Tag: Land

The situation in respect of land in South Africa is so complex that it almost defies journalistic treatment. Indeed it does but it should still be interrogated, if only because it exists. A good look at it will expose one to the possibility of a mental breakdown in most people, especially those who are overburdened with conscience or empathy. The story of the black people of South Africa is the story, the continuing story of ruthless exploitation of the majority of the owners of land but who have not only been dispossessed of the land in which their ancestors back to several generations are buried but have been enslaved in situ by strangers who form a minority.

Not only have the omo onílè been deprived of their land, they have been robbed of their spirituality, the property that connects them to the land which they have lost. Dispossessed of everything conferred on them by the land of their birth, they have thus become rootless in that land on which they cannot now make any demand, reasonable or not.

The Boer war, marked as it was by prodigious bloodletting was long and uncommonly bitter especially among the  Boers who lost wives, children, property and a great deal of self-esteem but retained the colour of their skin and that has turned out to be the most important aspect of this complex equation. When the fighting stopped and the former combatants got together for peace talks, it turned out to be a conclave of hyenas which tore the absent original owners of the land to pieces which were small enough to be comfortably swallowed. The Boer Republics were incorporated into a contraption which together with the Cape colonies became known as the Union of South Africa which was absorbed into the British Empire as a self governing territory which like Canada, Australia and New Zealand were said to have Dominion status within the British Empire. What they had in common was the whiteness of the outer covering of their rulers. The Boers, because of the superiority in number among the accredited voters within the Union retained political relevance, whilst the British were hoisted to the top of the extremely lucrative commanding heights of the economy, controlling banking and mining sectors. This made it possible for them to seize control of the modern industrial sector responsible for wealth creation within the Union. The blacks, who were terrorised in the conduct of the war and suffered a great deal of hardship were denied any form of acknowledgement as a human presence even though they could not have been absent in the consciousness of their tormentors. After all, capitalism must have it’s labourers, those whose productivity is needed to drive the machinery of exploitable production. In the end, they were only recognised as units of labour on the farms, down the mines and in their domestic establishments as care givers and cleaners. They were grudgingly allowed to be seen but never heard. Whatever potential they had for anything else was not recognised let alone allowed to develop to any significant extent. Whatever talent they had was allowed to wither and die because they were not even recognised as being human.

My primary school contemporaries will no doubt remember that one of the most eminent historical figures we were introduced to all those many years ago was Cecil Rhodes. We were told of his exploits in the field of commerce and politics and those qualities were backed up by the incontrovertible fact of having not one but two African countries named after him. The truth however is that he was a rapacious robber baron who wilfully stole African lands in his capacity as the controller of a commercial enterprise which ruthlessly built up a monopoly in the trading of gold and diamonds. His company, the British South African Company, had influence beyond South Africa. Early on in its career, the company took its search for precious metals across the Limpopo River into Matebeleland, signing spurious treaties with local chieftains all throughout what became known as Southern Rhodesia and further on into the copper belt which became Northern Rhodesia.

The main difference between North and South Rhodesia was that white colonisation was minimal in the North, whereas a gang of adventurers calling themselves the Pioneers who moved up from South Africa in those internal occupied drawn wagons moved into and occupied Southern Rhodesia, seized land from the indigenous people and proceeded to enslave them on the commercial farms which they had set up. It is the descendants of these notorious land grabbers that were invited a while ago by some historically ignorant governor to set up farms in Kwara State. For all I know they are still on their farms but I have no news of their exploits in Nigeria.

The land available to those interlopers in Rhodesia was very rich, labour cost very little and profits were high, so high that by the sixties, the whites in Southern Rhodesia enjoyed the highest standard of living of any group of people anywhere in the whole wide world. In their intoxicated state of satiation, the whites, determined to hang on to their criminal perquisites for ever, announced what they called a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain because the agitation for majority rule was getting too loud to be ignored. They had come to the conclusion that they had to consolidate their hold on the country that that had stolen. Only a few years before, the British Prime Minister on an African tour had warned of a wind of change which was blowing through Africa and threatening to blow the whites off the continent. The leader of that rebellion in Rhodesia, Ian Smith, at the height of the war of black liberation which followed the declaration of independence stated matter of factly that he did not believe in majority rule, that as far as he was concerned there would no majority rule in Southern Rhodesia for another thousand years which can be interpreted as no majority rule forever. Even as he spoke however, African freedom fighters were waging a bitter war against his lilly white government, the result of which led to the independence of Zimbabwe from white minority rule, much earlier than a thousand years, indeed, very much within his lifetime.

