Engel/Pallottii (eds.) 2016. South Africa after Apartheid

South Africa after Apartheid Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies Series Editor Gregor Dobler (University of Freiburg, Germany) Editorial Board William Beinart (University of Oxford, uk) Filip De Boeck (Catholic University Leuven, Belgium) Patrick Chabal† (King’s College London, uk) Paul Nugent (Edinburgh University, uk) Nicholas van de Walle (Cornell University, Ithaca, usa) VOLUME 17 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/aegis South Africa after Apartheid Policies and Challenges of the Democratic Transition Edited by Arrigo Pallotti Ulf Engel LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: Commemorating the Cape Town 2 September 1989 protest march „The purple shall govern“. Four days ahead of another round of apartheid elections, the police used water canons with purple dye against demonstrators for their later identification and arrest. Braamfontein, Johannesburg. Copyright: U. Engel. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pallotti, Arrigo, editor, author. | Engel, Ulf, editor, author. Title: South Africa after apartheid : policies and challenges of the democratic transition / edited by Arrigo Pallotti, Ulf Engel. Other titles: African-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies (Series) ; v. 17. Description: Boston ; Leiden : Brill, 2016. | Series: Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies ; v. 17 Identifiers: LCCN 2016026414 (print) | LCCN 2016027850 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004325593 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9789004326736 (E-book) Subjects: LCSH: Land tenure--South Africa. | Land reform--South Africa. | South Africa--Social conditions--1994- | South Africa--Politics and government--20th century. | South Africa--Politics and government--21st century. | South Africa--Foreign relations. 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This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Contents Foreword vii Anna-Maria Gentili List of Abbreviations x List of Contributors xiii Introduction 1 Arrigo Pallotti and Ulf Engel part 1 The Changing Fabric of Society 1 “A luta continua!” Democracy, Elections and Governance in South Africa, 1994–2014 11 Ulf Engel 2 The Uneven Journey towards Gender Equality during the Twenty Years of South African Democracy 31 Roberta Pellizzoli 3 aids Activism and the State in Post-Apartheid South Africa at Twenty 49 Mandisa Mbali 4 From Apartheid to the “Rainbow Nation”: Changing Multiculturalisms in South Africa, 1994–2014 68 Preben Kaarsholm Part 2 The Land Question 5 Dispossession, Black South African Land Ownership and Restitution in Historical Perspective, 1913–1948 and Beyond 87 Harvey M. Feinberg vi Contents 6 The South African Land Reform since 1994: Policies, Debates, Achievements 104 Mario Zamponi 7 Elusive or Illusory? Property Relations and the Constraints on Rights to Land for South African Farm Labour 128 Nancy Andrew 8 Does it Matter? Reflections on Twenty Years of Land Reform 153 Cherryl Walker part 3 South Africa in Southern Africa 9 South African Influence in Zimbabwe: From Destabilization in the 1980s to Liberation War Solidarity in the 2000s 175 Timothy Scarnecchia and David Moore 10 “Forged in the Trenches”? The anc and swapo: Aspects of a Relationship 202 Chris Saunders 11 Twenty Years after: Post-Apartheid South Africa, the brics and Southern Africa 220 Arrigo Pallotti and Lorenzo Zambernardi 12 South Africa and the Southern African Regional Police Chiefs Cooperation Organisation: The Dialectic between “National” and “Regional” Safety and Security? 240 Nicholas Dietrich Name Index 263 Subject Index 264 Foreword Anna-Maria Gentili South Africa now more than twenty years after the end of apartheid, and approaching crucial local government elections on 3 August 2016, is still facing major challenges with regard to its democratic transition. Yes, but ever-changing, a site of many struggles, to be watched closely, as these essays do, researching and assessing which is the state of the art in South Africa progress towards a more equitable society, true to the promises and the expectations of the struggle against apartheid, to free the real downtrodden under the apartheid regime, the poor, the workers and peasants? Julius K. Nyerere used to say it was a “miracle” Tanzania had survived after independence. Nelson R. Mandela called the end of apartheid and the constitution of a free independent South Africa a “miracle”. A miracle made real by the resilience of many forms of resistance and political and armed liberation struggles that spanned for decades the entire Southern Africa. A struggle that up to today, whatever the differences, the misunderstandings, the conflicts, has created a bond that goes beyond the political and economic linkages. Which is alive in the many forms of formal as well as of informal exchange of people, goods, competences, and above all, cultural ways of knowing and mobilizing for people full rights. Let’s remember that the end of apartheid meant the obligation to negotiate with an international all-powerful set of interests, in a world dramatically changed with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of Communism, and the defeat of the European model of welfare state, in in the wake of the 1980s “lost decade of development”. In this context, the victory of the ideologies and the political power holders which had been all the way basically hostile to the emancipatory ethos of the liberation struggles in Southern Africa, forced all African states to pay a price, South Africa included. Nevertheless South Africa has shown to be capable of a substantial autonomous pro-active initiative, particularly in negotiating and institutionalizing a strong basic function of democratic governance. Nobody today seriously challenge the unity of the country and its consolidated democracy, as demonstrated by an active healthy Constitution, a basically free and fair electoral process, the freedom of the media, a foreceful civil society. The fact that state institutions are constantly put to test, not only by the opposition parties, but also inside the dominant African National Congress (anc), has been determinant in pushing in favour of promoting a consistent number of relevant reforms, painstakingly negotiated among stakeholders. This has demonstrated the willingness and advanced viii GENTILI capability of pragmatic compromise. The other side of the coin is that outcomes are too often constrained by the power-holders choice to manage reforms giving priority to budget austerity, not up for debate, in the framework of market led priorities. And currently, increasing frictions within the ruling anc around the issue of “state capture” by a “Zupta” faction seem to demonstrate that the political vision of the anc indeed is at a critical juncture. At any rate, reforms on land, health, education, security, privatizations and immigration, have become the main arena of political struggles; insofar they challenge the existing distribution of power and privilege, not least inside the anc. If possible, the most critical challenge in this context is the land restitution and redistribution, at the centre of conflicting power struggles, intertwined with an ever-changing labour market, characterized by massive unemployment and forms of abusive informality. High rates of growth have not stopped the exodus of migrants heading to South Africa, neither have a severe legislation and police measures. Securing the borders has become a priority, raising criticism in the countries of the Southern Africa region which have supported the struggle against apartheid and have paid a high price for it. A consistent body of research on the land question, here well represented, agrees on the fact that it is far from being on the path to be solved and that conflict on land will not go away so smoothly. Certainly, in the process to find solutions, state-assisted market reforms have created more problems and raised new questions. The process of land distribution has on the whole been inefficiently slow, becoming even more elusive, insofar land in concrete terms and in different locations and economic and social environments means different things to different actors. Here the right to land of women might turn into a matter of further discrimination. Debates on which models of redistribution and productive exploitation could best contribute to growth, conducive to the transformation of the rural economy and to an accelerated reduction of poverty are plentiful but too often inconclusive. There is no single decisive answer because land issues are typically power issues representing struggles in the intertwined national, regional local and international multiple agendas. South Africa is a work in progress, in which at every step the contradictions between promises and expectations must be negotiated in a context of fractures and hierarchies inherited by the legacy of apartheid and influenced heavily by dominant international blueprints. The essays proposed here succeed to make connections between scholarly research and political and social action, between theory and practice. To show how state decision-making is influenced, and in what measure determined, by Foreword ix the nature and internal social changes and by government staying in power in regional and international relations. Connections that raise further relevant questions to stimulate the critique of the democratic process and on how these relations of power may influence, stall or even drive back, the path of autonomous emancipation, as it was and is embedded in the history of suffering and sacrifice of the population. List of Abbreviations acirc agm aids anc aprm avrs azt bmef brics cio clra cltp codesa cope cosatu crdp crlr csr da dirco dla drc drdlr eff epa esta ff Plus fhi Frelimo gear gii gnu gpa gplr hdi hiv hsrc African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crises Annual General Meeting Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome African National Congress African Peer Review Mechanism anti-retroviral drugs Azidothymidin Budget Expenditure Monitoring Forum Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa Central Intelligence Organisation Communal Land Rights Act Communal Land Tenure Policy Conference for a Democratic South Africa Congress of the People Congress of South African Trade Unions Comprehensive Rural Development Programme Commission on the Restitution of Land Rights Corporate Social Responsibility Democratic Alliance Department for International Relations and Cooperation Department of Land Affairs Democratic Republic of the Congo Department of Rural Development and Land Reform Economic Freedom Fighters Economic Partnership Agreement Extension of Security of Tenure Act Freedom Front Plus Freedom House Index Frente de Libertação de Moçambique Growth Employment and Redistribution Gender Inequality Index Government of National Unity Global Political Agreement Green Paper on Land Reform Human Development Index Human Immunodeficiency Virus Human Sciences Research Council List of Abbreviations idasa ifp iec imf Interpol isdsc iss larp lcc lgbt lrad lsc mdc mdc-t mk mpla mrdlr msf mtct nad nam nasa nc NCoP ndp NDoH nfp ngo nhi np npc numsa oau ofs opds plan plas pmtct pscs rdp Institute for Democracy in Africa Inkatha Freedom Party Independent Electoral Commission International Monetary Fund International Criminal Police Organisation Inter-state Defence and Security Committee Institute for Security Studies Land and Agrarian Reform Programme Land Claims Court lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Land Reform for Agricultural Development sarpcco Legal Sub-committee Movement for Democratic Change Movement for Democratic Change – Tsvangirai Umkhonto weSizwe Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola Ministry of Rural Development and Land Reform Médicines Sans Frontières mother-to-child transmission Native Affairs Department Non-Aligned Movement National Archives of South Africa Native Commissioner National Council of Provinces National Development Plan 2030 National Department of Health National Freedom Party non-governmental organisation National Health Insurance National Party National Planning Commission National Union of Metalworkers Organization of African Unity Orange Free State sadc Organ on Politics, Defence and Security People’s Liberation Army of Namibia Pro-Active Land Acquisition Strategy prevention of mother-to-child transmission sarpcco Permanent Coordinating Sub-Committee Reconstruction and Development Programme xi xii Renamo rocta rsa sacu sacp sadc sadcbrig saps sarpcco sigi sipo slag srb swanu swapo tac tb tig uanc uct udi udm ufh undp unsc uwc vap wege wnc zanla zanu pf zapu zipra List of Abbreviations Resistência National Moçambicana Regional Organised Crime Threat Assessment Republic of South Africa Southern African Customs Union South African Communist Party Southern African Development Community sadc Brigade South African Police Services Southern African Regional Police Chiefs Cooperation Organisation Social Institutions and Gender Index sadc Strategic Indicative Plan for the Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Settlement and Land Acquisition Grant Interpol Sub-Regional Bureau South West Africa National Union South West African Peoples’ Organization Treatment Action Campaign tuberculosis Transitional Inclusive Government United African National Congress University of Cape Town Unilateral Declaration of Independence United Democratic Movement University of Fort Hare United Nations Development Programme United Nations Security Council University of Western Cape Voting Age Population Women Empowerment and Gender Equality Bill Women’s National Coalition Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front Zimbabwe African People’s Union Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army List of Contributors Nancy Andrew is a rural and development