Unmasking the 'whitenisation' of land: The myth of post-colonial neutrality in South Africa and Namibia

More than three decades after the formal fall of colonial and apartheid regimes, land remains stubbornly white in its ownership, its meaning and its power.

- Gerson Shikukumwa

Lay of the land: Gerson Shikukumwa, one of the winners of the Canon Collins Troubling Power Essay Competition.

(Photo: Supplied)

The silence of constitutions, the diplomacy of commemorations and the politeness of post-independence governments mask a violent continuity — a continuity that shouts: the land question was never answered. In South Africa and Namibia, the myth of postcolonial neutrality has become the grandest deception of our time, precisely because it hides in plain sight. It wears the robes of legality, constitutionalism and democratic procedure — while beneath, the ghost of conquest smiles.

When Namibia and South Africa entered the postcolonial moment in 1990 and 1994 respectively, the dominant narrative spoke of reconciliation. But reconciliation between who and what? Between the dispossessed and those who kept the spoils? Between the landless and the landed? The so-called “rainbow-ism” of South Africa and the “One Namibia, One Nation” doctrine in Namibia were engineered not as frameworks of justice, but as devices of forgetting.

They asked the black majority to suspend memory, to unsee the chain-link fences, to stop asking how 7.3% of South Africans (whites) own 72% of productive agricultural land while 81.4% of black Africans own just 4%, according to ACTSA — and how in Namibia, whites hold 27% of 39 million hectares of farmland compared to only 16% owned by black people. In both countries, reconciliation without redistribution became a betrayal dressed as peace.

The political elite — once freedom fighters — soon became managers of colonial leftovers. Namibia’s independence, brokered through United Nations Resolution 435, made no provision for immediate land restitution.

South Africa’s ANC-led government inherited the 1913 Land Act not as a relic, but as a living document, embedded within unequal property relations that the new Constitution would largely preserve.