Land Reforms and Natural Resource Conflicts in Africa by Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo

Author:Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo [Lumumba-Kasongo, Tukumbi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138092686
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

7 The Land Question in South Africa

History of Dispossession, Political Discourse, and Post-Apartheid Government Policy

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Chimusoro Kenneth Tafira

Introduction

Our nuanced perception and sustained argument are that the land question in South Africa and elsewhere is at the core of colonial modernity and indeed is constitutive of coloniality. By coloniality we mean the matrices of power that define(d) and determine(d) subjective relations between the colonizer and the colonized through classificatory devices in which race is the primary criterion (Quijano 2007). The process of violent conquest spanning a period of five hundred years, as a unity and totality, has had attendant entangled ramifications whose facets include racial hierarchization, labor alienation, asymmetrical gender relations, psychological contraptions and other depredations associated with colonial contact. For this reason, we treat land in its colonial context and propose that it is at the pillar of decolonization and the emergence of a new personhood, a new human being. The land question, which remains an emotive subject, has in many situations and instances been the primary objective of anticolonial struggles, given its centrality in African socio-economic, cultural, spiritual and cosmological life. Land reclamation and restoration to its rightful owners are thus a need, a necessity and a requirement.

We are cognizant that copious literature exists on the matter. A lot has been written about the land question in South Africa. Our approach in this chapter is largely a theoretical trajectory that places land at the center of colonialism and of colonial property rights as defined by European jurisprudence, its historical totality being coloniality. We believe history matters. A historico-contemporary analysis provides us with adequate theoretical and political tools that are necessary for a principled position that will guide the process of decolonizing land. Why does history matter? It’s simply because today is informed by yesterday, just as tomorrow is drawn from today. It means we treat contemporary situations or problems as historical problems; therefore, the unhistorical or even anti-historical stances that are the core of bourgeois thought (Magubane 1977)1 are inimical to our endeavors to emancipate ourselves from the tentacles of colonialism, coloniality and Western modernity. Having said this, our proposal is that we should get our analytical and methodological tools right. Magubane writes:

The bourgeois social scientist formulates concepts, categories, and uses methods which not only rationalise the existing social order but numb our minds to injustices. (1977: 164)

In another context, Magubane has observed:

Our present reality is made up of the descendants of the beneficiaries of conquest as well as the victims of dispossession and the descendants of slaves and indentured labourers. In South Africa the past is never past; it is active in the present. Our present condition is a consequence of the actions of the past. Any attempt to forget the past will not cure our condition. (1996: 370)

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