As a monopoly capitalist and founder of the British African company as well as De Beers, the largest diamond trading company in the world, Cecil Rhodes took very vast tracts of African land and swallowed them whole. As the leader of government of the Cape colony for six years until 1902, Cecil Rhodes systematically disenfranchised Africans depriving them of any rights to vote, a right which some of them had been exploring for some fifty years. By 1902 when the Boer War ended, there were no black voters in the newly formed Union of South Africa. From that point on the country was ruled exclusively by the white minority and the blacks lost not only their vote but also their voice. They were not even ascribed any fraction as was the case when the American constitution was written more than a hundred years before when the consensus was that Africans were three-fifths of their white counterparts. The Africans however did not relent in their effort to participate in the government of their nation but without access to land and other forms of power, their efforts were doomed to failure and they duly failed. This is why they founded the African National Congress as long ago as 1912 to be the vehicle of their fight for political relevance. They made little or no headway in this direction for close to one hundred years but undaunted they fought on until they formed the government of a new South Africa as that wind of change which Macmillan warned the whites about finally swept them away in 1994.

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The political situation in South Africa worsened for the blacks over the next fifty years or so until 1948 when the heavens collapsed on them and buried them completely. That year the National Party, the political arm of the Boer nation, won the general election and formed a new government. One which was determined to push through what they described as a system of apartheid. Conceived by professors in the Department of Philosophy of Stellenbosch University and enthusiastically endorsed by the elders of the Dutch Reformed Church, apartheid was designed to pull all the constituent races apart in every sense and force the black majority into less than ten percent of available land in sterile areas which they called Bantustans. Black people were only allowed in white areas as workers who were working in white establishments and had to carry a pass on them at all times to testify to their identity as well as their place of work. The pass laws applied to males but they were soon extended to women who protested vehemently and publicly. In the township of Sharpville in March 1960, a demonstration against the pass laws which started peacefully got out of hand and the inexperienced policemen present fired into the crowd killing 69 people on the spot, some of them were shot in the back as they ran away from the scene. This incident opened the eyes of the world to the evil of apartheid but it took another thirty-four years for this evil to be exorcised. Even though Sharpville drew sharp and unfavourable attention to South Africa, it did not deter the Boers from driving on relentlessly with their agenda. It was at this time that Mandela was put on trial for treason and locked up in the notorious Robben island prison. He did not breathe the air of freedom for more than twenty-seven years.

The real issue in South Africa was land and the use of it for economic purposes. It was even more so when the land was found to yield large quantities of gold and diamonds. These minerals helped to turn a slow, agricultural society into a searing hot industrial society in need of large numbers of compliant workers who have no share in the wealth that they were creating for a minority within the society. In South Africa as it was or actually it still is in the United States, the people who tend to get locked out have a dark skin, more as a means of identification than anything else. It has been argued that before Africans became trade goods to be bought and sold like chattel and owned body and soul, the issue of racial inferiority was not taken seriously. As soon as blacks came on the market as slaves, everything changed and men began to look for ways and means of explaining why other men can and should be used as slaves. The white people desperately looked around for the justification for African slavery and claimed to have found it in their Bible. First, the so called God’s people were slaves in Egypt so, it should be alright if black people are made to go through the same ordeal to improve the race. Then of course, there is that contorted story of Ham, the progenitor of all black people who was cursed by God to serve others. It is even claimed that it is the wish of God that some people are born for the sole purpose of being slaves. The reason why this should be taken as true is not clear but such issues are never clear. They have to be accepted as articles of faith.

Looking for and putting on my science cap for once, I can say with all confidence that those reasons given are all spurious nonsense. There is only one human race and anyone who says otherwise is not only ignorant but is also a fool and a liar. After all, their beliefs are based on a lie. All those Stellenbosch professors were windbags whose sole purpose on earth was to mislead their fellow men and goad them into committing awful crimes against humanity. As for those stuffed up priests of the Dutch Reformed Church, they spread a doctrine of greed and earthly comforts which gave comfort to their flock; the nervous policeman who opens fire on crowds of black people, the mine owner who denied his worker a living wage, the stern judge who passed the death sentence on people without sin against man or God, the politicians who wilfully withheld education from generations of competent black people, the hangman who pulled the lever which sent men into execution pits dangling from a long piece of oiled hemp rope and even those who stood by and enjoyed unearned privileges just because they have a white skin and precious little else. Under the National Party, the whole of South Africa was a giant crime scene and an affront to humanity in the country and everywhere else. And so, the struggle continues.