tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/land-dispossession-33616/articlesLand dispossession – The Conversation2022-12-16T11:09:47Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1959432022-12-16T11:09:47Z2022-12-16T11:09:47ZLand is a heated issue in South Africa – the print media are presenting only one side of the story<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500352/original/file-20221212-96198-ffnxf6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">South Africa’s vast commercial press is dominated by four conglomerates.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Moeletsi Mabe/Sunday Times/Gallo Images/Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The land question was at the heart of the South African national liberation struggle. The 1913 Natives Land Act restricted black people from owning and occupying parts of the country, leading to whites owning about <a href="https://www.gov.za/1913-natives-land-act-centenary">87% of the land</a>. This reduced the African majority to “<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/sol-plaatjes-native-life-in-south-africa/editions-of-native-life-in-south-africa-1916-to-the-present/EC1B8069762D083ECF7D134B97017E42">pariahs in the land of their birth</a>”, in the 1916 words of Sol Plaatje, the founding secretary general of the African National Congress, now South Africa’s governing party.</p>
<p>To reverse this injustice, in 2018 the national assembly acceded to demands from various pressure groups and began the process to <a href="https://www.parliament.gov.za/project-event-details/285">amend section 25 of the constitution</a>, which deals with restitution and redress of the dispossessed. Some had argued that the section hindered land expropriation. Parliament <a href="https://www.parliament.gov.za/project-event-details/285">conducted public hearings</a> across the country to get public input on the proposed amendments. </p>
<p>This process received extensive media coverage. But, the voices of ordinary people at the public hearings were severely underrepresented in the media. This amounted to denying them narratives resources to tell their own stories. In the process, the dispossessed and marginalised were forced to look at themselves through the prism of others.</p>
<p>As the land reform debate rages, there are signs that the commercial press marginalises anti-western alternative voices opposed to the current dominant political, social and economic outlook underpinned by capitalism. This is discernible in views such as that the debate causes <a href="https://www.iol.co.za/business-report/economy/land-bank-issues-stark-warning-on-land-grabs-16664550">“uncertainty” and investment jitters</a>, primarily driven by business and government sources, are prevalent. </p>
<h2>Commercial press in South Africa</h2>
<p>South Africa’s press is vast and dominated by four conglomerates – Media24, Arena Holdings, Sekunjalo (Independent Media) and Caxton. While recent figures paint a bleak picture with plummeting circulation, the press still commands a sizeable readership. Circulation is estimated at 445,485 physical copies for dailies, 172,348 for weeklies and <a href="https://abc.org.za/">550,416 for weekenders</a>.</p>
<p>Though there have been changes in media ownership patterns since the end of apartheid, we argue in our latest <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23743670.2022.2033289">journal article</a> that the ethos of this press remains rooted in apartheid-like economic and ideological beliefs. Hence the voices opposed to the dominant ideas are marginalised. By elevating the views of economic elites over the dispossessed majority, the media perpetuate the past injustices. </p>
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<p>Commercial factors such as ownership and funding result in unfair treatment of anti-west and anti-capitalist discourses. The media don’t treat the concerns of the dispossessed as legitimate. </p>
<p>But how exactly do the print media represent the land debate? To answer this question, we analysed articles on “land expropriation” in the commercial press between January and December 2018. The newspapers we analysed include <a href="https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/">Business Day</a>, <a href="https://www.iol.co.za/capeargus">Argus</a>, <a href="https://www.citizen.co.za/">The Citizen</a>, <a href="https://www.iol.co.za/capetimes">Cape Times</a>, <a href="https://www.businesslive.co.za/fm/">Financial Mail</a>, <a href="https://www.heraldlive.co.za/">The Herald</a> and <a href="https://www.sowetanlive.co.za/">Sowetan</a>. What emerged was overwhelmingly negative coverage of the discourse, dominated by what we regard as elite sources. Instead of being impartial, the commercial press failed to play a democratic role. This erodes public trust in the media. </p>
<h2>Framing land expropriation</h2>
<p>This negative coverage is driven by five themes: land grabs, private property rights, food insecurity, negative consequences to the economy and investor confidence. </p>
<p>These themes betray the media’s slant towards ideas of the dominant class. Through a close analysis, it becomes apparent that the way the press represents the land debate is linked to its historical place in capitalist economy.</p>
<p>For example, through interviewing and quoting elitist sources from academia and business, the media employed the “land grab” frame to sound the alarm in numerous sensational headlines that the debate scares away investors and is damaging to the country. It’s suggested that the country would head down the same path of “ruin” as Zimbabwe if it pressed ahead with <a href="https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/daily-news-south-africa/20180816/281522226928541">land expropriation</a>.</p>
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<p>The “private property rights” frame was equally employed. The media leaned heavily on the European classical liberalism that perceives private property protection as the government’s primary purpose. Attempts to redress colonial injustices were portrayed as having dire economic consequences. The “private property” narrative remained unchallenged. </p>
<h2>Description bias and narrow neoliberal framing</h2>
<p>The framing of the land debate is guilty of “<a href="https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/79/4/1397/2234084">description bias</a>”. This is when the media avoid unpacking underlying causes of important issues. The media fail to critically engage the land question and the broader redistributive justice debate in the country. Their claim to be neutral obscures a neoliberal bias.</p>
<p>Many stories analysed were written in a manner that did not support land expropriation. A narrow neoliberal frame was employed rather than one that recognised the dispossessed. </p>
<p>When parliament organised public hearings on the land debate <a href="https://www.parliament.gov.za/project-event-details/285">in 2018</a> to give ordinary people a chance to air their views, their voices were severely underrepresented in the media. The dispossessed were compelled to look at themselves through the prism of others. The privileged spoke on behalf of the marginalised, reinforcing unequal power relations in society.</p>
<h2>Capitalism and media ownership</h2>
<p>Even though South Africa’s media ownership has gradually shifted to black-owned companies following democracy <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2019-01-04-00-who-runs-sas-media-is-a-black-and-white-issu">in 1994</a>, the financial muscle to control and define the overall goals and scope lies in the hands of powerful corporations with ties to global capital.</p>
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<p>The skewed reportage in the land debate can also be explained by the ownership and funding of the media. The causal relationship between ownership and media content is not always discernible. But numerous media scholars have found a strong <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23743670.2022.2096090">correlation between ownership and media texts</a>. </p>
<p>The framing of the land debate contributes to entrenching the injustices of colonialism and apartheid.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/195943/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mandla J. Radebe is affiliated with the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sarah Chiumbu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Skewed reportage on the land debate contributes to entrenching the injustices of colonialism and apartheid.Mandla J. Radebe, Associate Professor and Director, University of JohannesburgSarah Chiumbu, Associate Professor, University of JohannesburgLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1839122022-06-14T01:59:22Z2022-06-14T01:59:22ZUncovering the stories my family forgot, about a past still haunting Aotearoa New Zealand<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467883/original/file-20220609-14-sor6gr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=88%2C82%2C3779%2C2728&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A 19th century image of Parihaka, New Zealand, with Mount Taranaki in the background.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The day my great-grandfather Andrew Gilhooly was buried at Taranaki’s Ōkato cemetery in early February 1922, Jas Higgins played the Last Post. Neither man had seen active service in the “great war” with which that ritual is <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34768398">most closely associated</a>. Rather, both had served in the <a href="https://teara.govt.nz/en/new-zealand-wars">New Zealand wars</a>, an earlier series of conflicts fought across the mid-to-late 19th century as part of the colonisation of Aotearoa New Zealand.</p>
<p>In New Zealand and Australia it’s a mark of honour to have ancestors who fought on the Dardanelles or at the Somme or Passchendaele. A national origin myth has been constructed around the <a href="https://nzhistory.govt.nz/war/anzac-day/introduction">Anzacs</a>, replete with a day of remembrance, <a href="https://nzhistory.govt.nz/map/memorials-register-map">outsized monuments</a>, and a rich tradition of rituals that are rehearsed annually “lest we forget”.</p>
<p>Nothing like the same emotional (or financial) investment is made in remembering the wars that took place at home. Our own colonial violence, in <a href="https://nzhistory.govt.nz/war/taranaki-wars">Taranaki</a> and at <a href="https://gg.govt.nz/publications/battle-%C5%8Dr%C4%81kau">Ōrākau</a>, <a href="https://teara.govt.nz/en/artwork/36926/gate-pa-battle">Pukehinahina/Gate Pā</a> and elsewhere, has been relegated to the margins of the national consciousness. It’s an ongoing process of selective historical amnesia that we’re only slowly beginning to address – not so much lest we forget, as best we forget.</p>
<p>This might explain why I grew up knowing next to nothing about my maternal great-grandfather. Yes, there were plenty of stories about his wife (roundly condemned as having been a “difficult” woman) and six children (farmers, priestly prodigies and musical spinsters). However, other than the bare facts that he was born into a poor farming family in County Limerick in Ireland and had served in the New Zealand Armed Constabulary (AC), about Andrew there was only silence.</p>
<p>Last year I wrote a small family memoir, <a href="https://masseypress.ac.nz/books/the-forgotten-coast/">The Forgotten Coast</a>, in an attempt to address that and other silences in my family. As it turned out, the bugling of Jas Higgins at the graveside was the least of the things I didn’t know about my great-grandfather. </p>
<h2>Family silences</h2>
<p>Andrew became the conundrum at the heart of the book, but he was not the reason I began it. On Christmas Eve 2012, my father died during heart surgery we thought would be routine, but which rapidly became complicated. There were things I wish I’d said to him, and I started writing as a way of doing so. </p>
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<p>(Mind you, Dad wasn’t much given to talking either. After he died, just before his funeral, we were able to have him at home with us – and more than once, as we ate, drank and reminisced about him, someone observed that his verbal contribution was not noticeably less than it would have been had he still been alive.)</p>
<p>As the book unfolded, other people and other things began to intrude. It became increasingly clear that if I was to make sense of the silences there had sometimes been between me and Dad, I would also need to address those which draped around other relationships, including some within my mother’s family.</p>
