South Africa's President Reinvigorates Questions About Land Ownership

JOHANNESBURG -- When South African President Jacob Zuma rose to deliver the opening remarks to a session of the country's House of Traditional Leaders in Cape Town last month, the mood was, at best, politely attentive.

As the president plodded through his prepared remarks on the state of the country, he didn't so much as look up at the bright patchwork of leopard skin cloaks and beaded headdresses in front of him -- and his heavy-lidded audience afforded him approximately equal enthusiasm.

Then, abruptly, Zuma jolted upright, his voice suddenly animated.

"Your majesties," he began, "At the heart of our problem as Africans has been the fact that ... our land was taken away."

The audience, too, seemed to sit up taller. The solution, the president continued, was for the country to begin an audit of who owned the country's land before white colonizers arrived -- and then to begin taking it back without compensation.

For the two and a half decades since South Africa became a democracy, land has lurked quietly behind much of the country's politics. When apartheid ended in the early 1990s, white farmers owned about 70 percent of South Africa's land, a result of centuries of deliberate and widespread dispossession of the black majority. Since then, a vast program of voluntary land redistribution has shifted about 8 percent of that land, or just under 17 million acres, back into black hands. (Many more South Africans dispossessed of their land have received cash settlements).

But many, including the president, feel progress has not gone fast enough.

Meanwhile, the conversation around land redistribution has revived another set of questions -- about who mans the gates of the country's history, and how to decide which versions of the past deserve the most space in the present.

Zuma's insistence on a pre-colonial land audit, for instance, has called into question how the country should determine exactly which dispossessed people deserve to be given their land back. Is it anyone who ever had land taken from them by force? Only those who lost it in the last two centuries? Or should there be some other metric altogether?

At present, South African law only recognizes claims from people booted from parcels of land after 1913 -- the date of a particularly nefarious piece of colonial legislation that granted whites the right to 90 percent of South Africa, setting the tone for a century of dispossession and downward mobility for black South Africans.

Because the law limits itself to the last century, it means much of the evidence to prove what happened can be found in the country's archives -- vast repositories of colonial documents, maps, and title deeds that capture, often in meticulous detail, how land was shoved from black hands to white ones again and again in the last hundred years.

But those archives also come with clear limitations.

"Our archives are a two-edged sword," says Verne Harris, archivist for the papers of Nelson Mandela and a former deputy director of South Africa's National Archives. "They're full of the voices of those in power, full of disinformation." But, he says, by skimming off useful information -- dates, names or locations, for example -- they can also be used for purposes their creators never intended.

In Johannesburg, for instance, Baile Sedumedi has used an old municipal map he dug up from the bottom of a box in South Africa's National Archives to show where the houses once stood in his old neighborhood of Sophiatown, a chaotically multiracial community known for its jazz clubs, illegal drinking joints and cinemas until it was razed to the ground by the apartheid government in the 1950s. Several families have successfully used the map as part of their claims to previous land ownership in the neighborhood.

And it has psychological value too, he says.

"That map was so important -- it let us show what was there to show what we lost," says Sedumedi.

At the same time, however, a "deadly combination of neglect and politicization" have left many of the country's archives largely inaccessible to those who need them most, Harris says. Many local and provincial archives, for instance, are understaffed, poorly maintained and geographically distant from the communities that need them for land claims, legal cases, and other services, according to a 2014 report into the state of the country's archives.

That's a sharp change of pace from the 1990s, Harris says, when archive preservation was seen as a key building block to the country's new democracy -- a way to bring into the open and redress the wrongs of the past. But that thinking began to shift, he says, as the country's politicians realized that laws welcoming the public into archives with open arms could eventually reveal their own compromising political dealings. Slowly, laws around the classification of public records began tightening, and the archives themselves watched funding slide away.

Zuma has not said how he will conduct his "pre-colonial land audit," but many worry it will go the way of many recent land claims -- simply entrenching the power of people who already have it.

"It sounds nice politically -- return the land to the people -- but what's most likely to happen is you'll see land turned over to tribal authorities who say they're descended from the rightful pre-colonial custodians," says Michelle Hay, a researcher who conducts land claims investigations. Often "it's a smokescreen" for those in power to gain more, she says.

It is also, for Zuma, a pipe dream. Even within his own party, the ruling African National Congress, opinions on land restitution -- especially without compensating the owners, as was infamously done in neighboring Zimbabwe -- are sharply divided, and political change on the issue appears unlikely in the short term future.

Still, he says, the country's history cannot be complete without it.

"We've addressed the political power -- we have it... but we are not in control of the economic power," he told the traditional leaders in March. "The critical element of the economy is land. Our land was taken away. It's not in our hands... and the time to talk and analyze has passed. It is time for action. Concrete action."

Ryan Lenora Brown is a Twitter.