Blackness, oceans and South Africa’s colonial history are at my family’s core

Cape Town.
Sutterstock

This excerpt is based on an extract from the book, “Race Otherwise: Forging a New Humanism for South Africa” by the author.

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My blackness is supposedly visible only because I do not “look white”. But, in some parts of West Africa I am called white. My blackness is ambiguous because I am not black Black or black African. These descriptions are increasingly used to distinguish between formerly colonised South Africans with different historical relationships to this region and its colonial past. I am (more often than not) not considered African in South Africa. I am still called “Coloured”.

It is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to deal with the lexicon of race.

In my book “blackness” and “black” (not capitalised) refer to the racialised construct “black”. “Black”, capitalised and in inverted commas, refers to the apartheid racial category. Black, capitalised and without inverted commas, refers to the global political identification on the part of individuals and collectives who are constructed and classified as black.

At first use I place the apartheid race category “Coloured” in inverted commas to indicate that it is contested. Hereafter for ease of reading I do not use inverted commas. I capitalise the term to signify its continued official status as a race category. Simply writing “coloured” as a descriptive term erases its history, its contestation and its official status.

I write “White”, hereafter without inverted commas, to refer to the apartheid and the post-1994 official race category, capitalising the term to indicate its historical and current official categorical status. The terms “whiteness” and “white” (not capitalised) refer to the racialised construct “white”.

The cover of ‘Race Otherwise’.

In South Africa’s Western and Eastern Cape provinces “what I am”, racially speaking, is seldom questioned. People who say that they are from Limpopo and Mpumalanga, the northern provinces of South Africa, ask which tribe and which country I am from.

In parts of Europe I am assumed to be from a Caribbean island. African-Americans are surprised to find that I was born and live “in Africa”.

People from different parts of the world ask “what mix” I am. Which would you prefer? Salt and vinegar or cinnamon and sugar? Neither one of my parents was black Black. Neither one of them was white White. I am not half-and-half.

A bundle of story lines

Like all families, mine is a bundle of lines. A bundle of story lines. A bundle of journey lines. South Africa’s colonial history is at their core. Its “meshworks” – produced by the interconnected processes of modernity and coloniality – met in the southern African region and made waves of community that tangled in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

From these oceanic perspectives, the landscape and mindscape at the tip of the continent are thresholds between the two oceans; between the unrecorded lives sustained, changed and sacrificed by these seas; between circuits of ideas; and between circuits of lived experience and of possibilities.

My mother’s maternal grandmother was from St Helena Island in the south Atlantic Ocean. My mother told me that her paternal grandfather wore a kuffiya, a form of headdress worn by Muslim men in parts of the world, on his deathbed. He came to South Africa from the Indonesian island of Java with his parents, who were Muslim.

Their surname changed from Abdurahman to Adriaan. When this change happened remains unclear… I was shown photographs of a maternal great-aunt who was described as a “boere tannie” (Dutch aunty). She was called Cousin Snow and lived in the northern region of the then Cape Province.

My paternal grandfather was of the KhoiKhoi, people considered indigenous to South Africa. This is a diasporic history of cross-currents, of slavery and various forms of unfree labour, of “vrij zwarten” (free black people), of “inboekseling” (apprenticed labour), and of Dutch settlement.

It is a history of creolisation: processes by which ways of living and forms of community – for the most part (but not only) born of struggles against violent power – are forged in order to survive and to remake histories. These histories are intertwined in ways that do not obliterate social differences and they suggest several possibilities including complicity and resistance (not necessarily separate acts); domination and reciprocity; and various forms of intimacy and of distance.

My family’s stories are one response to a question posed by the literary scholar and poet Gabeba Baderoon:

‘What do the two oceans tell us?’ They show that the oceans ‘tell us about history’; about the ways in which ‘the individual relation to the sea is weighted with history’; about the ways in which ‘the register of the private can open a path to history’.

