South Africa: The next frontier for land occupations?

In 2001, I was a politically naive young Zimbabwean immigrant living in the slums of Johannesburg when, as a member of a local civic group, we got wind of an impending eviction of ‘squatters’ who had illegally occupied a piece of land on the outskirts of Johannesburg called Bredell. When we arrived at the impending eviction, the battle lines were already drawn; international media organisations, the likes of CNN, BBC, etc. had already raised their satellite dishes, poised to beam dramatic scenes of ‘squatters’ being evicted to the world. It looked as if many of us in attendance at this sombre event had come to witness a public hanging. Desperate land occupiers waited nervously holding their line.

Before noon, the wretched ‘land grabbers’ found themselves facing the ‘evil’ realities of the new South Africa. Makeshift homes constructed with tin and cardboard in a quest to have somewhere they could call home were demolished on camera. Although a few of us who had come to witness this obscene event tried to provide support by waving our ‘socialist’ flags and singing freedom songs, the eviction went ahead. Troops of black security guards wearing red boiler suits, locally known as ‘Rooi Gevaar’, demolished the land occupier’s homes and forcefully removed helpless women and children. It was an ugly experience; I felt like I was witnessing a woman being raped but with no means to help her. One elderly woman took off her clothes in protest, an act with a deep cultural meaning, as the nudity of an old woman is supposed to bring a curse to its onlookers. Whether those who evicted her were later befallen by misfortune, nobody knows.

As we all stood helplessly watching the demolition, we wondered about the logic of South Africa’s liberation. How could a government voted into power by poor and disenfranchised people forcefully evict them in the name of private property? Given the international news cameras, it seemed the South African government wanted as much publicity as possible for the eviction in order to demonstrate its commitment to the protection of private property; South Africa wanted to send the right signal to the markets that Zimbabwean-style land ‘invasions’ were not allowed here. The South African minister of land had earlier told the media that ‘land grabbing’ was not welcome; property rights were as sacred as the republic’s constitution. Those who illegally occupied farms would be forcefully removed. The ‘Bredell land grab,’ as the mainstream media called it, and the subsequent publicity it generated unmasked something sinister about post apartheid South Africa; it revealed the double standards within the leadership of the African National Congress (ANC).

While the ANC elites continue to make promises to the poor, the Bredell eviction saga demonstrated that the ANC government was more interested in calming nervous white land owners and foreign investors than addressing the root causes of landlessness and social injustice, steeped in the country’s apartheid history. What made this very public eviction saga more depressing was that the ANC, with its close trade union linkages, had for many years fought against apartheid policies like the 1913 Land Act which eventually gave three quarters of arable land to Whites and the subsequent eviction of ‘native’ South Africans to the so called ‘Homelands’. Moreover, the ANC came to power in 1994 after a landslide victory with promises of reversing apartheid era injustices based on the moral principles of the Freedom Charter. Many blacks saw the release of Mandela and the subsequent elections of 1994, which led to a free South Africa, as a new dawn. However, the Bredell eviction demonstrated that post-apartheid South Africa had a long way to go in addressing apartheid-era injustices.

What we witnessed on this day was not a one-off event. Besides landlessness, blacks in the new South Africa face all forms of social injustices: Poor sanitation, unemployment, homelessness, and electricity and water cut-offs – the list is unending. Many civic groups have now been formed in order to deliver all forms of parallel social services to the poor, including reconnecting water and electricity for those disconnected due to failure to pay escalating bills. The poor no longer rely on the government for social services, but on each other for their survival.

South Africa remains a very strange place, a divided society. The transition from apartheid to majority rule involved what Patrick Bond called ‘elite transition’, for the beneficiaries of the new South Africa are indeed few and mostly white. In some places one gets a feeling that there are two countries in one – a small Mediterranean archipelago with beautiful bungalows perched on hilltops, whites-only beaches where blacks are there to serve the rich; the other a stereotypical African country with overcrowded slums, high unemployment, petty thieves and petty commodity brokers living on the edge. Extreme poverty and extreme wealth live side by side in the new South Africa. Blacks have been reduced to a life of shameless grabbing of virtually everything for survival. Basic mobile phones, wedding rings and all small jewellery can attract violent robbers – even a pair of Nike shoes in inner city areas like Hillbrow can attract muggers.