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<p>Dad was raised in an orphanage, but married into a large, sprawling family that was – by virtue of three farms, which Andrew and his wife Kate came to control – part of a coastal Taranaki community with a strong sense of identity. Both the people and the place, in the west of New Zealand’s North Island, were important backdrops to my parents’ life together. So I couldn’t really tackle Dad without also dealing with the origins of that context.</p>
<p>The problem was that nobody seemed to know much about Andrew: there was nothing in Mum’s family’s collective memory about where he was born, when he came to Aotearoa, or about his involvement in both the military and agricultural campaigns of dispossession in Taranaki. Nothing other than silence, that is.</p>
<p>So I set about filling in the gaps, the most consequential of which concerned the part Andrew played in the events through which Taranaki Māori were alienated from their land. And the more I learned about that, the clearer it became to me that my own family’s origin story here in Aotearoa is also rooted in historical amnesia. </p>
<p>One of the effects of this is to obscure the uncomfortable paradox that my ancestor, whose own people had been dispossessed by English colonisers, had participated in and benefited from the confiscation of another people’s land.</p>
<h2>The Irish model</h2>
<p>There are two aspects to this contradiction. The first is that for nine years Andrew Gilhooly served in the AC, a hybrid police-military force designed to subjugate Māori, and explicitly modelled on an Irish organisation that had controlled his own people through violence.</p>
<p>The establishment of the AC in 1867 reflected the colonial administration’s desire for a force modelled on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Irish_Constabulary">Royal Irish Constabulary</a> (RIC), which was “generally acknowledged [to be] the finest force in the world”. Indeed, New Zealand’s version of the RIC was set up in the very year in which the Irish Constabulary took on the “Royal” moniker, following its role in the suppression of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Irish_Constabulary">Fenian Rising</a>.</p>
<p>True, it was far from unusual for Irish Catholics like Andrew to serve in either force. In the 1870s, more than 75% of the RIC’s constables were Catholic (although Protestants accounted for 80% of the officer class), while 37 of the 167 men who joined the AC in the year Andrew signed up (1877) were also Irish-born Roman Catholics.</p>
<p>But the point is that in 1867, New Zealand’s colonial administration copied the template of an institution developed to pacify the Irish and let it loose on another indigenous population. </p>
<p>A decade later one of those Irish indigenes – my great-grandfather – joined that force. And four years after that, he was standing alongside 1,588 other military men waiting to start the invasion of <a href="https://nzhistory.govt.nz/occupation-pacifist-settlement-at-parihaka">Parihaka pā</a>, home to the great Māori pacifist leaders <a href="https://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-CowHero-t1-body-d32.html">Te Whiti o Rongomai</a> and <a href="https://onehera.waikato.ac.nz/nodes/view/5335">Tohu Kākahi</a>.</p>
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<span class="caption">Armed constabulary awaiting orders to advance on Parihaka pā, 1881.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alexander Turnbull Library</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
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<h2>Living on confiscated land</h2>
<p>The second aspect of the paradox flows from Andrew’s subsequent role in the agricultural campaign that completed the alienation of Māori land in Taranaki. Shortly after his military service ended in 1891, he returned to the province where, in time, he and his wife Kate would come to control three farms that were part of the 1,275,000 acres confiscated from Māori by the colonial state in 1865, and subsequently granted or sold to settler farmers and their families.</p>
<p>As with the establishment of the AC, so too the legislation underpinning the confiscations had Irish antecedents. The two principal statutes were the Suppression of Rebellion Act and the <a href="https://nzhistory.govt.nz/the-new-zealand-settlements-act-passed">New Zealand Settlement Acts of 1863</a>. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-nzs-colonial-government-misused-laws-to-crush-non-violent-dissent-at-parihaka-126495">How NZ's colonial government misused laws to crush non-violent dissent at Parihaka</a>
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<p>The former, which was virtually copied from the 1799 Irish law of the same name, suspended the right of trial in particular circumstances so as to “punish certain aboriginal tribes of the colony”. Through the second, which was based on Cromwell’s Act of Settlement in 1652, the colonial state gave itself permission to confiscate Māori land for “public purposes”.</p>
<p>For generations, Andrew’s own people had farmed leasehold land in the township of Ballynagreanagh, land that had passed out of Irish ownership centuries before he was born in 1855. Andrew left behind the “at will” contract (which permitted land owners to evict tenants without reason), the absentee English landlord and the small family plot when he quit Ireland in 1874. </p>
<p>But the irony is that the path he took out of poverty was the same one down which his forebears had been marched into penury. </p>
<h2>Big and small histories</h2>
<p>The instruments used to displace the querulous Irish – the statutory creation of “rebels”, the parliamentary confiscation of land, the establishment of a police-military force, the administration of inequitable and iniquitous leases – are the same as those subsequently deployed to deal with the troublesome Māori. The difference was that when Māori were on the receiving end, Andrew became the beneficiary of injustice.</p>
<p>Andrew Gilhooly came from poor Irish farming people, who leased a slip of land in the parish of Kilteely from an English landlord who lived in Devon. In the space of a single generation, he and his wife would reinvent themselves socially, economically and politically, laying claim to acreage 16 times the size of that tiny plot in Limerick.</p>
<p>Those new New Zealand acres enabled my great-grandparents to cast off the yoke of Irish poverty and to become respected members of the Taranaki coastal farming community. By the time Jas Higgins played the Last Post for Andrew in 1923, the Irish farm labourer had long since made way for the Taranaki settler-farmer, which was an altogether better thing to be. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/learning-to-live-with-the-messy-complicated-history-of-how-aotearoa-new-zealand-was-colonised-172219">Learning to live with the 'messy, complicated history' of how Aotearoa New Zealand was colonised</a>
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<p>Because this transformation was enabled by laws and institutions based on those which had impoverished his own ancestors, it is easy to frame Andrew as the colonised turned coloniser. Certainly that was the unequivocal position I’d reached by the time The Forgotten Coast was published.</p>
<p>But as the book has made its way in the world, and other Pākehā have contacted me with often intimate reflections on their own histories with colonisation, I find that position shifting. An unequivocal view will always offer certainty and clarity, but sometimes at the expense of feeling a little forced.</p>
<p>Perhaps, I now wonder, it is unfair to deduce an intent from the sweeping, systemic forces of history and impute it to a particular individual, as if there is no distinction to be drawn between the “big story” of colonisation and the “small stories” of people like my great-grandfather. </p>
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<span class="caption">Becoming a New Zealander: Andrew Gilhooly (holding ball) with the AC rugby team in 1881.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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<h2>Becoming Pākehā</h2>
<p>Whatever his personal culpability, the book has also changed my understanding of time. New Zealand historian <a href="https://people.wgtn.ac.nz/Charlotte.Macdonald">Charlotte McDonald</a> rightly questions the standard view of the past as a collection of “actions and speech acts with no pulse, drained of any capacity to affect the present”. </p>
<p>Rather, the three Gilhooly farms generated material and immaterial benefits that continue to shape the lives of Andrew’s descendants. They are a form of living inheritance – and they are, of course, not available to those from whom the land was confiscated.</p>
<p>One of the intangible gains is the clear sense I have of being of and from this place called Aotearoa. I think of myself as Pākehā (a New Zealander with European ancestry) easily these days – but I also wonder when Andrew stopped being Irish and become this new thing, a New Zealander. At what point, if ever, did he cross his personal Rubicon? </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/putting-aotearoa-on-the-map-new-zealand-has-changed-its-name-before-why-not-again-168651">Putting Aotearoa on the map: New Zealand has changed its name before, why not again?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>I’ve no way of knowing, and neither can I apprehend what might have been lost in that process. Andrew has and will always have work to do as one of Alan Bennett’s “biddable dead”, his job forever being to leave the tragedy of Ireland for the sunlit uplands of a new world. But I imagine that this process was not uncomplicated for him or for other migrants; that alongside the social and economic metamorphoses there were also splinters of exile and rupture.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, there has been a method to the forgetting that has taken place in my family; a reason the ghost stories of the Armed Constabulary and the farming of confiscated land went untold for so long. My version of the historical amnesia that applies more broadly to the New Zealand wars has allowed me to avoid (until now) the uncomfortable paradox I have walked you through here. </p>
<p>It has meant I have been able to happily claim my place in the pioneer-settler foundation myth, the one that always begins with the purchase of the family farm and ignores the stuff that came before (until now). As the forgetting ends, things must change.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/183912/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Shaw does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>While tracing his own family’s journey from Ireland to Aotearoa New Zealand, Richard Shaw encountered how much ‘selective amnesia’ about the colonial past still shapes our lives today.Richard Shaw, Professor of Politics, Massey UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1822772022-05-16T12:07:37Z2022-05-16T12:07:37ZLand reform in South Africa: what the real debate should be about<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462968/original/file-20220513-19-23or2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Land ownership in South Africa remains skewed towards white farmers.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Silverman/via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Land reform in South Africa is an emotive and politically fraught subject. That’s because land was at the heart of the dispossession of Africans by colonial settlers. Successful land reform can help overcome this legacy, making it central to forging shared national bonds. It can also serve as a basis for a cohesive society through a properly managed redistribution programme.</p>
<p>But nearly three decades since the first democratic elections in 1994, <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-the-south-african-economy-9780192894199?facet_narrowbybinding_facet=Ebook&facet_narrowbyprice_facet=100to200&lang=en&cc=gb">South Africa has yet to crack land reform</a>. That’s not for a lack of initiatives. Some communities and individuals have indeed had their land restored. But for every one of these stories there’s another of a “failed” farming project or a small farmer stuck in a remote area without hope of gaining a livelihood. </p>
<p>Opinions vary on what <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Land-Matters-Africas-Failed-Reforms/dp/1776095960">has gone wrong with land reform</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-a-land-reform-agency-could-break-south-africas-land-redistribution-deadlock-165450">what should be done about it</a>.</p>