Birth of capitalist modernity

Histories of the North Atlantic have had a preponderant influence on scholarship about race because of its place in the birth of capitalist modernity as a world system based on the trade in African slaves. But, for scholars in the humanities and social sciences who study southern Africa, this is changing.

The Indian Ocean can be thought of as an emergent knowledge space. It is a domain of lived experience that is configured by interconnected histories; by the exchange and movement of people, things and ideas; and by the circulation of technologies, communities and institutions. The South Atlantic Ocean, and specifically St Helena Island, can also be thought of as an emergent and critical knowledge space.

These oceanic knowledge formations trouble ideas about race-making, race-mixing, and about inevitable links between place/nature and race/culture that are taken for granted. These links are expressed in what became a universal racial taxonomy premised on theories about the origin of permanent differences among humans as a species – Africa/Negroid, Asia/Mongoloid, Europe/Caucasoid.

St Helena Island and the port city of Cape Town at the Cape of Good Hope are two historical nodes in these ocean spaces through which people, ideas and goods circulated. These nodes, like slave and trading ships, tack together the two oceans making meshworks in the southern hemisphere. The mesh works are at the centre of my family history, and they are an important part of the history of southern Africa because of its position as a threshold between the two oceans.

“Race Otherwise: Forging a New Humanism for South Africa” published by Wits University Press: 2017.

Zimitri Erasmus, Associate professor of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

What Archbishop Tutu's ubuntu credo teaches the world about justice and harmony

Archbishop Tutu teaches that punishing wrongdoers, with an eye for an eye, is unjustified.
Filckr/UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferre

Archbishop Emeritus Bishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu’s 86th birthday on October 7 is a good occasion to reflect on the man’s contributions to South African society and global thought. I do so as a philosopher and in the light of ubuntu, the southern African (specifically, Nguni) word for humanness that is often used to encapsulate sub-Saharan moral ideals.

An ubuntu ethic is often expressed with the maxim,

A person is a person through other persons.

In plain English, this does not say much. But one idea that indigenous Africans often associate with this maxim is that your basic aim in life should be to become a real or genuine person. You should strive to realise your higher, human nature, in a word to exhibit ubuntu.

How is one to do that? “Through other persons”, which is shorthand for prizing communal or harmonious relationships with them. For many southern African intellectuals, communion or harmony consists of identifying with and exhibiting solidarity towards others, in other words, enjoying a sense of togetherness, cooperating and helping people – out of sympathy and for their own sake.

Tutu sums up his understanding of how to exhibit ubuntu as:

I participate, I share.

Apartheid as inhuman

Tutu is well known for having invoked an ubuntu ethic to evaluate South African society, and he can take substantial credit for having made the term familiar to politicians, activists and scholars around the world.

Tutu criticised the National Party, which formalised apartheid, and its supporters for having prized discord, the opposite of harmony.

Apartheid not only prevented “races” from identifying with each other or exhibiting solidarity with one another. It went further by having one “race” subordinate and harm others. In Tutu’s words, apartheid made people “less human” for their failure to participate on an evenhanded basis and to share power, wealth, land, opportunities and even themselves.

One of Tutu’s more striking, contested claims is that apartheid damaged not only black people, but also white people. Although most white people became well off as a result of apartheid, they did not become as morally good, or human, as they could have.

Nobel peace prize winner Desmond Tutu with winners of the emerging leadership awards at his Peace Centre awards ceremony in Cape Town, 2003.
EPA/Nic Bothma

As is well known, Tutu maintained that, by ubuntu, democratic South Africa was right to deal with apartheid-era political crimes by seeking reconciliation or restorative justice. If “social harmony is for us the summum bonum– the greatest good”, then the primary aim when dealing with wrongdoing - as ones who hold African values - should be to establish harmonious relationships between wrongdoers and victims. From this perspective, punishment merely for the purpose of paying back wrongdoers, in the manner of an eye for an eye, is unjustified.

Controversies regarding Tutu’s ubuntu

Tutu is often criticised these days for having advocated a kind of reconciliation that lets white beneficiaries of apartheid injustice off the hook. But this criticism isn’t fair. Reconciliation for Tutu has not meant merely shaking hands after one party has exploited and denigrated another. Instead, it has meant that the wrongdoer, and those who benefited, should acknowledge the wrongdoing, and seek to repair the damage that he did at some real cost.

Tutu has remarked since the 1990s that

unless there is real material transformation in the lives of those who have been apartheid’s victims, we might just as well kiss reconciliation goodbye. It just won’t happen without some reparation.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he chaired was aimed at helping South Africans come to terms with their past and laid the foundation for reconciliation. In the fifth volume of its Report it was also adamant about the need for redistribution that would improve the lives of black South Africans. And Tutu has continued to lament the failure of white communities to undertake sacrifices on their own, and to demand compensation from them, for instance, by calling for a “wealth” or “white” tax that would be used to uplift black communities.

Tutu weeps as he appeals for an end to killings during a funeral service 1986.
Reuters/Juda Ngwenya

Another criticism of Tutu is that his interpretation of ubuntu has been distorted through the lens of Christianity. Although Tutu’s Christian beliefs have influenced his understanding of ubuntu, it’s also the case that his understanding of ubuntu has influenced his Christian beliefs. Tutu’s background as an Archbishop of the Anglican Church does not necessarily render his construal of ubuntu utterly unAfrican or implausible.

In particular, Tutu has controversially continued to believe that forgiveness is essential for reconciliation, and it is reasonable to suspect that his Christian beliefs have influenced his understanding of what ubuntu requires, here.

I agree with critics who contend that reconciliation does not require forgiveness. But, might not Tutu have a point in thinking that forgiveness would be part of the best form of reconciliation, an ideal for which to strive?

A neglected view of human dignity

Tutu’s ideas about humanness, harmony and reconciliation have been enormously influential, not merely in South Africa, but throughout the world. There is one more idea of his that I mention in closing that has not been as influential, but that also merits attention. It is Tutu’s rejection of the notion that what is valuable about us as human beings is our autonomy, which is a characteristically Western idea.

Instead, according to Tutu:

We are different so that we can know our need of one another, for no one is ultimately self-sufficient. The completely self-sufficient person would be sub-human.

In short, what gives us a dignity is not our independence, but rather our interdependence, our ability to participate and share with one another, indeed our vulnerability. This African and relational conception of human dignity has yet to influence many outside sub-Saharan Africa. I hope that this tribute might help in some way.

Thaddeus Metz, Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Trump's Africa policy is still incoherent, but key signals are emerging

US President Trump addresses the 72nd UN General Assembly in New York.
Reuters/Brendan McDermid

Africa’s leaders, along with everyone else interested in US-Africa relations, have waited eight months for US President Donald Trump’s administration to explain its Africa policy. We aren’t there yet.

But in recent weeks Trump has indicated the level and extent of his interest. And, senior African affairs officials at the State and Defence Departments are at last attempting publicly to outline US goals and objectives toward Africa. This, apparently without much guidance from their president.

Trump’s inaugural address to the UN General Assembly said little about Africa – barely one paragraph towards the end. One sentence praised African Union and UN-led peacekeeping missions for “invaluable contributions in stabilising conflicts in Africa.” A second praised America, which

continues to lead the world in humanitarian assistance, including famine prevention and relief in South Sudan, Somalia and northern Nigeria and Yemen.

The next day Trump hosted a luncheon for leaders of nine African countries –Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, Uganda, and South Africa. Only his welcoming remarks have been published but they are nearly devoid of policy content or guidance. His opening gambit reminded me of a 19th century colonialist hoping to become rich, as he proclaimed:

Africa has tremendous business potential, I have so many friends going to your countries trying to get rich. I congratulate you, they’re spending a lot of money….It’s really become a place they have to go, that they want to go.

Trump called on African companies to invest in the US. Then, shifting to security cooperation, he urged Africans to help defeat Islamist extremists and the threat from North Korea.