The situation has not been helped by a high influx of immigrants from neighbouring countries flocking to South Africa in search of what seems like a paranoiac gold rush. This has resulted in dangerous levels of intolerance and xenophobia, which reached a breaking point last year when poor and dispossessed South Africans vented their anger on the easy scapegoat of illegal immigrants. The Rainbow Nation, glamorised by the iconic images of a free Mandela, has become a very dangerous place. Hordes of poor slum dwellers have no option but to resort to ‘affirmative action’ – the violent recovery of property from whites. Robberies have now forced many whites and the rich of all colours to live in homes that look like fortresses, fitted with state of the art security alarms, armed response, electric fences, burglar-proof gates, CCTV, neighbourhood watches, etc.

It has become dangerous to be rich in South Africa. A home has to be barricaded to avoid marauding robbers; many South African homes now look more like American embassies protected against potential terrorist attacks. Dangerously armed robbers lurk in the dark waiting to pounce on unsuspecting rich people; those who have been fortunate enough to enjoy the comforts afforded to them by the Rainbow Nation, courtesy of Mandela’s reconciliation legacy. South Africa’s inability to deal with repressed apartheid-era anger among blacks is a reason for concern. Politicians have glossed over the past by promoting an ideal image of a Rainbow Nation to lure foreign investors, while beneath the surface a simmering storm of discontent brews. Repressed anger manifests itself in the form of violence by unemployed blacks killing each in the battle for survival. With no work and no sense of dignity, masculinity among the poor is expressed through gun violence. The main victims of this violence are vulnerable women; South Africa has one of the highest incidences of rape in the world, and many of the victims of this rape end up infected with HIV, creating a vicious cycle of poverty and sickness in black neighbourhoods. This repressed apartheid-era anger has yet to find a proper exit; until it does, the ghosts of apartheid will continue to haunt South Africa in the near future.

Apartheid-era racial attitudes are more openly reflected in South Africa’s rural farming areas. Here the laws of the jungle apply. White vigilante groups deliver rough justice to poor blacks working in these rural enclaves, where changes in racial attitudes formed during the apartheid era are hardening instead of changing. Not long ago a farmer did the unexpected, killing a black farm worker by tying him behind the back of his truck and then driving along a gravel road for stealing tomatoes. What gave this farmer the confidence to commit this horrendous crime is that the end of apartheid was negotiated, and Nelson Mandela’s reconciliatory policies failed to dismantle the apparatus of apartheid. No wonder many of the rich love him and his legacy; history is yet to judge this iconic figure fully.

The recent killing of Eugene Terreblanche, the self-confessed white supremacist leader of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) by his farm workers demonstrates the battles that lie ahead. Although politicians in South Africa have down played Terreblanche’s murder as a one-off non-political event, his violent end is a significant political event that is likely to expose simmering racial tensions in South Africa’s rural farming enclaves. An estimated 3,000 White farmers have so far been murdered; this number is likely to increase, as battles for racial justice are likely to intensify in the future. Political leadership is required to channel black grievances if an open bloodbath is to be avoided in the near future.

In many racial enclaves it is still business as usual, as propertied elites use the law to protect their property from forceful acquisition. This quest to preserve their property is supported by the logic of neo liberal capitalism, which the ANC government overzealously adopted in its macro-economic policy formulation. The fear of a Zimbabwean style capital flight or a great exodus of investors is a reality that South African policy makers have been keen to avoid. A result of the above is that the poor have been sacrificed on the altar of the international markets; those who suffered during apartheid continue to live in poverty, while wealth remains in the hands of whites and a few black elites, beneficiaries of the so-called black empowerment. Behind the hullabaloo of freedom lies the naked truth about post apartheid South Africa – that millions of blacks continue to suffer the vagaries of injustice, unemployment, homelessness, and landlessness.

