JOHANNESBURG LETTER: Putting an acrimonious past aside, an Afrikaner group rows in behind a community organisation
THE MIXED group of protesters who marched to the department of land affairs in Johannesburg last week may have been small in number, but the significance of their composition was not lost on the South African public.
Even a few short years ago the idea that a group representing the interests of Afrikaners would throw its weight behind an organisation representing South Africa’s indigenous people,
given the former helped to eradicate the latter over hundreds of years, would have been scoffed at.
However, last Tuesday it seemed that both groups had put their acrimonious past aside, on one level anyway, when Afrikaner organisation AfriForum gave its support to the South African Progressive Civic Organisation (Sapco), a Khoisan community group, in its protest over land rights.
“Thank you from the bottom of our heart,” Sapco secretary Debbie Benjamin said to AfriForum Youth’s national chairman Charl Oberholzer in relation to its decision to support the group’s march to the land affairs’ offices, where they handed in a memorandum of their grievances and demands.
As well as providing numerical support on the march, AfriForum said it also gave Sapco, formed two years ago, a once-off financial offering that may lead to knowledge transfer.
While the two minority groups might seem like strange bedfellows given their past, the hazy direction in which the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party has taken its land reform programme to date appears to have cast them in the unlikely role of allies.
At the heart of the Khoisan’s grievance is a feeling they have not been afforded the same rights as the black African majority for physical and financial restitution since 1994, because the cut-off date for a valid claim is 1913 when the first discriminatory Land Act was made law.
The Khoisan – or Bushmen as they are commonly known in the Northern hemisphere – were the original hunter gatherer inhabitants of Southern Africa and their presence in the region dates back tens of thousands of years.
However, they were systematically cleared from their land by the Bantu-speaking Africans, cattle farmers who migrated south from central Africa as early as AD 300, and white Europeans who landed in the Cape region from the mid-1600s.
While their population was decimated and land taken, small groups still live in extremely impoverished conditions, for the most part, in desert regions across southern Africa.
Aside from land restitution the Khoisan also want to be officially recognised as the indigenous people of South Africa. And, last August South African president Jacob Zuma promised he would put a bill before parliament that would do so, but nothing has appeared to date.
This and the lack of progress in restitution has left the Khoisan feeling ignored, unrepresented and alienated in the new South Africa, a sentiment that Afrikaners say they know all too well.
Under the current land reform programme the ANC wants to transfer 30 per cent of the land owned by whites to black South Africans by 2014 as a way to reverse the wrongs perpetrated by the apartheid regime using the 1913 Land Act.
This Act barred blacks from occupying or owning 87 per cent of the land.
However, due to an effectual land reform policy only 8 per cent has been transferred to date.
A rethink on how best to address the land reform programme’s failings is under way in the form of a government Green Paper on the issue, and the current “willing buyer, willing seller” approach appears under threat.
Last Tuesday, Oberholzer explained the reason behind AfriForum’s support of Sapco as a desire to help other minority groups in the country who are increasingly feeling alienated by the ANC.
“The Khoisan approached us and we thought it important to tell the ANC that minority groups are here to stay,” he said.
AfriForum also felt the need to highlight that the Khoisan are staking claims to land which belongs to the state rather than white farmers, which was a development that showed the ANC’s land reform policy is outdated.
“In doing so it is proving that the ANC’s argument with regard to land reform, which is based on the principle that the land reform policy should only attempt to transfer land from a white minority to the black minority, is outdated.
“Any community, irrespective of colour, can lay claim to land in South Africa. History, in its totality, is the only real criterion by which the issue of land ownership can be measured,” Oberholzer said in a statement on AfriForum’s website.
That AfriForum may be merely using the Khoisan’s grievances as a means to surreptitiously fight their own corner is an argument that cannot be discounted. So how long their union lasts is anyone’s guess.
But for now, maybe the partnership between both groups is a case of my enemy’s enemy is my friend.