The American president proposed no new presidential initiatives for Africa. But, at least, he did not say those launched by predecessors were a waste of money and would be ended. Nor did he mention opposition to foreign assistance generally. He also did not mention his renunciation of the Paris Climate Accord and refusal to fund Green Climate Fund. Both are crucial for Africa’s adaptation to global warming.

Hints of a policy taking shape

A “US-Africa Partnerships” conference at the US Institute for Peace in Washington in mid-September provided additional clues to how this administration will conduct Africa policy.

Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Tom Shannon, offered the first high level official statement on Africa. Shannon, a highly accomplished Foreign Service officer, emphasised policy continuity. But, he implicitly affirmed Trump’s apparent desire for minimal engagement in Africa.

Shannon and Acting Assistant Secretary Donald Yamamoto at a later session, stressed the four main pillars that have framed Africa policy for many years, would remain. These are:

• peace and security;
• counterterrorism;
• economic trade, investment and development; and,
• democracy and good governance.

They endorsed previous presidential initiatives, including specific references to former US President Barack Obama’s Feed the Future, Power Africa and the Young African Leaders Initiative. Their continuation, and at what levels, will depend on budget decisions. Trump’s initial recommendations, endorsed by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, call for crippling cuts.

So far, the only new social development programme that Trump has endorsed is the World Bank’s global Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative, championed by his daughter Ivanka. The US has donated USD$50 million toward its global start-up budget of USD$315 million. As Yamamoto noted at the September meeting, Africa could benefit from this initiative.

Surprise praise for China

Trump will be less likely to challenge US military’s commitments in Africa. With this in mind I paid close attention to the address by General Thomas Waldhauser, Commander of the US Africa Command (Africom) at the September 13 meeting. He set out Africom’s current engagements in Libya and Somalia, where he said the mission was to support locally engineered political solutions.

Critics of America’s many previous failed interventions in these two countries and elsewhere, will rightly remain sceptical.

The second part of his address dealt more broadly with Africom’s capacity building assistance, nationally and regionally. He said Africom only operates where

US and partner nation strategic objectives are compatible and aligned and, second, the operations are conducted primarily by partner nation forces with the US in a supporting role.

Africom, he said, conducts “some 3,500 exercises, programs and engagements” annually, with “5-to-6,000 US service members working on the continent every day.”

Waldenhauser ended his address with a surprisingly specific and positive view on China’s role in Africa. He praised China’s assistance to building much needed infrastructure throughout Africa and for the rapid growth in China-Africa trade which exceeded USD$300 billion in 2016.

On security issues, he commended Chinese President Xi Jinping’s pledge of USD$100 million to the AU and for supporting UN peacekeeping missions with 8,000 police officers. He then referred to the construction of China’s first overseas military base, which is near the US base in Djibouti, as creating “opportunities found nowhere else in the world,” relating that:

China assigned the first soldiers to this base and expressed interest in conducting amphibious training between Chinese and US Marines. Across the continent, we have shared interests in African stability. We see many areas where we can cooperate with the Chinese military. For example, we both support UN peacekeeping missions and training with African defence forces. The fact that we have mutual interests in Africa means that we can and should cooperate.

To emphasise the importance of this comment he quoted Secretary of Defence James Mattis when he pointed out earlier this year:

Our two countries can and do cooperate for mutual benefit. And we will pledge to work closely with China where we share common cause.

Charting the future

But China-US security cooperation in Africa can’t succeed without the inclusion of African governments as equal partners in this “common cause”.

Such “win-win-win” experiments in mutual confidence building would not only benefit Africans, but could also serve as positive examples for other regions and could improve US-China relations globally. In the absence of a coherent and compelling US – Africa policy, this at least is one positive development that merits our attention.

John J Stremlau, 2017 Bradlow Fellow at SA Institute of International Affairs,Visiting Professor of International Relations, University of the Witwatersrand

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Donald Trump's passion for cruelty

U.S. President’s apparent passion for cruelty speaks to a greater American illness.
(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Donald Trump seems addicted to violence.

It shapes his language, politics and policies.

He revels in a public discourse that threatens, humiliates and bullies.

He has used language as a weapon to humiliate women, a reporter with a disability, Pope Francis and any political opponent who criticizes him. He has publicly humiliated members of his own cabinet and party, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and a terminally ill John McCain, not to mention the insults and lies he perpetrated against former FBI Director James Comey after firing him.

Trump has humiliated world leaders with insulting and belittling language. He not only insulted North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with the war-like moniker “Rocket Man,” he appeared before the United Nations and blithely threatened to address the nuclear standoff with North Korea by wiping out its 25 million inhabitants.

He has attacked the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico for pleading for help in the aftermath of a hurricane that has devastated the island and left many Puerto Ricans without homes or drinking water.

He has emboldened and tacitly supported the violent actions of white supremacists, and during the presidential campaign encouraged right-wing thugs to attack dissenters — especially people of colour. He stated that he would pay the legal costs of a supporter who attacked a black protester.

During his presidential campaign, he endorsed state torture and pandered to the spectacle of violence that his adoring crowds treated like theatre as they shouted and screamed for more.

Violence for Trump became performative, used to draw attention to himself as the ultimate tough guy. He acted as a mafia figure willing to engage in violence as an act of vengeance and retribution aimed at those who refused to buy into his retrograde nationalism, regressive militarism and nihilistic sadism.

‘Lock her up’

The endless call at his rallies to “lock her up” was more than an attack on Hillary Clinton; he endorsed the manufacture of a police state where the call to law and order become the foundation for Trump’s descent into authoritarianism.

Donald Trump supporters in Virginia in November 2016.
(AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)

On a policy level, he has instituted directives to remilitarize the police by providing them with all manner of Army surplus weapons — especially those local police forces dealing with issues of racism and poverty. He actually endorsed and condoned police brutality while addressing a crowd of police officers in Long Island, New York, this summer.

These are just a few examples of the many ways in which Trump repeatedly gives licence to his base and others to commit acts of violence.

What’s more, he also appears to relish representations of violence, suggesting on one occasion that it’s a good way to deal with the “fake news” media. He tweeted an edited video showing him body-slamming and punching a man with the CNN logo superimposed on his head during a wrestling match.

And recently, he retweeted an edited video from an anti-Semite’s account that showed Trump driving a golf ball into the back of Hillary Clinton’s head.

Trump’s domestic policies instill fear

The violence has found its way into Trump’s domestic policies, which bear the weight of a form of domestic terrorism — policies that instill in specific populations fear through intimidation and coercion.

Trump’s call to deport 800,000 individuals brought to the United States as illegal immigrants through no intention of their own — and who know no other country than the U.S. — reflects more than a savage act of a white nationalism. This cruel and inhumane policy also suggests the underlying state violence inherent in embracing the politics of disappearance and disposability.

In this Sept. 6 photo, Karen Caudillo, 21, of Florida and Jairo Reyes, 25, of Rogers, Ark., both brought to the U.S. as children, attend a Capitol Hill news conference in Washington. DACA has shielded them from deportation.
(AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)

There’s also Trump’s pardon of the vile Joe Arpaio, the disgraced former Arizona sheriff and notorious racist who was renowned by white supremacists and bigots for his hatred of undocumented immigrants and his abuse and mistreatment of prisoners.

This growing culture of cruelty offers support for a society of violence in the United States. Before Trump’s election, that society resided on the margins of power. Now it’s at the centre.

Trump’s disregard for human life is evident in a range of policies. They include withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate change, slashing jobs at the Environmental Protection Agency, gutting teen pregnancy prevention programs and ending funds to fight white supremacy and other hate groups.

Budget punishes poor children

At the same time, Trump has called for a US$52 billion increase in the military budget while arguing for months in favour of doing away with Obamacare and leaving tens of millions of Americans without health coverage.