sociologist specialising in land conflict and land reform in Southern Africa. She is an Associate Researcher at Les Afriques dans le Monde (lam), a multi-disciplinary research centre within Sciences Politiques at the Université de Bordeaux. Other research interests and publications are centred on rural livelihoods and development, gender dynamics and agrarian social relations, changing land use, land concentration and agro-industrial vs smallholder production, food security, growing land “grabbing” trends, as well as the land and agrarian dimensions of globalisation and the environmental crisis, including related theoretical debates. Recent publications include: (2014) “Une évaluation critique de la réforme foncière sud-africaine”, special issue: Afrique du Sud: 20 ans de démocratie? (Recherches Internationales); (2013) “Land consolidation and the expansion of game farming in South Africa: impacts on farm dwellers’ livelihoods and rights to land in the Eastern Cape”. In S. Evers et al. (eds.) Africa for Sale – Positioning the State, Land and Society in Foreign Large-scale Land Acquisitions in Africa (with F. Brandt et al.); and (2012) “Sizing up the developmental state and the future of the Tanzanian peasantry”. Book Review (Development Southern Africa). Nicholas Dietrich holds an ma in International Studies from Stellenbosch University, ... a joint ma in Global Studies from Vienna University and the University of Leipzig as well as a PhD he obtained in “Global Studies” as part of ... the dfg research training group “Critical Junctures of Globalisation” situated within the Leipzig Centre for Area Studies (cas). His research focuses on the role that police organisations play, in conjunction with other actors, in the production of regional security in Africa. He is furthermore interested in the intersections between global, regional, national and transnational images of security as they pertain to the geopolitics of law enforcement and the position of Africa in this political geography. Publications include: (2016, forthcoming). “Disentangling the regionalization of law enforcement in Southern Africa: portals of globalization. A framework to study the globalization/regionalization nexus”. In C. Baumann and M. Campbell (eds.) Portals of Globalization; and (2016, forthcoming). “The New Regionalisms of International Policing – The productive power of policing along the “Cocaine Route”. In U. Engel et al. (eds.) New Regionalisms: The Pattern of a New Global Order? xiv List of Contributors Ulf Engel is Professor of “Politics in Africa” at the Institute of African Studies at Leipzig University. He is a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Peace and Security Studies, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, and Professor Extraordinary in the Department of Political Science at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He is also director of the dfg Research Training Group 1261 “Critical Junctures of Globalization” and co-director of the dfg Special Research Programme 1448 “Adaptation and Creativity in Africa: Technologies and Significations in the Production of Order and Disorder” (ulr: <http://www.spp1448.de>). Recent edited collections include: (2013) Towards an African Peace and Security Regime. Continental Embeddedness, Transnational Linkages, Strategic Relevance (with J. Gomes Porto); (2013) African Dynamics in a Multipolar World (with M. João Ramos); and (2015) 1989 in a Global Perspective (with F. Hadler and M. Middell). Harvey M. Feinberg is Professor Emeritus of History at the Connecticut State University, New Haven, Connecticut. He has pursued research in Ghana and South Africa. His South African research has included numerous visits since 1985, most recently in 2015. He was an official observer to the South African election in 1994. Professor Feinberg was an Associate Fellow, the Southern African Research Program at Yale (1993–1994), and a recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1999–2000). His latest book is titled Our Land, Our Life, Our Future: Black South African Challenges to Territorial Segregation, 1913–1948 (2015), a study of land owned by black South Africans before apartheid, rural African initiatives, and changes in land policy. His most recent article is “South African Territorial Segregation: New Data On African Farm Purchases, 1913–1936” (Journal of African History, 2009, with A. Horn). Anna-Maria Gentili is Emeritus Professor of the Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna., Italy. She has done research and taught for 45 years at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Bologna with extended periods of teaching and research in Senegal, Nigeria, Tanzania and at the Centro de Estudos Africanos of the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane of Maputo, ... Mozambique. Among her publications is ... “Il leone e il cacciatore. Storia dell’Africa sub-sahariana”, 1995 (second revised edition 2008), translated in Portuguese and Spanish. Preben Kaarsholm is Professor of Global and International Development Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. Recent publications include: “Zanzibaris or Amakhuwa? List of Contributors xv Sufi Networks in South Africa, Mozambique, and the Indian Ocean” (Journal of African History, 2014); Mobility, Diasporas and Transnational Imaginings in the Indian Ocean (special issue of Social Dynamics, 2012); Print Cultures, Nationalisms and Publics of the Indian Ocean (special issue of Africa, 2011); The Popular and the Public: Cultural Debates and Struggles over Public Space in Modern India, Africa and Europe (Seagull and Chicago, 2009); and Violence, Political Culture and Development in Africa (James Currey, 2006). Mandisa Mbali is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. In 2009, she completed her doctoral dissertation in Modern History at the University of Oxford, where she was a KwaZulu-Natal Rhodes Scholar. It dealt with the history of South African aids activism. She has published book chapters and an article on aids policy-making and the political history of aids in South Africa. Mbali recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the History of Medicine at Yale University. She published South African aids Activism and the Politics of Global Health (2013). David Moore holds a PhD in Political Science from Canada’s York University. He teaches Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He has been trying to understand Zimbabwe’s political economy and history since about the time its president began his route to power. Moore also researches global political economy in relation to “development”, and development discourse more generally. In 2015 he published “Conflict and After: Primitive Accumulation, Hegemonic Formation and Democratic Deepening” (Stability: International Journal of Security & Development) and “Five Funerals, No Weddings, a Couple of Birthdays: Terry Ranger, his Contemporaries, and the End of Zimbabwean Nationalism – October 24 2013 – January 3 2015” (Review of African Political Economy). Arrigo Pallotti is Associate Professor of History of Africa at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Bologna (Forlì Campus) and Research Fellow in the Centre for Africa Studies at the University of the Free State. He is the author of two monographs, co-author of two books and has edited two books and three special issues of the Italian peer-reviewed journal Afriche e Orienti. He is also author of more than 20 chapters or articles in journals and edited books in both Italian and English. His research interests focus primarily on democratization in sub-Saharan Africa, the decolonization of Southern Africa, and relations between Africa and the European Union. xvi List of Contributors Roberta Pellizzoli is a gender and development expert specialized on women’s socio-economic empowerment and rural and agricultural development. As a consultant and advisor, she works for several national and international organizations, mainly on Mozambique. Previously, she was a Research Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Bologna, Italy, ... where in 2009 she has obtained a PhD in International Cooperation and Sustainable Development Policies with a dissertation on women’s access to and use of irrigated land in Mozambique. She has authored and edited several publications, in Italian and English. Chris Saunders is an emeritus professor at the University of Cape Town where he taught for many years before retiring, after which he worked for two years at the Centre for Conflict Resolution, also in Cape Town, South Africa. He was educated at uct and then Oxford University, where he completed a doctorate on the annexation of the Transkei’an Territories in the late nineteenth century. He has written widely on topics in the history of Southern Africa. He is co-author with Rodney Davenport of South Africa: A Modern History (5th edition, 2000) and, more recently, of a number of articles on Southern Africa in the late twentieth century. With Sue Onslow, he wrote the chapter on Southern Africa for the Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3. His most recent publication is a chapter on South Africa’s foreign policy in a volume edited by Robert Rotberg on Governance and Innovation in Africa: South Africa after Mandela (2014). Timothy Scarnecchia is an Assistant Professor of African history at Kent State University. He is the author of “The Urban Roots of Democracy and political violence in Zimbabwe: Harare and Highfield, 1940–1964” (2008) and a series of articles and chapters in Zimbabwean history, including “Rationalizing Gukurahundi: Cold War and South African Foreign Relations with Zimbabwe, 1981–1983” (Kronos 2011). Cherryl Walker has been Professor of Sociology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, since 2006, where she teaches courses on research design; poverty, inequality and development, and the sociology of land and the environment. Recent publications include Land Divided, Land Restored: Land Reform in South Africa for the 21st Century (2015, with B. Cousins), and a part-special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies (2014), “Reflections on the 1913 Land Act and its Legacies, 1913–2103” (with S. Marks). She was a core member of the Surplus People List of Contributors xvii Project, which produced a 5-volume study of forced removals under apartheid (1983), and a founding member of the land-rights organisation afra, in 1979. Between 1995 and 2000 she served on South Africa’s Commission on Restitution of Land Rights as Regional Land Claims Commissioner for KwaZulu-Natal. Lorenzo Zambernardi is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political and Social Studies of the University of Bologna, Italy, where he teaches International Relations. He authored I limiti della potenza: etica e politica nella teoria internazionale di Hans J. Morgenthau (2010) and edited Scenari di transizione: la politica internazionale nel xxi secolo (2012). His work has appeared in the European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, Washington Quarterly. Mario Zamponi is Associate Professor of History of Africa at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Bologna, Italy, ... where he teaches History of Africa and Issues in Development Studies. He is the editor of the Italian peerreviewed journal Afriche e Oriente. He has published extensively in journals and edited books. His main research interests are: democratization in subSaharan Africa, history of Southern Africa, land and rural development. Introduction Arrigo Pallotti and Ulf Engel The elections held in South Africa on 27–29 April 1994 marked a watershed in the history not only of the country, but of the continent as a whole. For the first time all South Africans irrespective of race could cast their vote in the parliamentary elections. The African National Congress (anc) won a large majority of seats in parliament and Nelson R. Mandela became the first non-white president of South Africa. The 1994 elections put formally an end to the apartheid regime and inaugurated South Africa’s democratic transition. The latter aroused enormous enthusiasm and expectations not only in South Africa, of course, but also in Africa and in the rest of the world. However, with the passing of time, enthusiasm gave way to growing disillusionment. South Africa’s transition has proved to be – perhaps inevitably – a difficult process, beset with limitations and contradictions, so that it could still be considered an “unfinished transition”. As repeatedly stated by the leadership of the anc, one of the main aims of the transition was to overcome the economic and social legacy of apartheid, in order to build a more inclusive and equalitarian society. The party’s 1994 election campaign slogan was “A Better Life for All”. While the overall policy frameworks for achieving this aim have changed over time – from social democratic economic growth policies (like the merg, the Macro-Economic Research Group’s Making Democracy Work), to World Bank-supported policies that centred around the notion of Growth, Employment and Redistribution (gear), and nowadays to Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (asgisa, adopted in 2005) – for many people the delivery of the initial promise remains a challenge. This holds true for the unemployment rate (officially at 25%) and social service delivery. Thus, post-apartheid South Africa remains a deeply polarized society in terms of economic opportunities, social conditions and life chances. Against this background this book takes stock of the post-apartheid dynamics in the crucial fields of politics, social development, land and regional relations. This edited volume is the result of a two-days international conference that was held on 8–9 May 2014 at the Musei San Domenico in Forli, Italy. The conference was jointly organized by the Dipartimento di Science Politiche e Sociali of the Università di Bologna and the Institute of African Studies of Leipzig University. Both institutions are members of the Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies (aegis; www.aegis-eu.org), who co-hosted the event. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�6736_00� 2 Engel and Pallotti This book is organized in three parts. In the first part an analysis of some structuring domestic features of post-apartheid South Africa is provided, with a focus on political processes and debates around gender, hiv/aids and religion. The second part of the volume focuses on the land question. And part 3 looks at South Africa’s role in the Southern African region. The choice to focus on these three particular areas has been primarily motivated by the fact that they have been covered to a lesser extent in comparable volumes (see Meyiwa et al. 2014; Booysen 2014; Vale and Prinsloo 2014; Beresford 2016). And, secondly, by focusing on these three core challenges the contributions to this volume discuss their topics in greater depth, thereby demonstrating just how unfinished the transition in South Africa is, and where the limits and contradictions are. The first part of the book deals with internal political transformations after the end of apartheid. This part provides a context for the following section on the land issue and also a reference point for the external challenges postapartheid South Africa has had to address. In his chapter “A luta continua! Democracy, governance and elections in South Africa, 1994–2014”, Ulf Engel takes the 2007 African ... Peer Review Mechanism (aprm) report on South Africa as a point of departure to reflect upon developments in the core area of democratic and political governance. In particular he singles out the successful establishment of an inclusive democracy and gives an overview on elections held ... since 1994. While the quality of elections and the building of strong democratic institutions in South Africa generally is widely acclaimed, there is also widespread concern over three trends: a deeply ingrained culture of violence (which has been changing in nature and intensity since the end of apartheid), and in particular violence directed against African migrants, as well as high levels of corruption among the political class. South Africa, as Engel concludes, is still a deeply divided society, with high levels of structural inequality with regard to access to education, health and labour. Although the anc still enjoys substantial electoral support among the voting electorate, popular discontent with the ruling party and particular President Jacob G. Zuma has been increasing, in particular in 2015. Against the background of the specific oppression and marginalization that African women suffered during the apartheid regime and the recognition of women’s struggles and resistance against apartheid, Roberta Pellizzoli, in her chapter “Two steps forward, one step back: A review of two decades of gender equality policies”, takes a look at the inclusion of the non-discrimination of women and gender equality in key formal documents and official discourses at the onset of the new democracy. She argues that women’s claims for representation, rights and participation in the new South Africa were strongly Introduction 3 supported during the transition period by the establishment of the Women’s National Coalition’s (wnc) and Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women. Which helped mainstreaming political discourse and rhetoric on gender issues. Twenty years after the substantive changes, Pellizzoli also discusses how much substantive equality in terms of socio-economic rights has been achieved – beyond formal democratic procedures and numerical representation by women. Throughout the 1990s, ... hiv/aids (Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) not only constituted a major public health crisis in the country, but for more than a decade it ... also caused one of the most controversial policy challenges to the Mandela and Mbeki governments. In her chapter on the “Fight against hiv/aids”, Mandisa Mbali situates the pandemic in the social and historical context of apartheid. In post-apartheid South Africa, she argues, aids has proven significant not merely in its reflection and exacerbation of various forms of social exclusion and injustice – it has also been politically important as it has been an issue which has catalysed some of the first successful post-apartheid civil society campaigns against the anc government. The chapter focuses on the Treatment Action Campaign (tac)’s successful use of “cause lawyering” and changing forms of political mobilisation around the socio-economic right to access to health care services in the context of the aids epidemic in post-apartheid South Africa. Mbali holds that both post-apartheid aids activism and the state in South Africa changed in politically crucial ways over the twenty year period examined. Mbali highlights in particular the tac’s constitutional litigation for the provision of the antiretroviral drug Nevirapine for the Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission (pmtct) of hiv, and discusses the reasons why aids activism is relevant in a contemporary context where there are still severe class-based inequalities in access to health care. Finally, in his chapter on “From Apartheid to the ‘Rainbow Nation’: Changing Multiculturalism in South Africa, 1994–2014”, Preben Kaarsholm takes on the issue of social mobilization through identity tactics in post-apartheid South Africa. As Kaarsholm shows, Cape Muslims and Durban Zanzibaris, both immigrant groups with a long historical presence in South Africa, have remoulded the fixed identities at the heart of the apartheid system and have staked claims to national citizenship “through self-representations that include both South Africa-ness and transnational belonging”. According to Kaarsholm, within the context of the recurrent waves of xenophobic violence in the country, ..., the space and recognition these two groups have received make them exemplary cases of an emerging framework of “multiculturalism based on democracy and more flexible understandings of culture and boundaries”. 4 Engel and Pallotti The second part of this edited volume,turns to the land question. No doubt, the land issue is at the core of South Africa’s unfinished transition. It brings to the fore multiple problems, as the government’s inability to effectively address the land issue has fed social tensions, strained the political legitimacy of state institutions, and deepened economic and social destitutions in the rural areas. Based on the 1913 Natives Land Act through which only about 7.3 per cent of the area of South Africa where identified for African ownership as well as the post-1948 large-scale dispossession that evicted some 3.5 million African owners and tenants from their urban homes and districts and expelled rural Africans from so-called “black spots” (and also led to the creation of the Bantustans, later homelands), the land question remained at the heart of the apartheid problem. Four chapters treat different dimensions of this crucial issue. In the opening chapter of this section, “Dispossession, black South African land ownership and restitution in historical perspective, 1913–1948 and beyond”, Harvey M. Feinberg evaluates the Natives Land Act and its impact, and discusses African agency in relation to African land ownership during the first half of the 20th century. Evidence on African agency explains how selected Africans exploited the exception clause in the Natives Land Act to continue to buy land after 1913. He also evaluates the degree to which segregation, the main goal of the promoters of the Natives Land Act, was achieved by 1948. Finally, Feinberg contrasts 1913 and 1948 policies, arguing that restitution became a constitutional demand after 1994 “as a result of apartheid policies and actions and because of the very unequal division of the land between the races, not because of the Natives Land Act”. In his chapter on “The South African land reform since 1994: Policies, debate, achievements”, Mario Zamponi is analyzing the details of the land reform programme as originally set out in the Reconstruction and Development Programme (rdp): restitution, redistribution and tenure reform. The results of land reform are contradictory. While Zamponi holds that the process of land restitution has scored fairly well, land redistribution has been far less successful, with the initial target of redistributing 30 per cent of the land by 1999 recently being postponed to 2025. And there has also been little progress with regard to land tenure reform. Thus, land reform has consistently fallen behind the targets set by the state and behind popular expectations, adding to a crisis of legitimacy. Zamponi concludes that “the historical contradictions between land access and productivity, between efficiency and equitable distribution, between agricultural commercial development and food security, are still unsolved and remain the major challenges the Government has to confront in the nearest future”. Introduction 5 In her chapter Elusive or illusory? The limits of South African land reform and tenure rights for farm labour”, Nancy Andrew highlights the contention over rights to land and tenure security reform for farm dwellers. The social conflicts over this segment of land reform focus, she argues, on ... the question of whether and to what extent solving the land issue involves changing the property relations that govern access to land and related resources, agricultural production and other land uses. The chapter looks at these relations and obstacles to tenure reform on commercial farms, comparing research mainly in the provinces of Mpumalanga and the Eastern Cape during two different periods within the past twenty years. Andrew postulates that the unequal property relations based on the dispossession of the African majority is one of the main, “non democratic” features of South Africa and one which was not changed by the “transition to democracy”. While the land question is a democratic problem and is closely linked to the national oppression still deeply dividing South African society and marking its ownership system”, according to the author, “it can only be solved by thoroughgoing transformation and will not be solved by regular liberal democratic procedures”. In the final chapter of this second section Cherryl Walker takes a rather different perspective. With a view to the relative importance of land reform, she even asks: “Does land matter? Reflections on South Africa’s faltering land reform programme”. While accepting that marked racial disparities in land ownership remain an unresolved challenge and political lightning rod twenty years after the transition to democracy, Walker poses a series of what she describes as difficult policy questions: “In what respects does ‘land’ matter, for whom and by how much? Which land matters – is it ancestral land, or good farm land, or mineral-rich land or well-located urban land? What about locality and ecology? How far do aggregated national totals for black and white land ownership go in measuring the actual distribution of wealth and well-being in the present juncture? Is land reform the most important land challenge facing the country – what about climate change, for instance? And just how important is land relative to other matters of pressing public concern, such as jobs, housing, energy supply, crime, the future of mining, and more?” After a discussion of the country’s land reform programme, the misinformation that surrounds much of the political-policy debate on the distribution of land and its social and economic significance as well as a brief reflection of the disjuncture between the symbolic and material dimensions of land, the author discusses the plasticity of “land” as an (often empty) signifier, and develops some points for developing a better grounded land reform programme. In the third part of this volume South Africa’s role in the Southern African region is reviewed. This policy arena, too, was characterized by high expectations 6 Engel and Pallotti about the role of the new South Africa in (Southern) Africa – given its legacy of regional destabilization and economic dominance. But, arguably, this also is the policy arena where South Africa’s external projections have encountered the most difficulties during the last two decades. As a large body of literature ... literature has explored the many limits and contradictions of post-apartheid South Africa re-engagement with Africa (Carlsnaes and Nel 2006) and Southern Africa (Lee 2002; Saunders, Dzinesa and Nagar 2012). The chapters in this section show how economic interests, political ambitions and the legacy of history have all contributed to making the definition of the new South Africa’s foreign policy part of the unfinished business that has to be addressed in the face of the many challenges of globalization, new multilateralism, and southsouth cooperation. The first two chapters of this section analyse South Africa’s bilateral relations with Namibia and Zimbabwe, respectively, within into an historical context. The second set of chapters in this section centre on South Africa’s engagement with the Southern African Development Community (sadc) region, one discussing South Africa’s regional security policy agenda and the other looking at its contribution at the regional level to combat transnational organised crime. In their analysis of the evolution of Zimbabwe-South Africa relations, “South African influence in Zimbabwe: From destabilization in the 1980s to liberation war solidarity in the 2000s”, Timothy Scarnecchia and David Moore show that after independence in 1980, the Zimbabwean government did not hesitate to cooperate with apartheid South Africa in order to avoid the risk of becoming a target of Pretoria’s regional destabilization policy. Accordingly, the Zimbabwean government prevented the anc from establishing military bases in its