South Africa’s land lies and the real fix - Andrew Kenny
Key topics:
The land debate is clouded by emotion, dishonesty, and racial vagueness
Original land owners were the Bushmen, displaced by Bantu and Europeans
True solution: give full title deeds and jobs, not seize property for the state
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By Andrew Kenny*
“We’re saying to the white people, let’s live together in peace, but we can’t live in peace if you don’t give us back what you stole from us.” So said Julius Malema at a Youth Day rally last week at the King Zwelithini Stadium in Kwazulu-Natal.
Who is “us”? The indigenous people of South Africa? The people who have been living here for over 100,000 years? Or the people of Malema’s ethnic group, who stole their land? By “us” does Malema mean his ancestors who invaded what is now South Africa about 1,500 years ago, conquered the ancient South African people and drove them out of the land they had been living in for tens of thousands of years?
The endless debate about land ownership in South Africa is characterised by emotion, dishonesty, elitism and, above all, vagueness. The arguments are all cloudy and if you ask for clarity you are shouted down. What do you mean by “the rightful owners” of land in South Africa? What do you mean by “black” and “African”? When you say X% of the people in South Africa own Y% of the land, do you mean by area or by value? What evidence have you got for land hunger among ordinary black people? None of these questions are answered.
My opening sentence was on Julius Malema’s latest announcement on land. There is nothing special about Malema; I could have quoted a dozen local political leaders saying the same thing, with the same mixture of bigotry and dishonesty. Malema lives in sumptuous luxury while black working-class children starve; he worships everything capitalist for himself, including transport, fashion accessories, education and medical care, while demanding that the working classes must be forced to have everything socialist, everything run by the state. He screams against “whiteness”, but sends his own children to private schools with white teachers; and from his mansion in Hyde Park he rants about land ownership while contradicting himself at every turn. Nothing unusual about that. The leaders of the ANC, SACP, MK, and others do the same. I have only chosen him because the mass media always choose him and give him maximum publicity for everything he says. On this occasion he spoke about stolen land.
No idea
There is no doubt about the original owners of land in South Africa. They were the Bushmen, who have lived here, all over South Africa, for at least 100,000 years. They had never met any other people and so had no name for themselves. The first whites in the Cape had no idea of their history in the rest of South Africa but saw these hunter-gatherers living in the bush and so called them “Bushmen”. The people themselves had no objection to this term, which confirmed their affinity with land. But later, patronising white anthropologists shrank from so earthy and African a term, and heard the Khoikhoi calling them “San”, which means “rascals” or “bad men”, and thought it sounded suitably academic, and so decided to call them by this racist term. If you call the Bushmen “San”, you are either ignorant or racist.
The ANC makes it compulsory to classify South Africans by race. By law you must declare whether your employers and students are “African”, “Coloured”, “Indian”, “Asian” or “white”. The ANC refuses point blank to define these terms. You will be punished if you do not classify human beings by race, and you will be denounced if you ask what these race categories mean. In other words, you are compelled to be an arbitrary racist. Actually, when they say “African” they really mean “Bantu”, which is an accurate, ancient, unambiguous and honorable term, proudly used by these black people all over Africa and the Americas – except in South Africa. “Bantu” means “human”.
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The Bantu originated in West Africa a long time ago. They are the most important ethnic group in the world, with a huge genetic variety. There is a greater genetic difference between two Bantu tribes living 100 km apart than there is between Chinese and English people living 12,000 km apart. Some thousands of years ago, some Bantu moved into east Africa where they came into contact with cattle herders and steelmakers. They picked up these technologies and some moved south, crossing the northern border of what is now South Africa about 1,500 years ago, maybe 2,000 years ago. Their technology and social organisation were superior to that of the Bushmen, and they displaced them, kicking them out of the lands of their ancestors. They intermingled with the Bushmen to some extent, marrying Bushmen women or at any rate having children by them. They picked up something of the Bushman languages, including the click sounds. Nelson Mandela is a product of their intermingling. DNA tests showed he has some Bushman blood, and the high cheekbones of his handsome face suggest the same. (By his looks, I think Jan Smuts probably had some Bushman blood too.)
Became the Boers
The Bantu, with many tribes, often in conflict with each other, moved south into KZN and then westward into the Eastern Cape. (All of these provincial names only came later.) They stopped at the Fish River because their summer rainfall crops would not grow in the winter rainfall Western Cape. The first European settlement was in Cape Town in 1652. Free burghers from Flanders were brought out to grow crops for the ships of the Dutch East India company. They became the Boers. The Boers moved north and east, killing Bushmen on their way. The Boers eventually met with the Bantu in the Eastern Cape towards the end of the 18th Century. So the Boers, white men, lived in the Western Cape centuries before the Bantu. Does this give them more right to own land there than the Bantu?
The Western Cape produced probably the most varied and confused mixture of races, languages and cultures on Earth. Bushmen, Khoikhoi, Europeans, Malays, Bantu, Caribbeans and others mingled together in commerce and conflict. They produced the gracious Cape Dutch farmsteads and a particularly vicious form of slavery. Today the human result is the “Coloured” population, who are the majority of people in the Western Cape, and almost certainly have more genes of the indigenous people of South Africa than anybody else, except of course for the few remaining survivors of the original people themselves.
