TRC Final Report

Volume 1

Chapter 2

Subsection 2

11 Indeed, one of most ambitious and far-reaching attempts at social engineering in twentieth century South African history was introduced by the first post-unification South African Party government in the form of the 1913 Land Act. No other piece of legislation in South African history more dramatically and drastically re-shaped the social map of this country. Not only did it lay the basis for the territorial separation of whites and Africans; it destroyed, at a stroke, a thriving African landowning and peasant agricultural sector. It did so by prohibiting African land ownership outside of the initial 7 per cent of land allocated to the so-called traditional reserves and ending sharecropping and non-tenancy arrangements on white-owned farms. The Land Act set in motion a massive forced removal of African people that led, amongst other things, to the deaths of many hundreds of people who found themselves suddenly landless.

12 An observer of the impact of the Act on the African people, Solomon Plaatje, commented:

For to crown all our calamities, South Africa has by law ceased to be the home of any of her native children whose skins are dyed with a hue that does not conform with the regulation hue ... Is it to be thought that God is using the South African Parliament to hound us out of our ancestral homes in order to quicken our pace heavenwards? ⁴ .

13 Plaatje retells a story told to him which illustrates the tragic human impact of the implementation of the Act:

A squatter called Kgobadi got a message from his father-in-law in the Transvaal. His father-in-law asked Kgobadi to try to find a place for him to rent in the Orange ‘Free’ State. But Kgobadi got this message only when he and his family were on their way to the Transvaal. Kgobadi was going to ask his father-in-law for a home for the family. Kgobadi had also been forced off the land by the Land Act. The ‘Baas’ said that Kgobadi, his wife and his oxen had to work for R38 (18 pounds) a year. Before the Land Act, Kgobadi had been making R200 (100 pounds) a year selling crops. He told the ‘Baas’ that he did not want to work for such low wages. The ‘Baas’ told Kgobadi to go. So, both Kgobadi and his father-in-law had nowhere to go. They were wandering around on the roads in the cold winter with everything they owned. Kgobadi’s goats gave birth. One by one they died in the cold and were left by the roadside for the jackals and vultures to eat. Mrs Kgobadi’s child was sick. She had to put her child in the ox-wagon which bumped along the road. Two days later, the child died. Where could they bury the child? They had no rights to bury it on any land. Late that night, the poor young mother and father had to dig a grave when no-one could see them. They had to bury their child in a stolen grave.

14 Plaatje ended the story with the bitter words that even criminals who are hanged have the right to a proper grave. Yet, under the cruel workings of the Land Act, little children “whose only crime is that God did not make them white”, sometimes have no right to be buried in the country of their ancestors.⁵

15 TM Dambuzu described the Land Act in these words:

There is winter in the Natives’ Land Act. In winter the trees are stripped and leafless.

16 But if this was an act of wholesale dispossession and discrimination, so too was the 1909 South Africa Act which was passed, not by a South African legislature, but by the British Parliament. In terms of the South Africa Act, Britain’s four South African colonies were merged into one nation and granted juridical independence under a constitutional arrangement that transferred power in perpetuity to a minority of white voters. No firm provisions were made for the protection or improvement of the civil and political rights of the indigenous black majority.

17 Admittedly, the British government of the day was responding to pressure from the all-white South African constitutional convention, but Britain had a juridical responsibility to all, and not simply its white, subjects.

18 No less of a betrayal was the 1936 Representation of Natives Act, by which Cape African voters were disenfranchised or the 1956 Senate Act, by which the membership of that body was enlarged to enable the National Party to summon a two-thirds majority to strip Coloured males of the vote. This latter piece of constitutional chicanery was only the end of a process of black disenfranchisement begun by the British in 1909.