territory. Then, in a regional context radically transformed by the demise of the apartheid regime and the end of the Cold War, relations between South Africa and Zimbabwe were strained by Zimbabwe’s crisis. President ... Mbeki’s efforts aimed at promoting political and economic stability in Zimbabwe played into the hands of President Robert Mugabe and the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (zanu pf), who have remained in power through a mix of political violence, human rights abuses and elections rigging. Thus, according to Scarnecchia and Moore, in the long term the “love-hate” relationship between South Africa and Zimbabwe has been characterized by a “congenial inability [of the former] to read the political dynamics of its northern neighbor”, and by the limited success of “South African efforts to mold the Zimbabwean political environment to its needs”. Chris Saunders’ chapter on “The anc and swapo: Aspects of a Relationship”, explains the cordial but cool relations between the governments of South Africa and Namibia during the last two decades; he argues that, in Introduction 7 spite of their common enemy, the anc and the South West African Peoples’ Organization (swapo) “waged separate diplomatic and armed struggles” – while swapo wanted to end South African occupation, the anc aimed at majority rule. Tensions developed between the two when, after the signing of the 22 December 1988 New York agreements between South Africa, Angola and Cuba, the military bases of anc’s armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe (mk), in Angola were closed down. While many aspects of the complex relation ship between the two liberation movements in power still remain open for future research, Saunders clearly demonstrates how the history of relations in the years of ...the (struggle) for liberation ... struggle influenced relations after Namibia’s independence and the first democratic elections in South Africa. In their chapter on “Twenty years after. South Africa and security in Southern Africa”, Arrigo Pallotti and Lorenzo Zambernardi discuss how during the last two decades political cooperation between the Southern African countries has also been critically hampered by the internal difficulties of sadc member states. In particular, widespread poverty and deepening inequalities pose a serious threat to the political legitimacy of ruling parties. As Pallotti and Zambernardi argue, it is within this context that sadc member states have hesitated to engage in collective efforts aimed at fostering democracy and respect for human rights, with the partial exception of election monitoring. While regional diplomacy has played a role in the restoration of constitutional order in Lesotho and Madagascar, South Africa and sadc have found it difficult to effectively address the short-circuit between democracy, social justice and authoritarianism brought about by Mugabe’s and zanu pf’s efforts to remain in power in Zimbabwe. The authors also show that during the last two decades South Africa’s (supposed) leadership role in Africa was contested by other African governments and was also weakened by the contradictions of the cooperation agenda pursued by Pretoria in Southern Africa. Thus, in spite of the autocelebratory statements of South African policy-makers, it remains to be seen how Pretoria will promote both political stability and inclusive development in Southern Africa, in addition to Africa’s collective interests through its membership in the brics group (of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Finally Nicholas Dietrich, in his chapter “South Africa and the Southern African Regional Police Chiefs Cooperation Organisation – the dialectic between ‘national’ and ‘regional’ safety and security?” considers the ways in which the emphasis on technical solutions to fight transnational organized ... crime has also been one of the main limitations of the inter-state cooperation activities undertaken during the last two decades by the Southern African Regional Police Chiefs Cooperation Organisation (sarpcco). As Dietrich remarks: “a more holistic crime prevention strategy that focuses on the relationship between crime, policing and socio-economic development” would provide a more 8 Engel and Pallotti effective contribution to security in Southern Africa. In addition, the serious problems besetting the South African Police Service (saps) have deprived regional cooperation between police forces of an effective leadership and introduced to sadc an element of South Africa’s own specific political culture. *** What all twelve chapters have in common is that they identify pertinent political, cultural, social and/or economic issues that the post-apartheid society still wants to be addressed, and that the anc government has only managed to deal with to a certain extent. Thus the different chapters highlight the contours of the “unfinished business in several important areas”. True, the choice of policy fields is selective. However, the editors chose to concentrate their debate on a limited number of policy fields, with a chance to deepen the argument and to present different perspectives. The answers provided by the authors of this edited collection on why there is “unfinished business” differ: governance, path-dependencies, the nature of some of the problems (and their framing), economic constraints, the limitations of formal liberal democracies and lack of political will are offered as explanations. And, in all fairness, one would also have to acknowledge the huge dimensions of apartheid’s various political, cultural, social and economic legacies – which continue pose a great challenge to planninng for and implementing a fundamental societal transformation. Bibliography Beresford, A. 2016. South Africa’s Political crisis. Unfinished Liberation and Fractured Class Struggles. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Booysen, S. 2014. Twenty Years of South African Democracy. Citizen views of human rights, governance and the political system. [Washington, DC]: Freedom House. Carlsnaes, W. and P. Nel (eds.) 2006, 2016. In Full Flight: South African Foreign Policy after Apartheid. Midrand: Institute for Global Dialogue. Lee, M. 2003. The Political Economy of Regionalism in Southern Africa. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Meyiwa, Thenjiwe et al. (eds.) 2014. State of the Nation. South Africa 1994–2014: A twentyyear review of freedom and democracy. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Saunders, C., Dzinesa, G. and D. Nagar (eds) 2012. Region-building in Southern Africa : Progress, Problems and Prospects. London: Zed Books. Vale, P. and E.H. Prinsloo (eds.) 2014. The New South Africa at Twenty. Critical Perspectives. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. part 1 The Changing Fabric of Society ∵ chapter 1 “A luta continua!” Democracy, Elections and Governance in South Africa, 1994–2014 Ulf Engel 1 Twenty years after the first inclusive democratic elections in South Africa, opinion about the achievements of post-apartheid governance and the quality of the country’s democracy is diverging considerably. The spectrum of assessments ranges from careful appreciation to outright disapproval of the African National Congress’ (anc) government record. The former position would highlight, in a historicizing perspective, that – given the country’s past – in 1994 most observers did not expect a rather peaceful consolidation of the protracted transition to a post-apartheid order and the subsequent attempts to make South Africa a more inclusive society (see, for instance, Booysen 2014). In contrast, the latter would stress that the government has consistently failed to deliver on its promise of “A Better Life for All” (which was the anc’s campaign slogan in 1994), but rather established a “comrade’s republic” that primarily is serving the interests of a new African political class and their cronies (often referred to as “tenderpreneurs”) – particularly under the presidency of Jacob G. Zuma who is ... in office since 2009 (see, for instance, Boraine 2014; Lodge 2014; Mashele and Qobo 2014; Southall 2013; Zapiro 2013). To provide some orientation in this debate, this chapter concentrates on one specific area of post-apartheid reform politics: the field of democracy, governance and elections. This choice is inspired by the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance (African Union 2007) that describes at great length a universal understanding of democracy and respect for human rights that is based on the notion of “human security”. The African Union’s Charter is designed “to promote and strengthen good governance through the institutionalization of transparency, accountability and participatory democracy” (African Union 2007: 1).2 However, even within the political sub-field of democracy, governance and elections, the concrete empirical areas that can 1 2 1 This article was originally written in November 2014 and revised on the basis of comments by two anonymous reviewers in February 2016. 2 The African Charter was adopted in January 2007 (see Kane 2008), but only entered into force in February 2012 after the necessary minimum of 15 au member states had ratified it and © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�6736_003 12 Engel be reviewed in a single chapter on South Africa’s “Unfinished Business” have to be further narrowed down. For this purpose reference is made to the African Peer Review Mechanism (aprm) process in South Africa. The aprm is a voluntary self-monitoring mechanism that was launched in 2003 and by now has been integrated into the structures of the African Union (see Mangu 2014; aprm 2014; nepad 2014). It focuses on four areas: (1) democratic and political governance, (2) economic governance, (3) corporate governance, and (4) socio-economic development. In this chapter the focus is one the first area only. As the chairman of the apr Forum, the late Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, has stressed: “[The aprm] should … be viewed as an instrument for improving governance and building consensus amongst all stakeholders for development within a State, while sharing best practices and problem-solving techniques across States” (aprm 2007: n.p.). South Africa acceded to the aprm in March 2003. The first Country Review Mission was conducted on 9–25 July 2006. The subsequent Peer Review was formally carried out by the Heads of State and Government at the apr Forum held in Accra (Ghana) on 1 July 2007. In the following three reports on implementation progress of the National Programme of Action have been presented by South Africa’s government at the apr Forum (rsa Government 2009, 2011, 2014). Currently it prepares to embark on a second peer review process. Making reference to the African Charter and the aprm process does not mean that this chapter is attempting to reconstruct the related debates within South Africa (on the latter see Turiansky 2010, 2014). Nor does this chapter aim at another theoretical contribution to the political science-based literature on procedural democracies and democratic regimes, and its application to South Africa. Rather the aprm Report will be used to identify some very few core areas of “democracy, governance and elections” that will shed light on the question where South Africa stands 20 years after the end of apartheid and what kind of “unfinished business” still has to be addressed in this respect. Thus, the aprm Report 2007 will serve to highlight, within the field of “democracy, governance and elections”, four core issues of praise and/or concern: elections, violence, xenophobia and corruption. Cross-cutting issues that would merit further attention, but for obvious reasons cannot be dealt with in this short chapter, include unemployment, service delivery, inequality, the HIV/Aids pandemic, land reform, crime, racism and affirmative action (see aprm 2007: 273–287). deposited the legal instruments. South Africa had signed the Charter on 1 February 2010, ratified it on 24 December the same year, and deposited the legal instruments on 24 January 2011. Democracy, Elections and Governance 13 Elections No doubt, the country has made huge progress towards establishing an inclusive democracy. Based on the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, which was finally adopted in 1996 (see aprm 2007: 57), national and provincial elections are held every five years (on the latest elections held on 7 May 2014 see Engel 2014; Melber 2014a). Local government elections have been held since 1999, and the next round is planned for August 2016. Against this background the 2007 aprm Report (2007: §4) summarises that: In 13 short years, South Africans have managed to leap across the deep divide of an oppressive racist state to become a modern constitutional democracy. Since 1994, the country has made undeniable progress in a number of critical areas. On the political front, democratic institutions are well established (see also §129). At the same time the report acknowledges that South Africa is still a deeply divided society when it comes to live chances and inequality (see ... Terreblanche 2002), and that there are a number of huge challenges – South Africa is “a democracy under severe socio-economic stress” (aprm Report 2007: §6). In the academic literature there is little controversy about the nature of the South Africa’s democracy: Most observers would agree that the country is a “dominant party regime” (Giliomee 1998; Giliomee and Simkins 1999; Southall 2005), i.e. a state that – despite of regularly held elections – is governed by a single party (the anc; see Lodge 2004; Lotshwao 2009; Booysen 2011; Suttner 2012) – without any alternation. A look at five consecutive parliamentary elections confirms this assessment (see table 1.1). Despite regular criticism raised against the anc tripartite alliance – also comprising the South African Communist Party (sacp, see Thomas 2007) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (cosatu) – it has governed the country since April 1994 with a comfortable percentage of the valid votes cast of always above 60 per cent, until 1997 in a Government of National Unity (gnu) with the National Party (np) and the Inkatha Freedom Party (ifp) as junior coalition partners. While the np – which had left the gnu already in 1996 and was renamed New National Party in 1997 – finally dissolved in 2005 and most of its members joined the anc, the ifp increasingly has been reduced to a party with only a regional status (and even that was lost in the 2014 elections, see below). These days the official opposition in the 400-seat National Assembly is led by the Democratic Alliance (da, see Southern 2011). For many years the chairperson of this party has been Helen Zille who also is the Premier of the Western Cape (since 14 Table 1.1 Engel South African parliamentary elections, 1994–2014 Year 1994 1999 2004 2009 2014 anc da NP/New np eef ifp udm ff Plus cope 62.65 (252) 1.73 (7) 20.39 (82) – 10.54 (43) – 2.17 (9) – 66.35 (266) 9.56 (38) 6.87 (28) – 8.58 (34) 3.42 (14) 0.80 (3) – 69.68 (279) 12.37 (50) 1.65 (7) – 6.97 (28) 2.28 (9) 0.89 (4) – 65.90 (264) 16.66 (67) – – 4.55 (18) 0.85 (4) 0.83 (4) 7.42 (30) 62.15 (249) 22.23 (89) – 6.35 (25) 2.40 (10) 1.00 (4) 0.90 (4) 0.67 (3) Note: Percentage of votes casted; in brackets number of seats (out of a total of 400). In addition, there ... There are also other, smaller parties represented in the National Assembly. Source: iec (2014). 