TSHEPO MADLINGOZI

This piece articulates two ideas about land. Firstly, I will argue that land dispossession must be understood as a position, or leading to a status of worldlessness – that is being without a world. An important consequence of landlessness and worldlessness is pariahdom; the idea that people who have been dispossessed of their land become pariahs in the land of their birth.

Secondly, I will propose that how one responds to this condition, or how, within a post- colonial context, the constitution, understood here as a legal framework for a new society, responds to being a pariah, either perpetuates worldlessness, or leads to the remembering and re-making of the world.

For purpose of this input, ‘constitution’ should be understood in terms of its etymological origin, from Latin, ‘con-stare’ which means ‘to stand together’, or in other words, to constitute a united nation.

In Sesotho, my language, a constitution is ‘molaotheo’, a foundational law. Therefore, a post-conquest constitution must found or constitute a new society after the world has been fractured by land dispossession and settler colonisation, a good constitution must remake the world.

I therefore propose to move away from the idea of land dispossession as the idea of losing a material good. Without land there is no identity, no belonging, no culture, and no ontology. Land dispossession presaged the shattering of the socio-cultural world of indigenous people – ilizwe lifile! Thus in the nineteenth century indigenous peoples regularly declaimed that “the nation/land is dead” (ilizwe lifile) in response to processes of colonization and the irruption of the world of colonists.

Therefore, in South Africa and Palestine, as in all settler colonies, the response to land dispossession cannot just be about land redistribution or land restitution. Instead, it should be about how we remake the worlds that were fractured by colonisation.

Before I go further with my input, it is necessary to address my positionality, which occupies a space between academia and activism. As Director of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at Wits University, I am acutely aware of how universities perpetuate the notion of non-belongingness of indigenous people.

Universities are not just sites that reproduce sexism, racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, ableism and homophobia; discrimination is institutionalised at our universities.

Furthermore, our universities are situated on stolen land. They reproduce land dispossession and thus serve to continue the expulsion of indigenous people from the world. This expulsion is further entrenched by the cannibalisation of indigenous knowledges that universities are engaged in – in the name of “decolonisation” and “decoloniality”.

Thus, while I occupy the legal and academic space, I am antagonistic to the project of the university and adopt the position of an activist intellectual. Alongside my profession in academia, I have worked since 2005 with the Khulumani Support Group, a community of victims of apartheid struggling for reparations, restitution, and land return. Accordingly, my ideas about reparation and restitution are informed by both my scholarly endeavours and my work alongside victims and survivors of apartheid.

I come from a place called South Africa, a place without a name, identity, or a sense of belonging. Created in 1910 by settler colonialists, South Africa is still a place that rejects its African identity and African location, leading to epistemological colonisation, cognitive injustice, and xenophobia. Despite the new constitution, South Africa is a place of ongoing conquest, clearly visible in the example of the land.

To fully understand issues of land, the longue durée of colonisation in South Africa must be considered. In the sixteenth century, cartographers in Europe drew an amity line between the North and the South, facilitating the idea of European Colonisation. This division was later described by Boaventura de Sousa Santos as the Abyssal Line.^{[1]Sousa Santos, Boaventura de. “Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 30, no. 1 (2007): 45–89. www.jstor.org.}

Above the line lies the place of human beings, rights, and legality, whereas the land south of the line was terra nullius, devoid of people and thus considered fit for conquest.

This division remains important for land rights in Palestine and South Africa today. In Canada, the United States of America, Australia, Palestine, South Africa, and in most of Latin America, land rights have not led to a sense of material and affective belonging because the Abyssal Line, conceived of as the idea that some people continue to be regarded as non-human beings, barbarians or lesser human beings and therefore are not deserving of property rights, continues.

Land conquests, slavery, and epistemicide – the denial of indigenous people’s knowledge systems – are intrinsically connected, and as such, considering land rights and property rights from a European perspective perpetuates their crime. This is because coloniality of power is inseparable from the coloniality of being and the coloniality of knowledge. This is clearly visible in the diaries of Jan van Riebeek, the leader of the colonialists that arrived in 1652. To paraphrase van Riebeeck:

“I’ve observed these Hottentots, these bushmen and when I observed them I realised three things. I observed that they don’t have a language – when they talk it’s like pah-pah-pah-pah, they don’t have a language. When I look around, I don’t see any schools – they don’t have any knowledge systems.”