If you believe that the “rightful owners” of South Africa were the original occupants, then everybody else, Bantu (black African), white and Indian must give back their land to the Bushmen. Julius Malema, get out of your multi-million-rand mansions in Hyde Park and Limpopo, give them back to the Bushmen, and go back to West Africa where you come from! The trouble is there are so few Bushmen left. Well then, give the land back to people with Bushmen blood, including a large number of Coloured people and black people such as Nelson Mandela. The more Bushman blood you have, the more land you are entitled to. Does this sound like a just and fair settlement? A practical one?
Or should land be given back to people based on who got there first after the Bushman? Whites got to the Western Cape before the Bantu, so should all blacks owning land there give it back to whites, especially Afrikaners? Should President Ramaphosa give back his mansion in Fresnaye (worth a monthly rental of R175,000) to some poor Afrikaner whose ancestor moved to the Cape three centuries ago?
Nation or tribe?
Or should land be given back to people according to the size of their races in South Africa? Or maybe in each part of South Africa? Bantu make up 81% of the total population, so should they own 81% of the land? Or should it be further broken down by nation or tribe? The Zulus are 25% of the population, so should they own 25% of the land? Or should it be by region? In the Western Cape, the Coloureds are the biggest population, so should they own the most land?
The ANC refuses to define the races but insists on racial classification. Today, using DNA, we could accurately define the races. We could say that if you have certain percentages of this or that gene, you belong to this or that race group. Everybody should be forced to have a DNA analysis of themselves, and then they could be accurately classified by race. Why doesn’t the ANC press for this if it insists on racial classification?
Do you measure land by area or value? The small bits of land in the richest parts of South Africa on which Ramaphosa and Malema have their palaces (small, that is, compared with farms even if huge compared with most people’s house property) are worth far more than hundreds of hectares in the deserts of the Northern Cape. Is it iniquitous that Ramaphosa and Malema own property of much higher value than ordinary South Africans? Should they be compelled to hand back some of this value to the people – by, for example, subdividing their mansions into a large number of tiny flatlets suitable for affordable rents for the working-class people, and living in one themselves?
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Who says there is desperate land hunger in South Africa and what do they mean by it? It seems to me that the only people in South Africa who carry on about land hunger are rich politicians who already own valuable land themselves. Malema is forever bleating about the people’s need for land while he himself owns mansions that he shows no intention of sharing with anybody, least of all the working classes, whom he despises. In 2013, the land minister Gugile Nkwinti said that of the 74,000 successful land claimants, only 5,900 opted for the land itself. The rest, 92%, preferred the cash. This land was farm land. Ordinary black people, like ordinary white people, like me, do not want farmland. What they want is a job and a house. Survey after survey shows this. The number one priority of ordinary black people in South Africa is jobs. Farming is a dangerous, highly risky and back-breaking career that very few people would choose. I’d hate to be a farmer; I found it much easier and safer to work in factories. I couldn’t care less if a small group of people of whatever race, black, brown or white, own a disproportionate amount of farmland, as long as they grow plenty of food for us townsfolk. Malema and the others are lying about farmland being the fundamental issue in South Africa. It isn’t.
Perverse way
But there is a fundamental issue about private property. Private property rights are essential for any healthy prosperous society, which means any capitalist society, since only capitalism has ever been able to make all the people prosperous. Karl Marx recognised this in a perverse way. He admitted that capitalism with private property was wonderfully productive. But he hated it and said that the first requirement for communism was the abolition of private property. He was responding to a profound prejudice, deep within his psyche, and deep within the psyche of so many superior people of all nations, that ordinary people should not be allowed to own their own property.
Communists, who are always from the snobbish classes, hate the idea of ordinary people having title deeds to their own property. They hate it. In South Africa, the government owns vast tracts of land doing nothing much. Why not just give it away free to ordinary people with full title deeds so that they can build their own houses on them, and start up their own factories, using their own property as surety from the banks for loan and capital? No! No! No! The ANC elite can’t bear the thought. Neither can Malema; the EFF manifesto echoes Karl Marx and says only the state should own land. In Tafelkop, Limpopo, the state gave land to black farmers on 30-year leases but not on title. David Rakgase, a successful black farmer, tried desperately to get title for the land he worked but was always refused.
The 2025 Expropriation Act, signed into law by President Ramaphosa, makes it crystal clear in Chapter 5, 12 (3) that any property may be seized by the state with “nil compensation” provided only that it is “in the public interest”, which could mean anything at all. Since communists do not believe in any private property ownership, any communist in the government (which means most people in the government) could seize any private property they wanted. This is precisely in line with Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and the ANC’s National Democratic Revolution. In practice of course, what Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro and Julius Malema meant by the abolition of private property was the abolition of all property ownership except by the state, which meant except by themselves. In Russia in 1930, Stalin owned everything. Julius Malema wants the same for himself when he takes over the state. Lenin and Stalin cared only for power not for wealth. Every communist leader who followed cared for power and wealth. Our local communist-leaning leaders and would-be leaders, including Malema, are the same.
Easy to solve
The land problem, like so many problems in South Africa, is easy to solve. Give full title deeds to all people, even if they are poor and black, to all who ask for them and are entitled to them. Full title means total ownership, the right to do whatever the owner wants with the land, including the right to sell it to anybody else.
There is plenty of state-owned land for this. Then just listen to the call of ordinary black people, mainly poor black people, as shown in survey after survey. The people want jobs; give them jobs without the restrictions of the rich man’s restrictive labour laws. People want services; they want the best services and don’t care about the race that provides them. Give them the best services.
Set our people free. Let the people own their own land.
*Andrew Kenny is a writer, an engineer and a classical liberal.
This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission