Gov’t must swift to give land to poor people On the 20th June South Africans marked 100 years of Land Act and DA leader Helen Zille visited Kimberly to honor Sol Plaatjie for being brave on land issue. We are marking 100 years crucial law passed by the Botha government in 1913, which imposed a policy of territorial segregation. This coincided 50 years anniversary of Mdantsane Township, after black people from Duncan Village forced to move by Verwoerd regime and dumped outside the skirt of East London. The 1913 Act was an attempt to establish a uniform land policy by restricting African occupancy to 10, 4 million morgen (7per cent of the country) with promise of more land in the future. African people were prohibited from purchasing or leasing land in white areas; African land ownership was limited to the demarcated reserves. Similarly whites could not acquire land in the African areas. With the rise in land values in the late nineteenth century, and the increasing commercialization of farming, white farmers sought to exclude competition from black peasant farmers and squatters and at the same time provided themselves with plentiful cheap labour. The 1913 Land Act achieved for white people , by reducing black squatters and sharecroppers in the white owned rural areas to tenant and wage labourers. Black people squatters in Natal and the Transvaal were spared evection from white farms until Parliament made a provision’ However in the Orange Free State, where similar provisions were already in force, the Act promoted the sudden eviction of large numbers of African squatters from white-owned farms, movingly described by ANC General Secretary Sol Plaatjie in his class Native Life in South Africa. The Cape was exclude from the 1913 Act as its application there would have affected black franchise rights entrenched by the South African Act. In 1936 those franchise rights were removed and new Land Act provided for uniformity throughout the country and authorized the provision of more land for black occupation, but in fifties all the land had in fact not been granted. This battle isn’t new - Frantz Fanon called the shanty town the gangrene of colonialism and the colonial city was often the displacement of the European slum. Mike Davis’ apocalyptic polemics have alerted many to the fact that almost a billion people; one in six of us, now lives in shack settlements. But the scale of the growth of the shanty town in the post-colony is not the only reason why Fanon haunts Davis. While Davis tells his readers that, this time, it is structural adjustment that produces the slum. The government is a real disappointed when it comes to land redistribution, because they use the ineffective strategy of the willing buyer and willing seller. The land belongs to the black people before the colonial arrived in the country. The majority of black people were squeezed in the homeland of Mdantsane don’t have money to buy the land which makes them unwilling buyers. White farmers are not willing sellers, and those who are sell their land at an exorbitant price. The government should invoke the land expropriation act on those who don’t want to sell their land. The Freedom Charter states quite clear that the land shall be shared among the people. The government should swiftly to give land to the poor people. Thanks Regards Thabang Maseko Eastern Cape Young Communist League
Posted on: Sun, 23 Jun 2013 18:11:22 +0000