South Africa's history is a harrowing tale of profound injustice, often untold. It is a narrative of state-sponsored land confiscation from indigenous people, a story of wars fought over land dispossession and the defence thereof. These are not just historical facts but our fellow citizens' lived experiences, and we must acknowledge and understand them.
In its quest to forge nationhood between conquerors and the conquered, South Africa, has been working on a project to persuade and expect those with a conqueror mindset to voluntarily surrender the spoils of the conquest without a post-war treaty.
The ANC-National Party accord, which preceded the Codesa negotiations and the 1994-1996 legally mandated constituent assembly, remains the only agreement with the force of a post-war treaty. It justifies South Africa's belief that it operates in a peaceful settlement firmament.
The 1996 constitution, the outcome of the constituent assembly, is a beacon of hope. It places a weighty obligation on the state to act in the interests of all citizens, even when those interests conflict. The constitution mandates respect, protection, promotion and fulfilment of the Bill of Rights — a crucial step towards recognising past injustices and healing the divisions they've caused. This is acute in the domain of land claims and associated grievances.
The common factor in global racism is spatial manipulation through land expropriation and gentrification of societies
As South African society matures into newfound freedoms, the tension between land-dispossession-created landowners and those who became landless from the same process is inevitable. Land dispossessors' knowledge, skill and experience are in such near-memory that their opposition to development-driven expropriation is informed by what they know they had done within a similar context. They oppose what they would have done with the Expropriation Act as they imagine or believe others could do the same.
Worse still, the ANC, which leads the GNU coalition, is not guaranteed to win the next national elections, making the new opposition complex potential heir apparent to the powers the act bestows on spheres of government. The vulnerability to varying interpretations of “public interests” will grow commensurate with rhetoric and interests that might rule the moment.
The common factor in global racism is spatial manipulation through land expropriation and gentrification of societies. Genocides or “smallpox pandemics” have all been associated with land dispossession to create racially conceptualised lebensraum. Gaza, in Palestine, a modern-day candidate to create a lebensraum in the Middle East and dispossess those living in it, is announced to be a candidate vendor purchase. At best, Gaza will be a property on a title deed with a new buyer. Like in many land-dispossession-intensive societies, the title deed will not include the inscription: “Here also lies the mortal remains of landowners who died in the process of preparing the land for sale or otherwise.”
Without invalidating the practice of expropriation, which is often preceded by negotiations and reasonable compensation offers, seller intransigence for price or other considerations tends to trigger nil or surveyor-general-determined price-taking compensation by the government in the “public’s interest”. The civility of this practice includes extensive negotiation with the title deed owner, irrespective of the history of the deed of ownership.
With this circumstance, the pursuit of equality as a founding provision of South Africa's constitutional order was never going to be easy in a society whose accumulated resources were based on state-sponsored and racism-inspired inequality engineering and, by default, land acquisition practices. For equality to happen, it calls for restitutive interventions in certain and special conditions. Given South Africa’s elaborate human rights-based democracy, executing land expropriation will be a prolonged assignment. Unlike expropriation to deal with the “poor white problem”, sanctioned by laws that are now part of the global criminal complex against humanity, in some instances genocidal in character, the management of a post-apartheid equality establishment programme requires less ethnonationalist victimhood.
It might be true that affirmative action works when a minority is persecuted. However, the South African version deals with conditions where a conquest mentality requires attention to make the founding provision of establishing South Africa to be legally realised, if not enforced. To this effect, equality- and nonracialism-believing South African leaders ought to know that what a Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu axis represents is not a guide to a social and economic justice-based coexistence of humanity. It is, in fact, a manifestation of a socialisation process whose intent can only be racial purity and white supremacy of Goebbels’ vocabulary.
The incapability of the state, misguided cadre deployment, corruption and state capture, and a public service that loyally executed unlawful policies has, over the past 30 years, played into the hands of an otherwise black-government-mistrusting constituency in the country. A theme of racial supremacy and mistrust of a black government, woven throughout South Africa's history, developed into a funded endeavour to institutionalise fear of nonracial coexistence and equality. Fear or distaste of a nonracial democracy disguised as a manufactured ethnonationalist victimhood is the antithesis of what being a true Afrikaner is all about. This “funded endeavour” is proving to be about the perpetuation of racial fear and entrenchment of historical inequality, thereby hindering progress towards a nonracial society.
Muscle flexing by all parties in a context where South Africa has real geopolitical and diplomatic tiffs with the US and its essential ally, Israel, is unnecessary.
The comfort of blaming corruption and state capture to shield racism is no longer sustainable. Race supremacists in society cannot and should not be allowed to keep on justifying the myth of a possible single-race governed world in South Africa. In the unlikely event of it being allowed, the country would have abdicated responsibility for changing the outcomes of our country's worst-ever and internationally declared criminal social engineering project, apartheid. The spin of starting to blame political parties and their leaders rather than history-attached systems and templates of dominance anchored on conqueror mindsets must stop.
The lobby that wore the “musk” of victimhood and ultimately trumped its way into the White House has demonstrated that they have not realised the depth of the forgiveness that came with the 1994-1996 settlement without having to proffer an apology for the criminal acts of colonialism and apartheid. Some have gone to levels where anyone that challenges their racialised worldviews — and acutely, the mistrust of a black government — as a challenge to their conveniently crafted identities as good and moral people.
The truth is that the funded fear and somewhat sustained fragility of sections of racial communities organised against racial integration and nonracialism is gradually proving to be either borne out of racial superiority-inspired entitlement or sheer disregard of the social cohesion project we all are obliged to participate in.
The recent executive order by the Trump administration to sanction South Africa and start a process of redefining trade and related relations should be seen against this backdrop. Plausible as it is, the disclaimer and declaration of not knowing who masterminded the disinformation that South Africa is confiscating land and private properties of minorities, there is growing evidence that there is a non-aligned and loosely organised group of disgruntled people that has fuelled the disinformation.
The managed or choreographed disclaimers, the taking up of the opportunity to challenge restitution policies of the post-apartheid state, the brazen declaration of legally derived economic empowerment and affirmative action policies, and the exploiting of the chance to challenge the crime-against-humanity narrative against apartheid and its land dispossession consequence is cause for concern. The commitment to South Africa, which belongs to all who live in it, has during this period suffered a significant knock, if not a reversal.
The time for sober leadership has arrived in South Africa. The agenda of the national dialogue is writing itself. Not only are dysfunctions in the governance of social and economic justice the drivers of the national dialogue idea, but the brazen responses by these organised formations catalyse the evolving necessity for it. South Africa urgently needs a social compact.
Muscle flexing by all parties in a context where South Africa has real geopolitical and diplomatic tiffs with the US and its essential ally, Israel, is unnecessary. The declaration of the Gaza War as genocidal and how Israel treats Palestinians as apartheid, and thus a crime against humanity, and at the behest of South Africa, is a complexity the national dialogue will have to deal with.
After all, “we the people” are all Africans. We owe our being to this land. We constitute the human presence that completes its beauty. We should not walk away. No superpower bullying should make “we the people” surrender to the crime of racism we have defeated. We must refuse to be silent. This is not a matter for tomorrow but a call for immediate action to address the deep-rooted issues of our society.
• Dr FM Lucky Mathebula is a public policy specialist and the founder of The Thinc Foundation.
For opinion and analysis consideration, e-mail Opinions@timeslive.co.za
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.