South Africa has a long history of colonisation and land dispossession. The first conflict between an indigenous people and a European in South Africa was in 1510. In 1652, the Dutch incursion began, shortly followed by further European settler colonialism in 1656, and later by the English in 1806. The African people met these attempts to conquer the land with one hundred years of military resistance from 1779 to 1878, a struggle leaving a complex legacy of memory and defeat. Thus, the issue at stake is not colonialism, for colonialism is an administrative issue.

Colonisation, which, as Patrick Wolfe elucidates, is a structure not an event, has been ongoing in South Africa since the sixteenth century, and at the heart of colonisation is the idea of land.

Land dispossession leads to the idea of Ilizwe lifile – the world is dead, an eighteenth century to nineteenth century cry by indigenous people mourning the loss of the land. The consequence of land dispossession was not merely the deprivation of property. It caused displacement, which lead to cultural subjugation, which in turn lead to the forceful entry of indigenous people into capitalism and western modernity, and the destruction of their socio-cultural world. The fundamental consequence of land dispossession was the severance of people from a cosmic harmony between land, non-human beings, the living-dead and the yet-to-be-born^{[2]In African cosmology, a community is made of the living, the living-dead or ‘ancestors’, the yet to be born, and non-human beings.}, or in other words Ilizwe Lifile.

Military defeat of indigenous peoples culminated in settler invaders creating South Africa in 1910. In 1913 The Native Land Act confined black people to 7% of the land. Tshekisho Plaatje, a colonial era indigenous leader, recorded in 1916:

“awakening 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.”

His use of the term pariah resonates with Hannah Arendt’s description of the dehumanisation and worldlessness of German Jews in the 1940s. Arendt asserted that German Jews, were no longer human beings, they were pariahs and therefore no longer citizens of the world.

To understand why land dispossession means the idea of being expelled from the land, we must consider the meaning of land from an indigenous perspective. In Sesotho, land translates to Le-fatshe^{[3]Tshepo Madlingozi Liepollo Pheko, Kopano Ratele and Palesa Sekhajane “Land, Lefatshe, and Reparations: Intergenerational Health Impacts of South African Colonial Dispossession” Lancet Report on Reparations and Redistributive Justice 2022}. Le-fatshe is made up of two words – lefa which means inheritance or bequeathment, and fatshe meaning the ground or grounding. Land dispossession takes away the idea of lineage and grounding. Without land, one is worldless, denied of identity or roots.

Ultimately, land dispossession, Ilizwe Lifile, our Nakba, meant the expulsion of indigenous people from the world.

Pariahs are presented with three choices of how to respond to their worldlessness: to assimilate, to become a fugitive who occupies a liminal space, or to become an insurgent determined to re-world and destroy settler colonialism.

In South Africa, the idea of re-worlding was conveyed in the notion Mayibuye iAfrika!- Africa return! Africa resurrect! Africa re-membering! However, this idea took two divergent forms: African Nationalists fought for complete decolonisation, whereas the ruling ANC accepted South Africa and fought for democratisation and inclusion. In 1994, the democratisation paradigm triumphed over the decolonisation paradigm. The constitution of 1996 proclaimed that “land back” after apartheid would provide land restitution, land redistribution, and secure land tenure to provide workers with secure residential rights, effectively buttressing the democratisation paradigm vis-à-vis the decolonisation paradigm. As a result, currently only 8-10% of the land has been returned and White people still own 60-70% of the land despite constituting only 8% of the population.

Underpinned by an understanding of land as property, land restitution has continued from a Western perspective, continuing epistemicide and the subjugation of African ways of understanding the world.

If we understand land dispossession in Palestine and South Africa as connected to the idea that indigenous people are lesser human beings with inferior knowledge systems, it becomes clear that Western knowledge systems or legality – the tools of colonisation, epistemicide and inferiorisation of “non-westerners” – are unfit to reverse that consequence.

Arguably in South Africa today there is no constitution – there is no standing together; a new nation has not been founded. The crises of constitution, of de-worlding, continue. The Abyssal Line continues the bifurcated state where white people are human beings and black people must assimilate to white ways of being in the world.

We must remake the world, or risk perpetuating worldlessness even under conditions of democracy and civil rights. Land rights and land return can never achieve a return to pre-colonisation, however, if executed thoughtfully, it can partially restore the past and create a novel future. This reading is in line with Edward Said’s vision of Palestine as both, “… a place to return to and … an entirely new place, a vision of partially restored past and of a novel future”.

This article was first published in Landwalks Across Palestine and South Africa, edited by Meghan Ho-Tong, Tomà Berlanda, Marah Khalifeh, and Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, published by the University of Cape Town and The Palestinian Museum, Bierzeit, Occupied Palestinian Territory, 2022. Re-published in herri with kind permission of the author and the editors.