<p>The first problem is that the topic often rears its head close to election time. As the governing party, the African National Congress (<a href="https://www.anc1912.org.za/anc-today-2022/">ANC</a>), gets closer to its national elective conference <a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2022-01-20-nwc-proposes-december-16-for-start-of-anc-national-conference/">scheduled for December</a>, the country can expect another heated debate on land reform. The curtain raiser to this debate will be the ANC’s <a href="https://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/anc-policy-conference-set-for-july-f383a0cf-df14-4052-a0b6-5b93fc0dfd39">policy conference in July </a> which precedes the elective conference.</p>
<p>But the debates in these charged environments tend to generate more heat than substance. Take the decision of the <a href="https://cisp.cachefly.net/assets/articles/attachments/73640_54th_national_conference_report.pdf">2017 ANC policy conference to amend Section 25 of the constitution</a>. The political rationale was that this would enable expropriation of land without compensation under specified conditions, which, in turn, <a href="https://www.polity.org.za/article/54th-national-conference-report-and-resolutions-2018-03-26">would accelerate land reform</a>.</p>
<p>But a prominent legal scholar on land reform, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi pointed out in 2018 and 2019 that land reform <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2018-06-08-00-how-land-expropriation-would-work/">had not been held back by the constitution</a> but by capacity constraints and the lack of political will on the part of government. </p>
<p>Ngcukaitobi went on to consolidate his views in a book, <em><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.co.za/book/land-matters-south-africa%E2%80%99s-failed-land-reforms-and-road-ahead/9781776095964">Land Matters: South Africa’s Failed Land Reforms and the Road Ahead</a></em>, published in 2021.</p>
<p>His book should be part of the basis for the debates on land reform during the forthcoming ANC conferences. It offers insights on what an effective land reform programme – and the institutions to deliver it – might look like. </p>
<h2>Why land matters</h2>
<p>Ngcukaitobi reflects on the role of business in dispossession and apartheid, and therefore its potential contribution to land reform. In this he invokes the late Stellenbosch University economist Sampie Terreblanche <a href="https://www.amazon.com/History-Inequality-South-Africa-1652-2002/dp/1869140222">who also flagged the role of business in contributing to reparatory justice</a>. </p>
<p>Ngcukaitobi also argues that land reform shouldn’t be seen only as an agricultural industry problem. Rather, it should be viewed as a multi-industry challenge involving non-agricultural players. Underpinning this view is his analysis that white farmers weren’t the only beneficiaries of the colonial and apartheid regimes’ land policies. Most of those who profited from apartheid live in urban areas. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Book cover showing the title 'Land Matters'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/463304/original/file-20220516-20-ov300z.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/463304/original/file-20220516-20-ov300z.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=817&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463304/original/file-20220516-20-ov300z.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=817&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463304/original/file-20220516-20-ov300z.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=817&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463304/original/file-20220516-20-ov300z.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1026&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463304/original/file-20220516-20-ov300z.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1026&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/463304/original/file-20220516-20-ov300z.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1026&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On this point, <a href="https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/201907/panelreportlandreform_0.pdf">the proposals</a> of a Land Reform Fund that came out of the Expert Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture in 2018 could be a perfect vehicle for business to contribute through donations for land reform. Perhaps, Ngcukaitobi should have reflected on the panel’s proposal.</p>
<p>His research draws heavily on archival material. He casts a spotlight on the large-scale loss of black South African livestock during the years of dispossession, starting from the late 1600s through theft and killings and during the wars since the late 1600s. This insight brings home the point that black South Africans lost more than land. They lost their livelihoods and productive assets too in the form of livestock. </p>
<p>He writes</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the story of land dispossession will never be complete without an understanding of the loss of indigenous people’s cattle. Cattle, more than land, were a visible sign of wealth.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Unfinished work</h2>
<p>The book also brings home the reality of the slow progress of land reform in South Africa. In 1994 when the country became a democracy, white farmers owned 77.580 million hectares of farmland <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-the-south-african-economy-9780192894199?facet_narrowbybinding_facet=Ebook&facet_narrowbyprice_facet=100to200&lang=en&cc=gb">out of the total surface area of 122 million hectares</a>. </p>
<p>Ngcukaitobi writes that the ANC’s Reconstruction and Development Programme (<a href="https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv02039/04lv02103/05lv02120/06lv02126.htm">RDP</a>) set a target of redistributing 30% of agricultural land <a href="https://www.parliament.gov.za/storage/app/media/Pages/2017/october/High_Level_Panel/Commissioned_Report_land/Diagnostic_Report_on_Land_Reform_in_South_Africa.pdf">in the first five years of the new democratic government</a>. The RDP was the socio-economic policy framework of the first ANC government in 1994.</p>
<p>Government has missed this goal and has been shifting the goal posts ever since. The aim now is to reach <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-a-land-reform-agency-could-break-south-africas-land-redistribution-deadlock-165450">the 30% goal by 2030</a>.</p>
<p>The achievements so far have been small. Exactly how far off the target the government is is the subject of heated debate. Some researchers <a href="https://www.plaas.org.za/land-debate-in-south-africa-is-clouded-by-misrepresentation-and-lack-of-data-2/">argue that land reform has been painfully slow</a>. In my work with Stellenbosch University agricultural economist, Professor Johann Kirsten, we <a href="https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192894199.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780192894199-e-10">estimate</a> that a total of 13.2 million ha (or 17%) has already been transferred away from white landowners to the state (3.08 million ha) or black owners (10.135 million ha) through private and state supported transactions including land restitution. </p>
<p>These have included restitution, redistribution, private transactions and state procurement transactions.</p>
<p>If we add the hectares of land (2.339 million ha) that were successfully identified for restitution, but for which communities elected to receive financial compensation as the means for restitution, then the total area of land rights that were restored since 1994 is 15.56 million ha.</p>
<p>This is equivalent to 20% of formerly white-owned land – much closer to the 30% target (of 23.25 million ha) than commonly believed.</p>
<p>I don’t mention these statistics to justify the relatively slow pace of land reform but to highlight the challenge of the lack of credible land data in South Africa. For effective policy-making, accurate data is key and we have suggested on various occasions the methods of <a href="https://theconversation.com/small-towns-are-collapsing-across-south-africa-how-its-starting-to-affect-farming-162697">accelerating this process</a>.</p>
<p>Ngcukaitobi argues that the failure to faithfully implement the land reform policy and its three pillars of redistribution, restitution and tenure should be attributed to weaknesses in the state, including corruption. Thus, blaming the constitution for the slow pace of land reform – and calls for an amendment – are perhaps, misplaced.</p>
<p>Another critical aspect the book highlights is the role of women in land reform by offering both the historical part played by women in the South African society, and a mirror of how they have not benefited from redistribution in the recent past.</p>
<p>Finally, there are some success stories that might have been examined in more in depth. Example are joint venture approaches to land reform, specifically within agriculture. The success stories are important as they <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-narrow-the-big-divide-between-black-and-white-farmers-in-south-africa-172328">provide insight</a> into what can be done better going forward.</p>
<p>Overall, Land Matters is crucial work that should be read by all South Africans who care about the country’s future. The point about the weakness of institutions comes up several times in the book. This is a critical aspect that the government should prioritise. It should strengthen the land reform delivery instruments, and do more with the establishment of the Land Reform and Agricultural Development Agency <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-a-land-reform-agency-could-break-south-africas-land-redistribution-deadlock-165450">that has already been announced by the president</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/182277/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Wandile Sihlobo is the Chief Economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa (Agbiz) and a member of the Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC).</span></em></p>Land reform had not been held back by the constitution but by capacity constraints and a lack of political will.Wandile Sihlobo, Senior Fellow, Department of Agricultural Economics, Stellenbosch UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1678172021-12-09T15:16:19Z2021-12-09T15:16:19ZThe new enclosure: how land commissions can lead the fight against urban land-grabs<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433143/original/file-20211122-23-82ywzj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In 2020, Liverpool became the first city in England to set up a land commission.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/liverpool-skyline-rooftop-view-buildings-england-1787259515">Songquan Deng | Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When Boris Johnson sold the 35-acre <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f7b5599c-c7b0-11e2-9c52-00144feab7de">Royal Albert Docks in London</a> to Chinese buyers in 2013, it was his biggest commercial property deal as mayor of London and one of China’s largest investments in the UK. The Greater London Authority sold off further parcels of land in the area in a bid to regenerate the Royal Docks, which had fallen into disrepair with the decline of the docklands from the 1960s. </p>
<p>Over the past few decades, huge transfers of land from public to private ownership have occurred throughout Britain. Since Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979, <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/3050-the-new-enclosure">one-tenth</a> of the entire British landmass, or about half of the land owned by all public bodies, has been privatised. This has included, for instance, dozens of <a href="https://www.forces.net/services/tri-service/more-50-bases-go-mod-estate-sell">former military bases</a> on Ministry of Defence land. </p>
<p>In our cities, one result of this land privatisation has been the long-term shift from public to private housing tenure: social rented housing <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13604813.2012.709403">declined</a> from 31% of Britain’s total housing stock in 1981 to just 18% in 2012. </p>