2015 the chair is Mmusi Maimane) – the only province not governed by the anc (see below). An election pact between the da and the newly established Agang (Nguni for “to build”) South Africa party of former anti-apartheid activist Mamphela Ramphele – which many observers thought would change the game – failed in January 2014. Outside Western Cape the da has strongholds in some of the metropolitan municipalities in Gauteng (including Johannesburg and Tshwane, formerly Pretoria). Breakaway parties from the anc rallied less support then most observers initially were expecting: Both the Congress of the People (cope, established in 2008) and the Economic Freedom Fighters (eff, 2013), the latter led ... led by former anc Youth League leader Julius S. Malema, scored less then seven per cent of the vote; the United Democratic Movement (udm, 1997) – the only merger of prominent former African and European party politicians – only once got 3.42 per cent of the vote (1999) and ever since is declining in popularity. The Afrikaaner, far-right party Freedom Front Plus (ff Plus, 1994) is still represented in parliament, though only on the margins. A look at election results from the provinces indicates three important dynamics (here and in the following iec 2014; see also Ndletyana and Maserumule 2015). First, and despite of the anc’s overall dominance, two provinces remain contested. In recent elections, in Gauteng the anc’s share of the total valid votes was reduced from 64.04 per cent (2009) to 53.59 per cent (2014), while at the same time the da’s share increased from 21.66 to 30.78 per cent; and although in the Western Cape the anc managed to slightly increase its share (2009 to 2014 by 1.34 percentage points), the da increased its lead by 7.92 percentage points (from 51.46 to 59.38%). Second, in KwaZulu/Natal, that used Democracy, Elections and Governance 15 to be heavily contested in the 1994 and 1999 elections, the anc scored 64.52 in 2014 (+1.57 percentage points) while the ifp, which led the province from 1994 to 2004, has been reduced to the status of a minor party (with decrease in support from 22.40% in 2009 to 12.76% in 2014). And, third, the da has increased its share of the vote in all provinces, mainly at the expense of other opposition parties (among others with an increase between 2009 and 2014 of 11.32 percentage points in Northern Cape and 6.21 in Eastern Cape). At ... the same time there was a decline of voter turnout in some provinces where the da made inroads (for instance in Eastern Cape from 76,69% in 2009 to 70,32% in 2014).3 However, opposition, parliament and provinces remain weak counterparts to the anc’s national government. The dominance of the anc in the National Assembly was further amplified through two 15-days “crossing the floor” periods which, in 2005 and 2007, allowed members of parliament to change their party affiliation without losing their seat – by the end of 2007 the anc held 297 out of 400 seats (Booysen and Masterson 2009: 443; aprm 2007: §§79, 135, 152). Until the late 1990s the tripartite alliance of anc, sacp and cosatu managed rather well to integrate divergent positions. In a sort of division of labour cosatu succeeded in portraying itself as the “real opposition” to the anc government. However, this has changed with the rise to power of Zuma at the anc’s national elective conference in Polokwane in December 2007 and later also the factional conflict between Zuma and his then-vice president, Kgalema P. Motlanthe, who competed for the chairmanship of the anc in 2012 (see Calland 2013; Booysen 2015). And in the run-up to the elections in early 2014 cosatu was struggling with one of its biggest affiliates, the National Union of Metalworkers (numsa), which called on cosatu to break its ties with the ruling party (Mail & Guardian 2014). Meanwhile numsa has been expelled from cosatu. In general, the quality of elections in South Africa is widely accepted. Apart from the 27 April 1994 national and provincial elections which were marred by non-transparency of the actual counting process and political negotiations behind the scenes (see iec 1994; Commonwealth Secretariat 1994; un SecretaryGeneral 1994; Engel 1994), most elections that followed received quite good marks from international election observer missions, though at times falling short of the label “free and fair”. For instance, on the 7 May 2014 elections the Commonwealth Observer Mission noted: 3 Despite some shortcomings in a number of areas which we have highlighted in our report, they are largely technical in nature and we believe that this did not have any impact on the overall integrity of the electoral process. The exemplary conduct of all political parties in accepting the 3 I would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for drawing my attention to this point. 16 Engel outcome of the results bears testimony to the maturity of democracy in South Africa. The technical efficiency of the iec [Independent Electoral Commission], the conduct of political parties, robust media and above all, the large turnout of enthusiastic voters all contributed to a well-managed, transparent and largely violence-free election. The electoral process fully met international and regional democratic standards to which South Africa has committed itself, and we therefore attest to the credibility of these elections, which, in our view, were credible. Commonwealth Secretariat 2014: 19 Earlier the aprm Report (2007: §92) had observed, that Although there have been sporadic expressions of dissatisfaction, as well as isolated election-related violence, stakeholders have generally accepted the legitimacy and integrity of the electoral processes and results. Thus, unlike in some other African countries, the performance of the governance system is not likely to be a source of conflict in South Africa. And the South African government, in its 3rd aprm implementation report, holds that the country’s “commitment to a people-centred democracy through public participation is demonstrating cumulative improvement” (rsa Government 2014: 32). Generally speaking, and contradicting some of the expectations with regard to the size of the non-anc vote nurtured in the run-up to the last two general elections, South African citizens in fact have a fairly good opinion of the state of democracy in their country (see Mattes 2007). To illustrate this point, data will be drawn from Afrobarometer, an independent research project that conducts polls in 35 African countries. Research on South Africa started in 2000; the fifth round of surveys was conducted in 2011 (round 6 surveys begun in March 2014). Three questions from the Afrobarometer sample will be used (on ... the ... following see Afrobarometer 2008: 29, 2011: 31). On the question “In your opinion how much of a democracy is South Africa today?” in the 2008 survey 2 per cent of respondents answered that the country was not a democracy and 18 per cent stated that South Africa was a democracy, but with “major problems”. Three years later (this is the last survey available), the combined percentage of respondents sceptical about the quality of South Africa’s democracy was down to 11 per cent. The percentage of people who regarded South Africa a democracy with only “minor problems” was stable at 28 per cent. At the same time the number of people who thought that the country was a “full democracy” had increased from 36 to 41 per cent. Likewise, on the question “Overall, how Democracy, Elections and Governance 17 satisfied are you with the way democracy works in with Africa” the percentage of respondents who stated that they were “not at all satisfied” decreased from 18 to 11 per cent while the percentage of people who were “fairly satisfied” increased from 36 to 41 per cent, and those who were “very satisfied” from 13 to 19 per cent. Thus, according to these figures, and at least up to 2011, overall acceptance of and satisfaction with the South African democracy has increased – despite all critical debate in the media and academic journals.4 Although there are regional differences: It seems that South African citizens in Gauteng and Northern Cape on average are far more satisfied with the quality of South African democracy then their fellows in KwaZulu/Natal or Western Cape. Generally, these findings are supported by Du Toit and Kotzé (2011) who, based on the “World Value Surveys” series, claim that although “little headway has been made in narrowing the racial gap in perceptions about the state as far as confidence levels are concerned”, there has been a rising confidence in civic institutions (such as the churches, charitable organizations, but also the Constitutional Court or the National Assembly), “particularly [among] those that operate in the social space between the individual and the state” (Du Toit and Kotzé 2011: 68). At the same time they observe a gap between elite and public opinion: “For the public, basic economic or ‘bread and butter’ issues receive higher priority” (ibid.). Basically, similar claims have been made in a study conducted by Susan Booysen on behalf of Freedom House that is based on focus group interviews. It concludes that: While there is strong disappointment with the government and its leaders, South Africans retain their faith in the democratic system and do not transfer their discontent to the African National Congress … . booysen 2014: 1 Indeed, frustration over non-delivery and other issues has so far not translated into a considerable higher share of the vote for opposition parties. Rather it is expressed by not voting at all. Over the years the percentage of eligible voters who are not participating in the general elections has risen considerably – by now this group of the electorate even outnumbers those who vote for the ruling party (see table 1.2). While the non-voters only made up 14.47 per cent of the electorate in 1994, when mobilisation levels obviously were very high, their 4 4 Developing a sophisticated “quality of democracy” set of indicators, Graham for instance, describes South Africa as a “medium quality democracy” (2015: 364). See also Misra-Dexter and February (2010). 18 Engel Table 1.2 1994 1999 2004 2009 2014 Voter turnout 1994–20145 As of registered voters (%) As of eligible voters (%) anc (as % of Non-voters (as % eligible voters) of eligible voters) 86.87 89.28 76.73 77.30 73.43 85.53 62.87 55.77 59.29 59.34 53.01 41.72 38.87 38.55 36.39 14.47 37.13 44.23 40.71 40.66 Source: McKinley (2014). share has increased to 40.66 per cent in 2014. In 2014 registration rates were particularly low among the “born free” generation, i.e. those who were born after the end of apartheid in 1994 and were eligible to participate in elections for the first time that year (see Newman and De Lannoy 2014; ... Norgaard 2015). Of an estimated 1.9 million eligible people in this group, just some 646,313 have registered – approximately 34 per cent (Reuters 2014). The overall percentages for the anc would be even lower if the most recent estimate of the voting age population (vap) was taken into account. According to Faull (2014), the iec’s figures are based on the 2011 population census. Based on 2013 census estimates, the vap meanwhile has grown to 32.7 million. Adjusted figures would show that the anc had in fact lost 10.41 per cent of its 2009 votes, and the da had gained 26.77 per cent (Faull 2014: 23, 26; see SchulzHerzenberg 2014a, 2014b). Internationally, these figures compare positively to Nigeria (2011 with a vap turnout of 25.80 per cent) and are similar to India (2009 at 56.45 per cent), but compare negatively to countries such as Brazil (2010 at 80.62 per cent; see idea 2014).6 Violence Although the human rights situation in South Africa has greatly improved after the end of apartheid, according to the aprm Report (aprm 2007) violence still 5 6 5 For the years 1994 to 2009, these figures deviate slightly from the database provided by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (idea 2016). 6 This paragraph is reproduced from Engel (2014: 85). 