"The land shall belong to those who work it"

On the 19th of June 1913, the government of the Union of South Africa passed the infamous Native Land Act. This gave legislative effect to a process of land seizure by the white settlers that has been going on since Jan van Riebeeck set foot on the shores of the Cape of Good Hope in 1652.

Yesterday was 90 years since the adoption of this law that has brought untold suffering to generations of black people. Through this and other racist laws, millions of our people were uprooted from their land, their homes bulldozed and their dignity destroyed.

The Department of Land Affairs has declared this month as ' Land Month', which is dedicated to the achievements that we have made so far, in reversing racial land dispossessions and the measures that we have taken to ameliorate the pain, grief, trauma and despair occasioned by years of forced removals.

The history of land dispossession in our country is inseparable from the brutal system of colonialism and apartheid. Three years before the passing of the Land Act, in 1910, Britain had formed a whites-only government that combined the whites-only republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State, as well as the Natal and Cape colonies.

The 1910 formation of the Union of South Africa represented the political consolidation of the military defeat of the African kingdoms, and the legalisation of white minority rule by British imperialism.

Thus, the new Union government was a government by white people, for white people. Not even some pretence was made that the political and other rights of the black majority would be respected.

The next important issue with regard to the consolidation of the military victory of the settlers was the land question. Some of the main objectives of the colonisation of our country, which followed the military conquests, were the destruction of the indigenous kingdoms, the socio-political domination of black people and land dispossession.

In 1912, between the formation of the Union and the passage of the Land Act, and responding to both, representatives of the African people formed the ANC, to fight for the freedom of the black people and reverse the negative consequences of the colonialism and apartheid pursued by successive white regimes.

Interestingly, the first Secretary General of the ANC, Sol Plaatjie, wrote a highly informative book on the impact of the 1913 Land Act on the rural African masses, graphically describing the resultant further impoverishment and subjugation of the African people.

Although many black people had already lost their land in the wars of dispossessions by the time the Union was formed in 1910, the insatiable avarice of the resident colonialists saw them seeking new ways of grabbing more and more land that was still in the hands of black people.

Thus the Land Act of 1913 was followed by other laws, which sought to reserve most of the land in South Africa for exclusive ownership and use by the white minority. These include the Development and Land Act of 1936 as well as a plethora of laws that denied black people the right to own land and property in most of South Africa.

Later, the Group Areas Act and other laws further restricted the possibility of blacks to own land in their country and denied them freedom of movement.

It is estimated that 3,5 million people were forcibly removed in the post World War II period in a further drive in the process of land dispossession. Most of the dispossessed were dumped in the Bantustans, the labour reservoirs originally called native reserves.

Constituting at least 80% of the population, the Africans ended up occupying at best 13% of their motherland.

The consequences of the process of land dispossession were extremely pernicious, inhumane, and had long-term negative effects on the black people, whose legacy is central to our transformation process today.

Among other things, the loss of land led to widespread homelessness, absence of security of tenure, overcrowding, unstable families, rural-urban migration, the degradation of the soil, and severe limitations on the possibility of Africans to pursue meaningful agricultural and agro-industrial activities.

The denial of Africans to own land in urban areas, through the infamous Groups Areas Act and other laws, coupled with the migratory labour system, led to family break-downs, dysfunctional families and the spread of slums.

Because Africans were regarded as temporary migrants, no essential services were provided for them in their residential areas in the designated white areas, and no property rights were accorded to them. This was because it was decreed that their permanent homes were in the Bantustans.

However, the masses of our people did not meekly submit to these inhuman practices. Under the leadership of their organisation, the ANC, they mounted many heroic struggles to resist forced removals and the impositions of the various laws that sought to make blacks foreigners in their own country.

The more repressive laws the white minority governments passed and enforced, the more resistance they encountered.

In the process, many among the oppressed majority joined the ranks of the liberation movement to fight for their total liberation. Individual communities also fought courageous struggles to retain their lands.

In these areas, in the end the brutal force used by the white minority regime resulted in the defeat of the people. Yet, this was a temporary victory by the colonial and apartheid forces. They won the battles, but would ultimately lose the war.

In 1994 our people who had placed their confidence in the ANC from its foundation, crowned their heroic struggles by achieving an overwhelming victory in the elections that brought to an end centuries of colonialism and apartheid, beginning a new era of transformation and the undoing of the damage caused by the racist policies of the past.

Accordingly, given the many cruel consequences of the colonial and apartheid land policies, one of the main challenges that has faced the democratic government since our freedom in 1994, was and remains the urgent redress of this centuries-old legacy of land dispossession.

While the entirety of government is part of this process of correcting the wrongs of the past, the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Affairs occupies the front trenches in this struggle.

Understanding the importance of the land question to many of our people, the democratic government passed the Restitution of Land Rights Act 22 of 1994. This law offered a legal framework to address and resolve land claims through negotiations.

In this context, we appointed a Commission on Restitution of Land Rights, which has been tasked with the land restitution programme of government.

Through this law we also created the Land Claims Commission, which facilitates and negotiates the settlement of claims and the Land Claims Court, which adjudicates over claims that require legal intervention.

Today, through the restitution, redistribution and land tenure reform programme, more than 1,3 million hectares have been transferred to the formerly dispossessed, including the more than 590 000 hectares transferred under the land restitution programme.

While returning people to their ancestral lands and ensuring access to land by new individual and cooperative farmers are important, of central relevance is the development process that is part of this crucial process. This is done through the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD) programme, which has empowered many across the country.

Beneficiaries of this programme, who include farm workers, can access grants of between R20 000 to R100 000, to assist them as they use the land for productive purposes.

The other important process, which is relevant to the land question, is the access of black people to their property, land tenure and housing rights, especially those in the urban areas and on commercial farms.

Since 1994, government has built more than a million houses for the poor, mainly black, and handed over to the people, the houses that they rented for many years, but were denied the right to own them, because it was said that these properties were in 'white South Africa'. The new owners of both new and old houses also own the land on which these houses stand.

Many others have been given tenure rights in places in which they were born and had worked for all their lives.

The activities carried out during this month of June, which is both the Land Month and Youth Month, emphasise that we have a responsibility to assist the process of the transformation of our country by engaging in programmes that will assist our people who have been given their land back, to use their land productively. Land acquisition and its productive use are critical to the success we must achieve, to push back the frontiers of poverty.

There are many ideas, programmes and projects that would, in the context of Vuk'uzenzele and Letsema, help these masses of our people, to use their land to enjoy a better life.

It is important that those among us who have the technical expertise should find ways of assisting in this process. In this regard, we must express our sincere appreciation to the white farmers and farmers' organisations that have readily extended a helping hand to the new black farmers.

We also urge the financial institutions to give these people the possibility to carry out profitable farming activities by ensuring that they have access to the much-needed finance.

The people working at Agriculture and Land Affairs, are our leading troops in the struggle to use land to fight unemployment, poverty and underdevelopment, and redress past wrongs. At the same time, we all have a duty to lend a hand and enter into a people's contract for a better tomorrow. We should not, and will not waver in our resolve to address the land question.

Ninety years after the passage of the 1913 Land Act, we are on the way towards meeting the demand contained in the Freedom Charter, that the land shall belong to those who work it.