People’s Power for Economic Freedom Table of Content
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- Stakeholders, Roles And Responsibilities
- Bibliography
- CHAPTER 5
- The Creation of Modern Racist South Africa
- The Great Compromise
- The Property Clause
Expected Outcomes Vision An Afrocentric social justice and penal system where the legal service is not commoditised but accessible to all, everyone is equal before the law and the penal system is rehabilitative. Mission To establish an equitable judicial system where awaiting trail is a choice for all through the abolition of the bail system and high sentencing, where sentencing is for just deserts limited individual crime, and where incarceration is for correctional and rehabilitative purposes only.
To achieve radical judiciary, justice and correctional services transformation, the EFF is committed to transparency, equity, equality, accountability, a capacitated state, and corruption fighting state. The EFF is equally committed to the cause of nationalisation, for through economic freedom shall we able to shape and construct the justice system that is desirable for all our people.
SAPA. (2013). Ndebele: SA Has Highest Prison Population In Africa. In: Mail & Guardian: National 11 Feb, 2013. Retrieved from: http://mg.co.za/article/2013-02-11-south-africa-has-highest-prison-population-in-africa-says-ndebele CHAPTER 5 Land and Agrarian Revolution “For a colonized people the most essential value, because it’s the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity”-
Several challenges face our movement towards realizing the task of land redistribution as a key determinant in achieving the goal of Economic Freedom in our life time. These basic questions are inter alia: How shall the land be redistributed? How shall land be owned and by whom (the land tenure regime)? What shall we do with the land once it has been reclaimed? Furthermore, the paper shall deal with the concerned that rests in the question; how shall our movement circumvent the real danger of imperialist sabotage? Is such an attack inevitable? What is the position of our movement between now and when EFF takes power? This paper seeks to provide an overall frame work of understanding the land and agrarian questions as key questions of a thorough-going revolutionary project informed by the ideologue frame work of our movement which is the Marxist-Leninst-Fanonian perspective and outlook.
There is no understanding the South Africa of today without understanding the history of land dispossession. There is no facet of SA society which is not implicated in the land question. The fact that we have two societies1 in one is direct outcomes of land theft. The fact that we have been forced to adopt Europeans religion, cuisine, languages and identify is direct outcomes of the land question2. Pre 1994 South Africa has been variously described as a settler colonial, colonialism of a special type and racial capitalist amongst others descriptions. All these descriptions in varying degree recognize the reality of modern South Africa as created principally by land dispossession. The creation of modern South Africa has to be located in 1652 with the arrival of white settlers in the cape shores. Jan van Riebeeck remains the symbolic father of settlerdom3. Modern South Africa is created out triple dispossessions4. The primary dispossession is land dispossession which logically led to the two other dispossessions which is dispossession of African labour and finally and perhaps more devastatingly the dispossession of the African way of being. These triads of dispossessions are made possession by the original organizing logic of slavery which has reduced the African into a mere “thing amongst things” as Fanon avers. The capturing of African as slaves and placed on the auction block with animals and also put on the plantation next to the oxen and whipped to create wealth and security for the white master had opened Africa for abuse and theft of not just the land but her people too. Land dispossession and attendant dispossessions correctly then are part of the second coming, which is colonialism of various types. The first transgression that links all black people in the world is slavery. The reality of being captured was true for each and every African, therefore slavery affected even those who were not captured. What is key here is to recognize that the transgression against the black body provided lisence for the land related transgression by the West. Its almost impossible to imagine colonialism without slavery. Its important to note that land dispossession was effected to power white supremacy and the relative racist industrialization of South Africa. The discovery of gold and diamond in the mid nineteenth century intensified the dispossession of African land and labour. The proleretarianisation of the African was primarily to feed the labour needs of the new industries based on both diamonds and gold. Ironically, these discoveries also led to deepening of land dispossession to force African off the land to provide labour on farms and mines. Cecil John Rhodes was very honest about this process, he said “it must be brought to Africans that they will spend one tenth of their time providing labour”. The hut tax that led to Bambatha to rebel in 1906 was essentially a scheme to force Africans into labour. The tax was to be paid in the coloniser’s currency. This means if one was not in the employment of whites then they had no means to pay the tax. The refusal to pay the colonial tax by Bambatha was essentially a refusal to surrender more of his people to the slavery of labour and also to the reality of landless. The assault on the African sense of being is graphically described by Fanon as “… colonialism is not satisfied merely by holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brains of all form and content… it[colonialism] turns to the past of the oppressed people and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.” Once this process of mutilation of the African spirit and soul was complete, African identity laid fundamentally injured and traumatized. Shame and sense of inferiority generally defined what it means to be an African. The great civilizations of Timbaktu and Kemetic discoveries lay shattered in the face of western destructive forces. The pyramids as testimony of superiority of life defined by the unison of science and the development of the spirit were equally defiled and stripped of its place in the in the Pantheon of world civilization. Once, the African was enslaved and colonized, all her achievement was disappeared under the lies of white supremacy. As Aime Cesaire ironically said referring to us blacks, “those who discovered nothing!”