One of South Africa’s worst nightmares is looking more likely by the day: orchestrated, Zimbabwe-style land invasions. Last week’s invasions marked a significant escalation in the campaign by militant activists to mobilize hundreds of thousands of landless blacks against the disproportionately white land-owning class. The occupation was organized by the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), a tiny black-consciousness party that terrified whites during apartheid with the slogan “one settler, one bullet,” and is now gathering political capital by offering practical help to would-be invaders. Government officials downplayed the problem, but their concern was hard to hide. Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Thoko Didiza warned that people illegally occupying land would be dealt with “ruthlessly,” and sought an urgent court order to evict the squatters. By Thursday more than 200 squatters were hauled off to jail. The “government will not tolerate Zimbabwean-type land grabs at any time,” Didiza told the media, adding that “this type of action can seriously damage the economy.” On cue, the South African rand slid to a record low of 8.2 against the U.S. dollar.
There’s reason to worry. From the advent of democracy in 1994, tensions over land have been at a slow boil. An estimated 3.5 million black South Africans were kicked off their property during the dark days of apartheid, many with brutal force. Yet any massive and instantaneous land redistribution would almost certainly result in white flight and wreak irreparable havoc on the economy. So the ruling African National Congress (ANC) sought to strike a delicate balance. During the negotiations that ended nearly 50 years of white rule, leaders of the ANC agreed to constitutional protections for land ownership. Provisions were also made for an aggressive land-reform program that would address the grievances of those who lost property. Those reforms included neutral arbiters of land claims, buyouts of landowners and giving state-owned property to the poor and dispossessed.
In recent months, South African leaders have pointed to the reforms and dismissed comparisons to neighboring Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe has orchestrated the mass invasion of white-owned farms by bands of liberation “war veterans.” “Land invasions,” President Thabo Mbeki stressed, “will never happen here.”
But dealing with land claims has proved a massive task. The Land Claims Commission, set up to address apartheid-era wrongs, is hopelessly overburdened. Between 1995 and June 1999, the commission resolved a mere 41 of nearly 69,000 claims. As tension has ratcheted up, the commission has picked up the pace, resolving 12,314 cases in the past 18 months. That’s still fewer than one in five of all claims.
The situation is ripe for radicalization. A survey last year found that 54 percent of black South Africans supported the land grabs in Zimbabwe. Now, across the country, activists have begun to defy Pretoria. In Mangete in KwaZulu-Natal province, 5,000 squatters recently invaded sugar farms. Crops have been burned, and the local church has been attacked. In the upmarket suburb of Kloof outside Durban recently, a network of activist groups orchestrated a mass invasion by some 1,000 squatters on a property whose owner had died. Barricades were erected to prevent further squatting, but not before several hundred people had managed to erect shacks and move in.
The city of Durban now thwarts up to 50 such invasions a month. Says its manager of land-invasion control, Neville Fromberg, “If you threw a dart randomly onto the city map, it’s guaranteed to land within meters of a problem.” Fromberg, who has an “invasion-control team” of 20 people and says he needs to triple that number, and adds that three other recent invasions in different suburbs have shown the same pattern–planned, carried out quickly by a community organization and often involving “selling” plots.
Still, none of the actions resembled last week’s protests. Never before have so many taken action so close to the economic capital, Johannesburg, with such effect. The PAC, which spent the weekend preparing for the court challenge and briefing squatters, made no apologies. “This land belongs to the people, and the Constitution says people have a right to land,” said PAC Eastern Cape leader Zingisa Mkabile. Government officials are also digging in for a long fight. Land Affairs Minister Didiza warned that “we won’t show sympathy for anyone breaking the law,” and complained to the local media that those who said they were motivated by desperation were guilty of “jumping the queue.”
But there are few options open to a government caught between land-hungry South Africans and its commitment to orderly, legal land reform. One option would be for Pretoria to speed up the dispersal of state-owned land; the state and public entities own vast tracts of land. But that would go only so far. The government estimates that 5 percent of its 25.5 million hectares are suitable and available for land redistribution, and expropriation of private land has proved tricky. When acquiring land is deemed in the public interest, the government has the right to buy it, at a price determined by the market. “But market-priced land can be expensive, and the state lacks resources,” says Mcebisi Ndletyana of the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg. “Not being able to afford to buy back land is a profound problem for a government faced with impatient people who are starting to take matters into their own hands.”
If something isn’t done soon, the government may have scores more protests on its hands. Even picturesque Cape Town is not immune. Descendants of the Khoi-San–the area’s original inhabitants–have claimed rights to the city, invoking First Nation Status under international law over parts of it, such as the hugely successful Victoria and Albert Waterfront development. Like indigenous people in Canada and the United States, the Khoi-San want big companies occupying their ancestral land to pay royalties.
Nationally, PAC politicking will continue to fan the flames. The party has long demanded massive land redistribution to the poor, but last week three provincial leaders told the Mail & Guardian weekly that the party had decided to act: in April it embarked on a countrywide campaign to occupy state land and instructed local PAC officials to identify communities that would benefit from a land grab. Security minister Steve Tshwete threatened to charge the PAC with fraud, but was beaten to it by the opposition Democratic Alliance, which brought charges last week.
Notably, last week’s invasion occurred in Kempton Park, site of the historic settlement between the apartheid government and the ANC. It has been almost 10 years since apartheid’s pillars crumbled–race-classification laws; the Group Areas Act, which drove people into segregated neighborhoods, and the Land Acts, which squeezed 75 percent of the population onto 13 percent of the land, leaving the rest for whites. The laws may be gone, but over the coming months, the Mbeki government’s nerve will be sorely tested by their most divisive legacy.