<p>As what was effectively our <a href="https://theconversation.com/urban-commons-are-under-siege-in-the-age-of-austerity-heres-how-to-protect-them-121067">common wealth</a> is sold off, local authorities are losing the capacity to address the interconnected housing and climate change <a href="https://www.tcpa.org.uk/blog/blog-the-need-for-better-environmental-standards-in-homes-old-and-new">crises</a>. From London to Leeds, this transformation of land has <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264275115300299">impeded democratic involvement</a> in urban planning. It has <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13604813.2012.709403?needAccess=true">displaced</a> working-class communities. And it has <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13604813.2012.754190">heightened</a> social inequalities.</p>
<p>In a bid to make Liverpool the fairest and most socially inclusive city region in the UK, the mayor, Steve Rotherham, launched England’s first land commission in September 2020. The commission’s findings chime with <a href="http://www.gmhousingaction.com/who-owns-the-city/">our research</a>. It argues for a fundamentally new understanding of what land is. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Panoramic view of London from Highgate Hampstead Park" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433148/original/file-20211122-17-1h5hnoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433148/original/file-20211122-17-1h5hnoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433148/original/file-20211122-17-1h5hnoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433148/original/file-20211122-17-1h5hnoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433148/original/file-20211122-17-1h5hnoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433148/original/file-20211122-17-1h5hnoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433148/original/file-20211122-17-1h5hnoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Even many of our so-called urban commons don’t belong to the people at all.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/panoramic-view-london-highgate-hampstead-park-632934269">pabmap | Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What is a land commission?</h2>
<p>Liverpool was the first metropolitan area in England to establish a participatory land commission. The participants were from the public, private and voluntary sectors as well as from academia. They were <a href="https://www.liverpoolcityregion-ca.gov.uk/steve-rotheram-launches-englands-first-land-commission-focused-on-community-wealth-building/">tasked</a> with a radical year-long mission: to figure out how to make the best use of publicly owned land in the city region. </p>
<p>The idea is to build what economists call <a href="https://cles.org.uk/community-wealth-building/what-is-community-wealth-building/">community wealth</a>. In response, the commission released its <a href="https://cles.org.uk/publications/our-land/">final report</a> in June 2021, in concert with the Manchester-based <a href="https://cles.org.uk/">Centre for Local Economic Strategies</a>. </p>
<p>Public authorities in recent decades have largely looked at urban land through a narrow economic growth lens. This has focused on <a href="https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/man-city-champions-league-final-20494480">attracting investment</a> at the expense of wider community needs – social housing, say, or public green space. </p>
<p>By contrast, the commission recognises that land plays an important function in <a href="https://landforthemany.uk/">addressing</a> social and environmental, as well as economic, needs. This challenges the processes of privatisation, commodification and wealth extraction that have characterised urban development since the 1980s, and which political economist Brett Christophers has described as the <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/3050-the-new-enclosure">“new enclosure”</a>. Similar processes can be seen in <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X16305484">other countries</a> around the world too. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/enclosure-grand-scale">Karl Marx</a> and <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-invention-of-capitalism">others</a> drew a direct connection between the <a href="https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=568">enclosure of the commons</a>, which took place during the 16th-19th century in England, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite. If enclosure led to the dispossession of the rural peasantry, that storing up of wealth by the privileged few, in turn, led to the rise of capitalism in western Europe. </p>
<p>As historical <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520260009/the-magna-carta-manifesto">research</a> shows, the very notion of the commons is revolutionary. It defines land as collective wealth that belongs to everyone. This stands in stark contrast to the capitalist model of private property. </p>
<p>It is this idea that motivated the 17th-century reformer, <a href="https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/culture/theory/item/2978-a-common-treasury-for-all-gerrard-winstanley-and-the-diggers">Gerard Winstanley</a>, along with a group of men and women who became known as the Diggers, to create a social order based on common ownership of the land. </p>
<p>This historical tradition animates the Liverpool land commission’s vision of how urban land can be managed for the benefit of the many rather than the few. The report explicitly situates the commission’s work within that long history of enclosure and resistance, quoting a <a href="http://jacklynch.net/Texts/winstanley.html">1649 pamphlet</a> from Winstanley: “The earth was not made for you, to be Lords of it, and we to be your Slaves, Servants and Beggars; but it was made to be a common Livelihood to call, without respect of persons.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433146/original/file-20211122-25-nausrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Overhead view of the Three Graces and the Liverpool waterfront" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433146/original/file-20211122-25-nausrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433146/original/file-20211122-25-nausrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1067&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433146/original/file-20211122-25-nausrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1067&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433146/original/file-20211122-25-nausrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1067&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433146/original/file-20211122-25-nausrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1340&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433146/original/file-20211122-25-nausrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1340&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433146/original/file-20211122-25-nausrs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1340&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Urban land is increasingly seen as an economic asset, at the expense of its social functions.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/lrG9KIuxQzo">Phil Kiel | Unsplash</a>, <a class="license" href="http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en">FAL</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Practical steps</h2>
<p>The commission’s report includes a series of practical recommendations to reclaim the social function of urban land. These include establishing a citizen-led body for governing public land. It recommends making public land available to community organisations for socially valuable projects such as cooperatives, green spaces and social enterprises. And it suggests establishing an online map of public land resources, including empty land, that is currently held by councils.</p>
<p>Further, it recommends capturing rising land values (future profits derived from the development of currently underused land) to fund reparations for Liverpool’s historic role in the transatlantic slave trade. And it suggests using public land to install the green infrastructure needed to combat climate change. </p>
<p>If adopted, these recommendations will mark a rupture from the Thatcherite approach to <a href="https://theconversation.com/ending-austerity-stop-councils-selling-off-public-assets-113858">selling off public assets</a> that has dominated since the 1980s. As such, the commission demonstrates how decisions about urban land use can be undertaken in a democratic, participatory and transparent manner. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.gmhousingaction.com/who-owns-the-city/">Our research</a> on public land privatisation in the neighbouring city of Manchester suggests that the land commission approach needs to be expanded to other UK cities. We raised a number of concerns about public land sales by Manchester City Council, including the lack of transparency around deals and the fact that large amounts of public land have been sold to private developers to build <a href="http://www.gmhousingaction.com/report_launched_on_housing_finance_gm/">city centre apartment blocks</a> that contain no social or affordable housing. </p>
<p>In response to this research, over 60 civil society organisations <a href="http://www.gmhousingaction.com/gm-land-commission-letter/">signed an open letter</a> calling for the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, to stick to his <a href="https://andyformayor.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Andy-Burnham-Manisfesto-v2.1-002.pdf">manifesto</a> commitment to establish a Greater Manchester land commission. </p>
<p>The UK government’s “<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/56238260">levelling-up</a>” programme has brought regional inequality and postindustrial urban decline to the fore once again. But addressing these longstanding issues will require a fundamental rethink about what land is for and the purpose it serves in today’s society. The Liverpool land commission has opened the door to the future. Which cities will follow?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/167817/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jonathan Silver receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, and the European Research Council</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tom Gillespie receives funding from the University of Manchester and the Economic and Social Research Council. </span></em></p>Liverpool is the first city in England to investigate, via a land commission, how urban property can best serve everyone.Jonathan Silver, Senior Research Fellow, University of SheffieldTom Gillespie, Hallsworth Research Fellow, University of ManchesterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1373192020-05-15T08:57:12Z2020-05-15T08:57:12ZThe arrival of British settlers 200 years ago continues to cast a shadow over South Africa<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334630/original/file-20200513-156651-1ckcqx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The 1820 Settler Monument in Makhanda, Eastern Cape, commemmorates the arrival of 5,000 British colonial settlers.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hoberman Collection/Universal Images Group/Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Two hundred years ago 5,000 people from Britain were settled in the south eastern part of South Africa in an area around present-day Makhanda and Port Alfred, then called the ‘Zuurveld’, by the British colonial authorities. To some South Africans (and particularly to many of their descendants) they are heroised as having brought development and ‘civilization’ to the area. </p>
<p>But should South Africa celebrate or mourn their arrival and legacy?</p>
<p>The settlers were allotted land which African people had occupied for millenia. The western Cape of South Africa had long experienced the dispossession of indigenous land under the regime of merchant capitalism of the Dutch East India Company <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Colonial-Origins-Reconsiderations-Southern-African/dp/0813917352">from the mid 1600s</a>. But British colonialism ushered in powerful and devastating new dynamics. </p>
<p>From roughly the 1770s, wandering Dutch-speaking farmers tried to settle east of the Cape Colony. But for 40 years, their new and strong neighbours, the amaXhosa, resisted their efforts. They fought each other in 100 years of wars, <a href="https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/house-phalo-history-xhosa-people/author/peires/">which left the Xhosa weakened </a>.</p>
