Vol. 72/No. 39      October 6, 2008

Below is an excerpt from Apartheid’s Great Land Theft, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month in September. It tells the story of the dispossession of Africans from the soil and the struggle against this massive land theft. In so doing it also explains a great deal about the origins of apartheid and the revolutionary movement that emerged to overthrow it. Copyright © 1986 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
 

To you, the sons and daughters of the soil, our case is clear. The white oppressors have stolen our land. They have destroyed our families. They have taken for themselves the best that there is in our rich country and have left us the worst. They have the fruits and the riches. We have the back-breaking toil and the poverty… .

Over 300 years ago the white invaders began a ceaseless war of aggression against us, murdered our forefathers, stole our land and enslaved our people. Today they still rule by force. They murder our people. They still enslave us… . They have declared war on us. We have to fight back!

ANC LEAFLET, 1968

BY ERNEST HARSCH  
From the time of the first colonial land wars, South African Blacks have fiercely resisted every move by the white authorities to take their land and cattle. Though Blacks were militarily defeated and deprived of most of their land rights, their struggle for land has continued. It takes varying forms, from informal occupations of unsupervised white-owned lands through sporadic peasant rebellions in the Bantustans.

The struggle for the land has not lost its force or importance over the decades. It remains a vital issue for all Blacks. The white monopoly over most land is a cornerstone on which the entire apartheid structure rests and without which it could not have been created and maintained.

Despite South Africa’s extensive industrialization and the growth in the number of Blacks living in the urban centers, land is still an immediate concern to a significant part of the Black population. Because of the regime’s massive forced resettlements, more than half the entire African population live in the Bantustans. Several million more live and work on white-owned farms.

A considerable number of African wage workers still have one foot in the countryside. They are not yet part of the hereditary proletariat, who view themselves as belonging to a distinct, permanent working class with no further perspective of returning to the land.

There are some 2 million African migrant workers—nearly a third of all African workers—who labor for periods of time in the cities and must periodically return to the Bantustans, where their families live. Most migrant workers still have access to some land, even if it is only a minimal amount, and they have repeatedly shown their determination to hang on to it.

In addition, many nonmigrant workers in the cities are only recent arrivals and retain family and other social and cultural ties in the rural areas. Even working-class families that have lived in the cities for several generations are affected by the poverty, hunger, and disease of the Bantustans. These conditions drive down the living standards of all Blacks.

Demands and struggles relating to the land have been part of every major period of mass opposition to white minority rule. The upsurge that has been rocking South Africa for the past year and a half has been no exception.

“The black rebellion, which began in the big city ghettos like Sharpeville, Crossroads and Soweto, then spread to small-town South Africa, has now reached the pastoral backwaters of what the South African government calls tribal ‘homelands’ [the Bantustans], ”prominent South African journalist Allister Sparks noted in the October 26, 1985, Washington Post.

The United Democratic Front (UDF), the 2-million-member anti-apartheid coalition that has led many of the protests, has called for the scrapping of the Bantustan system and of all laws restricting Black land rights. Other groups have raised similar demands. Supporters of the African National Congress (ANC)—the political vanguard of the struggle to bring down the apartheid regime—have been popularizing the slogan, “The land shall be shared among those who work it!”

The fight of Blacks today to reconquer the land is a central aspect of South Africa’s unfolding national, democratic revolution. The demand for land—for a sweeping and deep-going agrarian reform that will overturn the racist and unjust system of land ownership—is one that elicits an immediate response from millions of Blacks.

Many areas of the Bantustans have long traditions of rebellion and opposition to the regime’s racist agrarian policies. Between 1940 and 1963, major peasant revolts swept a number of them.

These rebellions were provoked by the regime’s drive to push even more Blacks off the land, a drive that accelerated with the coming to power in 1948 of the National Party. The new government institutionalized apartheid as official state policy and drastically extended the repressive and discriminatory measures of earlier regimes.

In the countryside this involved kicking millions of Blacks out of farming areas in order to tighten the whites-only monopoly over land ownership and rental. The expelled Blacks were forced to settle in the Bantustans, making the Bantustans even more overcrowded, reducing the size of farming plots, and increasing the number of landless.  
 
 
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