Bushmen Rule
Rian Malan
A Research Fellow of the Institute of Race Relations, has written an erudite synopsis of our country’s turbulent past and examines Julius Malema’s recent claim to all of the land in South Africa. As usual young Julius is found to be long on fire and brimstone and orator’s rhetoric but falls short on facts, logic and truth. The synopsis is in the form of an open letter to our Julius and begs a response. I look forward to the reply if published. Read ‘Bushmen Rule’ an edited presentation of Mr Malan’s thought provoking article.
"We are here unashamedly to disturb the white man’s peace because we have never known peace. We, the rightful owners, our peace was disturbed by white man’s arrival here. They committed a black genocide. They killed our people during land dispossession. Today, we are told don’t disturb them, even when they disturbed our peace. They found peaceful Africans here. They killed them! They slaughtered them, like animals! We are not calling for the slaughtering of white people, at least for now.... But 1994 means NOTHING without the land! Victory will only be victory if the land is restored in the hands of rightful owners. And the rightful owners are unashamedly black people. This is our continent, it belongs to us."
Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema said the above in a speech outside Newcastle Magistrates court last week.
Julius Malema must be exhausted. All the rabble rousing, all the chaos in parliament, all the interviews and marches and threats won him just 98,000 more votes in the August 3 local government elections than his Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) won in the general elections in 2014. He needs a million more votes to really make a permanent mark on South African politics. What, he must often think, does he have to do to get there? His remarks outside a court in Newcastle the other day, to the effect that blacks won’t “slaughter” whites, “for now” are typical of the man when he is under pressure. It’s the safest go-to in our politics. But it is a false premise, or promise, even if he really meant it, which I doubt. Malema’s narrative is that whites landed in this country and disturbed a peaceful indigenous population and then slaughtered them.
But that is way too simplistic. The fact is that the life of black people in SA was, in the words of the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, a life of “... continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.
Life in SA in 1652, the year Jan van Riebeeck landed here and the year after Hobbes published his most famous work, Leviathan, was just like that as tribes and clans clashed constantly for territory and dominance. The fact that whites then added to the violence doesn’t make the past go away. But it wasn’t just blacks who killed blacks four centuries ago.
White tribes in Europe had been slaughtering each other for hundreds of years by 1652. The English slaughtered Scots. The Germans slaughtered Romans. The fact is humans are inherently violent. The question to ask is whether tribalism, or at least the formation of clans and tribes, promotes violence or whether they form as a response to violence.
The liberal writer and thinker Rian Malan has written a forceful response to Malema’s silly outburst in Newcastle. He takes his house in Johannesburg’s Emmarentia as a starting point and wonders who walked in what is now his garden, in the distant past.
Rian Malan responds:
Dear Mr Malema:
I am writing in response to your recent remarks calling for whites to return the land to its rightful owners, failing which you may have to slaughter us. I think it’s good that you have put this issue under the spotlight, and I would like to help resolve it.
I personally had nothing to do with what the EFF sees as the “mass butcher/slaughter of black people” by white land thieves in the colonial era. On the other hand, I am an Afrikaner with capitalist inclinations, so I am clearly guilty by association in your eyes. Hey, that’s all right by me. I’m not here to argue. I am here to find a solution, and to do that, it’s necessary for me to put my own land on the table and discuss what’s to be done with it.
This land (about 1200 square meters) is located in Emmarentia, Johannesburg, a good place to ponder our history because it is located at the foot of the Melville Koppies, where archeologists have unearthed a great deal of evidence about previous owners. Their findings can be summarized as follows:
1) Around 250,000 years ago, Emmarentia was inhabited by our hominid ancestors. These creatures appear to have died out.
2) Around 100,000 years ago, the first humans made their appearance. Unfortunately, I don’t know their names and their descendants have proved untraceable.
3) Some twenty thousand years ago, the so-called San or Bushmen took up residence in a cave in the kloof near where Beyers Naude Drive cuts through the Koppies. Among the artefacts they left behind is a Stone Age device for making arrowheads. The whereabouts of their descendants is unknown.
