situations are different. Farms are by no means safe, but EWC is a far more nefarious concept than the ‘fast-track land reform’ of South Africa’s northern neighbour. If explained correctly, EWC would most likely generate a far less enthusiastic response from proponents outside government. More importantly, it would be far harder to sell, as it is not a quick one-two punch to the beneficiaries of colonialism and apartheid but a subtle deepening of state power across the board. Officials like Sisulu are quite open about what EWC means to them, and that the scope of land reform has extended beyond its original aims, but the emotional core of the debate remains the same as it was back in 1997 – whites took the land and must now return it.
There are still many land scholars who argue that addressing inequality is a bottom-up process and who are attempting to narrow the focus back to finding solutions for rural subsistence farmers in order to stem the flood of people to the country’s metros, for example. These far less emotive issues are a matter of common sense, comprising trends and patterns that government isn’t blind to but seemingly prefers to keep on the down-low in order to avoid a more sensible policy-making process. There is evidence that government is aware of the looming urbanisation crisis in state-commissioned reports; for example, there is this from a 450-page Rural Development Plan for the Fezile Dabi district in the Free State province, published in November 2016 in terms of the Comprehensive Rural Development Programme launched by the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform:
The development of a[n] RDP (Rural Development Plan) is done within an environment characterised by strong emerging trends, which include: i. Strong urbanisation trend where 80% of South Africa’s population is expected to be urbanised by 2050 ii. the rapid densification of urban informal settlements (and the areas on the fringes of major towns), and the emergence of rural settlements forms [sic] which continue to rely less on agriculture and more on urban cash economies, especially in the construction, trade and transport sectors iii. the emergence of a rural-urban space economy that is now complicated by declining rural poverty share (due to massive increase in social grants and remittances), and rising urban poverty (due to rural-urban migration), and the implication for planning intervention iv. the rapid shift away from agricultural employment in favour of wage employment even in the former traditional areas as evidenced by the declining contribution of agriculture to household income, and the existence of large areas of underutilised arable land v. the continued failure of development programmes to revitalise rural areas despite huge capital expenditures and outlays.
Or this, from a similar plan for the ZF Mgcawu district in the Northern Cape, published in March 2017:
Globally, the world has entered an age of de-industrialisation. In South Africa, there is a marked contrast between the former commercial farming areas and the former homeland or communal areas, where large numbers of rural people still migrate to urban areas to seek employment. Rural settlements are often large and sprawling, infrastructure is frequently lacking, and arable land is scarce, particularly in the arid climate of the Northern Cape. Rural households in these areas also have markedly lower household incomes than urban households or their commercial farming neighbours, with many falling below the minimum living level or poverty line. As a result, people are forced to seek employment elsewhere in the towns and cities creating strong urban linkages and dependencies for the majority of households.
Population growth in ZF Mgcawu DM has been slow, averaging just 0.7 per cent over the past fifteen years. This may be due to out-migration that has been observed in the Northern Cape as a whole (possibly due to the decline in mining and agriculture industries, as well as the increased mechanisation of these industries.)
Or this, from another Rural Development Plan for the Namakwa District Municipality in the Northern Cape, also published in March 2017:
[I]t is evident that both the poverty pocket concentrations and economic potential is aligned which proofs [sic] that migration towards built up areas is a real cause of concern. Urban built up areas cannot accommodate the current migration patterns from rural to urban settlements.
This issue is found in government reports but never in government speeches or the policy sold to the masses. Land for housing in urban areas