From: hllhar01@uctvax.uct.ac.za
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african
Subject: Re: >>Theft of land
Date: 21 Jul 92 19:05:49 +0200
Organization: University of Cape Town

In article <1992Jul19.015315.17851@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU>, 
philip@ziggy.stanford.edu (Philip Machanick) writes:

> In article <1992Jul18.142824.202031@uctvax.uct.ac.za> 
> hllhar01@uctvax.uct.ac.za writes:
>
>> By the way, your last sentence above is just an empty phrase. Perhaps you can
>> explain exactly how every white person benefitted from land redistribution.
>> You'll probably find that the number of people who did derive any benefit is
>> very small. I will agree however that the blacks who were shoved off their  
>> land got a raw deal (especially the Mfingo who were pushed into the Transkei
>> where the Xhosas prodeeded to persecute them).
> 
> Since 1913 and especially since 1948. blacks were not legally able to  
> accumulate personal capital through acquisition of land. This does not purely
> refer to farm land but also private homes. [As someone pointed out (Gavan I  
> think) relatively few people are farmers.] Apartheid firmly institutionalised
> this concept by the destruction of the few remaining areas of freehold land  
> near cities, and by making a large percentage of the urbanised black 
> population tenants of the government.

Again, I have no problem with all this, except that it doesn't interest me. I
am not making any attempt at protecting Apartheid legislation, I'm merely
pointing out that it didn't make such a large difference on a grand scale. I
most certainly do sympathise with people who lost land or weren't able to
purchase houses because of Apartheid, but at the same time I'm saying that even
without Apartheid things wouldn't have been very different. This is because
the great disparity between white and black wealth has a very long history in
South Africa, much longer than that of Apartheid. Apartheid didn't cause racial
inequality in this country, it just made it visible to the rest of the world.
 
> How does this affect the average person?
> 
> Proper figures would be needed to argue this properly, but it would not  
> surprise me if a large percentage of any white individual's personal wealth  
> could be attributed in some way to capital accumulation through ownerhsip of  
> private residential property and inheritance. If they don't own a house, 
> their parents probably did, and even if they didn't there is a good chance 
> that at least one of their grandparents owned one. For blacks on the other 
> hand this is a relatively rare concept given that Group Areas etc. denied 
> them the option of spending money on purchasing a house even if they could 
> afford it.

Now here I actively disagree with you, and for two reasons:

(1) The amount of total area of land which blacks were forced to vacate is in
    fact very small in comparison with the area of land owned by whites at the
time. Hence this reallocation of land didn't make a large percentage difference
to the total amount of land owned by whites in 1910 say. Also, most of the land
in question was situated in rural areas. Ergo, as a percentage, 
the number of whites who benefitted from the exercise has to be small (even 
counting those who derived indirect benefit as you outlined above). 

I can't quite figure out why so many people are under the impression that the
consequences of the Apartheid land reallocation scheme were so radical in terms
of the percentage of land it moved from black hands into white hands. The truth
is that in 1910 blacks were probably much poorer than they are now, and the
area of land under their control was very small. If you're white and own land
now, chances are it belonged to whites long before 1910 already.

(2) Much of the land which non-whites were forced to abandon in 1910 didn't 
    belong to them anyway - they were forced to leave because their areas were
rezoned white. This is true for some parts of the southern suburbs and District
Six in Cape Town for example (I'm pretty sure about these two examples, but
there are others). The Coloureds living in these places rented homes from white
landowners.

Now, this brings us to the crux of the idea behind the Group Areas act. Many
people labour under the misapprehension that land was confiscated from blacks
in order to make whites wealthier (and blacks poorer if you're really a
hard-core activist). But this is far from the truth - the masters of Apartheid
really implemented their policies because they *believed* that in order to
survive as a nation, they had to separate themselves completely from all other
racial groups. If white material gain was in their minds, it certainly didn't 
occupy a very prominant position - what was more important was the belief that
racial integration would destroy Afrikaner self-determination (and there's 
something to be said for this conviction).

> My argument is that land confiscation may have been a historical cause of 
> the relative economic inequality of black and white but long-term denial to 
> access to _ownership_ of land is a more immediate issue in comparing black 
> vs white personal wealth. (Of course there are others but let's not confuse 
> the issue by talkng about more than one thing at once.)

If this is your argument, then I'm afraid its fundamentally flawed. Apartheid
was well-publicised, and for this reason many people who look at South Africa's
uneven ethnic landscape believe that Apartheid caused it to be so. Also don't
forget that its very easy to put on your ethnic bangles, paint your "Interim
Government Now" posters and go onto the streets denouncing Apartheid, and
whatever else. For these reasons its only too easy to establish a fallacious
cause-effect relationship between Apartheid and black poverty.

Even without Apartheid, blacks wouldn't have been able to buy much land etc.
This is because before Apartheid the black-white economic divide was already
well-established. White ownership was steadily increasing and black ownership
was steadily decreasing, and such patterns have the habit of persisting, given
no intervention. For example, consider Brazil, where there is no 
institutionalised segregation, but where people of Spanish descent are much 
wealthier than natives. There, the descendents of the Spanish colonists
established a monopoly on land ownerships and things have never changed - the
system there can be described as feudal, and I'm sure you know who the serfs
are. Even though there is no legal barrier preventing descendents of South
American indians from buying land, where do you think they'll raise the money?
Once that kind of ethnic biass in property ownership has set in, its there to
stay, and you can only change things by force. When a certain ethnie has
established control over certain resources, they ain't gonna deal with
outsiders - don't underestimate historical inertia!

So, all in all, Apartheid certainly did prevent blacks from owning land in
certain areas, but you're perpetrating a logical boo-boo if you deduce from
this that without Apartheid they would have owned much more land. In fact, one
can perhaps even say the opposite - now, with the removal of Group Areas,
whites are buying land that was reserved for non-whites. We're seeing this in
the Bokaap in Cape Town - that area which was reserved for Malays is now being
snapped up by whites, and is destined to become hot residential property, much
too expensive for most whites even. But this is just the pattern before
Apartheid - whites were obtaining more and more, and non-whites were constantly
losing. Perhaps the logical terminating point is the Brazilian scenario, maybe
that would have been the current situation in South Africa had it not been for
Apartheid.

> If you have ever done a computation of the relative economic benefits of home
> ownership versus renting you will know what I am talking about.

I certainly do, but the following is false:

  No Apartheid = Black Home Ownership

> Philip Machanick
> philip@pescadero.stanford.edu

Peace be with you! (Only joking of course).

Hardy Hulley (His Most Generous Grace)
Centre for the Study of Martian Dinner-Table Etiquette
Peoples University of Southeast Tonga