In 1957 the American folk singer Woodie Guthrie wrote a folk song called 'This land is your land'.
With apologies to Guthrie, a current day version here in South Africa might read:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From Polokwane, to Cape Aghulas Lighthouse
From the Gauteng maize farms, to the Swartland wheatfields
This land you made I'll take from you
Before you go all racist on me, I'll be the first to admit the Dutch and English swiped a ton of South African land from Africans. That part is indisputable.
What does get me is that ALL land in this country is being claimed as belonging to Africans, and therefore must be returned to them forthwith. This policy has led to a wholesale flight of white farmers to other countries and a massive decrease in land-productivity.
There are two problems here. If one foregoes the willing-buyer-willing-seller arrangement, as is now being mooted by our President, how does one reward the current owner for the improvements he has made to the land? If it can be proved that the current owner turned fallow bush into productive farmland, he has caused the land to appreciate in value.
Farming isn't for sissies. Aside from the hard physical labour and long hours, it also takes money, equipment and know-how. Successful farms are a business like any other. They require insurance, maintenance and investment. Often bank loans are needed to overcome droughts, floods or other calamities. To make a decent living off a farm you need commercial scale equipment - tractors, ploughs, combine harvesters. Cattle need to be dipped. Sheep need to be sheared. Wheat and maize must be planted, irrigated and harvested.
So you can't simply walk in and say, 'Hey, this belonged to my ancestors. Your ancestors stole it from them and I want it back. Leave.' On the face of it, that is blatantly unjust.
On the basis of recent history, over 80% of white-owned farmland in South Africa that has been returned to its ancestral owners is no longer productive. Mostly, this is because the new owners don't have the agricultural knowledge or financial collateral, or both, to maintain the farm in its productive state. Since democracy, we have actually moved from being a net exporter of grains to a net importer.
A better solution to this first problem would be a collaborative solution. The ancestral owners can be assisted by the current owner to cutivate either a portion of the farm, or land adjacent, as productive farmland. It is in the current owner's interests to empower the ancestral owners because he gets to keep his land, or a portion of it. It is in the ancestral owners' interests as they get to expand the farming operation and earn a good living as commercial farmers, while maintaining the productivity of the land. The two become co-dependent.
The second problem is the one raised recently in Parliament when the Honorable Deputy Minister of Agriculture pointed out that Africans had not migrated to the Cape when the Europeans arrived, so automatic claims of ancestral entitlement were invalid in this area. To which our State President responded with dire warnings and threats.
Deputy Mulder was about as diplomatic as Hitler on a bad hair day, but unpopular as it may be, he is correct, and it's all got to do with the Portuguese.
Any anthropologist will tell you that African agriculturalists, although they had established some settlements earlier, started migrating south in significant numbers around the fifteen hundreds. They farmed certain grains, tubers and cattle. As they moved, they displaced the khoi and san hunter-gatherer tribes. (More about them later).
As they moved to the East African coast, they came into contact with Portuguese traders. From them, they acquired something that would give them a strong foothold in the South: maize. It was far easier to cultivate and process than the cassava and yams that they'd lived off up north, and it was much higher in carbohydrates. For protein, they continued to depend on their main source of wealth: cattle. The combination of maize and cattle gave rise to larger settlements, villages and towns, and an establishment of community on a scale never before seen in this area. People settled the land. There was no such thing as land management because it wasn't necessary. Once cattle overgrazed an area, you simply moved them to another area. There was so much land, the affected area had plenty of time to recover.
Back to the khoi and san. As hunter-gatherers, they had survived in this region for thousands of years before the arrival of Africans by moving with migrating herds of wildlife - eland, wildebeest and so on. Whatever roamed the land was fair game to hunt. They had no concept of land settlement or that an animal could actually belong to someone. So when the Africans arrived with herds of cattle, the khoi and san couldn't believe their luck. Huge herds of slow moving beasts that were far easier to shoot than even the biggest eland, and with enough meat on them to feed the whole clan. Naturally the Africans didn't share this point of view. They responded by ethnically cleansing the khoi and san from any land into which they moved.
By the sixteen hundreds when the Dutch were starting to settle in the Cape, Africans were thriving in what is now Zambia, Zimbabwe, and northern and eastern South Africa. So why did the Dutch not find any Africans in the Cape?
Maize.
Maize is a summer rainfall crop. It doesn't grow in winter rainfall areas. Like the Western Cape.
That's why Africans didn't move south of the Fish River. They also didn't move west of what is now the Eastern Cape because of the Karoo (a semi-desert region covering most of the Northern Cape).