Many young, old and vulnerable populations will pay with their lives for Trump’s embrace of this form of domestic terrorism.

He’s added a new dimension of cruelty to the policies that affect children, especially the poor. His proposed 2018 budget features draconian cuts in programs that benefit poor children.

Trump supports cutting food stamp programs (SNAP) to the tune of US$193 billion; slashing US$610 billion over 10 years from Medicaid, which aids 37 million children; chopping US$5.8 billion from the budget of the Children’s Health Insurance Program which serves nine million kids; defunding public schools by US$9.2 billion; and eliminating a number of community-assisted programs for the poor and young people.

These cruel cuts merge with the ruthlessness of a punishing state that under Trump and Attorney General Sessions is poised to implement a law-and-order campaign that criminalizes the behaviour of the poor, especially Blacks.

It gets worse. At the same time, Trump also supports policies that pollute the planet and increase health risks to the most vulnerable and powerless.

Violence an American hallmark

Violence, sadly, runs through the United States like an electric current as terrible events in Las Vegas have proven once again. And it’s become the primary tool both for entertaining people and addressing social problems. It also works to destroy the civic institutions that make a democracy possible.

Needless to say, Trump is not the sole reason for this more visible expression of extreme violence on the domestic and foreign fronts.

On the contrary. He’s the endpoint of a series of anti-democratic practices, policies and values that have been gaining ground since the emergence of the political and economic counterrevolution that gained full force with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, along with the rule of financial capital and the embrace of a culture of precarity.

Trump is the unbridled legitimator-in-chief of gun culture, police brutality, a war machine, violent hypermasculinity and a political and social order that expands the boundaries of social abandonment and the politics of disposability — especially for those marginalized by race and class.

He’s emboldened the idea that violence is the only viable political response to social problems, and in doing so normalizes violence.

Violence that once seemed unthinkable has become central to Trump’s understanding of how American society now defines itself.

Language in the service of violence has a long history in the United States, and in this current historical moment, we now have the violence of organized forgetting.

Violence as a source of pleasure

As memory recedes, violence as a toxin morphs into entertainment, policy and world views.

What’s different about Trump is that he revels in the use of violence and war-mongering brutality to inflict humiliation and pain on people. He pulls the curtains away from a systemic culture of cruelty and a racially inflected mass- incarceration state. He publicly celebrates his own sadistic investment in violence as a source of pleasure.

At the moment, it may seem impossible to offer any resistance to this emerging authoritarianism without talking about violence, how it works, who benefits from it, whom it affects and why it’s become so normalized.

But this doesn’t have to be the case once we understand that the scourge of American violence is as much an educational issue as it is a political concern.

The challenge is to address how to educate people about violence through rigorous and accessible historical, social, relational analyses and narratives that provide a comprehensive understanding of how the different registers of violence are connected to new forms of American authoritarianism.

This means making power and its connection to violence visible through the exposure of larger structural and systemic economic forces such as the toxic influence of the National Rifle Association, U.S. arms exports, and lax gun laws.

‘Dead zones’ of imagination

It means illustrating with great care and detail how violence is reproduced and legitimized through mass illiteracy and the dead zones of the imagination.

It means moving away from analyzing violence as an abstraction by showing how it actually manifests itself in everyday life to inflict massive human suffering and despair.

The American public needs a new understanding of how civic institutions collapse under the force of state violence, how language coarsens in the service of carnage, how a culture hardens in a market society so as to foster contempt for compassion while exalting a culture of cruelty.

How does neoliberal capitalism work to spread the celebration of violence through its commanding cultural apparatuses and social media?

How does war culture come to dominate civic life and become the most honoured ideal in American society?

Unless Americans can begin to address these issues as part of a broader discourse committed to resisting the growing authoritarianism in the United States, the plague of mass violence will continue — and the once-shining promise of American democracy will become nothing more than a relic of history.

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A version of this analysis was originally published on Moyers & Company.