4) Around five hundred years ago, the first Tswana showed up. These were sophisticated people who used Iron Age furnaces to work minerals mined nearby. They also owned sheep and cattle and grew millet and sorghum along the banks of the stream which flows past my house.
On its face these Tswana would appear to be the only previous owners whose descendants are still living in the area, so in theory I should give my land to them. But when you look closely at the Tswana, a complicated picture emerges.
In the beginning, around 1700, almost all Tswana fell under the authority of the Hurutshe, a powerful tribe that exacted tribute from lesser Tswana chiefs and kept them in line.
Around 1750, things began to change. Nobody knows exactly why, but one suspected cause is the mealie, which arrived here around that time. Mealies boosted crop yields. More food led to population growth, which led to intensified competition for scarce resources. The Hurutshe hegemony was challenged and overthrown. Without proper supervision, minor chieftains started tooling up and making war on one another. The Fokeng attacked the Kgatla. Kgatla attacked the Po. Pedi fought the Kwena, and so on. According to the anthropologist Isaac Schapera, there were 26 civil wars in the decades prior to 1820.
In response, Tswana kingdoms became increasingly militarized and autocratic, which is to say, they moved from level 3 societies, which were chilled, to levels 4 and 5, where kings and chiefs practiced an early form of capitalism, extracting labour and tribute from weaker vassals. Since the vassals did not necessarily like this, the more powerful Tswana chiefs began to concentrate their people in large towns, usually sited on easily defensible hilltops and surrounded by stone walls.
This did not help much. An analysis made of Tswana praise poems and oral histories indicate that being a chief in Emmarentia and surrounds was a very dangerous occupation between 1700 and 1820. Of 71 chiefs mentioned in oral traditions, only 48 percent died in their beds. The rest were assassinated or killed in battle.
As a result of these factors it has proved difficult to establish exactly which Tswana grouping owned my land during this period of violence and confusion. Most likely, ownership changed several times, and at some point it was taken over by the Po, the Nguni people who controlled the Witwatersrand from a headquarters located near the Gillooly’s freeway interchange. Have you ever heard of these people? No, me neither, but don’t worry, because they were soon swept away by the Mfecane.
Contrary to popular belief, it seems the Mfecane was not really caused by Shaka Zulu. According to my readings, that man’s role has been exaggerated by Inkatha supporters who love to depict Shaka as a black Napoleon who single-handedly invented the short stabbing spear and the horns-and-chest battle formation, thereby overcoming all. More recent research holds that Shaka was just one of many southern African kings who more or less simultaneously embarked on a program of militarization and nation building, thus leaping from level three to level five and in the process destabilizing their neighbors included the Hlubi, the Ngwane and the Swazi. After Shaka came to power around 1818, these people decided it would be wise to move onto the highveld to get away from him. But the nearest parts of the highveld were already occupied by the Phuting and Hlakwana, who lost their crops and cattle to the invaders and had to flee westward, into territories controlled by various Tswana entities. This resulted in a chain reaction that rolled on for years, turning the highveld into a zone of “persistent raiding and displacement” that shattered African social structures and turned many people into refugees.
Around 1824, Mzilikazi and the Ndebele arrived on the scene, also fleeing the Zulus. Mzilikazi was by far the most efficient of the level-five autocrats. He ate up all the tribes in his path, usually killing males and incorporating women and children into his own ranks. One exception to this was the Po, who reportedly saved themselves by submitting to Mzilikazi and joining his cause as “allies or slaves.”
One therefore assumes that the Po moved with Mzilikazi to Rustenburg district, where the Ndebele made their capital. The king lived in the very centre of the new empire, surrounded by loyal Ndebele commoners and swathes of pasture for the royal cattle. Beyond the pasture was a ring of tribute-paying vassal chiefs and beyond them lay the march – a vast area that had been cleared of all human inhabitants. Mzilikazi trusted no-one, and wanted to make sure he could see his enemies coming.