<p>Once the British took over in 1806, via diplomatic agreements in Europe, everything changed. In the first great removal in South African history, the Xhosa were dispossessed. It began with the expulsion of 1811/1812. What followed was an additional 70 years of war. </p>
<p>The Zuurveld was the crucible of South African history in the sense of being the area where the country’s diverse peoples first encountered each other. It was also the crucible of settler capitalism.</p>
<p>So what should we do with this 200th anniversary? It offers an invitation to sober reflection on where South Africa has travelled as a nation over two centuries and how the savage inequalities established in the past, continue in its present.</p>
<h2>Scorched earth policy</h2>
<p>This first round of expulsion was particularly cruel. Crops were destroyed, cattle confiscated, homes burnt. This led to 20,000 people under Chief Ndlambe’s leadership being forced across the Fish River and later the Keiskamma and ultimately the Kei. </p>
<p>This ‘scorched earth policy’ has been described by the victors as <a href="https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/they-were-south-africans/author/john-bond/">‘a superbly executed campaign’</a>.</p>
<p>British colonialism drove this process of dispossession, employing unprecedented levels of force which soon led to yet another war. As tensions escalated, the British simply went over the borders and seized Xhosa cattle. At the beginning of 1818, the largest to date of such raids saw 2,000 head of cattle taken. By November that year, the number of cattle taken by force from the amaXhosa in yet another raid was 23,000. </p>
<p>The ensuing fifth ‘frontier war’ in 1819 left the British once again as military victors. The colonial forces nominally controlled the old Zuurveld, as well as new stretches of land beyond the Fish River boundary.</p>
<p>By then, experience had shown that the amaXhosa would not simply stay away from their former homes by diplomatic agreement. The conquered land could only be maintained in British hands by filling it up with its own people. </p>
<p>In other parts of the empire indirect rule, using indigenous leadership, often worked. But this had proven impossible in the borderline areas of the Eastern Cape. The settlement of the 5,000 British in 1820 was a direct outcome of the latest war. It was to be the largest settler scheme undertaken in the whole of the colonial era. </p>
<p>After 1820 a small elite group of British settlers built on this process to create a new and savage social order: settler capitalism.</p>
<h2>Settler capitalism</h2>
<p>Capitalism involves the process whereby both the means of production and labour become commodities. While in this case the initial dispossession was driven by colonialism, the process of commoditisation was driven by an elite that developed their own brand of settler capitalism.</p>
<p>Deeply embedded in British colonialism, these settler elites soon articulated and perpetuated a virulent racism. It followed hot on the tail of the most massive attack the amaXhosa had ever waged against the Colony. On Christmas Eve 1834, 12,000 to 15,000 armed invaders crossed the full length of the Fish River boundary in one huge wave. They burnt settler farmhouses, killed the occupants and confiscated livestock. </p>
<p>It was an all-out attempt to get rid of the unwelcome neighbours. Most of the direct engagements in the Zuurveld forced the British settlers to abandon virtually the whole country east of Algoa Bay, saving only the towns of Grahamstown and Fort Beaufort. The Xhosa now carried guns as well as their assegais and shields.</p>
<p>But in 1835 the colonial forces soon went on the offensive and cleared the Xhosa not only out of the Zuurveld area once again, but also from strictly Xhosa-occupied lands further east. They suffered severely when the British applied the same strategy as in 1811 – a scorched earth policy which destroyed their economic base. </p>
<p>As a result, many were reduced to eating herbs and roots and forced to seek employment in the Colony from the very people who had destroyed them. Once again, the large-scale importation of British troops secured a military victory for them after nine months of fighting.</p>
<h2>A militarised racism</h2>
<p>The deep-seated racism of settler capitalism was linked to war. The war of 1834-35 was the first in which the settlers participated, and it created a particularly vitriolic racism. In the words of one of the settler elite, Mitford Bowker, the Xhosa were <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=LDoXNwaUZ_UC&pg=PA123&lpg=PA123&dq=Mitford+Bowker,+the+Xhosa+were+%E2%80%98ruthless,+worthless+savages%27.&source=bl&ots=uuTgXiZl1A&sig=ACfU3U34O6enJwrCxsLrbK-u8r7D8-kRuA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjo4NSiibPpAhUTHMAKHUYECXgQ6AEwAXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=Mitford%20Bowker%2C%20the%20Xhosa%20were%20%E2%80%98ruthless%2C%20worthless%20savages'.&f=false">‘ruthless, worthless savages’</a>.</p>
<p>The landscape around Grahamstown was the scene of many violent encounters in the wars of dispossession and the settler elite were directly involved as soldiers, as a source of supplies to the British forces and as members of the colonial administration. They had the most to gain, in the form of new lands available for their own use. Some of these same people made small fortunes as war profiteers and war mongers. Overall, as Timothy Keegan <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Colonial-Origins-Reconsiderations-Southern-African/dp/0813917352">wrote</a>, the British settler elite, were marked as exhibiting “acquisitive, warmongering propensities”.</p>
<p>This settler elite promoted their personal economic interests. They did so initially through the occupation and commoditisation of Xhosa land and through establishing and extending lucrative trading networks. Land speculation was extensive and involved buying up conquered lands and establishing sheep and cattle farms. Cattle sales and wool exports became the basis of many settler fortunes. Between 1837 and 1845 <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Colonial-Origins-Reconsiderations-Southern-African/dp/0813917352">property prices in the Eastern Cape quadrupled</a>. </p>
<p>Settler capitalism also involved the incorporation and exploitation of the amaXhosa as wage labourers. </p>
<p>The war of 1835 resulted in the importation of 16,000 amaMfengu as cheap labour for the colonists, while the war of 1846 concluded with <a href="https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Frontiers-Epic-South-Africas-Creation-Tragedy/21545276334/bd">major labour recruitment among the defeated amaXhosa</a>. Settler capitalism also involved the establishment of the financial institutions and infrastructure to promote speculation and trade. </p>
<p>The new social order that emerged was defined by racism, primitive accumulation and ‘free’ labour. It involved a continual displacement and transformation of social relations. What historian Clifton Crais calls <a href="https://repository.nwu.ac.za/handle/10394/5405">‘racial capitalism’</a>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>tore up communally based societies and began to replace them with a single colonial order. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is not hard to see the roots of the 20th century apartheid policies in the legacy of the settlers. From 1811, they advocated total domination and geographical separation along race and colour lines. Over the entire 19th century, the principles of dispossession, accumulation and domination grew and affected more and more land and people.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/137319/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The Society, Work & Politics Institute (SWOP) receives funding from the Ford Foundation.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julia Wells does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It is not hard to see the roots of 20th century apartheid policies in the legacy of the British settlers.Jacklyn Cock, Professor Emerita in Sociology and Honorary Research Professor in SWOP, University of the WitwatersrandJulia Wells, Associate Professor Emeritus and Head, Isikhumbuzo Applied History Unit, Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1254372019-11-09T18:51:55Z2019-11-09T18:51:55ZMining activities continue to dispossess black families in South Africa<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299694/original/file-20191031-187894-g9tc9j.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A cemetery in Phola, a black residential area near Witbank, to which some graves were relocated to make way for coal mining</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Supplied</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Dispossession in South Africa is associated with the period of colonialism and apartheid. As a result, not much consideration is given to how previously marginalised black communities continue to be dispossessed by coal-mining activities in democratic South Africa.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/de7bea_3030b7a84f674c838fb58b7f3f8c8eca.pdf">paper</a> that formed part of my PhD research, I investigated what communities lose because of coal mining. The research was conducted in Ogies, a town that lies 29km south-west of Witbank (Emalahleni), in Mpumalanga province.</p>
<p>I found that the relocations continue as a result of coal mining companies buying up land owned by white farmers. Black farm dwellers and labour tenants are given short shrift because the mining companies see houses – and graves – as mere movable structures and, therefore, replaceable.</p>
<p>Dispossession is historically thought about only in relation to <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/natives-land-act-1913">land</a>. But this framework is limited, given that relocation affects more than people’s homes. It happens to the graves of their families too. In my research I refer to this as loss of the intangible – families lose their spiritual security, identity, heritage and belonging. Household and grave relocations feature as an aspect of dispossession in my work. </p>
<h2>Household and grave relocations</h2>
<p>In my paper I traced the relocation of 120 families between 2012 and 2016 from Goedgevonden farm, Tweefontein farm and other farms in the vicinity of Ogies, 112km east of Johannesburg. Families were moved to make way for the Goedgevonden open-cast colliery mine, which is owned by the global mining giant Glencore. </p>
<p>As part of the relocation, at least 1,000 graves were relocated from Tweefontein farm. The graves belonged to former migrant labourers and labour tenants who came from various parts of South Africa and from other countries such as Mozambique and Swaziland. Most of the deceased people’s relatives live in the surrounding black townships such as Phola and Witbank. Others left a long time ago. This meant that some graves were claimed and others were not. </p>
<p>The study found that graves are subject to contestation because of contradictions in South Africa’s laws. On the one hand, the National Heritage Resource Act (1999) protects graves. But the South African Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (2002) allows land to be used for mining purposes. </p>
<p>The result is that the laws undermine government’s stated objective of protecting previously marginalised communities. </p>
<p>Importantly the study also found that graves are material evidence of a history that is entangled with narratives of land dispossession and restoration – even today. Graves matter because they validate citizenship for African communities that were previously denied such status. </p>
<p>Relocating graves for mining activities removes the material obstacles to a company’s desire to make profit. For the affected families, though, the relocation erases the evidence of their historical ties to a place and, above all, disrespects their ancestors. </p>
<p>The relocations at Ogies left the families feeling spiritually vulnerable and disconnected from their ancestors.</p>
<h2>Contradictions in the laws</h2>
<p>Mining companies have to provide heritage impact assessment reports when they apply for mining rights, in line with the <a href="http://www.energy.gov.za/files/esources/pdfs/energy/liquidfuels/act28r.pdf">Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act</a> and the <a href="http://www.dac.gov.za/sites/default/files/Legislations%20Files/a25-99.pdf">National Heritage Resources Act</a>. The reports often detail the structures which will be impacted during development. </p>
