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“Nobody can write fast enough to write a true story.”
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Title: Promised land: Exploring South Africa’s land conflict
Author: Karl Kemp
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781776094752
Once upon a time in America, I worked at an underground newspaper alongside a writer who sought to emulate the stream-of-consciousness technique popularised by Tom Wolfe in the 1960s, but couldn’t quite get the hang of it. “Nobody can write fast enough to write a true story,” he complained. In California, this was a comment on the dainty metaphysics of capturing reality on the page. In South Africa, it is more like a law of nature; the targets move too fast, and there are too many of them.
Here again, to remind us of this difficult truth, comes Karl Kemp, a (then) 28-year-old lawyer and part-time journalist who set forth to examine the land issue. Armed only with a notebook, he visited dozens of squatter settlements where police fear to tread and interviewed hundreds of players on all sides, only to wind up with his head in his hands, lamenting the impossibility of fully understanding a country where “one major scandal or controversy follows the other in an unending chain of ineptitude and hubris”.
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Armed only with a notebook, he visited dozens of squatter settlements where police fear to tread and interviewed hundreds of players on all sides...
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The resulting book is called Promised land, and while it touches here and there on farm murders, its gaze is most intently focused on South Africa’s urban fringes, where armies of the desperate are eyeing tracts of open land and plotting ways to grab it for themselves.
This is an arena where land conflicts broke out in earnest in the 1980s as rural Africans began to defy apartheid and erect shacks on the outskirts of every city. Nearly 40 years later, the struggle is so far advanced that the ANC’s impending adoption of EWC is almost irrelevant. Every South African city is already ringed by giant shack settlements, almost all erected on land that was illegally grabbed at the outset, and some still technically subject to eviction. But on the ground, everyone knows this will never happen. “Once a critical mass is achieved in large-scale occupations,” writes Kemp, “there is simply no way for the original inhabitants to reverse it. The squatters have already won, and everyone knows it.”
In the summer of 2018, I accidentally witnessed the opening stages of what Kemp describes as “possibly the single worst land invasion in the country”. It was a hot Saturday afternoon, and I was heading down the N1 freeway towards the Free State. As I neared the Grasmere toll plaza, I saw smoke in the sky up ahead. Around the next bend, minibus taxis were pulling off the freeway, their drivers jumping out and shouting agitatedly into cell phones. Next thing, they all jumped back into their vehicles and started reversing towards me at speed. I thought, uh-oh, there must be trouble ahead, so I reversed, too, following the taxis up the nearest off-ramp and out of there.
Driving home two days later, I came across scars on the tar where protestors had blockaded the freeway with burning tyres, and, beyond them, a landscape that had been divided into thousands of tiny plots, on each of which stood a brand new tin shack. The scale of this instant settlement was dumbfounding – an area of roughly 15 square kilometres, with thousands more shacks invisible beyond the horizon.
I felt like Rip van Winkle, emerging into a world I didn’t understand. Who had done this? How had it been done so quickly? What did it mean? I raced home and started googling for answers, but there were none, at least not on the news sites I consulted. For a week or so, I kept thinking I should return to the scene of the crime and make further inquiries, but I lacked the courage, and, besides, other calamities were clamouring for my attention. In the end, I forgot about it until I cracked the covers of Promised Land.
Kemp’s account of Grasmere’s instant settlement begins in the early 1970s, when the mad scientists of apartheid forced Indians and coloured people out of Johannesburg and into new settlements south of the city. Some were resettled in suburbs like Ennerdale or Lenasia. Others were given leases on adjoining tracts of farmland, and invited to have a go at producing food for the nearby city. After the fall of apartheid, these small farmers assumed the land belonged to them by virtue of long occupation, but the state registry still listed it as state-owned.
According to Kemp, this is an important factor; land invaders prefer to target state-owned land because the government is generally supine, while private landowners are inclined to fight back. Information from the land registry is therefore valuable, and mid-level government officials are willing to provide it for a price.
The buyers invariably present themselves as social justice warriors seeking to hasten the pace of Radical Economic Transformation (RET). But many of them, according to Kemp, are also keen to harvest some of the fruits of RET for themselves. Some want a second home that can be rented out for income. Others are investors who understand that profit awaits those who have the nerve to hold onto invaded land until opposition fades away.
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The investment shack is barely larger than a dog kennel, but once it is up, it becomes a home in the eyes of the law, and demolishing it becomes infinitely more difficult.
