Then I went out to the archives in Cape Town: I search, search, search, search! He was disgusted with former President Jacob Zuma, who, after nine singularly unprincipled years in office, stands accused of sixteen counts of corruption, fraud, and racketeering. Work with your hands! Not sitting on your ass and talking a lot of crap in Parliament. But his understanding of land reform in South Africa is not so different from that of another impressionable septuagenarian, the President of the United States.
It belongs to us. What could we do with a whole farm? If we are successful with our land claim, I must buy Mr. Ramaphosa a case of whiskey! Snyders shrugged. Before it was called McGregor, the village where Snyders lives was named Lady Grey; there is an art gallery by that name on Voortrekker Street. As the colonists opened mines and built farms, Grey saw in the black population a source of disposable workers. The Glen Grey Act was the first piece of legislation to enshrine in law the residential separation of the races.
It was also the basis for the notorious Natives Land Act of , which in its final form allocated a mere thirteen per cent of all arable land to the black majority. There were no individual property rights on the reserves, so no land could be sold—which meant that black people could make no money from their assets. In , the Afrikaner National Party came to power and began instituting ever more elaborate systems of racial categorization, determining who could live where and with whom: nonwhite South Africans were pushed to the peripheries of cities and towns, and were divided, based on their tribal background, into ten rural regions, called Bantustans.
This policy enabled the government to declare that there was no black majority in South Africa, only a collection of disparate ethnic groups. More than three and a half million people were removed from their homes in rural areas. Their land was expropriated without compensation and sold at low prices to white farmers.
Under apartheid, eighty-five per cent of South African land was reserved for whites, who made up some seventeen per cent of the population. As of , when the last census was taken, the country was seventy-nine per cent black, nine per cent white, and nine per cent colored. He now lives above a shop, and pays a white man on the other side of Voortrekker Street to keep his three cows in the yard at night; every day he grazes them in the bush on the edge of town.
One afternoon, he took me into the mountains, where he was brought up, in a small brick house that his mother had inherited from her parents. When Jansen was in his early teens, his parents died, and he moved into town with his older brother to attend school.
The mayor told them that they had no right to their property, and that their house would be dismantled. They could continue to graze livestock there only if they paid rent. It was all behind a wire fence, which he was afraid to pass. The A.
When the A. A system of tenure reform would secure formal property rights for people who had lived for decades in places that they could not legally own. And, finally, the A. Twenty-five years later, it has managed roughly eight per cent. White South Africans own seventy-two per cent of the land held by individuals in the country.
The ownership of land as entrenched in has not changed. The failure of land reform is one of the reasons that South Africa is among the most unequal societies on earth. Unemployment is at thirty-seven per cent. Only thirteen per cent of South Africans earn more than six thousand dollars a year. The education system is in shambles: nearly eighty per cent of nine- and ten-year-olds fail simple tests of reading comprehension. To add to the woes of South Africans, some seventeen billion dollars disappeared from state coffers under Jacob Zuma, and is still being pursued by the courts.
All of this helps explain the rise of a politician named Julius Malema—Juju to his supporters. After being expelled from the A. In , fending off accusations of corruption, he told the South African journalist Debora Patta that he identified with the underprivileged. The white man has been too comfortable for too long. Black gangs are supported by the language and actions of mainstream politicians.
It seems the only thing that has shifted is who has the power. When I visited him at his headquarters, in an office plaza outside Pretoria, he was wearing glasses and a blue shirt with the AfriForum logo stitched along the pocket, which gave him the look of an I. The National Party, which instituted apartheid, was established specifically to secure their interests. In those days, their language—Afrikaans, a creole sometimes referred to as Low Dutch—was imposed on nonwhites.
The Soweto Uprising—in which some twenty thousand students marched, and several hundred were killed by the police—was held to protest the mandatory use of Afrikaans in schools. Now Afrikaans both unites and divides the country; it is the basis of a white-identity movement, but it is also the first language of three-quarters of colored South Africans.
Traditionally, there has been friction between whites of English descent and Afrikaners. Robert Edgar, a professor emeritus of African history at Howard University, told me that mainstream historians reject this idea. Roets does not deny that apartheid was a moral catastrophe. We are free-market people.
Apartheid was a big-government system. The police count sixty-two, of whom forty-six were white. These killings constitute only two-tenths of one per cent of the homicides in South Africa. But to Roets and his constituents they represent part of a politically motivated strategy to push white people off a continent that they have inhabited for hundreds of years. Southern suggests that the attack was a straightforward act of politically motivated racial hatred.
She neglects to mention that the murderer was previously convicted of stealing a pickup truck from Featherstone and spent time in jail for the crime. The perpetrator was on tik —South African meth—at the time of the killing; he had stabbed his girlfriend to death a few days earlier. He is currently serving a life sentence. Ihlenfeldt, a fifty-four-year-old mother of two with short white hair, told me that she was interviewed under false pretenses.
South Africa is still a place in which it is highly advantageous to be white. The average white person there earns five times as much as the average black person.
In McGregor, people of color cross to the white side of Voortrekker Street every day, to tend gardens, clean houses, build fences. White people are rarely seen on the colored side. Yet many whites feel that their status is threatened.
In the past two decades, according to estimates, some four hundred thousand more whites have left the country than have moved in. The Ihlenfeldts may follow. Pete Ihlenfeldt hopes to see foreign intervention in South Africa. There are some twenty thousand homicides a year in South Africa. Would foreign forces guard only the white farms? Pete was unconvinced. In , J. Neither of the Ihlenfeldts believed that there was a link between the attacks and the proposed amendment.
In the last nationwide municipal elections, support for the Party fell to its lowest level since , as it lost control of three important metropolitan areas—Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela Bay, and the City of Tshwane. The D. At the same time, the E. Before entering the government, he was an anti-apartheid leader and a trade unionist, strongly allied with Mandela; he is also a businessman who built a fortune of half a billion dollars, much of it during his time with the A.
He got stuck with it. In South Africa, voters elect a party to lead Parliament, which then determines which of its members will become the President. The most recent A. So he got in, but he was given the poison chalice. Ramaphosa appointed Hall and nine other scholars and business leaders to serve on an advisory panel on land reform; they are rushing to prepare a report on the future of the issue.
That case involved a speculator who bought a plot, in , knowing that there was a claim against it, made by a tenant farmer whose family had been working the land since without title.
After the Natives Land Act allocated the majority of farmland to whites, it was common for black farmworkers to labor without pay in exchange for being allowed to remain in their homes. We have to take into account history. We are not dealing with the price of a box of chocolates. Ngcukaitobi disputed this. For instance, it may offer decent advice in some areas while being repetitive or unremarkable in others. We look at every kind of content that may matter to our audience: books, but also articles, reports, videos and podcasts.
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In this in-depth essay, Ariel Levy aptly navigates current political debates around land reform. The vast disparity in land ownership between blacks and whites has become a hotly contested political issue, she reports. In , the apartheid regime further marginalized non-whites by moving them to the outskirts of cities and remote rural areas.
Over 3. The discrepancy in land ownership continues to perpetuate racial inequality in South Africa. Summary of Who Owns South Africa?
Ariel Levy The New Yorker , Instant access to over 22, book summaries. Try it for free. Editorial Rating 5. The rating — what does it mean?
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