by Nokwanda Sihlali
At the height of a global pandemic in South Africa, the City of Cape Town and the City of Johannesburg have been brutally removing people from their homes and viciously demolishing their shelters on the accusation of them having “illegally” invaded state land. A very graphic picture of a black man being thrown out of his home in his underwear virally circulated the web from one of these forced removals. Adding again to the blasé nature in which black bodies, drenched in ignominy are displayed because it has become ubiquitous, a graphic video of a man. Beneath the clicktivism and pontifications infused in wokeness on social media, we need to understand that at the core of this continued ferocious enforcement of state violence, is the issue of landlessness in the Republic.
Land is at the core of racial tensions in South Africa. It has built and secured generational wealth for the minority of white people in the country, whilst the majority of black people’s lives have been ravaged by generational poverty. The 1994 Constitution, a delicately written document, spells out the rights equally afforded to all the citizens of South Africa and gives the state the responsibilities to enforce them.
The primary aims of land reform have been unsuccessful in tackling racialised spatial planning and have been inadequate in addressing poverty and underdevelopment driven by landlessness. Through the programme of Security of Tenure[1], the precarity of recognised tenure is ubiquitous in informal and undeveloped spaces occupied mainly by marginalised black people, who are underprivileged and predominantly working class. The programme of Restitution, which is operationalised through the Restitution Commission, was intended to be a relatively small court-driven component of land reform – targeting people who were forcibly removed on their land during apartheid. However, the Commission was not sufficiently structured and equipped for the massive job it was undertaking (HLP, 2017). In the practical sense, there are capacity issues in the human resource division which includes legal skills and historical knowledge that form the basis of their jobs. The filing systems and digital database of the Commission are disorganised, and the contribution of high staff turnover to poor institutional memory further exacerbates the issues that act as a hindrance to effectively dealing with landlessness of the marginalised.
A primary example of this comes from the exclusionary nature of the extractives industry towards Black African rural communities. There is a triad consisting of politicians, capital and symbolic capital that gate keep the spoils of mining by excluding communities at a high level. Using legislation such as the Traditional Khoi-San and Leadership Act that allows a traditional leader to legitimately take decisions about communal land without consulting those directly affected and without obtaining their consent. Exclusion is institutionalized through the use or mis-use of legislation by this triad. Social Labour Plan programmes are in shambles because mining companies engage in tick-box exercises that act as confirmation that consultation has taken place, but never stating at what level or if it was even with directly affected persons.
Mines operating in a neo-liberal playing field, are supported in their objectives to maximize profit and minimize risk. And so if engaging solely with the senior traditional leader will get them mining rights and land leases quickly, why not? Collectively, as rural and urban citizens, we need to consider alternatives that will negate the imposition of the mining experience onto communities that will not benefit in any way. We need to create laws that safeguard the rights of community members to say no to mining, with no consequence. Allowing them the space to protect their sacred burial sites, their grazing fields and their communal land.
Land itself has a plethora of subjective meanings that usurp the superficiality of only viewing it as a commodity. Land holds cultural capital in terms of history and heritage; and symbolical capital in terms of the honour and prestige that comes with actual ownership of land. By forcing communities to conform to the idea that their way of being is incorrect and land can only be economic, we find ourselves engaging in a process of explicit othering that undermines the human rights of rural land occupants in our country.
[1]http://www.larc.uct.ac.za/research-land …
