RESTITUTION
From land reform collapse to land reform renewal
A prominent publication recently posted two articles about land reform farms where everything had collapsed. ALI VAN WYK sought insight from agricultural journalist Chris Burgess and learned about a new spirit that has quietly begun to take hold.
RESTITUTION
From land reform collapse to land reform renewal
A prominent publication recently posted two articles about land reform farms where everything had collapsed. ALI VAN WYK sought insight from agricultural journalist Chris Burgess and learned about a new spirit that has quietly begun to take hold.
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I'VE ALWAYS been interested in the land debate, because land played such a central role in the history of my ancestors, almost all of them Voortrekkers who settled in the Free State. The first thing I was told about land was that the land on which we farmed and lived was bought with the blood of my forefathers.
I realised early on how problematic this view was because the people who were “paid for with blood" now sat without land, and they couldn't do much with the white people's blood that had seeped into the sand. These very people had been alienated from their own soil for at least a century – most much longer, even permanently.
It took me years to understand what land means as a political concept, rather than just a means of production. When faceless, aggressive EFF supporters on social media tell you to give back the land and fuck off back to the Netherlands, I would usually first ask the person if they had applied for land through restitution or redistribution. After all, a negotiated settlement was reached in the country and one of the first programmes agreed upon was a drastic redistribution of land. For this purpose, the first new law in the new democracy was written in 1994, the Restitution of Land Rights Act of 1994, which was made possible by Article 25 of the new constitution...
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Next articleAli van Wyk
Content editorAli van Wyk is content editor of Vrye Weekblad.