The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
As a subject land is a matter that all living beings should have some deep understanding and knowledge of.
However, the obvious nature of the subject of land tends to conceal the fact that as a resource land is not one thing to everyone but it is many different things to different people. Human beings in different places do not experience land in the same way.
There is more to land than just the land, that is the soil and its many properties and belongings, it is metaphysical. Malcolm X told but half the story when he poignantly observed that “revolution is based on land, land is the basis of all independence, land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.”
For the reason that land is one resource upon which other resources are based and landed, land becomes the resource of resources and therefore a volatile source of competition and conflict.
All wars and revolutions are in more than one way based on and concerned with land and the goods and services that are founded and landed on it. To be landed at the end of the day is to experience land with dignity, power and pride. In that way land is liberation itself.
The Conquest of the Land
The conquest of Granada in the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 that resulted in the “discovery” and Christianisation of the New World or the Americas was first and foremost a conquest of the land that was followed by the subjugation and objectification of the natives.
That, in many ways was the beginning of the modern colonial world system that is capitalist, Christian, Euro-American, western, patriarchal and violent. It is then that land became not only nourishing nature but a natural resource to be exploited in the market, and to be reduced to property.
In Africa, the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 was the arrival of the Euro-American world system that had the continent sliced up into convenient territories for colonial administration and exploitation.
Ali Mazrui was correct that the Berlin Conference was the empowerment of western powers in Africa and the production of Africans into vulnerable peoples that were to be objects and some subjects of the land and not citizens.
The metaphor of the knife of Otto von Bismarck cutting into the African cake is telling of the political and psychological violence that constituted the slicing up of the continent, division of peoples and what Ngugi wa Thiongo has described as dismemberment of the continent.
The physical maps and borders that were constructed by the conquerors also became political and ideological, turned some people into natives and others into foreigners on the land, insiders and outsiders.
The divisions on the land were used to produce political identities. Conquest produced settlers and natives, powerful and powerless people on the land.
In mapping and bordering the land the conquerors also classified people, distributed and circulated power in racist, colonial and unequal ways.
The creation of the scarcity and competition of the land turned nativity, which is belonging to the land, into nativism which is the toxic competition and political discrimination based on location and belonging to the land.
In that way, land moved from just being a geographic location to being a historical, political, cultural, spiritual, economic and psychological location.
Powerful political ideologies and passions such as nationalism and patriotism were first and foremost landed energies and beliefs that are founded on land as power. To land is to hold and experience power and to use it.
The many ways of Landing
Mother Earth in reference to the land is a politically correct but a misleading ideological statement that conceals the fact that land has really not been for women in the world, it is called after women but it is not theirs. In reality land has been constructed to be male and to be for men first.
As people live and die on the land over time land has become a site of history, memory and heritage. For that reason, colonial invasion was not only physical violence but also a deeply sociological and psychological calamity that Nelson Maldonado-Torres has called a “metaphysical catastrophe,” a disaster that goes beyond what can be seen.
The colonial transformation of the land from a nourishing and sustaining garden and mother to a natural resource, property and means of production was also a removal of the spirituality of the land and an introduction of land as a substance and commodity.
The natives that had land as the source of their livelihood, their identity and a shrine where the bones of their ancestors were resting were forced to disinvest their sentimentalism from the land.
Colonialism was for that reason a violent theft of spirits and violation of the spiritual universe of the colonised. In the same way, land was violently transformed from a communal space of life and happiness to political territory that has its owners and aliens, insiders and outsiders. Land itself was raped, robbed of its minerals, water, plants and fertility.
Its communal provisions were rationed, privatised, commercialised and artificial scarcities were created to increase the private and commercial value of the land.
In a way colonisation with its capitalist ideologies was in a strong way a way of landing and invading the native universe and co-opting it into the Euro-American world system.
Different people have, as a consequence, become different things on the land and the land has become different things to different people, land has become a contested site of history and politics.
Margaret Mitchell spoke for many when she said “the land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it’s the only thing that lasts.” In a way to live is to be landed. Land is the stage and setting of all the history and life.
Beyond the Anthropocene
When an Empire builder and imperialists such as Cecil John Rhodes said “I prefer land to niggers” he expressed how imperialists elevated themselves above the land and degenerated some human beings below it, the colonised became objects and not citizens of the land in their own territory.
To separate the humanity of some human beings from the land and give them the status of objects and things was one of the ways in which coloniality dehumanised the colonised. In an anthropocentric way, Empire builders and colonial merchants elevated themselves above the land as masters of nature and the universe and demoted the conquered to objects on the land.
That is what basically has been called the coloniality of nature. Through greedy and artless ways of mastering and conquering nature Empire has sparked an ecological crisis where land and the atmosphere around it have come to threaten human beings and other forms of life with extinction.
The land and the atmosphere are not home to only human beings but also plant and animal life. There is also a host of other macro and micro beings that have land and the atmosphere as their home. Even some seemingly lifeless objects have the land as their abode.
Land is a complex ecosystem that has value beyond simple human interest and benefit. Attitudes to land and to nature at large should go beyond the Anthropocene to the planetary where all lives, human and non-human, matter.
In some indigenous cultures land is named and ceremonialised like a living being on its own. Mountains and rivers are given individuality and personality.
The paradox of landness in Africa is that landscapes that were colonised with chaos, violence and disorder now have to be decolonised through law, process and order.
Not only that but the fact that there is more to land than just the soil is minimised so much so that the land as a source of identity, dignity and a form of heritage is ignored.
The materiality of land is elevated above its spiritual, psychological and social value. To decolonise land is not simply to remove settlers but also to return land to its sacred status as nature and a site of all history and life.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Pretoria: [email protected].