<p>In section 36 of the Heritage Act, graves are classified and protected according to their age and spatial location (for example, inside or outside a formal cemetery). But these measures, which are meant to reduce any possible adverse effects of mining on communities, aren’t enough. </p>
<p>The Minerals Act trumps the Heritage Act in most cases. This is evident in that no mining right or development has been denied because of the existence of graves on the site. Moreover, mining houses, and to some extent heritage consultants who are hired by mines to facilitate the relocations, don’t understand people’s attachment to their homes, and the sacredness attached to ancestral remains, as well as the meaning of land in African communities. </p>
<p>The intricate meanings of land in African communities were best
described by an anthropology professor, Peter Geschiere. He <a href="https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo6017282.html">noted that</a>
when a child is born in most African communities, her umbilical cord is buried in the soil to mark the space to which she shall be returned when she dies. Essentially, the piece of land becomes sacred at the birth – and in death. </p>
<p>During the interviews with the families whose graves were relocated, it was evident that death only marked a disconnection with the physical body. The interviewees believe that the spirits of ancestors continue to live. They bring about good omens, but also bad luck if violated. Hence, the relocated families complained that the treatment of their ancestral remains – such as putting them in plastic garbage bags during the relocations and using child-like coffins for the reburial – caused them and the ancestors distress. </p>
<h2>Intangible loss</h2>
<p>The people’s stories reveal a continued violation of the previously marginalised black majority. Even in death, the colonial and apartheid era experiences remain very much a part of post-apartheid South Africa.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/125437/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dineo Skosana receives funding from The Ford Foundation.</span></em></p>Mining companies and some heritage consultants don’t understand the sacredness attached to ancestral remains, and the meaning of land in African communities.Dineo Skosana, Researcher, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1065172019-01-10T18:25:39Z2019-01-10T18:25:39ZCultivating a nation: why the mythos of the Australian farmer is problematic<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/247414/original/file-20181127-140540-1nrmvch.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=245%2C5%2C3065%2C1988&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">As a society, we need to address the role of farming in dispossession and violence in the colonial-settler era.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wes Mountain/The Conversation</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of a series focusing on the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/the-politics-of-food-64073">politics of food</a> – what we eat, how our views of food are changing and why it matters from a cultural and political standpoint.</em> </p>
<hr>
<p>Like the Anzac soldier and bronzed surf lifesaver, the farmer holds a special place in the Australian imagination. Through hard work on a harsh and unforgiving continent, the farmer cultivated a nation. Or so the story goes. </p>
<p>Is this the whole story? Farming and agriculture were crucial to establishing the new nation, but they were also intimately involved in settler-colonial violence and dispossession of Indigenous Australians’ land and foodways.</p>
<h2>The mythos of the farmer</h2>
<p>In 1906, George Essex Evans celebrated the farmer in his poem, “<a href="http://www.middlemiss.org/rhymes_rudely_strung/2012/02/the-men-upon-the-land-by-george-essex-evans.html">The Men Upon the Land</a>”. According to Evans, it is not the bankers or office workers who “shall make Australia great,” but: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the hearts that build the nation, are the men upon the land. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The agrarian nationalism of Evans’ poetry taps into a long history that regards the farmer as the backbone of society. In 1785, Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of America, famously described farmers as “<a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/let32.asp">the most valuable citizens</a>”. </p>
<p>While factory workers and artisans could flee to another country if things got difficult, Jefferson said, the farmers: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>…are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>As such, farmers put down literal and metaphorical roots in a place.</p>
<p>In the 1930s, these ideas of agrarian civic virtue formed the basis of the <a href="http://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/country-party">Country Party</a> in Australia. <a href="http://aph.org.au/earle-page/">Earle Page</a>, 11th prime minister and leader of the Country Party (1921-1939), used the notion of “country-mindedness” to argue that Australia depended on farmers and graziers for its high standard of living. It was also the farmers who forged the core elements of the national character by taming the environment, making it productive, and creating a home. </p>
<p>Therefore, according to Page, the nation owes a special debt to the farmer. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/water-in-northern-australia-a-history-of-aboriginal-exclusion-60929">Water in northern Australia: a history of Aboriginal exclusion</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The mythos of the Australian farmer who battled a harsh environment of drought, floods and fires continues today. Although over <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locations=AU">85% of Australians</a> live in urban centres, it is in the bush, writes historian <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Bush.html?id=AvkAoQEACAAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y">Don Watson</a>, where “the real Australians live”.</p>
<p>The existence of these “real Australians” – the bushman and the farmer – continues to authenticate and deepen urban-dwelling Australians’ claim to the continent. Note the way prime ministers from Bob Hawke to <a href="https://www.afr.com/news/politics/why-queenslanders-dont-like-prime-minister-malcolm-turnbull-20180731-h13elu">Malcolm Turnbull</a> wear <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/a-new-pm-treads-an-old-track-but-leaves-the-akubra-at-home-20180827-p5003v.html">Akubra hats</a> and R.M. Williams apparel and pose with tractors in a bid to appear “authentic”. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/247874/original/file-20181129-170238-9zene9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/247874/original/file-20181129-170238-9zene9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247874/original/file-20181129-170238-9zene9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247874/original/file-20181129-170238-9zene9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247874/original/file-20181129-170238-9zene9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247874/original/file-20181129-170238-9zene9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247874/original/file-20181129-170238-9zene9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Politicians frequently dust off the Akubra hat when they visit regional Australia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tracey Nearmy/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Violence of settling a new population</h2>
<p>The celebration of the farmer for taming the continent and creating a homeland for white Australia, however, masks the role of agriculture in settler-colonial violence.</p>
<p>Agriculture played an important part in establishing settler-colonial societies such as Australia, as well as the United States, Canada and New Zealand. In contrast to exploitative colonialism, in which a nation takes all the mineral resources of a colony and then leaves, <a href="https://globalsocialtheory.org/concepts/settler-colonialism/">settler-colonialism</a> seeks to establish a new and permanent society. </p>
<p>Agriculture allows a population to settle, reproduce and grow at the cost of Indigenous peoples. </p>
<p>As Patrick Wolfe, an anthropologist who studied settler-colonial societies, has <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623520601056240">observed</a>, agriculture “progressively eats into Indigenous territory” for the reproduction of the settler population while simultaneously curtailing “the reproduction of Indigenous modes of production”. </p>
<p>This situation has forced Indigenous peoples to either enter the new economy of a colony, usually in the form of unfree labour, or raid farms for food, which Wolfe notes is “the classic pretext for colonial death-squads”.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246616/original/file-20181121-161621-1jimbqh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246616/original/file-20181121-161621-1jimbqh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246616/original/file-20181121-161621-1jimbqh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246616/original/file-20181121-161621-1jimbqh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246616/original/file-20181121-161621-1jimbqh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=590&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246616/original/file-20181121-161621-1jimbqh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=590&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246616/original/file-20181121-161621-1jimbqh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=590&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Map showing regions of Australia devoted to sheep and wheat in the 1920s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Library of Australia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>In Australia, the expansion of agriculture led to many of the bloodiest massacres in the 19th century. </p>
<p>Declarations of the intent to murder were not kept quiet. In 1824, <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/threlkeld-lancelot-edward-2734">L. E. Threlkeld</a>, an English missionary, records in his <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/21473915">diary</a> a public meeting in Bathurst where a man named William Cox, “one the largest holders of sheep in the colony”, declared:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…that the best thing that could be done, would be to shoot all the Blacks and manure the ground with their carcas[s]es, which was all the good they were fit for!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In <a href="https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/detail.php?r=1694">May</a> and <a href="https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/detail.php?r=1696">September</a> of that year, there were two separate massacres within 50km of Bathurst. At least 51 Wiradjuri men, women and children were murdered. It is unknown if Cox was involved, but from Threlkeld’s account, he had certainly made his views clear. </p>
<h2>Agricultural and evolutionary progress</h2>
<p>Agriculture not only instigated violent clashes, but was also used as an evolutionary marker. The <a href="http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ANZLawHisteJl/2005/4.pdf">“stadial theory” of societal evolution</a>, associated with the Scottish Enlightenment in the 18th Century and influential at the time of colonisation, held that there are four stages of civilisation: hunter and gather, pastoral and herding, settled agriculture and commercial exchange. </p>
<p>On this basis, Aboriginal Australians were <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=YsKyAwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&vq=stadial&pg=PT16#v=onepage&q&f=false">regarded</a> as the lowest stage of societal evolution, a stage where there were no property rights and therefore no basis for claims to territory. </p>
<p>As early as <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-27/fact-check-did-lachlan-macquarie-commit-mass-murder-and-genocide/8981092">Lachlan Macquarie’s</a> tenure as governor of NSW in the 1810s, efforts were made to forcibly transform local Indigenous populations into settled farmers. </p>
