NEWS

The land issue revisited!

maruping
Our Columnist Maruping Phepheng, this week revisit the most controversial ‘land’ issue.

So, what has been your active, transformative role in the past twenty years and what are the results thereof? How is your life? Indeed are you happy?

Is your neighbour better off as a result of your vote?

Is your fellow black man better off as a result of your vote and daily non-supremacist activities, white man? Indeed is the white man through the activities of his own free from his tendency to oppress (if this is at all possible to start with)? How have we assisted each other through our vote and daily lives, frankly speaking?

You and I could tabulate a million points that are directly linked to our vote, but we are not fools with a million wheelbarrows of sweet time to waste. So I will go to the crux of the matter – and, sorry to disappoint you because the crux of the matter is not a new matter at all. No. It is that all or nothing matter of land.

When land was appropriated from Blacks in 1913, it was through legislation.

In other words theft and dehumanisation of blacks was legalised by a government that knew what it wanted and without delay went for it: they took from blacks and went on to enslave them in their own country. So the manner in which indigenous people where dispossessed of their land and subsequently enslaved in South Africa was pretty simple – all the colonial, draconian pro-white government had to do was to pass an act – the Native Land Act of 1913 – and it was done.

Essentially and quite effectively whites through a shockingly dreadful system of apartheid corruptly acquired land, ascertaining that, as Sol T Plaatje put it,” awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.”

We owe the above historical exposition not to some falsification of facts.

In other words, to believe that whites did not steal land and therefore wealth from blacks is in fact to falsify history. Equally, to say I must not talk about this because then I am stuck in the past is plain horse-feathers.

So, lest we forget, we all know who took the land from the native Plaatje refers to. It is white people. They know this too.

If we are all honest, just and peace loving humans of Mandela and Tutu’s rainbow nation, why have land not been returned willingly and without any coercion by whites to the ravaged and indignified blacks?

Why is it necessary to have blacks live one more day without their land and a fair share of the country’s wealth?

Ok. So we are, quite sadly, at a point in our sorry lives where Pieter Mulder and his disciples still feel the theft must proceed so that a white minority continues to benefit more than indigenous people of this country.

But, and many people have made this point before, with the very same hungered blacks having installed a black government – why do we still have the status quo persisting?

How much of this understanding does the voter have – I talk mainly of the black voter and exactly how much of this dehumanisation is the black voter willing to suffer?

Indeed how much more is the black voter willing to be a pariah in his own land of birth?

Perhaps we need something stronger than a vote. As I argued now the other day when the proverbial matter of correcting black people’s lack of self worth, of their lack of self love and the indignification this particular race arose, I said: “The number one enemy of humanity (forget blacks for a second) is the evil complex called white superiority.

You collapse that devil you at once dignify everybody – the oppressor included! But is the mighty supremacist ready to become human so that we can all- black and white, become human? No? So what do we do…?”

By the way, the very fact that those who stole from blacks are not willing to give back what is not theirs is a clear-cut declaration of war – and this, if we were to engage in some nasty revolution, would have to be considered as the central cause for that revolution.

So, I ask again: what has been your active, transformative role in the past twenty years and what are the results thereof? How is your life? Indeed are you happy?

Is your neighbour better off as a result of your vote?

(Maruping Phepheng is author of “What Happens In Hankaroo…” and “Of Anger and Revenge.” You can follow him on Twitter @TheDukeP)

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