19 Democracy, Elections and Governance Table 1.3 Freedom House ratings, 1990–2014 1990 1994 1999 2004 2009 2014 pr cl pr cl pr cl pr cl pr cl pr cl 5 4 2 3 1 2 1 2 2 2 2 2 partly free free free free free free Note: pr = political rights, cl = civil liberties (on a scale from 1 to 7). Source: Freedom House (2016). constitutes a serious problem – though changing in nature and intensity. In very general terms, human rights can be translated into “political rights” and “civil liberties” as, for instance, measured by the Freedom House Index (fhi).7 Accordingly South Africa’s rating has, and that is not big surprise, improved immediately after the end of apartheid and remained at excellent levels ever since – though the assessment of political rights has gone down slightly after the presidency of Thabo Mbeki (1999–2008; see table 1.3). There are no systematic human rights violations by state organs. However, police violations of civil rights have been frequently reported by human rights organizations, in particular with regard to detention, in prisons and during demonstrations (Amnesty International 2016). Often the rights of foreign refugees, undocumented migrants and asylum seekers are not sufficiently respected. Despite of the extremely liberal constitution (Melber 2014b) citizens that identify with non-hetero sexuality (lgbt) face serious difficulties; sexual violence against women and children is rampant. In this respect, the aprm Report (2007: §112) warned of a “deteriorating moral and social fabric within the South African society” (but see also rsa Government 2014: 38f.). In general, the country is characterised by quite alarming levels of systematic violence in three areas: isolated incidents of political violence, acts of violence against migrants – see below – and violence against farmers (but see also Landau 2012). There is a deeply ingrained culture of violence (see, for instance, von Holdt 2013) that has its roots in extreme social inequality and mass poverty. In addition, the collective memory of all population groups is fundamentally shaped by the legacy of colonial conquest, colonial “border wars”, segregation during the 20th century, apartheid from 1948 to 1994, related new 7 7 Founded in 1971, Freedom House is an independent, though not unbiased watchdog on human rights, with offices in Washington dc and New York. 20 Engel “border wars” in the Southern African region as well as liberations struggles since the 1960s. Basically, the population is deeply traumatized, as Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu has described it (Tutu 1999; see also Krogh 2000; Du Bois-Pedain 2007). During the transition (1989–1994) various forms of political violence have occurred, often linked to political infighting or economic competition – the borders between politics and organized crime often were blurred. Although this trend has declined since, it seems to be rising again during the last years. In KwaZulu/Natal in particular, politically motivated killings linked to the violent competition between the anc and the ifp continued after the end of apartheid, causing more than 2,000 casualties in the years 1994 to 2000 (Taylor 2002; trc 1999). However, numbers went down considerably in the 2000s – but recently have gone up again. These incidents seem to be linked to the establishment of the National Freedom Party (nfp), that was founded by the former ifp chairperson Zanele kaMagwaza-Msibi, which is seen as a viable competitor to the declining ifp (in the local elections 2011 this party immediately managed to get 10.4% of the vote). However this form of violence somewhat is decoupled from dynamics at the national level. All in all, the confrontation between anc or ifp self-defence units and related warlords during the 1990s has faded away (for this conflict see Jeffery 1997). Forms of state violence do occur periodically, the most recent example obviously being the “Marikana massacre”: On 16 August 2012 police shot 34 wild-cat mine worker strikers in North–West province east of Rustenburg; in total the conflict cost some 44 lives (see Alexander 2013; Bond and Mottiar 2013; Botiveau 2014). However, at the time of writing the report of the Commission of Inquiry chaired by Judge Ian G. Farlam is still pending. Legal strikes regularly go hand in hand with habitualized forms of violence (Petrus and Isaacs-Martin 2011). Violence against famers, in many cases European ones (ca. 61% of all cases), constitutes a special case. According to the Transvaal Agricultural Union (tau) between January 1990 and September 2014 some 1,734 farmers have been killed (tau 2014). The debate on farm assaults is ethnically loaded, as “European” farmers are unilaterally singled out in public debate. Typically, violent acts are carried out by young male Africans. According to a police investigation (2001– 2003), most of the researched cases in the period 1998–2001 were related to robbery. Only in two per cent of the incidents a political motive could be found or violence was related to labour conditions and wage disputes (Special Committee of Inquiry 2003; see also hrw 2001; Burger 2012). Democracy, Elections and Governance 21 Xenophobia Violence against African migrants and refugees has increased since the end of apartheid. Already in 2007, the aprm Report (2007: §103) argued that perceptions of illegal immigrants have prompted social tension and the eruption of violence and crime which, if not properly managed, may convert into major sources of internal strife and, possibly, sources of inter-state conflict. An atmosphere of xenophobia, particularly against black African people coming from other African countries, seems to be emerging. Indeed, mass evictions, targeted murder and pogrom-like excesses have peaked in the metropolitan areas of Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban in May 2008, with ca. 62 victims and some 100,000 displaced persons (Worby, Hassim and Kupe 2008; Zondi 2008; Desai 2010; Landau 2011; Matssinhe 2011). Though figures have declined since, xenophobic violence remains a serious issue – the most recent incidents occurred in December 2015 (Mail & Guardian 2015). Xenophobic violence is rooted in economic competition in townships, and alleged threats to South African masculinity (Hayem 2013; Crush, Chikanda and Skinner 2015). Historically South Africa has always been a centre of labour migration from neighbouring countries, especially in the mining sector, but also with regard to “domestic” workers (Trimikliniotis and Zondo 2008). With the end of apartheid borders have become more permeable and migration also from areas that were drawn into the orbit of the Southern African Development Community (sadc) increased considerably, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In addition the continuing crisis in Zimbabwe not only has driven political refugees to South Africa (as of 15 June 2015, the unhcr had registered some 75,333 Zimbabwean refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa; unhcr 2016), but also – depending on the source – some 1.3 to 3 million people who have fled their country because of poverty and economic reasons. South African human rights organizations indirectly blame the government for the poor legal protection of migrants and the xenophobic atmosphere in the country. While on the one hand the government is propagating an “open” South Africa, on the other is has institutionalised a strict asylum and migration regime (aprm 2007: §§269, 271) – though this is not efficiently implemented. Non-documented migrants are partly deported in masses. The pogroms of 2008 and subsequent smaller incidents have only been addressed lukewarm 22 Engel by the government. A recent Afrobarometer poll indicates that xenophobic attitudes among the population have increased since (Mataure 2013; see also Du Toit and Kotzé 2011: 159–171). Corruption According to Transparency International, a Berlin-based international advocacy group favouring a live free of corruption, South Africa has over the years consistently slipped on the issue of corruption (see table 1.4). On a scale from 0 (“highly corrupt”) to 1 (“very clean”), the country’s score has deteriorated from 0.56 in 1995 to 0.44 in 2014; in relative terms, and in global comparison, South Africa’s rank has dropped. Although the Country Self-Assessment Report in preparation for the aprm Report argues that “the perception of corruption in the country is actually worse than the reality on the ground” (aprm 2007: §234), Afrobarometer surveys on the evaluation of corruption in South Africa show a different picture (see also aprm Report 2007: §241). Comparing three administrations – Mbeki (1999–2008), Motlanthe (2008–2009) and Zuma (since 2009), 40 per cent of the respondents state that during Mbeki’s realm “some” of the people around the president and his office were corrupt (see also Southall 2008). This figure decreased for Motlanthe’s brief reign (23%), but increased significantly for Zuma’s tenure (51%) (Afrobarometer 2008: 37, 2011: 48). This assessment also has affected the reputation of the National Assembly. On the question “How many of the following people do you think are involved in corruption?” in 2008 15 per cent stated “none”. This figure went down to 6 per cent in 2011. At the same time the number of people seen to be involved in corruption increased from 40 to 48 per cent (“some of them”) and 21 to Table 1.4 Score Rank Corruption index for South Africa, 1995–2014 1995 1999 2004 2009 2014 0.56 21 (41) 0.50 34 (99) 0.46 44 (146) 0.47 55 (180) 0.44 67 (175) Note: Rank among total number of countries (in brackets) reviewed. Source: Transparency International (2016). Democracy, Elections and Governance 23 32 per cent (“most of them”), respectively (Afrobarometer 2011: 48, 2008: 37). The same is true of the public perception of local councillors. In 2008 15 per cent of respondents regarded them not to be corrupt – this figure decreased to 6 per cent in 2011. At the same time 37 per cent felt that “most of them” were corrupt – as opposed to only 25 per cent in 2008 (while the percentage of respondents who thought that “all of them” were corrupt increased from 10 to 14%; Afrobarometer 2011: 48, 2008: 37). However, the legal framework for fighting corruption is in place, some ten different institutions are concerned with it (Naidoo 2013; see also rsa Government 2014: 46–49). A Special investigating Unit (siu) has examined more than 31,000 cases and prosecuted some 3,800 of them for fraud. In ... particular in executive positions corruption or the mixing of private and public office and interests seems to be increasing. And, as the aprm Report (2007: §240) observed, there was no regulation in place “requiring the disclosure of sources of private funding for political parties”. The dissolution in 2008 of a special unit of prosecution, the Scorpions, i.e. the Directorate of Special Operations of the National Prosecuting Authority (npa), has been seen as an indicator of the government’s intention to procrastinate procedures against President Zuma who has been implied in various cases of corruption and misspending of public funds (from the so-called arms deal in 1999 to the recent saga around the “security upgrade” of his family home in Nkandla; see Feinstein 2007, 2010; Holden 2008; Public Protector 2012; Mail & Guardian 2016). First results from the Afrobarometer Round 6 Survey (2014–2015) indicate that this has repercussions on the general respect for President Zuma: Approval of President Zuma’s performance almost halved between 2011 (64%) and 2015 (36%) and is now well below the presidential average since 2000 (55%). This is the first time that a majority of South Africans have expressed outright disapproval of a president’s performance (62%) since the initial Afrobarometer survey in 2000. lekalake 2015: 2 Seen from an anc perspective even worse may be the fact that the distrust against the country’s and party’s president also translates into dissatisfaction with the ruling party itself: “more than half (53%) of survey respondents ‘agree’ or ‘strongly agree’” that the country “needs a new labour/workers’ party to defend working-class interests” (Nkomo 2016: 1). In the industrial heartland of South Africa, in Gauteng province, support for the idea of such a new worker’s party is as high as 63 per cent (ibid.: 2). Finally, the decreasing public trust 24 Engel in the president and the ruling party ... has also consequences for the general support of democracy by South Africans: It has declined from 72 per cent in 2011 to 64 per cent in 2015. And despite this still majoritarian “stated support for democracy, six in 10 citizens (61%) would be willing to give up regular elections in favour of a non-elected government that could deliver basic services” (Lekalake 2016: 2). Conclusions Twenty years after the end of apartheid South Africa has come a long way in overcoming the legacy of apartheid and colonial oppression. The peaceful transition and the building of strong democratic institutions after 1994 have been widely acclaimed. Yet despite some economic growth,8 various social interventions and the introduction of reform policies, the high levels of social inequality have not changed fundamentally. South Africa is still a deeply divided society, with high levels of structural inequality with regard to access to education, health and labour. For a considerable time popular discontent with the ruling party has not translated into major political changes. To the contrary, even in the 2014 elections the anc still enjoyed substantial electoral support – only the number of voters no longer participating in elections has grown significantly, even outnumbering the support for the anc. In the realm of democracy, governance and elections, and within the four areas singled out by the 2007 aprm Report (elections, violence, xenophobia and corruption), voter apathy, a deeply ingrained culture of violence, widespread xenophobic attitudes and related practices of violence as well as high levels of corruption have been identified as the country’s core challenges. It is in this respect that the dominant party state still has some “unfinished business” on its plate. Increasingly the expectant mood of the early post-apartheid days has given way to subdued or even grim sentiments. 