This allowed the Europeans to settle in the Western Cape unchallenged. They brought with them plenty of European crops that thrived in winter rainfall regions - mainly wheat and fruit, which was vital for the sailors using the Cape as a pit-stop to the East (the vitamin C in the fruit stopped them dying of scurvy, and the wheat provided bread rations for the ship's crew).
The Dutch also encountered the khoi and san. And they reacted in much the same way as the Africans - by killing them en masse. Or mating with them. Remember this was a time when slavery was still accepted as a totally normal aspect of European society. Khoi and San families became enslaved on the Dutch farms, and many of their women ended up being bedded by their masters (slaves had no rights and were simply the possessions of their owners). The resulting offspring became the early ancestors of what we now call the coloured or mixed-race communities of the Western Cape.
The next big wave of immigrants to arrive were the French Huguenots. By the end of the 17th century, roughly 200,000 Huguenots had been driven from Catholic France during a series of religious persecutions against protestants. They mostly fled to the Americas and to South Africa. Until then, the Dutch had been pottering around with wine, but the Huguenots were the ones who really established viticulture in the Cape.
The Dutch must have been a bit piqued by this one-upmanship by the French, because they responded by systematically destroying French culture in the Cape. Huguenot settlers were forbidden to speak French and forced to speak Dutch. That's why we have Franchoek (French Corner) in the Cape, where many of the wine farms still carry their original French names: La Motte, La Cotte, Cabriere, Provence, Chamonix, Dieu Donne and La Dauphine. It's also why so many Afrikaners still have French surnames - Du Toit, Du Plessis, Labuschagne and Pienaar (from the French Pinard).
Things went swimmingly in the Cape for the next two hundred years or so until the next big influx of Europeans - the English. By 1806 the English had become the new occupiers of the Western Cape, and not a few Dutch were pretty gatvol (pissed off) with their new rooinek (redneck) bosses - especially their decision to abolish slavery, so they upped sticks and moved north in a migration remembered as the Groot Trek (the Big Move), between the 1830s and 1840s.
This is when the kak (shit) really hit the fan. Two cultures, both agriculturalists, both farming grains and cattle. One growing ever more populous in the north, the other moving with their grains and cows slap bang into the same area. Recipe for disaster. To make matters worse, the English tried to counter this northern colonisation by the Dutch by enticing hundreds of English Settlers with promises of free land and untold riches.
So the 1820 Settlers arrived in the Eastern Cape and Natal. Just what you need when a new military genius in the region, Shaka, son of Senzagakona, was starting to establish one of the greatest military empires in the south - the mighty Zulu. From there on it got messy. Isandlwana notwithstanding, the English stole most of Natal from the Zulu and the Eastern Cape from the Xhosa, while the Dutch established their Oranje and Transvaal republics further north, taking land from Moshoeshoe until all he had left is what is now the enclave kingdom of Lesotho, and forcing another military general, Cetshwayo, further and further back until he was deprived of everything, except the current small nation of Swaziland.
After the Brits defeated the Boers in the two Anglo Boer Wars (1880 - 1881 and 1899 - 1902), the Union of South Africa remained a Commonwealth realm of the crown until 1960, when the Nationalist Government under H F Verwoerd lowered the voting age for whites to 18, and had also included the white voters of South West Africa, now Namibia, on the electoral roll. Afrikaners, who were more likely to favour a republic than English-speaking white South Africans, were also on average younger than them, with a higher birth rate. Similarly in South West Africa, the Afrikaners and German-speaking whites outnumbered English-speaking members. The referendum was won by the Nats 52.3% to 47.7% and we became a republic on 5 Oct 1960. South Africa rejoined the Commonwealth after becoming a democracy in 1994.
Three hundred years later, President Zuma (a Zulu) is conveniently forgetting that his ancestors' lands did not extend to the Cape. This is a convenient amnesia because the Cape is becoming increasingly prized. After Johannesburg, it's the next biggest economic hub in the country.
And frustratingly for Zuma and the ANC, it does not belong to them. Western Cape voters don't vote with the same knee-jerk obedience to the ANC as their more northern cousins. They don't feel the same allegiance and therefore voted another party into power to lead the Western Cape. This, the ANC has never lived down. They take it as a personal affront that they do not 'own' the Western Cape, with one of their spokespeople infamously saying that there was an "oversupply" of coloureds in the Western Cape. Does he mean to forcibly re-locate them, as his former oppressors used to do during apartheid?
If the Western Cape should be returned to anybody, it should be to the coloureds, the mixed race descendants of the khoi and san who both Africans and Whites so systematically wiped off the face of the sub-continent.
