The land question is not only about race

Organisations such as South Africa’s Abahlali baseMjondolo, Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement and the Diggers in 17th-century England reimagined social relations with land

- Imraan Buccus

Land has been a highly contested issue in South Africa since the period of colonial conquest. The eyes of the world are watching now that this contest has gone global.

For many, the land question in South Africa is purely a question of race. It is irreducibly a question of race, but for the left it is also a question of class and of what land is used for and how it is managed.

These kinds of questions are asked by radical social movements around the world, and have been asked for centuries.

In the spring of 1649, as England reeled from civil war, a small band of radicals took to the commons of St George’s Hill in Surrey. Led by Gerrard Winstanley, these “Diggers” or “True Levellers” sought to reclaim England’s common lands, establishing cooperative farms on what they viewed as a God-given inheritance stolen by the powerful. Their experiment lasted barely a year before landowners and local authorities crushed it with violence and legal persecution.

The Diggers emerged during the English Revolution, when parliamentary victory over absolute monarchy failed to deliver the radical democracy many commoners had fought for. “In the beginning of time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury,” wrote Winstanley in his 1649 manifesto, The True Levellers Standard Advanced.

The Diggers’ fundamental claim was that England’s common lands — progressively enclosed and privatised since the 13th century — rightfully belonged to all people equally. They practised what we might now call “direct action”, occupying land and cultivating it collectively as a practical demonstration of their vision.