I can’t be 100 percent sure, but I suspect Emmarentia was part of this so-called march. Here’s why. In 1836, an aristocratic British sportsman named Robert Cornwallis-Harris came this way to hunt big game. When he reached a range of hills which could have been the Witwatersrand he began to see the ruins of “extensive villages,” deserted save for a handful of “half-starved persons” hiding in the bushes. According to Cornwallis-Harris, the abandoned villages were strewn with broken earthen vessels, fragments of ostrich shell and game skins. And that’s almost exactly what archeologists find when they dig trenches on the koppie above my house.
Against this backdrop, your remarks about “peaceful Africans” strike me as somewhat odd. The last person to make such an argument was Joe Slovo, whose seminal “Colonialism of a Special Type” essay was riddled with black holes and omissions intended to present whites in the worst possible light. That’s because Slovo was desperate to ingratiate himself with black people and become your leader, an ambition which led directly to what you see as the great sellout of 1994. You surely know better than to trust a white man, sir.
But anyway, our story has just begun. The first white settlers showed up in Emmarentia a few months after the hunter Cornwallis-Harris. You seem to imagine these Voortrekkers as an army of genocidaires using guns and horses to drive peaceful Africans towards extinction. Not so. Mzilikazi opened the hostilities, massacring a party of Trekkers near the Vaal River and then stripping the Boers of all their livestock at Vegkop. At this point, the Tswana who’d previously dominated the area came out of hiding and offered their support to the Boers, which led to Mzilikazi’s defeat at the hands of multi-racial DA-style army at the battle of Mosega.
In the aftermath, Mzilikazi fled northwards across the Limpopo, and the Boers claimed “his” land as their own. The suburb where I live became the farm Braamfontein, property of the Bezuidenhout family. These were my people, but let me be the first to admit that they did not behave like civilized white liberals.
Instead, they emulated the African kings who came before them, exacting tribute (especially in labour) from subject chiefs and periodically raiding more distant neighbors for cattle and captives. Some of those captives, especially the children, became inboekelinge, or indentured servants, working on Boer farms for nothing until they were 25.
Let’s face it -- this was a form of slavery, and we must answer for it. But the Fokeng and the Kgatla must answer too, because they were our partners in crime, constantly joining the Boers in “mutually beneficial” raids on surrounding tribes. As a result, the Kgatla (who lived around Sun City) and Fokeng (near Hartebeestpoort) became rich and powerful. According to historian Fred Morton, Kgatla chief Khamanyane (who ruled from 1853 to 1875) acquired an astonishing fortune in wives (43) and cattle, while many of his subjects “attained higher living standards than most Boers.”
This is not to say that the Boers and their Tswana allies had it all their own way. On the contrary: the Boers were weak, and existed in a state of uneasy equilibrium with surrounding African principalities. Gert Oosthuizen, baas of the farm where I now live, would have been called out on commando at least 14 times in his first thirty-odd years on the Highveld, but seldom returned home a victor.
Most Boer military campaigns ended in stalemate, and they were defeated on at least three occasions -- by the Pedi in 1852, the Sotho in 1858, and the Venda in 1861. By 1867, they were under such pressure that they had to abandon the Soutpansberg, leaving behind a few stragglers who survived by paying tribute to their conquerors in the African way.
After the discovery of diamonds, Africans began to acquire guns and push back even harder. In 1870, the Boers abandoned Potgietersrus. In 1871, they lost another war against the Pedi. By 1877, they seemed to be in an extremely precarious position, which is why the British stepped in to annex the Zuid-Afrikaanse Republiek.
Beyond this point, your understanding of history becomes more tenable. Professional soldiers sent by Queen Victoria crushed the Zulu and Pedi with considerable slaughter, as they'd previously crushed the Xhosa and were soon to crush the Boers. Black Africans wound up losing about two thirds of the land they'd held before 1652, and for this whites must answer. Then again, the British army had African auxiliaries in all its campaigns, so they must answer too.