But somehow I can't see President Zuma jumping at that option...
With apologies to Guthrie, a current day version here in South Africa might read:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From Polokwane, to Cape Aghulas Lighthouse
From the Gauteng maize farms, to the Swartland wheatfields
This land you made I'll take from you
Before you go all racist on me, I'll be the first to admit the Dutch and English swiped a ton of South African land from Africans. That part is indisputable.
What does get me is that ALL land in this country is being claimed as belonging to Africans, and therefore must be returned to them forthwith. This policy has led to a wholesale flight of white farmers to other countries and a massive decrease in land-productivity.
There are two problems here. If one foregoes the willing-buyer-willing-seller arrangement, as is now being mooted by our President, how does one reward the current owner for the improvements he has made to the land? If it can be proved that the current owner turned fallow bush into productive farmland, he has caused the land to appreciate in value.
Farming isn't for sissies. Aside from the hard physical labour and long hours, it also takes money, equipment and know-how. Successful farms are a business like any other. They require insurance, maintenance and investment. Often bank loans are needed to overcome droughts, floods or other calamities. To make a decent living off a farm you need commercial scale equipment - tractors, ploughs, combine harvesters. Cattle need to be dipped. Sheep need to be sheared. Wheat and maize must be planted, irrigated and harvested.
So you can't simply walk in and say, 'Hey, this belonged to my ancestors. Your ancestors stole it from them and I want it back. Leave.' On the face of it, that is blatantly unjust.
On the basis of recent history, over 80% of white-owned farmland in South Africa that has been returned to its ancestral owners is no longer productive. Mostly, this is because the new owners don't have the agricultural knowledge or financial collateral, or both, to maintain the farm in its productive state. Since democracy, we have actually moved from being a net exporter of grains to a net importer.
A better solution to this first problem would be a collaborative solution. The ancestral owners can be assisted by the current owner to cutivate either a portion of the farm, or land adjacent, as productive farmland. It is in the current owner's interests to empower the ancestral owners because he gets to keep his land, or a portion of it. It is in the ancestral owners' interests as they get to expand the farming operation and earn a good living as commercial farmers, while maintaining the productivity of the land. The two become co-dependent.
The second problem is the one raised recently in Parliament when the Honorable Deputy Minister of Agriculture pointed out that Africans had not migrated to the Cape when the Europeans arrived, so automatic claims of ancestral entitlement were invalid in this area. To which our State President responded with dire warnings and threats.
Deputy Mulder was about as diplomatic as Hitler on a bad hair day, but unpopular as it may be, he is correct, and it's all got to do with the Portuguese.
Any anthropologist will tell you that African agriculturalists, although they had established some settlements earlier, started migrating south in significant numbers around the fifteen hundreds. They farmed certain grains, tubers and cattle. As they moved, they displaced the khoi and san hunter-gatherer tribes. (More about them later).
As they moved to the East African coast, they came into contact with Portuguese traders. From them, they acquired something that would give them a strong foothold in the South: maize. It was far easier to cultivate and process than the cassava and yams that they'd lived off up north, and it was much higher in carbohydrates. For protein, they continued to depend on their main source of wealth: cattle. The combination of maize and cattle gave rise to larger settlements, villages and towns, and an establishment of community on a scale never before seen in this area. People settled the land. There was no such thing as land management because it wasn't necessary. Once cattle overgrazed an area, you simply moved them to another area. There was so much land, the affected area had plenty of time to recover.
Back to the khoi and san. As hunter-gatherers, they had survived in this region for thousands of years before the arrival of Africans by moving with migrating herds of wildlife - eland, wildebeest and so on. Whatever roamed the land was fair game to hunt. They had no concept of land settlement or that an animal could actually belong to someone. So when the Africans arrived with herds of cattle, the khoi and san couldn't believe their luck. Huge herds of slow moving beasts that were far easier to shoot than even the biggest eland, and with enough meat on them to feed the whole clan. Naturally the Africans didn't share this point of view. They responded by ethnically cleansing the khoi and san from any land into which they moved.
By the sixteen hundreds when the Dutch were starting to settle in the Cape, Africans were thriving in what is now Zambia, Zimbabwe, and northern and eastern South Africa. So why did the Dutch not find any Africans in the Cape?
Maize.
Maize is a summer rainfall crop. It doesn't grow in winter rainfall areas. Like the Western Cape.
That's why Africans didn't move south of the Fish River. They also didn't move west of what is now the Eastern Cape because of the Karoo (a semi-desert region covering most of the Northern Cape).