. To conceal the great sin committed against the African a massive machine of lies by erasure was invented by the West. The African, was then placed outside of history and humanity and blackened. White was life as black was death. The self-imagine of the Africa, was destroyed. The west impose itself by the sword and the gun. In essence land dispossession led to cultural dispossession too, therefore, ipso facto, the demand for land is the demand for cultural liberation of our people. The outcomes of these inter linked dispossessions present themselves graphically today as the life of blacks in poverty and squalor on the one hand and the life of whites as charecterised by privilege and security on the other: township and suburbs! Employer and employee, baas and boy, miesies and maid, Sandton and Alexander, metro rail and Gautrain, private hospital and public hospital, mansion and RDP house. When we close our eyes and imagine these categories and the races that occupy them we can see, that the black has been forced into both a material and spiritual wasteland. Therefore, the call for land return, is essentially a call for redress of all dispossessions that have visited upon the African. Land return is essentially for the reparation of the haunted African soul and to create new social relations away from the current ones which are essentially racist and anti-black. Without land, there is no redressing the 350 years of dispossession and disfigurement of black life. So the battle for a different South Africa was always depended on how best to deal with the land question. The first battle happened as soon as they colonialist arrived in the cape. It went on since 1652 to basically 1906 with the defeat of Bambatha. By 1913 the African was already disposed being. The infamous 1913 Land Act, was not the point of dispossession but a point of confirmation in law what has been achieved through superior arms in the battle field by the settler colonialist. The 1913 Land Act is therefore a mere codification into law of the fact of dispossession. The formation of the African National Congress in 1912, was part of the resistance to colonial occupation that never realy ended but only fluctuating with time and opportunity. It can be argued that the culmination of the resistance against the internal occupying force was the assumption of the armed struggle by the people’s army such as Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) and the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (Apla). Whilest these armies mounted a brave battle against the settler regime they did not march to Pretoria victoriously. This reality is significant in understanding why after twenty years of democracy there has been no land redistribution.
It is common knowledge that the post 1994 democratic settlement was the outcomes of a negotiated settlement. Whilst the balance of forces at the time suggests that there was stalemate, whereby the warring factions were forced to sit down and negotiate since none could claim victory and impose their will over the other. For the liberation forces this meant the much anticipated march to Pretoria by the victorious people’s movements was never to be, instead the matter was settled by negotiations. Negotiations are a matter of give and take. What did the oppressed have to give at the negotiations table? And on the other hand what did the oppressor offer? An analysis of the balance sheet from the negotiations table shows that ultimately the oppressed exchange their birth right to land for political power. This political power, ironically, was rendered impotent as long as the representatives of the oppressed were willing to maintain their side of the bargain even long after its strategic utility had been achieved. If in 1994, such a compromise was necessary for the black majority to attain political power, then it was a wise move, however, once the conditions that necessitated the compromise were obliterated by the fact of the consolidation of the control of the former liberation movement on the levers of state power and the instrument of legitimate use of violence (police, army, secret services etc) and on the other the continued support of the overwhelming majority of our people on the other, then maintain the compromise meant simple a sell-out position and self-enslavement driven by cowardice and fear. This the elevates a tactical retreat into a strategic defeat and making virtue of out of refusal to use political power to complete the programme of decolonization5. Such a criminal refusal to use power to continue the logic of liberation war simple means the ruling party transformed itself into the body guards of white supremacy. Post 1994, then became a normal neo-colony where those who fought the white settlers during the colonial/apartheid period had after assuming power continued with the same colonial/apartheid administration, which was established to privileged a settler white minority through violence and super exploitation of the black majority. Dr Chinweizu, coined the concept of “black colonialists” for the black rulers who took power and continued the same system they fought against. The essential characteristic of this black colonialists or the comprador is the insertion of their economies into the global economic system of oppression to continue the same colonial relations of exporting raw materials to the “mother” country whilst importing finished goods and thereby sustain a colonial economy. The other arm of this system is maintaining the colonial relations of production by a mixture of violence and consent, but increasingly by violence more so when the native population forced into wage slavery demands part of the national wealth through a fair share in the profits through modest demands for a living wage or land. Under such conditions, the electoral process is used to legitimize the continued colonial relations. The refusal to end colonialism and apartheid is justified by the mantra that “the people voted for us”. Generally, such elections do not represent the will of the people because they are based on lies and the people have not completely yet arrive at a new radical political consciousness. To return to the negotiation table. The oppressed through their representatives (unelected at the time), offered land and the economy to the apartheid regime in exchange for political office. This agreement found expression in section 25 of the Constitution of South Africa. The section is drafted in a contradictory manner, reflecting the indetermined balance of forces at the time.
In this section we discuss the specificity of the property clause or section 25 of the Constitution. As indicated about its this clause which gives expression to the great 1994 political compromise. The full section is laid out below followed by a discussion on the key perspectives on the clause. Directory: files -> 2014 2014 -> Heuristic Theorizing: Proactively Generating Design Theories 2014 -> Eight theories of religion second edition 2014 -> C. N. Biltoft The Unconventional Child of an Orthodox Marriage 2014 -> Bringing Ritual to Mind Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms 2014 -> Advancing research in second language writing through computational tools and machine learning techniques: a research agenda 2014 -> Anbookstore com Copyright 2013 Download 1.05 Mb. Share with your friends:
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