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Hence the concept of “investment shacks”, thrown up almost overnight to exploit a law that protects squatters from summary eviction. The investment shack is barely larger than a dog kennel, but once it is up, it becomes a home in the eyes of the law, and demolishing it becomes infinitely more difficult.
According to Kemp’s sources, the owners of Grasmere’s investment shacks are playing a waiting game. Back in 2019, the ANC provincial government sued to obtain a blanket eviction order that might yet be enforced if the ANC is willing to weather the protests likely to greet such a move. Precedent suggests a different outcome, however; rather than court unpopularity, the government will eventually recognise the settlement as permanent and provide roads, water, electricity and sewage removal.
Beyond that point, an investment shack becomes a tradable commodity, and the original occupants of the land face ruin. Kemp introduces us to a certain Oom Stanley, one of the small farmers established on state land in the 1970s. Now his brick house is an anomalous dot in a sea of shacks. Stanley says he once had 70 cattle, but they’ve all been stolen. He hides his broken tractor under a tarp so it doesn’t get stolen, too. One of his neighbours is bulldozing a deep trench across what remains of his land, in the hope of retaining at least a fragment.
Not far away, Kemp meets an elderly lady trapped in a house surrounded by shacks so densely packed she can barely get out of her gate. She tells Kemp she’s afraid to leave her home because she fears it will be occupied while she is out. “They stole my phone line,” she says. “They stole the electricity cables. I have nothing.”
People whose lives have been blighted in this way don’t like to be told that the invaders are poor people who deserve sympathy and understanding. Oom Stanley says, “One rich Soweto businessman has put up twenty shacks. Now he’s just waiting for development and then he will sell the stands.” A friend of Stanley’s says, “These fuckers are taxi owners. They are business people. They are landlords.”
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Many squatters are truly desperate. They are migrants from elsewhere in Africa, jobless males, single mothers struggling to support children on a grant that doesn’t even cover the food bill.
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One assumes this is true, but then again, nobody lives in a tin shack out of choice. Many squatters are truly desperate. They are migrants from elsewhere in Africa, jobless males, single mothers struggling to support children on a grant that doesn’t even cover the food bill. According to Kemp, very few see themselves as soldiers in Julius Malema’s war to reclaim the land from white conquerors.
He goes on to argue that it is “wrongheaded” to see land invasions as “intrinsically tied to a historical feud between settlers and natives”. The squatters he interviews invariably blame the ANC for their problems, as Richard “Bricks” Mokolo told Kemp: “After 1994, black people took over the government and were supposed to start building a certain standard, equalising the development with the suburbs ... but the ANC government is continuing with township-style development. After twenty-five years of democracy! This is not a problem created by the white people after twenty-five years.” Almost all are polite or even friendly towards their Boer visitor, even the guy who once carried a gun for the military wing of the Pan Africanist Congress. This leads Kemp to conclude that “the land crisis is actually a housing and unemployment crisis, and has been for a long time”.
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Almost all are polite or even friendly towards their Boer visitor, even the guy who once carried a gun for the military wing of the Pan Africanist Congress.
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In a sense, this is unassailable; migrants are drawn to South Africa’s cities by the dream of landing a decent job. But there are many millions of them, and their numbers are growing while the economy declines. In the course of researching his book, Kemp visited around 30 sites of land struggle, from Philippi outside Cape Town to Tzaneen near the Zimbabwe border. In all of them, he found people living on the brink of despair, the poor because their hopes of a better life were fading, and landowners because they were beginning to realise that nobody would come to their rescue.
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In the course of researching his book, Kemp visited around 30 sites of land struggle, from Philippi outside Cape Town to Tzaneen near the Zimbabwe border.
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As Kemp says, it might have all been different if our economy weren’t on its last legs, strangled by bad policies and politicians who attack “White Monopoly Capital” to distract the masses from their incompetence and larceny. We’ve been struggling to breathe for years already, and Kemp thinks COVID-19 might be the end of us.
As the pandemic closed in, he began to receive plaintive text messages from his interview subjects. Some said new invaders were gathering at their borders. Others said crime was trending upward. Outbreaks of rioting and looting around Cape Town presented themselves as omens of economic decline, even as politicians opined that a year of lockdowns and job destruction would somehow hasten the arrival of socialist utopia.
Alas, poor Karl; the South African story had decided to move on before his book was even finished. But it is a good book, anyway, full of sharp insights, kamikaze escapades and, sadly, a great deal of depressing information. “The country is in for a rough ride following the COVID-19 pandemic,” says his concluding line. “The trails have already been blazed.”
See also:
Het beloofde land: Verkenning van het Zuid-Afrikaanse landconflict