<p>In 1840, the London-based <a href="https://guides.slv.vic.gov.au/law/nativetitle">Imperial Land Commissioners</a> advised <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/gipps-sir-george-2098">NSW Governor George Gipps</a> that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…reserves of Land should be made for [Aboriginal peoples’] use and benefit in order that the best means should be taken for enabling them to pass from the hunting to the agricultural and pastoral life.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>By the 1860s, farming and gardening were key activities of the “<a href="http://latrobejournal.slv.vic.gov.au/latrobejournal/issue/latrobe-61/t1-g-t3.html">civilising</a>” process of the protectorates and missions. It was believed that cultivation and improvement of the soil would correspond to a cultivation and improvement of the self. </p>
<p>Yet, in this process of “improvement”, traditional lands were stolen and intricate systems of knowledge disrupted. </p>
<p>These are not the stories we tend to tell about farming in Australia. Few books on the history of agriculture in Australia mention the violence, dispossession and evolutionary ideas that contributed to the destruction of Indigenous foodways.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-great-australian-silence-50-years-on-100737">Friday essay: the 'great Australian silence' 50 years on</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Instead, we focus on the resilience and the triumph of the farmer battling the elements and creating a new homeland. According to environmental historian, <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/187715011?selectedversion=NBD52251868">Cameron Muir</a>, this myth is: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>…founded on a perception of the Australian environment as hostile and useless, and hence why the moral character of those who battled the land and made it grow European commodity plants was revered. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>But was the environment hostile to human flourishing? </p>
<p>The belief that Australia was inhospitable ignores the fact that Indigenous peoples had lived on the continent for more than 60,000 years. </p>
<p>Tragically, over the past 230 years, Indigenous foodways have progressively been decimated, and today Indigenous Australians suffer disproportionately from <a href="https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsGP/Racgp/Food-security-and-nutrition-in-Aboriginal-and-Torr">food insecurity and diet-related diseases</a>. </p>
<p>Thus, the myth of the battling farmer not only celebrates but silences historical wrongs and their present-day effects. </p>
<h2>A way forward?</h2>
<p>The recent recognition of the work of <a href="https://tedxsydney.com/talk/a-real-history-of-aboriginal-australians-the-first-agriculturalists-bruce-pascoe/">Bruce Pascoe</a> and others has challenged the centuries-old “accepted view” of Indigenous peoples in Australia as:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>simply wandering from plant to plant, kangaroo to kangaroo in hapless opportunism. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Pascoe highlights the intricacy and sophistication of Indigenous foodways in cultivating, harvesting and processing foods. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/is-australias-current-drought-caused-by-climate-change-its-complicated-97867">Is Australia's current drought caused by climate change? It's complicated</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Drawing on the work of Pascoe, <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/the-deal-magazine/charles-massy-call-of-the-reed-warbler/news-story/f6ad6388aad1bba522341b569b6500a0">Charles Massy</a>, a fifth-generation sheep farmer in NSW and agriculture reform advocate, has tried to promote his approach to “<a href="https://regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerative-agriculture/">regenerative agriculture</a>” within the context of the history of Australian agriculture – a history he considers environmentally and socially destructive. </p>
<p>He acknowledges the importance of recognising the past and continuing connection of Indigenous peoples to the land and contends that to: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>…manage, nurture and regenerate country, then we need to fathom where it came from … what it is made of, how it works and functions, how it was managed before us.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>While we can’t change past wrongs, we can start re-thinking the environmental, social and political implications of the way we produce our food on this continent. </p>
<p>Restoring the land and environment is important, but we also need to address the role of farming in dispossession and violence. This is not only about remembering, but moving forward in a way that avoids repeating the past and may open up ways of <a href="https://www.pozible.com/project/202236">restoring Indigenous foodways</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/listening-but-not-hearing-process-has-trumped-substance-in-indigenous-affairs-55161">listening to the voices</a> of those who have suffered and resisted settler-colonialism.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Read other articles in the politics of food series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/the-politics-of-food-64073">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/106517/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christopher Mayes receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>The farmer has long been held up in society as the ‘real Australian’, but this image ignores the role of agriculture in dispossessing Indigenous people of their lands and culture.Christopher Mayes, DECRA Research Fellow, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/763552017-05-23T14:40:45Z2017-05-23T14:40:45ZThe pros and cons of commercial farming models in Africa<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/170298/original/file-20170522-25082-38am7t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Workers harvesting from a commercial farm in Ethiopia. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Barry Malone</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Colonialism brought large-scale farming to Africa, promising modernisation and jobs – but often dispossessing people and exploiting workers. Now, after several decades of independence, and with investor interest growing, African governments are once again promoting large plantations and estates. But the new corporate interest in African agriculture has been criticised as a “<a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03066150.2011.559005">land grab</a>”.</p>
<p>Small-scale farmers, on family land, are still the mainstay of African farming, producing <a href="http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/est/Investment/Agriculture_at_a_Crossroads_Global_Report_IAASTD.pdf">90% of its food</a>. Their future is increasingly uncertain as the large-scale colonial model returns. </p>
<p>To make way for big farms, local people have lost their land. Promises of jobs and other benefits have been slow to materialise, if at all.</p>
<p>The search is on for alternatives to big plantations and estates that can bring in private investment without dispossessing local people – and preferably also support people’s livelihoods by creating jobs and strengthening local economies. </p>
<p>Two possible models stand out. </p>
<p><a href="https://boydellandbrewer.com/africa-s-land-rush-pb.html">Contract farming</a> is often touted as an “inclusive business model” that links smallholders into commercial value chains. In these arrangements, smallholder farmers produce cash crops on their own land, as ‘outgrowers’, on contract to agroprocessing companies.</p>
<p>Then there is growth in a new class of “<a href="https://boydellandbrewer.com/africa-s-land-rush-pb.html">middle farmers</a>”. These are often educated business people and civil servants who are investing money earned elsewhere into medium-scale commercial farms which they own and operate themselves.</p>
<p>So what are the real choices and trade-offs between large plantations or estates; contract farming by outgrowers; or individual medium-scale commercial farmers? </p>
<p>These different models formed the <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2016.1263187">focus of our three-year study</a> in <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2016.1259222">Ghana</a>, <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2016.1260555">Kenya</a> and <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2016.1276449">Zambia</a>. Evidence suggests that each model has different strengths. For policy makers, deciding which kind of farming to promote depends on what they want to achieve. </p>
<h2>Plantations are ‘enclaves’</h2>
<p>Our cases confirm the characterisation of large plantations as being “enclaves” with few linkages into local economies. They buy farming inputs from far afield, usually from overseas, and in turn send their produce into global markets, bypassing local intermediaries.</p>
<p>Plantations are large, self-contained agribusinesses that rely on hired labour and are vertically-integrated into processing chains (often with on-farm processing). They’re usually associated with one major crop. In Africa, these started with colonial concessions, especially in major cash crops such as coffee, tea, rubber, cotton and sugarcane. Some of these later became state farms after independence while others were dismantled and land returned to local farmers. </p>
<p>Many plantations do create jobs, especially if they have on-site processing. Plantations may also support local farmers if they process crops that local smallholders are already growing. For example, we found an oil palm plantation in Ghana that buys from local smallholders, giving them access to processing facilities and international value chains they would otherwise not reach. </p>
<p>But, typically, plantations have limited connections into the local economy beyond the wages they pay. Where production is mechanised, they create few jobs, as we found in Zambia: the Zambeef grain estate employs few people, and most of these are migrants whose wages don’t go into the local economy. And the jobs that are created are invariably of poor quality.</p>
<p>The main story is that plantations take up land and yet often don’t give back to the local economy. In the cases we researched, all the plantations led to local people losing their land. For instance, the establishment and later expansion of the 10,000-hectare Zambeef estate led to forced removals of people from their cropping fields and grazing lands.</p>
<p>There are some benefits from plantations and estates. But, given more than a century of bad experience, it may be time to concede they seldom – if ever – live up to their promises.</p>
<h2>Contract farming brings benefits for some</h2>
<p>Contract farming has a <a href="http://www.fao.org/uploads/media/FAC_Working_Paper_055.pdf">long history in Africa</a>, dating back to colonial times. As with plantations, these arrangements were largely for the major cash crops, including cocoa, cotton, tobacco and sugarcane. </p>
<p>Contract farmers are smallholders who enter into contracts with companies that buy and process their crops. Sometimes members of outgrowers’ households might also get jobs on larger “nucleus” estates run by the companies. Whether or not they benefit, or get mired in debt and dependence, depends entirely on the terms of these contracts. Our study looked at contract farming in Ghana’s tropical fruit export sector, in French bean production in Kenya and in sugarcane farming in Zambia. </p>
<p>Contract farming has been hailed by some as the “win-win” solution, enabling commercial investment for global markets without dispossessing local farmers. Farmers farm on their own land, using their own family labour, while also accessing commercial value chains – rather than being displaced by large farms. But we found that this is not necessarily the case. Crucially, there are different kinds of arrangements that determine who benefits. </p>
<p>In Kenya, <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2016.1260555">contract farmers</a> are poorer than most farmers around them. For them, farming on contract provides a crucial livelihood, especially for poor women, who cultivate French beans for the European market and combine this with seasonal jobs on big farms.</p>
<p>In one <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2016.1276449">Zambian</a> block scheme all outgrowers gave up their land to Illovo, a South African company that grows sugarcane. The company pays them dividends. Here, the landowners, typically the old patriarchs, benefit from cash incomes. Young people lose out: they neither inherit the land nor control the cash incomes. </p>
