South Africa

It's about time another Chapter was added to that fine Someamoungus novel "How to make friends and influence people". The latest Chapter comes to us from the fine gentlemen at the Transvaal Agricultural Union with this statement -

 

"South Africa's blacks were advantaged because of the presence of whites, not disadvantaged"

 

I think someone has been smoking too many pumpkin seeds in their corn pipe. If you want to talk about how blacks (and lets just focus on the black farmers here since this is something the geniuses at TAU can understand) were advantaged why don't you turn your mind back to that most equitable and enabling piece of legislation The Natives Land Act (No. 27) of 1913. Blacks were clearly the winners here -

 

"The most systematic land dispossession by the state came into effect after 1913. The Native Land Act of 1913 apportioned 8% of the land area of South Africa as reserves for the Africans and excluded them from the rest of the country, which was made available to the white minority population....Black people were prohibited from buying land in areas outside the reserves. This apportionment of land remained until the end of apartheid in early 1990s and remains virtually unchanged. The main purposes of the Land Act 1913 were firstly to make more land available to white farmers. Secondly, it was to impoverish black people through dispossession and prohibition of forms of farming arrangements that permitted some self-sufficiency. This meant they became dependent on employment for survival, thus creating a pool of cheap labor for the white farms and the mines."

 

Disagree? Well how about the Group Areas Act which further isolated blacks from the best land in the country by placing them in tiny enclaves? Are these maybe the "advantages" the TAU is talking about?

 

"The Group Areas Act of 1950, passed soon after the National Party took over government in 1948, was used by the apartheid state to carry out forced removals of black people from land declared to be white areas and to complete the policy of racial segregation by removing "coloured" and Indian people from so-called white areas. Pockets of black farmers who had escaped the 1913 Land Act because they had title deeds to their land, were removed under the Group Areas Act in a process that was dabbed cleaning up the "black spots." The "black spots" were usually fertile land whereas the areas in the Bantustans where the people were moved to were over-crowded"          

                                 *both extracts taken from Sam Rugege Land Reform in South Africa

 

For the utimate in black advantages you can look at the Human Rights Commission report on the miserable conditions farm workers in SA are forced to endure thanks ion large part to these two pieces of legislation.

 

If the TAU wants to get into a serious discussion on Land Reform and the problems they face they must realise that THEY are the ones who were (and are) advantaged and not just in terms of favourable land ownership. Again the pumpkin seeds must be having an effect because I clearly remember the numerous tax breaks, subsidies and handouts provided to white SA farmers under the former Nationalist government. Why the sudden amnesia?

 

Apparently the TAU also made reference to a group of farmers who have threatened to start a struggle similar to that waged by the ANC. To those farmers and the TAU I have the following to say - you demand the government step back from the edge and accede to your demands? You poor boy, asleep in the back of the car the whole trip, finally waking up and wondering where you're at.

 

The Native Land Act, Group Areas Act, The Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act, the SAHRC report. 

 

Mark friggin Scott-Crossley

 

You can't even see the edge from here. You left it behind a hundred miles back.

 

So don't give me that chest-thumping crap about starting your own "struggle" if your demands aren't met. Don't give me your "blacks were advantaged because of whites" if everybody doesn't follow your basically racist statements and selective history in the name of the New Boere Order.

 

Get used to the world you have created and the stench your actions in the past unleashed.

 

Props to Hunter from Daily Kos.