Although South Africa supports a policy of land restitution, the process of land claims gets stuck in bureaucratic processes, with some communities simply giving up, as they have no capacity to interpret the law and have limited access to legal aid. Many people who lost their land during apartheid-era ‘black sports clearances’ are still waiting to recover stolen property. This situation is likely to explode in the future. The government’s mainly market-driven land reform has failed to deliver land, only an insignificant amount of land has so far been recovered. White farmers continue to dictate the pace of land reform and in the process they distort land markets to their advantage. The cannibalistic tendencies of markets are at play here – as George Soros once remarked, ‘markets have a notorious habit of fluctuating’. In the South African context, land markets have been fluctuating to the benefit of white farmers; Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market has helped white farmers secure their land holdings by frustrating the South African government’s efforts to recover land and resettle landless blacks.

The logic behind all this is the obsession with foreign direct investment – for it is argued that confiscating land to resettle people will send the wrong signals to the markets. Markets get ‘emotional’ where property rights are not respected, as was demonstrated in Zimbabwe where the economy was deliberated sabotaged and boycotted after peasants occupied commercial farms.

However the language of property rights brings with it certain ambiguities; do landless blacks not have the same right to property ownership as their white counterparts? What about the recent history of forced removals, black sports clearances, and the violent murder of civilians at Sharpeville? Moreover many of these foreign capitalists that the ANC government is keen to protect directly benefited from apartheid. There is evidence to suggest that during apartheid foreign direct investment increased, with many European and American corporations investing in a country that openly violated human rights. These are the same people that are enjoying the protection of ANC elites, an insult to the suffering masses in black townships.

South Africa has a lot to learn from its northern neighbour Zimbabwe. The pitfalls of delaying land reforms were demonstrated there not long ago, when a desperate Mugabe unleashed peasants to help themselves to white farms, after markets failed to deliver land to the landless as expected. There is evidence to suggest that Mugabe has become something of a cult figure to many landless South Africans and other landless people across Africa, who see their own governments as too aligned to landed capitalists instead of righting historical injustices. Although the World Bank is now well aware of the political dangers associated with delays caused by market-driven land reform, it continues to promote these policies in South Africa, contrary to research carried out by its own economists, which has long highlighted the political risks associated with land concentration.

A few South African white farmers I’ve met are already nervous about the future and some have taken the bold step of selling and repatriating their profits before things get nasty. But for many rich and privileged white land owners, owning huge tracts of land is addictive – something that one can not give up even when the consequences become very expensive. Instead of co-operating with government efforts to address the land hunger facing blacks, they have instead resorted to a powerful farmer’s lobby, which has frustrated efforts to recover land for resettlement.

There is no doubt that South Africa will indeed become the next frontier for ‘land invasions’; the situation in the country is a ticking time bomb. It’s almost impossible to think that a system of extreme injustice and poverty reflected across the country could be sustained forever. Sooner or later South Africa’s poor will run out of patience and the problem is that, unlike their Zimbabwean counterparts, the South African poor will be dangerously armed. It will only take a maverick or charismatic leader to do what Mugabe did – play a political game by giving the poor the green light for an unofficial fast track land reform to take place.

However such a scenario could be easily avoided if all those involved in the land issue in South Africa work together to resolve the issue before a repeat of what happened in Zimbabwe occurs. It seems though that many of those hoarding land are keen to keep their entrenched positions. The only hope for South Africa’s landless poor no longer lies with the ANC government’s market driven land reform, but in the ‘barbaric’ process of ‘land grabs’ or self-provisioning.

The model can be found nowhere other than in Soweto, where self-trained ‘activist electricians’ are helping to reconnect those affected by power cut-offs. One wonders if this Soweto model will one day be cascaded to address the issue of landlessness. Such a process is the only way many landless people can get access to somewhere they could call home. This however requires leadership; in Zimbabwe it took Chenjerai Hunzvi the late charismatic war veterans’ leader to arm-twist a reluctant Mugabe into confronting landed elites; in South Africa however such leadership is non-existent yet.

Many ANC elites of the ‘Umshini wami’ genre, epitomised in the person of Jacob Zuma and Julius Malema, have sunk deep into the luxury and bliss afforded to them by the Rainbow Nation, rich kulaks with limited links to their rural constituencies. One can only hope that one day a leader will emerge among the poor to lead the battle for socio-economic justice.

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* Grasian Mkodzongi is a human ecologist and PhD candidate at the Centre of African Studies (University of Edinburgh).
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