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Mandela pledged to “liberate [our] people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination” (Mandela 1994a). During the State of the Nation Address held on 24 May, he reiterated the need to combat gender discrimination with policies and prac­ tices to be implemented through the mainstreaming of issues related to women’ rights within public institutions: all structures of Government, including the President himself, should understand … that freedom cannot be achieved unless the women have been emancipated from all forms of oppression. … The objectives of the Reconstruction and Development Programme will not have been re­ alised unless we see in visible and practical terms that the condition of the women of our country has radically changed for the better and that they have been empowered to intervene in all aspects of life as equals with any other member of society. The Government will … look at the establishment of organs of Government to ensure that all levels of the public sector … integrate the central issue of the emancipation of women in their programmes and daily activities. mandela 1994b In the Interim Constitution approved the year before it was explicitly stated that there was the need to “create a new order … in which there is equality between men and women and people of all races” (rsa 1993) and Chapter 8 provided for the establishment of the Commission for Gender Equality. The 1996 Constitution recognized non­sexism as a founding provision of the new 1 Preamble of The Women’s Charter for Effective Equality, February 1994, in Hassim (2006: 269). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�6736_004 32 Pellizzoli democracy and gender equality as one of the non­derogable rights of the Bill of Rights – along with other relevant provisions (rsa 1996; see Liebenberg 1995). The inclusion of the non­discrimination of women and gender equality in key formal documents and official discourses at the onset of the new democ­ racy was the result of a series of factors. It came from the acknowledgement of the specific oppression and marginalization that African women suffered during the apartheid regime and the recognition of women’s struggles and re­ sistance against apartheid (Walker 1991; Cock 1991). It was, also, the culmina­ tion of the Women’s National Coalition’s (wnc) experience, an umbrella orga­ nization comprised of dozens of women’s organizations and several regional coalitions officially established in April 1992 in order to bring forward women’s claims for representation, rights and participation in the new South Africa (Hassim 2006: 129–169; Gouws 2006; Meintjes 1996). It reflected, finally, the way in which gender equality and women’s emancipation issues were becom­ ing part of the mainstream political discourse and rhetoric on the eve of the Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women (Baden and Goetz 1997). Indeed, the transition period created spaces and opportunities for gender equality to be accepted and inserted into the democratization process and its very nature, together with the political autonomy and strength of the wnc and the ear­ lier struggles for equality (Hassim 2006: 130), contributed to what is generally known as a “success story” (ibid.: 129). “There is generally a good story to tell”2 Twenty years after the inauguration speech, during the National Summit on Gender Equality organized in April 2014 by the Commission for Gender Equal­ ity, the former Minister for Women, Children and People with Disabilities, Lulu Xingwana, claimed that: when we look back we can attest that, despite the many hills and valleys that still lie ahead in this journey of gender equality and women empow­ erment, there is generally a good story to tell, especially if you consider where we come from.3 2 Quote from the speech held at the National Summit on Gender Equality held in Benoni, Ekurhuleni, 9 April 2014. (Xingwana 2014). See Aschman (2014) for a comment on the Summit. 3 See above. The Uneven Journey towards Gender Equality 33 According to the Presidency’s Twenty Years Review (RSA Presidency 2014), that includes the analysis of the country’s progress with regards to gender equal­ ity within the chapter on social transformation, the creation of participatory spaces and structures since 1994 has produced a remarkable success in raising the voice of South African women. The percentage of women in Parliament has increased from 2 per cent before 1994 up to 44.8 per cent (2009 elections);4 the number of women in the judiciary sector has increased (and two are mem­ bers of the Constitutional Court); several specific pieces of legislation protect women’s rights and promote gender equality. The Review highlights also some of the remaining critical areas, such as the earned income gap between men and women,5 the limited access to care and support services for poor women and children (thus influencing women’s “meaningful participation in the econ­ omy”), the widespread gender­based violence. An equally ambivalent assessment is provided in the South Africa’s Bei­ jing +20 Report submitted to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) in June 2014 as a measurement of the progress made on the implementation of the Beijing Declaration (Department for Women, Children and People with Disabilities 2015). The report highlights in particular the gap between de jure and de facto equality. Whereas the adoption of several laws has certainly fostered an enabling environment for the achievement of gender equality, the full effective implementation of these laws, as well as key policies and strategies is still lagging behind. Indeed, the main gains presented are in the legislative framework, in the institutional mechanisms and arrangements, and in the high percentage of women in political6 and decision­making posi­ tions – all falling within the “formal gender equality” achievements –; while major gaps are reported between policy and practice, which leads to persisting systemic gender discrimination and inequality at all levels. A specific area of concern in the country remains gender­based violence, an issue that is linked to the inadequacy of formal gender equality achievements to “tackle systemic and structural discrimination and inequality” (ibid.: 11). 4 It is important to note here that the Review was released in March 2014, two months before the elections that resulted in a decline of three percentage points (41,5%) in women’s repre­ sentation in the South African Parliament (Lowe Morna et al. 2014). 5 According to oecd Statistics, the estimated earned income is US$5,647 for women and US$12,637 for men. url: <http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=GID2> (accessed on 10 January 2015). 6 For an analysis of the effect of the South African’s proportional representation system (paired with a system of voluntary women’s quotas) on the women’s parliamentary representation, see Ballington (1998). 34 Pellizzoli The indexes and data available tell, in part, a slightly different story, with more lights than shadows – the “generally” good story claimed by former Min­ ister Xingwana. In the 2012 oecd Social Institutions and Gender Index (sigi),7 South Africa is ranked fourth out of 86 non­OECD countries (first among Afri­ can countries and improved from the 49th position over 102 countries in 2009); the 2014 sigi report includes South Africa among the top performing coun­ tries in guaranteeing women’s domestic, civil and political rights (oecd 2014: 51). The sigi recognizes the specific efforts that have been made to remove discrimination against women within the Constitution and through legal re­ forms, though highlighting the need for improving awareness and the enforce­ ment of these reforms (in particular in the areas of women’s inheritance and property rights as well as violence against women). A more detailed analysis of the variables, however, provides a more nuanced picture of the South African story, showing two main fractures: again, between legislation and its imple­ mentation and between traditional “women’s issues” and areas of intervention that might impact more effectively on substantive gender equity. South Africa ranks well also in the World Economic Forum’s 2015 Global Gender Gap Index, which calculates national gender gaps on economic, po­ litical, education and health­based criteria and aims at tracking a country’s progress over time. In 2015, South Africa is 17th (with a score of 0.759) over 145 countries (it was ranked 6th in 2009 with a 0.7709 score, improving its posi­ tion from the 22nd in 2008, scoring 0.7232). However, the ranking by sub­index shows a more uneven picture: South Africa is ranked among the first countries in “health and survival” and 14th in “political empowerment”, but in “economic participation and opportunity”, “education attainment” is respectively posi­ tioned in the 72th and 85th (wef 2015). South Africa scores less well in the Gender Inequality Index (gii) of the United Nations Development Programme (undp),8 where it is ranked 90th (121st in the Human Development Index, hdi, of the same institution) among 7 The sigi captures discriminatory social institutions, such as early marriage, discriminatory inheritance practices, violence against women, son preference, restricted access to public space and restricted access to land and credit. It is calculated on the basis of 16 variables grouped into 5 sub­indices: discriminatory family code, restricted physical integrity, son bias, restricted resources and entitlements and restricted civil liberties. url: <http://genderindex. org/data/> (accessed on 10 January 2015). 8 The gii is a composite measure which captures the losses in achievement, within a country, due to gender inequalities, using three dimensions: reproductive health, empowerment, and labor market participation. The world average score on the gii is 0.463, reflecting a percent­ age loss in achievement across the three dimensions due to gender inequality of 46.3 per cent. Sub­Saharan Africa’s regional average is nearly 58 per cent. The Uneven Journey towards Gender Equality 35 186 countries with an average score of 0.462 (in line with the global average score). In particular, the gii highlights a severe gap in the labour force partici­ pation rate from the age 1 to 5 (44% women; 60% men). At the regional level, South Africa scores 2nd in the 2014 sadc Gender and Development Index (sgdi) introduced in 2011 by the Southern Africa Gender Protocol Alliance and aiming at measuring how sadc governments perform in the 28 targets of the sadc Protocol on Gender and Development to be achieved by 2015. The indicators are grouped under six categories: Governance, Education, Economy, Sexual and Reproductive Health, hiv and aids, and Me­ dia.9 Despite the constant second position – after Seychelles and together with Mauritius and Namibia – for four years in a row, the 2013 Country sadc Gender Barometer report shows that the very positive performances in Education and Political participation have no correspondence in other areas. It highlights in fact severe gender gaps in the economic sphere, the persistence of discrimina­ tory social norms limiting access to opportunities, resources and, ultimately, empowerment; unacceptable levels of gender violence; higher unemployment rates among women and a persistent divergence in the income earned.10 The picture that these indices portray is certainly a very partial one, and their effectiveness in capturing the gender dimensions of development has of­ ten been questioned, both for the conceptual limitations of their components and for the lack of disaggregated data to measure the impact of laws, policies and programmes (Klasen and Schüler 2011; Beteta 2006). However, with all their limitations, they – in line with the institutional reports shortly presented here – show a very clear trend in the South African’s journey towards gender equality: a profound division between formal measures and practices leading to substantive change. But while the formal is easy to measure and analyse (which and how many laws protect women’s rights and promote gender equal­ ity, how many women in Parliament or in local government), the impact and consequences of these formal mechanisms elude measurement. And where measurement is attempted, it is limited to the economic dimensions of deci­ sion­making and empowerment (for example, differences in salary) and does not capture other relevant dimension of inequality and exclusion (such as con­ trol over resources or reproductive choices). 9 10 Values range from 0 (for the worst possible performance) to 100 (for the best possible performance). url: <http://www.genderlinks.org.za/page/sadc­research> (accessed on 10 January 2015). The South Africa Country Report is available on­line. url: <http://www.genderlinks.org. za/article/sadc­gender­protocol­barometer­2013­south­africa­2013­11­22> (accessed on 10 January 2015). 