But for what exactly? You keep saying “genocide.” I’m not sure that’s the right term. In the 1980s, historians Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar published a comparative study of the North American and South African frontiers. Someone stole my copy of that book and the precise details are fading, but it claims there was something like ten million “Red Indians” when the American frontier opened circa 1780, and only 250,000 left a century later. That’s genocide.
In SA, the numbers tell a different story. According to Thompson et al, there were around two million Africans when our frontier opened, also in 1780, and roughly double that number when it closed in 1880. Since then, the African population has grown at a healthy rate, apartheid notwithstanding. That’s why whites are now so heavily outnumbered, and why if you say, surrender your land, I have not much choice.
But surrender it to whom? If we take the arrival of the first white settlers in 1836 as our point of departure, I should give my house to the descendants of Mzilikazi. But that won’t go down with the Tswana, who remember Mzilikazi as a bloody tyrant who robbed them of their birthright.
The Po might rematerialize and make a claim, and then there’s the Bushman to think about. They were here long before anyone else, but vanished in the 1820s. Perhaps they also ran for their lives when they saw Mzilikazi coming, and took refuge in the Kalahari.
If so, this was a frying-pan-into-fire move, because the Tswana out there were short of labour, and they turned Bushmen and other vassal races (the Kgalagadi and Yei) into slaves who were exchanged for goods, passed on as heritable property and “controlled with startling brutality” by their masters. According to historian Barry Morton, slave herdsmen were “observed to live in an indescribable state of general squalor.” Death from malnutrition was “not uncommon,” and slaves were “punished and occasionally killed…for losing a single animal.”
According to Morton, evidence to back such claims lay hidden in plain sight in the archives, ignored for decades by researchers swarming into the Kalahari to study one of the world’s last hunter-gatherer populations. I can only surmise the researchers were white liberals who didn’t want to spoil the plot, which holds that it was the Boers who caused all the trouble in our history until they were overthrown by the saintly Mandela, thus giving birth to the Rainbow Nation.
Judging by your speeches, you detest white liberals even more than I do, which is why I have drawn all these complications to your attention. The fact of the matter, sir, is that all our ancestors have blood on our hands. More blood on mine than yours, at least at this point, but still: the only innocents in this story are the Bushman.
They were harmless level one people, with no chiefs and no material ambitions. Whites hunted them like wild animals, but your people were little better. The first British official to arrive at the royal court of the Xhosa (Sir John Barrow, c 1798) was told by King Hintsa, “My people exist in a state of perpetual warfare with the Bushmen.” Perhaps this helps us understand why the north-eastern portion of this country is littered with the relics of Bushmen who vanished long before white settlers came.
And so we come finally to the point of this letter. The victims and villains of history are beyond my reach, but I am not without conscience. I am sorry about all the Zulu who perished at the hands of Lord Chelmsford in 1879, and the Shona and Ndebele slaughtered by Rhodes’ Gatling guns. But I am particularly sorry about the Bushmen who used to live in the kloof above my house. They suffered greatly at the hands of people like us, and their claim to being the original and thus “rightful” owners of Emmarentia looks unassailable.
I therefore think it might be best if I share my land with my friend Errol, an Afrikaans-speaking colored person with at least a bit of Bushman blood in his veins. He’s not black, strictly speaking, but at least he has an Afro. And his apartheid victim credentials are impeccable. But before I go ahead, I would like to make sure this accords with the fast-track land reform scheme you envisage. If I do the right thing by Errol, will my life be spared?
Your swift reply is awaited.
Stop the alternative facts about land reform
2017-02-21
Max du Preez
There can only be one reason why President Jacob Zuma and his loyalists lie about the real facts about black participation in the economy and land reform: they’re using emotive issues to mobilise around in order to divert the attention from their greed and corruption.
Inequality along mostly racial lines is still at dangerous levels. But why twist the statistics to make it look worse than it is? Why deny the progress already made? This is an old populist trick.
Misrepresenting the facts about land ownership and wealth is not helping this battle that all South Africans need to fight with great energy and wisdom.