This allowed the Europeans to settle in the Western Cape unchallenged. They brought with them plenty of European crops that thrived in winter rainfall regions - mainly wheat and fruit, which was vital for the sailors using the Cape as a pit-stop to the East (the vitamin C in the fruit stopped them dying of scurvy, and the wheat provided bread rations for the ship's crew).
The Dutch also encountered the khoi and san. And they reacted in much the same way as the Africans - by killing them en masse. Or mating with them. Remember this was a time when slavery was still accepted as a totally normal aspect of European society. Khoi and San families became enslaved on the Dutch farms, and many of their women ended up being bedded by their masters (slaves had no rights and were simply the possessions of their owners). The resulting offspring became the early ancestors of what we now call the coloured or mixed-race communities of the Western Cape.
The next big wave of immigrants to arrive were the French Huguenots. By the end of the 17th century, roughly 200,000 Huguenots had been driven from Catholic France during a series of religious persecutions against protestants. They mostly fled to the Americas and to South Africa. Until then, the Dutch had been pottering around with wine, but the Huguenots were the ones who really established viticulture in the Cape.
The Dutch must have been a bit piqued by this one-upmanship by the French, because they responded by systematically destroying French culture in the Cape. Huguenot settlers were forbidden to speak French and forced to speak Dutch. That's why we have Franchoek (French Corner) in the Cape, where many of the wine farms still carry their original French names: La Motte, La Cotte, Cabriere, Provence, Chamonix, Dieu Donne and La Dauphine. It's also why so many Afrikaners still have French surnames - Du Toit, Du Plessis, Labuschagne and Pienaar (from the French Pinard).
Things went swimmingly in the Cape for the next two hundred years or so until the next big influx of Europeans - the English. By 1806 the English had become the new occupiers of the Western Cape, and not a few Dutch were pretty gatvol (pissed off) with their new rooinek (redneck) bosses - especially their decision to abolish slavery, so they upped sticks and moved north in a migration remembered as the Groot Trek (the Big Move), between the 1830s and 1840s.
This is when the kak (shit) really hit the fan. Two cultures, both agriculturalists, both farming grains and cattle. One growing ever more populous in the north, the other moving with their grains and cows slap bang into the same area. Recipe for disaster. To make matters worse, the English tried to counter this northern colonisation by the Dutch by enticing hundreds of English Settlers with promises of free land and untold riches.
So the 1820 Settlers arrived in the Eastern Cape and Natal. Just what you need when a new military genius in the region, Shaka, son of Senzagakona, was starting to establish one of the greatest military empires in the south - the mighty Zulu. From there on it got messy. Isandlwana notwithstanding, the English stole most of Natal from the Zulu and the Eastern Cape from the Xhosa, while the Dutch established their Oranje and Transvaal republics further north, taking land from Moshoeshoe until all he had left is what is now the enclave kingdom of Lesotho, and forcing another military general, Cetshwayo, further and further back until he was deprived of everything, except the current small nation of Swaziland.
After the Brits defeated the Boers in the two Anglo Boer Wars (1880 - 1881 and 1899 - 1902), the Union of South Africa remained a Commonwealth realm of the crown until 1960, when the Nationalist Government under H F Verwoerd lowered the voting age for whites to 18, and had also included the white voters of South West Africa, now Namibia, on the electoral roll. Afrikaners, who were more likely to favour a republic than English-speaking white South Africans, were also on average younger than them, with a higher birth rate. Similarly in South West Africa, the Afrikaners and German-speaking whites outnumbered English-speaking members. The referendum was won by the Nats 52.3% to 47.7% and we became a republic on 5 Oct 1960. South Africa rejoined the Commonwealth after becoming a democracy in 1994.
Three hundred years later, President Zuma (a Zulu) is conveniently forgetting that his ancestors' lands did not extend to the Cape. This is a convenient amnesia because the Cape is becoming increasingly prized. After Johannesburg, it's the next biggest economic hub in the country.
And frustratingly for Zuma and the ANC, it does not belong to them. Western Cape voters don't vote with the same knee-jerk obedience to the ANC as their more northern cousins. They don't feel the same allegiance and therefore voted another party into power to lead the Western Cape. This, the ANC has never lived down. They take it as a personal affront that they do not 'own' the Western Cape, with one of their spokespeople infamously saying that there was an "oversupply" of coloureds in the Western Cape. Does he mean to forcibly re-locate them, as his former oppressors used to do during apartheid?
If the Western Cape should be returned to anybody, it should be to the coloureds, the mixed race descendants of the khoi and san who both Africans and Whites so systematically wiped off the face of the sub-continent.
But somehow I can't see President Zuma jumping at that option...
