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Friday, June 6, 2025

South Africa’s land reform failures

by

Orin Gordon
12 days ago
20250525
Orin Gordon

Orin Gordon

Orin Gor­don

The one time I saw my hero Nel­son Man­dela, I wasn’t sup­posed to be in the room. In 1997, at the Com­mon­wealth sum­mit in Ed­in­burgh, I slipped in­to his press con­fer­ence with Tony Blair, the host prime min­is­ter. I was cov­er­ing the Caribbean for the BBC. Man­dela, then pres­i­dent of South Africa, wasn’t part of my beat; but I had to see the great man in per­son.

Hugh Masekela’s pore-rais­ing and plain­tive Bring Him Back Home be­came a glob­al an­them. Af­ter his re­lease in 1990, Ja­maica’s Car­lene Davis up­dat­ed Masekela with Wel­come Home Mis­ter Man­dela. His bi­o­graph­i­cal tome, Long Walk to Free­dom, oc­cu­pied a promi­nent place on my book­shelf.

In 1999, I stood in the small cell on Robben Is­land where Man­dela spent most of the 27 years of his im­pris­on­ment. Your bath/show­er/toi­let room is prob­a­bly big­ger. I couldn’t wrap my head around how he man­aged per­son­al and na­tion­al rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with the peo­ple who phys­i­cal­ly and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly abused him, locked him up and la­belled him a ter­ror­ist.

How­ev­er, the longer I stayed in the coun­try, the more I came to re­alise that many Black South Africans were dis­ap­point­ed in Man­dela—from low­er mid­dle-class Sowe­tans to well-heeled pro­fes­sion­als. In five years in of­fice, they said, he hadn’t done any re­bal­anc­ing of the in­equal­i­ties of apartheid.

Man­dela felt that he need­ed to re­as­sure the fear­ful that the end of apartheid meant nei­ther ret­ri­bu­tion nor re­dis­tri­b­u­tion. When he was grow­ing up in an all-white com­mu­ni­ty, Fran­cois Pien­aar, the Afrikan­er cap­tain of the South Africa rug­by union team, heard talk of civ­il war when­ev­er the ter­ror­ist was re­leased. They stocked up on food and wa­ter, and “pre­pared for ar­maged­don”.

When Pien­aar led South Africa to vic­to­ry at the Rug­by World Cup in Jo­han­nes­burg in 1995, Man­dela walked out to greet him in the Spring­boks’ cap and rug­by shirt, apartheid’s most po­tent sport­ing sym­bol. It was a pow­er­ful mo­ment. White South Africans ral­lied to Madi­ba. The rain­bow na­tion, as Arch­bish­op Desmond Tu­tu de­scribed them, would sing in uni­son the world’s most beau­ti­ful na­tion­al an­them—the Xhosa lan­guage Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfri­ka.

How­ev­er, of all of the pieces of ord­nance that mi­nor­i­ty rule left, Man­dela did not defuse the most ex­plo­sive—apartheid’s bloody land grab. It’s still the case to­day that 80 per cent of Blacks own on­ly four per cent of pri­vate­ly-owned land. Whites com­prise eight per cent of the pop­u­la­tion but own 75 per cent.

The apartheid gov­ern­ment forcibly evict­ed Black and In­di­an landown­ers and ban­ished them to small­er and in­fe­ri­or lots, home­lands and ban­tus­tans. For decades, gov­ern­ments ap­proached the is­sue with cau­tion. In­di­an South African jour­nal­ist Ve­rash­ni Pil­lay, whose fam­i­ly was dis­pos­sessed in the 1960s, de­scribed it this way.

“What in­fu­ri­ates me is that not a sin­gle white per­son has had their land tak­en with­out com­pen­sa­tion by our de­mo­c­ra­t­ic gov­ern­ment in thir­ty years. But mil­lions of black South Africans lost theirs to the apartheid gov­ern­ment, in­clud­ing my fam­i­ly, a wrong that has nev­er been ful­ly ad­dressed.

“Many white peo­ple got to keep the land that was tak­en dur­ing forced re­movals in the six­ties (nev­er mind the ear­li­er land grabs) and yet some still com­plain and make them­selves the vic­tims. It’s like we’re liv­ing in the up­side-down.”

Pres­i­dent Trump has em­braced the up­side-down. It led to the Oval Of­fice roll-the-tape panto­farce when he met with Pres­i­dent Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House. Ramaphosa’s gov­ern­ment led pas­sage of a law that al­lowed seizure of land with­out com­pen­sa­tion, sub­ject to ju­di­cial re­view. It wasn’t rad­i­cal stuff, but the dug-in ab­so­lutists on South Africa’s far-right who Trump em­braced don’t want to give up any­thing.

South Africa has one of the world’s high­est rates of homi­cide. Al­most 20,000 peo­ple were killed in the last nine months of 2024. The over­whelm­ing ma­jor­i­ty of the vic­tims of vi­o­lent crime are Blacks. Trump pushed a false­hood-laden claim of “a geno­cide of White farm­ers”. Farm folk killed among the 20,000? Thir­ty-six. Own­ers? Sev­en. Black and White.

It’s un­clear whether the closed-door meet­ing that fol­lowed changed Trump’s mind, but it may have un­done three decades of slow, cau­tious move­ment to­wards right­ing a griev­ous his­tor­i­cal wrong. The apartheid bill came due on Man­dela’s watch. In de­clin­ing to take pay­ment from the start, he has made resti­tu­tion more dif­fi­cult to­day.


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