Let’s stick to the facts. We are not a Trump republic.
The lie that has been repeated so often that it is now widely regarded as fact – I heard it again yesterday afternoon on talk radio – is that white South Africans control 90 percent of the economy.
The real situation, as was confirmed on Sunday in an opinion piece by the deputy minister of finance, Mcebisi Jonas, is that 40 percent of the JSE’s capitalisation and 50 percent of the JSE top 40 is foreign owned.
According to Jonas, the state owns and controls about 30 percent of the economy. The Public Investment Corporation is the biggest single investor in the economy with the R1,8 trillion in the pension funds of civil servants (overwhelmingly black) it controls.
Jonas also pointed out that some of the largest segments of “white monopoly capital” are listed primarily on foreign stock exchanges and that their foreign investments and interests far surpass their interests in South Africa.
Economist Mike Shussler wrote this week that the gap between the income of white and black households had shrunk by 40 percent over the last nine years. That is radical progress.
The significant difference in education levels between black and white partly explains the income gap, Schussler says. Blame the past, of course, but also the monumental failure of the governments since 1994 to manage education and skills training like, for instance, Zimbabwe had done.
Zuma told Parliament last week that only 8 million ha of the 82 million ha arable land had thus far been transferred to black owners. That is less than 10 percent, surely a statistic that should let the red lights flash?
On Sunday, Deputy Minister of Public Service and Administration Ayanda Dlodlo wrote in City Press that the state only owns 14 percent of the land and that 97 percent was in white hands.
If this were America, I’d call these statements “alternative facts”. Locally we just call them blatant lies.
The total land surface of South Africa is 122 081 300 ha. A quarter is controlled by the state: 15 percent or 18 million ha is communal land in what used to be called “homelands” and other reserves, and 10 percent or 12 million ha consists of conservation areas or property of the SANDF, the SAPS and other national or provincial departments.
18 million plus 12 million plus 8 million ha mean we already have 38 million ha not in white hands.
Another 3 million ha would have been transferred to black owners through the land restitution project, but these beneficiaries preferred financial compensation – over 90 percent of claims, according to the president’s State of the Nation Address. The amount so paid, more than R6 billion, came from taxpayers.
This annoyed Zuma, who urged people to take the land rather than the money because “it perpetuates dispossession”.
He seems to choose to disregard the fact that two out of three South Africans live in cities in towns now. They would prefer urban land, houses, better services and education rather than to go struggle as farmers. That’s why most of them took the money.
One also has to factor in the land that has been bought by black individuals and black-owned companies on the open property market, the significant number of share schemes for farm workers that mean they own half or a significant portion of the land and the land reform projects of private farmers and agri-business.
The exact figure hasn’t been calculated yet due to insufficient information, but it would be safe to say that in 2017 less than 60 percent of the land belongs to white people. Not 79 percent or 87 percent.
Here’s a shocking piece of information: if the amount of money spent on land transformation since 1994 had been used to buy farms on the open market and transferred to black owners, white South Africans would have owned less than 50 percent of the land in 2017.
Where did all the billions go?
As recently as last week, Zuma and Co. still blamed the principle of willing buyer, willing seller for the slow pace of land reform.
But this principle was chucked out of the window by former President Thabo Mbeki at the Land Summit in 2005 already, a decision that was again formally confirmed in 2012.
Why lie about it now? Obviously it is to cover up the incompetence and corruption in the responsible departments.
If we don’t have the facts, the real picture, in front of us, we can’t tackle the problem properly.
Analysis: Land – real problem, great political tool
Stephen Grootes
In a country with a history as difficult as South Africa’s, and its tough current reality, it is undeniable that the issue of land and its ownership is always going to be highly contested and emotional. The fact that it so strongly limits the options of so many of our young people looking for upward mobility makes it an ultimate "hot-button" political issue. For various reasons, some entirely legitimate and others more to do with short-term political aims, the voices pushing for some sort of land redistribution or restitution are growing louder. Still, the forces against any kind of radical shift should not be underplayed either.