Henry Giroux, Chaired professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

How land reform and rural development can help reduce poverty in South Africa

Rural poverty affects a growing number of people in South Africa.
REUTERS/Mike Hutchings

South Africa will need to review its land reform policy, with an eye to boosting productive land use among the rural poor, if it is to push back rising poverty levels.

The country’s poverty levels have increased sharply over the past five years with an additional 3 million people now classified as living in absolute poverty. This means about 34 million people from a population of 55 million lack basic necessities like housing, transport, food, heating and proper clothing.

Much of the commentary on these sad statistics has emphasised the poor performance of urban job creation efforts and the country’s education system. Little has been said about the role of rural development or land reform.

This is a major omission given that about 35% of South Africa’s population live in rural areas. They are among the worst affected by the rising poverty levels.

Large tracts of land lie fallow in the country’s rural areas, particularly in former homelands (surrogate states created by the apartheid government). They were fully integrated into South Africa in 1994 bringing with them large amounts of land under traditional authorities.

Research by the Human Sciences Research Council suggests that poverty levels can be pushed back significantly if policies are put in place that focus on food security and creating viable pathways to prosperity for the rural poor. This would be particularly true if land reform helped people develop the means of producing food, generating value and employing people.

The problem

Researchers investigating the land needs of marginal communities, such as farm workers and rural households in the former homelands, have uncovered a considerable desire for opportunities on the land.

But they found that municipalities, government departments and banks were offering relatively little assistance to poorer would-be farmers seeking to improve their land and its value.

In the former homelands in particular, many families reportedly felt opportunities existed literally on their doorsteps but they lacked the means and support to grasp them. A common response among young people to the absence of such opportunities is to pick up and leave for the cities.

The need to rekindle rural development in South Africa is widely recognised even within the government. The country has lots of policies that speak to the ideal of lifting the rural poor out of poverty. Some policies are just not followed while others have proven to be inappropriate.

A fundamental problem underpinning successive rural development initiatives has been the split between the two main strands of government land reform policy: land restitution and land redistribution.

Land restitution was largely conceived as a means of addressing the colonial legacy of land dispossession. For its part, land redistribution was mainly designed to create a new class of black commercial farmers who would inherit existing white commercial farms.

Neither has been successfully implemented. Land restitution has been painfully slow, while land redistribution has been criticised for becoming increasingly elitist.

To advance land redistribution the government put in place a land acquisition strategy that acted as an enabler for entrepreneurs who wanted to get into large-scale, commercial agriculture. Once again the poor were left at the margins.

In the early years of democracy, the African National Congress adopted a “do no harm” approach in relation to land tenure in the former homelands. The reasoning was that this land served as a bulwark against poverty.

But that policy appears to have shifted to focus on bolstering the power of local chiefs to oversee land use. The ruling party is leveraging the clout of the chiefs to secure rural constituency support during elections.

A sharp historical irony is that the present government is arguably reproducing patterns of land ownership that were originally justified by the colonial ideology.

What must be done

A range of different models could be adopted in different localities. Recently there’s been a significant rise in the establishment of informal land markets.

This indicates that disregarded rural land has substantial value. But this value is being undermined by a lack of appropriate titling opportunities and land management systems.

What is required is a single and inclusive land reform programme. It must view all land as economically valuable and aim to maximise its potential without undermining people’s social and cultural rights and expressions of identity and belonging. Such a programme should recognise that unused land can be used to address poverty and stimulate growth if it is incorporated into rural value chains.

And to make farming easier and more worthwhile new mechanisms and arrangements must be designed to release productive land currently locked up in customary practices. Although individualist freeholding is an inadequate and often wildly inappropriate alternative to present tenure practices, chiefs and communities should be held accountable if they appear unable to improve their land.

Leslie J. Bank, Deputy Director in Economic Development and Professor of Social Anthropology, Human Sciences Research Council and Tim GB Hart, Senior Research Project Manager and Rural Sociologist, Economic Performance and Development, Human Sciences Research Council

This article was originally published on The Conversation.