<p>Contract farming clearly provides one effective avenue for smallholders to commercialise. It means, though, that smallholders take on both the risks and the benefits of connecting to commercial value chains. </p>
<h2>Medium-scale farming: a promising option</h2>
<p>Between the large plantations and the small contract farmers is another model: medium-scale commercial farms owned by individuals or small companies. We studied areas where medium-scale farms were dominating: mango farmers in Ghana, coffee farmers in Kenya and grains farmers in Zambia. While this kind of medium-scale farming also has colonial origins, the past two decades have seen massive growth in new “middle farmers”. Many of them are male, wealthy, middle-aged or retired, often from professional positions.</p>
<p>The medium -scale commercial farming model has a lot to offer. We found that they create more jobs and stimulate rural economies more than either big plantations or smallholder contract farmers. Yet cumulatively, such farms may threaten to dispossess smallholders, just as the big colonial and more recent plantations and estates have done. </p>
<p>The push behind the explosion of the “middle farmers” in the countries we studied has been investment by the educated and (relatively) wealthy. In <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2016.1259222">Ghana</a> in particular, we found, their expansion has displaced smallholders. Cumulatively, even modest-sized farms have led to substantial dispossession and reduced access to land. </p>
<p>Their informal employment patterns mean poor working conditions and few permanent jobs. But, unlike the plantations, these farms are well connected with the local economy. Building on social networks, these “middle farmers” often buy inputs and services from local businesses. At least some of their produce is sold into local markets. </p>
<h2>Winners and losers</h2>
<p>While policy choices are of course political, they can and should be informed by research about the implications of these different pathways of agricultural commercialisation. What is clear from our research is that different kinds of commercial farming will have different effects on the economy. It’s not just about efficiency. Ultimately, it’s about who wins and who loses.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/76355/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ruth Hall received funding from the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council (Grant ES/J01754X/1) which made possible the research reported in this article. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dzodzi Tsikata received funding from the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council (Grant ES/J01754X/1) which made possible the research reported in this article. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ian Scoones received funding from the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council (Grant ES/J01754X/1), which made possible the research reported in this article</span></em></p>Many African countries are still searching for inclusive commercial farming models that can bring in private investment without dispossessing local people.Ruth Hall, Professor, Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western CapeDzodzi Tsikata, Associate Professor, University of GhanaIan Scoones, Professorial Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, University of SussexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/692492016-12-05T14:16:30Z2016-12-05T14:16:30ZSouth Africa’s land reform efforts lack a focus on struggling farmers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147393/original/image-20161124-15333-1sjlzvj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Lack of support for beneficiaries of land reform in South Africa has seen many new farmers fail to live off the land.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>South Africa’s land reform programme has suffered many failures and its beneficiaries have in many cases seen little or no improvements to their <a href="http://www.plaas.org.za/bibliography/land-reform-review-nmf">livelihoods</a>. </p>
<p>Land reform remains a contested terrain or what land rights specialist Ruth Hall calls an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ibpIpi2zAE">“unresolved historical grievance”</a>. South Africa has a history of colonisation, racial domination and <a href="http://www.plaas.org.za/bibliography/rhall-thesis-landreform">racially based land dispossession</a>. Black people were forced off the land they owned and depended on for their <a href="http://unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/(httpAuxPages)/63265CAFF973018D80256B6D005785D1/$file/dmaguban.pdf">livelihoods</a> through numerous legislative policies and other coercive measures. </p>
<p>In 1994, South Africa’s democratic government implemented <a href="http://mokoro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/pol_econ_land_reform_sa.pdf">land reform</a> to rectify these past racial injustices, to correct skewed land ownership patterns and to alleviate poverty. The land restitution process is part of the broader land reform programme which includes redistribution and tenure reform. </p>
<p>There is a general agreement that land reform has been a failure and <a href="http://www.thenewage.co.za/pace-of-land-reform-not-fast-enough-political-analyst-says/">needs to be sped up</a>. Research shows that between 70% to 90% of the projects (including land restitution projects) <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2015-10-15-farmers-rights-must-be-defended">have failed</a>.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the public, academics, politicians and other stakeholders have largely focused on the land acquisition or restitution phases of the process, to the exclusion of land reform implementation and what happens afterwards. </p>
<p>The chorus for <a href="http://www.universityofpretoria.co.za/media/shared/Legacy/sitefiles/file/48/4153/fromfreedomchartertocautiouslandreformthepoliticsoflandinsouthafrica_wardanseeuwandchrisalden.pdf">land acquisition</a> has drowned out the plea by land beneficiaries for state support. </p>
<p>We studied the issue by focusing on a land restitution project in Macleantown, a village near East London in the Eastern Cape. Our qualitative research found that people living in the village had not benefited tangibly from having land returned to them as part of the restitution process. </p>
<h2>What’s gone wrong</h2>
<p>Some <a href="http://irr.org.za/reports-and-publications/atLiberty/files/liberty-2013-from-land-to-farming-bringing-land-reform-down-to-earth">research</a> has been done on the impact of land reform. Most researchers have concluded that it has contributed little to helping beneficiaries earn a <a href="http://www.plaas.org.za/sites/default/files/publications-pdf/RR32.pdf">livelihood</a> from the land. <a href="http://www.plaas.org.za/sites/default/files/publications-landpdf/RR38.pdf">The reasons</a> for this include inadequate post-settlement support, lack of skills, poor planning and infighting within communities.</p>
<p>Another contributing factor has been that post-restitution projects are designed in a way that favours capital intensive commercial farming unsuitable to the <a href="http://www.plaas.org.za/blog/unworkable-land-reform-project-designs-offer-inappropriate-farming-models-rural-dwellers">beneficiaries’s circumstances</a>. The Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies notes that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>South African land reform beneficiaries have been victims of unworkable project designs, largely irrelevant to their livelihood possibilities, <a href="http://www.plaas.org.za/blog/unworkable-land-reform-project-designs-offer-inappropriate-farming-models-rural-dwellers">aspirations and abilities</a>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But the most common cause of failure is a <a href="http://irr.org.za/reports-and-publications/atLiberty/files/liberty-2013-from-land-to-farming-bringing-land-reform-down-to-earth">lack of support</a> for farmers once they become landowners. </p>
<p>There are many examples of thriving agricultural entities becoming ghost farms <a href="http://irr.org.za/reports-and-publications/atLiberty/files/liberty-2013-from-land-to-farming-bringing-land-reform-down-to-earth">after land reform</a>. In some cases, farm infrastructure has been stolen and production has halted. </p>
<p>An important component of land reform is for the beneficiaries to become self-sufficient. It is thus necessary to understand what mechanisms need to be put in place to ensure that beneficiaries can generate adequate livelihoods after they’ve been given land by the government.</p>
<h2>The Macleantown case study</h2>
<p>The benefits of land restitution appear to be more symbolic than material.</p>
<p>Our study showed that beneficiaries remain poor 17 years after being given their land back. Most are unable to generate a livelihood from agriculture and depend on state social grants for survival. Beneficiaries were able to rejoice at having their land back, but they have been unable to escape poverty.</p>
<p>This is particularly worrying since one of the main motives for pursuing land reform was to create self-sufficient farmers able to generate a decent livelihood from their land. </p>
<p>Our findings show that land beneficiaries have been virtually neglected by the government. They have a strong desire to grow crops but lack the support needed to start ploughing. </p>
<p>One respondent said she could not farm because she did not have money to fence her yard or keep livestock. Farming would therefore be a waste of time as cattle would walk onto her land and eat her crops. </p>
<p>One emotional resident said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We don’t get the necessary support from the government man! We don’t get it, at all, they are not interested in coming to support us and help us to give us something … They should come here and make a workshop and call us together, those who are interested in farming and stuff like that, there would be a lot of people because I am not the only one… They don’t support us! They do give the land, and what’s the reason of giving people land and then not helping them? Because we need a tractor, we need this and that, we need seeds… </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Apart from an absence of support, resettled people face other problems. </p>
<p>Water taps can run dry for days. The absence of a health clinic means that they have to use the little money they have to get services from elsewhere. The mobile clinic only comes twice a month.</p>
<p>The local school is too small to cater for all the pupils, forcing some to travel vast distances at huge cost. And then there are the land invaders, leading to fierce competition for grazing land.</p>
<h2>Looking ahead</h2>
<p>The plight of the people of Macleantown highlights the need to revive the country’s many failed land reform projects through post-settlement support strategies. </p>
<p>Giving people land and then depriving them of appropriate support to earn a living from the land is regressive. As much as land reform is justified, it is self-defeating for the government to dump people on land without sufficient or relevant support. </p>
<p>The government needs to re-look its policy of simply acquiring land for redistribution. It needs to take measures to make sure that redistributed land is used productively.</p>
<p>If land reform is to continue in its current fashion, its prospects are doomed. It is the government’s duty to see to it that they create self-sufficient farmers through the provision of post-settlement support.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/69249/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mzingaye Brilliant Xaba receives funding from the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Human Development that is based at Wits University.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Monty J. Roodt is the chairperson of the Board of Directors of the Border Rural Committee, a Section 21 not-for-profit company that works with rural communities in the Eastern Cape. He is co-writing this article in his capacity as Mzingaye Xaba's PhD supervisor in the Sociology Department at Rhodes University.</span></em></p>South Africa’s government makes much of its efforts of putting more land in the hands of the previously disenfranchised black majority. Yet, many beneficiaries continue to wallow in poverty.Mzingaye Brilliant Xaba, PhD candidate in Sociology, Rhodes UniversityMonty J. Roodt, Professor of Sociology specialising in development., Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.