What may well be lacking from the land reform debate at the moment is clarity over what the ultimate aims may be. In other words, we should ask yourselves, what do we really want to achieve? 2
Even before 1994 it was obvious that land reform was going to be one of the biggest problems the new nation that we have tried to create since that day would face. This was one of the more contentious clauses in the Constitution, and why the “Property Clause”, or Section 25, was so difficult to agree to. At the time, there were already loud voices wanting land taken from white people whose families had taken it from black people. While some of those voices may have been in the ANC, the parties that campaigned for a more radical solution to this problem, such as the Pan African Congress, did not gain much support in South Africa’s first free elections.
Over time, there has been a suggestion that Section 25 was the result of a compromise by Nelson Mandela’s negotiators, including the now Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, and that he “sold out” on the issue. But this is also to miss the political realities of the time; the National Party government, as it then was, still had much of the power in reality. And people like Valli Moosa, who were part of that negotiating team for the ANC, have said people have actually completely misunderstood what was really happening. He has suggested that the clause was inserted at the insistence of the ANC, because they wanted to ensure black people were never arbitrarily deprived of their property again.
When discussing land, and the future of land policy in South Africa, it may be important to distinguish between two separate and possible goals.
The first is to examine the symbolism that land carries for many South Africans: it was the ultimate aim of colonialism and apartheid for white people to take their land. Different people may view this differently, but it is surely undeniable that the symbolism of land is very powerful.
Just for that reason alone, something must be done.
Then there is the practical purpose which can be served by changing our current situation. What is the ultimate practical aim? Is it to create a new class of black farmers, who own their land, live on their land, and sell their produce commercially, and thus create black-owned wealth and grow food for the country? Is the aim solely to increase the amount of food we produce to reduce any dependence we may have on other countries (and in so doing, reduce the impact of a fluctuating currency)? Or is the aim to improve the situation of people living on farms they don’t own, but work on? There are other possible aims too – should people living in informal settlements who may have a claim to land be encouraged to move to that land to work on it through some other kind of negotiated settlement, perhaps?
What is surely missing from the current debates around land is clarity on these questions. If the aim is to make some kind of symbolic gesture, then we would need to examine what form that could take. And symbolism alone would surely not be enough, you would need practical change on the ground.
At the same time, it is easy to overstate the importance of this issue. While some people may talk about an emotional attachment to land, and legitimately suggest that apartheid will always be present until “the land is returned”, there is evidence to suggest that is not an overwhelming majority. In his State of the Nation Address this year, President Jacob Zuma said that around 90% of the people who lodge a successful land claim end up opting for financial restitution, rather than taking actual ownership of the land. One should not forget here that in many of these cases, communities will have changed dramatically since they were forced off the land. And it may be much easier to split money rather than land, if there is a large number of descendants of the original people who owned the land.
That said, it is unlikely that many people who live in urban areas now would want to move to a rural life, unless the asset they were given control over in the process was worth it. Even if everyone was given a square kilometer of land in the Northern Cape, we probably would not see many people moving back there from Gauteng.
And of course, there are parties who campaign on this issue. And their combined support does not go beyond the 10% mark.
It is hard to find evidence that there is much of a search for clarity in our current public land debate. Julius Malema may say in public that he wants “expropriation without compensation”, but he does not say what that actually means. He appears to be finding a surprise ally in President Jacob Zuma, who is now suggesting that the “black parties in Parliament should join together” on the land issue. But Zuma himself is a latecomer to the land issue. It appears he is suddenly jumping upon it, as if to burnish his “radical” credentials. Considering that he has been in political power since 2009, it is hard for his supporters to explain his eight years of silence on this issue.
Instead, it appears that his new comments are, more than anything else, a result of political expedience and control of the ANC’s leadership battle. In some ways, politics can be about creating conflict, making something an issue, and then forcing your opponent on to the wrong side of it. Zuma would be trying to do this to his opponents, both inside and outside of the ANC, believing that the majority of