AFRICANEWS

Africa

Landless: Beggars in their own house

Racism

Most former British colonies are characterised by glaring land inequalities. Such sad status was part of the agenda during the recent UN conference against racism and related intolerances.

All that Griffiths Aaron Molefe has to show for his forty years of labouring for a white farmer on a farm near Waalkraal, South Africa, is a small tent and shack. These are alongside the road where Molefe's last employer dumped him after evicting the elderly man four years ago. That was the appreciation for the 84-year-old who worked very hard and for almost no pay for white farmers since he was 14 years old. During the apartheid era, he, his wife, and 10 children shuffled from farm to farm before settling on the one farm for forty years. Molefe shared his story with participants of the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance (WCAR), held from August 31 to September in Durban, South Africa. Immediately before the government portion of the conference was a non-governmental forum, from August 27 to September 2, where people told their stories and presented their analysis of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerances from all over the globe.

Molefe's story reflects one of the topics of the NGO Forum and a problem faced by many the world over: ownership of, and access to, land almost always depends upon the colour of one's skin and/or the size of one's wallet.

During apartheid South Africa, for instance, 13 percent of the land was allocated to the black majority, while the white minority controlled the remaining 87 percent, according to the National Land Committee, a consortium of non-government organisations in South Africa fighting for equitable land distribution. The total population of the country is 40 million and the white community comprises of 15 per cent of that. The committee and other groups held a series of events during the NGO Forum to raise awareness of the connection between racism and landlessness

Not much has changed since apartheid was abolished and the "new" South Africa was born in 1994, largely because the South African government has followed a World Bank market-led approach to land reform which makes land available to those who could pay, says the group. After seven years of 'land reform,' according to these prescriptions, less than two percent of land has changed hands from white to black, and the majority (more than 85 percent) of the country remains under "white" ownership," says report by the Committee. "Meanwhile, 19 million poor, black rural South Africans eke out a living on the remaining 15 percent of land, and millions of poor, black urban South Africans face constant and repeated eviction from the "illegal" informal settlements that surround our cities."

And there is also a disparity in the way that this land is used. The group says that white-owned farms are primarily involved in commercial agricultural activities, while black-owned lands are mostly for subsistence production. The National Land Committee estimates that in South Africa, there are seven million poor, black, rural "farm dwellers" such as Molefe who live under the constant fear of physical abuse and eviction.

"Farm dwellers on the 60,000 white farms that still control the country's land wealth live and work under slave-like conditions, working six to 12-hour days a week, but earning an average of less than US$50 per month less than the cost of a single night's stay at a four-star Durban hotel during the WCAR," says the and Committee report.

Neighbouring Zimbabwe has its share of inequities. There, 4,000 white commercial farmers or 0.04 percent of the 11.2 million population of Zimbabwe own 70 percent of the land, according to a report released in July by the New York-based Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. However, although the Zimbabwe government had identified in past United Nations documents that "the question of land distribution has been one of the most critical policy issues that has faced the independent Zimbabwe government," little has been done so far to carry out proper land reform.

Instead, the country has dissolved into a form of anarchy over the past year in which war veterans have violently invaded and occupied white-owned farms. A number of white farmers had been killed in these invasions. On September 7 of this year, officials attending the Commonwealth talks in Abuja, Nigeria, brokered a land-reform deal that would provide white farmers with "full and fair" compensation, according to a Reuters report. The Zimbabwe government has earmarked 95 percent of white-owned farms for resettlement, which covers an area of 9.5 million hectares.

The similar situation abounds in another former white settler colony-Kenya. In Kenya, white Kenyans and foreign multinational companies own the largest farms in the country, says the report by the Lawyers' Committee. This sad status is rooted in colonial laws such as The East African Acquisition of Lands Order in Council of 1897, The Crown Lands Ordinance Act of 1902 and 1915, and The Native Land Trust Ordinance of 1930 set the stage for Africans to be pushed onto the least productive land. This is according to a last year report by a Nairobi based human rights group, Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC). In fact, the 1950s Mau Mau guerrilla movement was sparked by the fact that a "relatively small number of white settlers" received Kenya's best agricultural lands, which totalled 20 percent of the country's land mass. Post-independence governments picked up where the colonialists have left off, keeping much of the legislation and structures as they engage in corrupt land-grabbing, says the KHRC's report. "The failure to reconsider these unjust laws after independence has meant that our government has continued the treatment of poor Kenyans as second class citizens, while the ruling class of Kenyans and foreigners enjoy the fruits of independence," says the report. A full 80 percent of Kenyans still depend on the rural areas for their livelihoods.

This class inequity can be seen very starkly in Nairobi, Kenya's capital. According to United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat) statistics, 60 percent of Nairobi's estimated two million people live on five percent of the city's total residential land area. In slum areas such as Kibera, the population density can reach 250 units per hectare as compared to 15 units per hectare in such wealth areas as Karen, says Habitat. Uneven distribution of urban land was one of many topics in a WCAR plenary held one day after Israel and the United States had announced that they would pull out of the conference.

Joseph Igbinedion, the WCAR's Habitat representative, spoke about how urban populations tend to group themselves along cultural, racial, social, and class lines. "Segregation can be a major factor in reinforcing disadvantage and exclusion," he said at the September 4 plenary. "It may lead to the formation of underclass ghetto or slum communities with restricted geographic and social mobility.

"It is critical that we place housing and discrimination within the context of the indivisibility and universality of human rights," he said. Also raised in WCAR and NGO Plenary discussions was the concept of "environmental racism," where the misuse of land and the surrounding environment disproportionately harms marginalised groups. In Nigeria, the land and environment in which the Ogoni and other peoples of the Niger Delta live has been devastated because of Shell's oil extraction in the area.

The issue of compensation for environmental racism, colonial systems of land appropriation, current land inequalities, and other land-related issues could have been included within discussions of and agreements for reparations, both at WCAR's NGO Forum and its government portion. The US Non-Governmental Organisations Co-ordinating Committee stated that, "Indigenous peoples continue to be denied the return of their stolen land and rights to self-determination. Lack of a land base interacts with other forms of racism directed at them, resulting in significant violations of their human rights." The group named land as being one form of reparation "that will serve to repair the violation."

In its WCAR report, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law noted how African ministers attending a pre-conference meeting had issued a declaration of how the world community could compensate Africans and their descendants "for the effects of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and, more broadly, the effects of European colonial domination." And, in determining the content and forms of reparations, Human Rights Watch called for: a focus on current economic and social inequalities rather than just an acknowledgement of past misdeeds; the use of compensation for education, housing, health care, and other systems rather than for consumer goods; and a "progressive realisation" standard that would see different populations receive reparations tailored to their needs and circumstances.

Judging by the experiences in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya, the unequal distribution of land according to racial and class lines would surely fall under "European colonial domination," current economic and social inequalities, and other factors for reparations that NGOs had outlined. In the end, European nations apologised, from a moral point of view, for the slave trade, but they steered clear of the land question.

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