The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
Continued from last week
Conquest did not require constitutions, intellectual debates or Parliamentary deliberations, no.
The conqueror enjoyed such power and privilege and conducted the conquest outside reason and law.
The liberator of today does not have the same privilege, power and luxury. There must be consultations, policies and laws before land is redistributed. International super powers and their almighty investors must approve every step; in other words, the land must be taken and redistributed with the permission, happiness, pleasure and participation of those that presently hold it.
Liberators must build a new world in which both the oppressor and the oppressed will be born again as new equal citizens.
The conqueror did not have to worry about the conquered, he simply turned them into, at best labourers and at worst slaves. I invite the present conversation to an awareness of the difference between the world of the conqueror and that of the liberator, and to that the liberator may not in any way imitate the conqueror and decolonise the land by use of massacres and genocides, and still remain a liberator.
Unmasking the Colonial/ modern World System
South Africa and other countries of the Global South are threatened with the death of their economies should they expropriate land without compensation from white commercial farmers. Markets and currency ratings react angrily to news that land will be seized.
The rand goes down tumbling at the mention of land expropriation and redistribution. I argue that there are no powerful, neutral and invisible forces called economic and market forces that lose their temper when white commercial landowners are threatened with the loss of the land.
It is some well-known people, countries and corporations that lose their temper and punish the rand and South Africa.
Whose world and economy, and market forces hate the restoration of land to its historical and just owners? It is definitely not God’s world and economy but that of the conquerors and beneficiaries of colonisation.
There are people, states, organisations and corporations, interested parties, behind what are called economic and market forces that seem to hate decolonisation and fear liberation.
The world system with its political and economic structures is ultimately managed and controlled not just by forces but by some people that have economic and political interests of their own.
The manufacture of Poverty
The conquest, displacement from the land and dispossession of their source of livelihood of the colonised made them poor labourers, slaves and diseased servants of the conquerors and colonised.
Black people in South Africa and the entire Global South are not naturally and therefore normally poor.
They were impoverished and they continue to be impoverished.
Black poverty was constructed, and then naturalised and normalised as common sense. Social and political justice demand that this historical wrong and injustice be corrected. There are no people, under the sun that are supposed to be natural to poverty and disease, there are historical and social explanations to their condition.
It is not God’s wish or the normal black condition that poverty should be so endemic and rampant among black communities.
The Global South has become a crime scene where people have been, in their masses, rendered poor, diseased and turned into slaves, labourers and servants — or criminals and corrupt tricksters. The anger of those that have no land as much as the fear of those that presently hold it are both real and they come from true existential conditions that have to be dealt with.
The Manufacture of Ignorance
The land question is also a knowledge question. Racist and colonial historians have generated and circulated such myths as the idea of empty lands.
The myth holds that conquerors found terra nullius, lands that were clear and unoccupied and they dutifully turned them into productive land. Such myths seek to manufacture and circulate ignorance about the history of blacks and their lands in the South.
Lands were occupied and utilised not only for animal rearing but also farming and wildlife that was the source of food for indigenous communities, contrary to the confabulations of that myth. The animals and trees in the wild were also sources of medicine. Animals grazed on vast landscapes and in rich forests. That land lay unused is a colonial, racist and misleading myth. The manufacture of ignorance is a deliberate political ploy to force blacks to be grateful for their own conquest and colonisation, to thank the white colonists for helping them cultivate and industrialise the land. Another myth is that land would be wasted and abused in blacks that have no agriculture in their DNA.
Redistribution as Liberation
South African policy has previously called for willing buyer and willing seller approaches that still force the poor to look for money to buy land from rich holders that might refuse to sell the land after all.
There has also been the move towards restitution where those that were displaced and dispossessed can prove that fact at law, a process that requires archival research and the use of expensive lawyers; the victims of conquest carry the burden of proof of their victimhood.
The gesture of distribution entails that those who have use for the land can apply for it. All these approaches continue to punish the victims and losers and to promote the victors and winners that have the time, money and education to use or abuse these approaches and options.
The stubborn historical fact is that land inequality and the land poverty of majorities of the Global South should be addressed through re-distribution of land and supply by governments of knowledge, skills and equipment for the productive use of the land by those that were previously dispossessed and displaced.
Any people under the sun can be educated, skilled and equipped into using the land productively. It is a colonial myth that productive use of land is a white attribute.
Beware the pseudo-struggle
There are two extreme arguments. The first is that the land is safe and productive in minority white hands and those that are clamouring for land should shut up or risk destroying the economy and the country forever.
The other one is that all land should urgently be seized and transferred into the rightful owners, black people. Both these are opportunist and fundamentalist arguments that are dangerous. Capitalists and monopolists are using excuses to cling onto privilege on the one extreme hand while black political and economic elites want to use land to buy votes and amass personal and partisan wealth, both these ends of argument are disastrous and nihilist.
The two disputants are white colonialists and aspiring black colonialists jostling for land that should be liberated from coloniality and distributed for productive ownership and use to all that live in it and deserve it.
Land is too heavy and too deep to be left to economic and political expediency.
Land that is redistributed along personal and party lines is land stolen that will soon require another revolution to liberate it from the new colonists. Africa should liberate land from both white and black colonists for land liberation to be realised.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a founder member of Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN). He writes from, Braamfontein, Johannesburg: [email protected].
