The land question is not just a issue of correcting a historical colonial injustice. It is a life and death matter about fixing the social economy of African society that was destroyed by the racist, supremacist and abusive dispensation over the past century or two.
The land question did not arise out of colonial settlers needing farmland, it arose out of colonial capitalists being very very desperate for cheap labour. The land question is about the violent wrenching of the African people from their agricultural-pastoral social economy to force them into job dependency.
In the late 1800s the mushrooming mining industry of the Witwatersrand was desperate for labour. The African community, then, was living in a social economy revolving around pastoral and arable agriculture. The Africans needed their time to tend their livestock and till their land. They did not have the time to work in the colonialists' mines and factories.
So dire was the labour situation that the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (Wenela) was formed in 1902, followed by the Native Recruitment Corporation (NRC) around 1912, to recruit labour from neighbouring countries and the region. The NRC recruited mainly from Lesotho and later Transkei. Wenela recruited from the north and had offices as far as Tanzania but the bulk of the workers came from the Rhodesias (Zimbabwe and Zambia), Nyasaland (Malawi) and Mozambique.
It is a topic for another day but let me briefly point out that these two organizations are the ones that introduced and cemented a culture of labour migration to South Africa throughout the region, not recent events like Mugabe's rule or the end of Afrikaner led apartheid. Apartheid was a mere interruption to the labour migration trend.
By the way these organizations still exist today in the form of TEBA Limited.
The desperation for labour eventually spawned a strategy of denying local blacks self-reliance. That is why the Native Land Act of 1913 banned Africans, not just from owning land, but from renting land in 93% of the country. Thus Africans were squeezed into tiny areas to deny them self-reliance. or forced to become tenant labourers, effectively recreating medieval English society of serfs (commoners) and lords but this time along racial lines.
The strategy of turning Africans into cheap labour has been extremely successful. Who can raise their hand and deny that the majority of today's black South Africans are just a pool of very cheap labour desperately trying to drive away competition from regional labour that was also invited by the same 1900s strategy that made locals landless.
With this knowledge at hand, it should be clear that land reform is not just a matter of grabbing land and giving it to blacks (although that will work in the very long term) but a strategy of fixing the social economy of blacks by returning them to a measure of self-sustenance on the land.
That will not work without some measure and effort to reskill Africans with some basic agricultural skills. Afrikaners only became successful farmers because of heavy subsidies, affirmative action and of course abundant cheap labour during the apartheid era.
Does land reform work? It is working in Zimbabwe. Seventy percent of Zimbabweans live in rural areas growing their own food. They have little need for a cash economy. One of the reasons why Zanu-PF regularly wins elections is that every year it provides free agricultural inputs to rural dwellers.
The Zimbabweans who are in SA are mostly former city dwellers and others who choose to be dependent on the cash economy.
To get cash, unless you have assets, you need a job. But what do you need cash for? To buy food and pay for shelter (rent). If you have access to enough land sufficient to grow your own food, you won't need much cash once you build your home on that same piece of land.
My own mother was living in Harare until 2003 when Mugabe's land reform took place. Then she got 6 hectares and access to a common grazing area on a former white owned farm. She now has 15 head of cattle and chicken runs with capacity for 1000 chickens. I depend on her for food when I am home.
What is keeping Zimbabwe's economy in the doldrums is not land reform but corruption. South Africa has got that too, plenty of corruption. The early signs of the cost of corruption on the economy (shortages and high energy prices (petrol and electricity)) are already showing in South Africa. Another sign is a dysfunctional public service (police, civil servants who are reluctant do their duty to serve you unless you pay tshotsho, or are high-profile individual).
I believe strongly strongly that the land question is not a civil rights issue. It is above all a social economy and social justice issue. Protecting the property rights of those who own too much land based on past racial and colonial abuses will not prevent revolution that is coming.
As long as the social economy is based on impoverished cheap labour, revolution will happen. It is only a matter of time.
