A missed opportunity

When Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Deputy Minister Pieter Mulder last week made the claim in parliament that blacks had no legitimate claim to large tracts of land in South Africa because whites got there ahead of them, he pressed all the right buttons of the black elite.

A seething President Jacob Zuma could hardly contain himself, nor could a sizeable number of media talking heads, as they choked on their cereal the next morning.

Mulder got what he wanted - a momentary place in the spotlight for an insignificant right-wing outfit in the country.

But the responses were all wrong. The provocative use of the word "Bantu" this side of apartheid was, of course, meant to irritate and provoke; it's like calling African- Americans Negroes in 2012.

His insensitivity to the land question, knowing full well that the ANC leadership has to restrain with difficulty the more radical elements in its ranks on this matter, is of course irresponsible.

And yes, his outrageous reading of history that ignores a European settlement penetrating foreign land could easily make the blood of a black nationalist boil.

The problem is that these are not Mulder's views alone. He speaks for a few million white South Africans who actually believe this nonsense, even if most will never risk saying so in public.

I recently heard a bitter white dean of an established Afrikaans university make exactly the same point to an informed audience that included a current cabinet minister.

So, instead of seizing on this opportunity as a teachable moment for a next generation of especially Afrikaner youth, our apoplectics got in the way - with Mulder and his motley crew no doubt high-fiving each other behind closed doors inside the very parliamentary buildings they once denied the majority.

"You are from Cape Town," a very wealthy Afrikaner told me recently. "Why don't you speak up against the Africans taking over everything?"

I knew where he was coming from. I am at least, in part, of Khoisan origins. My people were there originally before Boer and Bantu, to use Mulder's inflammatory labels.

My family should be beating on our collective ethnic chests and claiming original ownership.

I smiled unconvincingly as I struggled to contain my anger at how he framed me, and how he expected me to separate myself from fellow South Africans.

Given that Mulder is not the audience, the president should have taken time to say what one of the world's most respected scholars of Africa shared with me: there is solid archaeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence that Africans populated what became South Africa hundreds of years, perhaps 1000 years or more, before Jan van Riebeeck arrived in 1652.

For example, Nigel Worden, in the fifth edition of his The Making of Modern South Africa, addresses this claim and refers to African arrivals 10000 years ago (hunters and gatherers), 2000 to 3000 years ago (herders), and 1 000 BC to 200 AD (pastoralists).

From William Beinhart to Chris Ehret to Cavalli-Sforza, the notion of European settlers arriving in vacant space, before or at the same time as Africans, would today be regarded as a figment of colonial imagination. If the historical evidence was too much to hold the attention of dozy parliamentarians, the president could perhaps have appealed to common sense.

"Come, Pieter, take a drive with me through Stellenbosch, Paarl, Franschhoek and the Steenberg Estate and convince me that simply through duty and dedication, whites secured these most fertile lands, while blacks just happened to find themselves locked inside the tin shacks of Nyanga and those heated ovens called 'flats' in Lavender Hill."

The Prez might pause at this stage and ask the obvious: "Are you saying, Pieter, that there were no land acts, no forced removals, no white preference areas to give you advantage?

"So what, Pieter? We are here now, together, having to work out how to live on and work the land together. We have to require fairness in land distribution to correct historical wrongs even as we do this in a way that wins the participation of our white brothers and sisters. If we fail to do this, Pieter, meeting the demands of justice and the ideal of inclusiveness, we are all dead. Is that what you want Pieter?"

Instead of reasoned debate and factual correction, Mulder got what he wanted - an angry, inflammatory response. What tens of thousands of watching youth did not get in this exchange was a vital account of history they would also escape in the classroom.