36 Pellizzoli “We cannot march on one leg or clap with one hand”11 According to Gouws and Hassim (2014: 4), gender equality measured in the way discussed above “captures only one aspect of the historical demands of South African women’s movements”, whose socialist feminist tradition12 has been overshadowed by a “thin version of liberal feminism that delinks formal equality from the question of equality outcomes” (ibid.). South African women have participated to the anti­segregation and anti­ apartheid struggles along the whole 20th century (Walker 1991). However, until the opening of the transition period, women’s political requests within organi­ zations such as the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the African National Congress (ANC) were marginalized from the internal debate and the hierarchi­ cal power structures, that “demanded unquestioning loyalty to the leadership” (Hassim 2006: 132).13 Against that marginalization, the idea emerged in ... the early 1990s that women could constitute an electoral constituency, bringing to the revival of the idea (previously realized with the Federation of South African Women, fedsaw, in the 1950s) of a national, non­racial women’s movement that cut across party lines. This idea was openly put forward at the Malibongwe Confer­ ence held in February 1990 by the anc in Amsterdam: The emancipation of women in South Africa requires national liberation, the transformation of gender relations and an end to exploitation. We believe that our emancipation can only be addressed as part of a total revolutionary transformation of the South African social and economic 11 12 13 See footnote 1. According to Hassim (2006: 34–35), despite “attempts to delegitimize feminism as a politi­ cal discourse …, the specific interpretations of women’s oppression by organizations and activists [after the mid­1980s] contained sophisticated formulations that might be seen as the kernel of an indigenous feminism”, a field and political project that until then had remained “largely segregated” (Bozzoli 1983: 139). A rupture in this approach happened in September 1981, at the Conference of the Women’s Section of the anc held in Luanda, where Oliver Tambo recognized the specific oppression imposed on women by the liberation movement and stated that women “… have a duty to liberate us men from antique concepts and attitudes about the place and role of women in society and in the development and direction of our revolu­ tionary struggle … The struggle to conquer oppression in our country is the weaker for the traditionalist, conservative and primitive restraints imposed on women by man­dominat­ ed structures within our movement …”. url: <http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=4392> (accessed on 10 January 2015). The Uneven Journey towards Gender Equality 37 relations. National liberation in South Africa does not automatically guar­ antee the emancipation of women … Our desire for a national organisa­ tion of women should be made a reality, encompassing all women in our society, with particular attention being paid to mobilising our women in the rural areas. Through our concerted efforts to forge unity and to build one national women’s organisation, we shall be able to place firmly on the agenda … the process of integrating women`s emancipation into the national liberation struggle.14 The Malibongwe Conference, and its Programme of Action, brought about a series of relevant changes. In May 1990, a Statement for the Emancipation of Women of the anc National Executive Committee re­launched the role of the anc Women’s League as the driving force mobilizing South African women15 – a strategy soon questioned also among women inside the anc, that justified the need for a broader women’s movement with the argument that a stronger body was needed, representing all women’s interests across party lines and embracing the diversity of women’s organizations existing at the time in the country. In September 1991, the anc Women’s League organized a meeting to dis­ cuss with the representatives of several women’s organizations the possibility of a national women’s structure, defining women’s interests broadly in order to guarantee proper inclusivity and to effectively influence the negotiations (Cock 1997). It was, as Hassim (2006: 129–136) defines it in her accurate account of the process that brought to the establishment of the wnc in April 1992, a sort of “pragmatic unit” among the different women’s organizations existing in the country based on a shared sense of exclusion from the discussion on transi­ tion: the members of the Conference for a Democratic South Africa (codesa) were, in fact, all men. The wnc was created with the task of drawing a Women’s Charter to “re­ inforce” the Constitution. The Charter was expected to be drafted on the ba­ sis of the results of a countrywide campaign aimed at creating spaces for all South African women to talk about the way they experienced oppression and discrimination and, ultimately, at linking the grassroots level to national po­ litical processes of transformation (Meintjes 1996). The drafting process was less consultative and participatory than originally envisioned and sparked an intense debate among the different components. However the final document preserved the spirit of the original mandate – negotiate diverse interests for a 14 15 url: <http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=4673> (accessed on 10 January 2015). url: <http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=7140> (accessed on 10 January 2015). 38 Pellizzoli national consensus among women – including both requests for formal equal­ ity as well as more substantive objectives (Hassim 2006: 152).16 A further area of intervention of the wnc was lobbying for the inclusion of women’s issues within the negotiation discussion. While originally excluded from the codesa, the wnc partly succeeded in ensuring women’ participa­ tion when a Gender Advisory Committee was established to evaluate the gen­ der implications of the negotiation process. With the transition from codesa to the Multi Party Negotiation Process, a Gender Collective monitoring the drafting of the Constitution replaced the Gender Advisory Committee and it was guaranteed that each delegation included one woman among its mem­ bers. This led to a series of favorable gains, including the recognition of gender equality as a fundamental principle in the Constitution, a Bill of Rights pro­ tecting against discrimination on the basis of sex, gender, marital status and sexual orientation, the requirement for the customary system to be subordi­ nated to the Constitution’s non­derogable rights.17 The strategies pursued, challenges faced and tackled, and gains obtained by the wnc showed an example of how the diversity of women’s interests, rather than producing separation and conflicting claims, could be gathered at the lowest common denominator to influence the decision­making, thus reformu­ lating the patterns of women’s engagement with politics. Gender equality and women’s rights, that had been previously considered subordinated to national liberation and racial equality priorities, emerged on the South African political agenda and lead to the institutionalization of ad­ hoc state mechanisms and structures. After the 1994 first democratic elections, where more than 26 per cent of women were elected into Parliament, the new South Africa hit the headlines as a successful example of democratic transition that created “material and metaphorical spaces” for women’s effective partici­ pation (McEwan 2000: 643). Simultaneously, the iv un World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 – and the broader international momentum to­ wards the promotion of women’s empowerment – “provided the impetus and focus for gender activists within government to lobby for implementing the commitment to gender equality” (Hassim 2006: 212) through the principle of mainstreaming and the pursuing of a strong representational strategy. The conclusion of the formal transition process and the elections marked the decline of the wnc experience, as well as the reconfiguration of the 16 17 The final version of the Charter was adopted in June 1994, when the Interim Constitution had already been finalized. Notwithstanding the hostile opposition from the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (contralesa). The Uneven Journey towards Gender Equality 39 women’s movement, that faced a process of fragmentation produced by the “institutionalization” of many coalition’s leaders (Gouws 2014) in the new state structures and by the emergence of new demands and needs to be articulated within “conventional institutional sites” (Hassim 2003: 85). Two Steps Forward, One Step Back Since 1994, a series of progressive laws have been promulgated to promote gender equality and protect women’s rights according to the South African Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Some of these respond directly to the commitment to protect women’s rights against discrimination and improve women’s conditions: the Guardianship Act (1993) provided for shared guardianship of children between parents;18 the Free Health Care policy providing free access to public health services for pregnant women and children under six years of age (1994); the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act (1996) recognizes women’s rights to bodily integrity and ensures that a woman is able to terminate pregnancy without the consent of her partner, or in the case of a minor, her parents;19 the Child Support Grant (1998), a social cash transfer programme that provides financial support to a child’s primary caregiver; the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act (1998) recognizes the validity of customary marriages;20 the Domestic Violence Act (1998) provides for men, women and children in abusive domestic relation­ ships to obtain protection from the law; the Maintenance Act (1998, amended in 2009) states that parents are jointly responsible for maintaining their children. Others fall into the domain of promoting gender equality through the main­ streaming of a gender­sensitive approach into sectoral laws that could produce strategic change and substantive equality (particularly in the area of employ­ ment): the Labour Relations Act (1995) protects workers (including previously unprotected persons such as farm and domestic workers) from both direct and indirect unfair discrimination on the basis of sex, race, family responsibility 18 19 20 It has been repealed in 2005 by the Children’s Act that regulates the balance of power between joint guardians. Any obstruction or prevention of this right is considered unlawful, as it is the state re­ sponsibility to provide reproductive health care and safe conditions for reproductive rights to be exercised. Before they had an inferior status compared to civil marriages and women did not enjoy equality in terms of right to land and property, right to equal inheritance, and general marital rights. 40 Pellizzoli and any other ground; the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (1997) ensures minimum wages, housing and health care for previously excluded groups of workers and provides that there is a minimum requirement for maternity leave; the Employment Equity Act (1998) requires companies to have an equal opportunities plan and report regularly to government on race, gender and disability categories. Women are specifically targeted as candidates for affir­ mative action employment;21 the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act (2000) provides protection against direct and indirect discrimination and the elimination of both de jure and de facto discrimination including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion conscience, belief, culture, language and birth. Many of these pieces of legislation had already been passed when, from 2004, a series of studies mainly from South African scholars started to analyze the impact in terms of gender equality of the first ten years of democracy. The general acknowledgement was that, while it could not be denied that several positive gains had been made in term of inclusion, representation, promotion of gender­sensitive laws, the enthusiasm and commitment of the very first years of democracy had been decreasing and the legacy of the wnc experi­ ence seemed lost. The reasons identified at the time were several: first, the “institutionaliza­ tion” of feminists and women’s leaders within State structures, an apparent ini­ tial achievement, undermined the efficacy of the lobbying and advocacy from women’s organizations in the civil society. Gender equality and women’s rights became a matter of technocrats and policy elites rather than a shared path as it was envisioned by the wnc coalition (Saul 2010). Second, an excessive reliance had been placed on the number of women in parliament and in the Government as the deus­ex-machina for promoting change. However, party politics did not always allow for gender issues to be ad­ dressed and put forward by their women parliamentarians. At the same time, with gender activism weakening and the National Gender Machinery yet to become an effective and influential body of institutions, the fracture between gendered party politics, ad-hoc state institutions and civil society widened (Gouws 2006; Geisler 2000). Third, much of the enthusiasm of the very first years of democracy was based on the apparent enabling environment created for women and gender 21 From 2014, with the proclamation of the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Amendment Act approved in 2013, the categories of designated beneficiaries of afferma­ tive action measures have been refined, targeting only black women. The Uneven Journey towards Gender Equality 41 equality by the anc’s Reconstruction and Development Programme (rdp), and it was crushed with the approval of the Growth, Employment and Redis­ tribution Strategy (gear) that was more focused on economic growth than on fighting existing inequalities – including those based on gender (Hassim 2006; Saul 2010; Marais 1998). Fourth, notwithstanding the aim for inclusion of previously marginalized groups (and particularly black South African women), many of the new laws dealt with women on the grounds of sameness between them, failing to ac­ knowledge how women in different race groups may experience discrimina­ tion differently (Hames 2006).22 This undermined the impact of laws and poli­ cies and contributed to the crystallization of the condition of black women. Fifth, many inequalities had been removed on paper thanks to the pro­ gressive legislation promulgated, but socio­economic discrimination has re­ mained deeply entrenched within the South African context, both because of poor implementation of the laws and of the persisting impact of custom and tradition that hindered structural transformation and limited women’s possi­ bility to enjoy the rights to which they are entitled to (ibid.). The disillusionment and perceived decline of the centrality of gender equal­ ity in the new South Africa resonate in the analysis of the ten years after the landmark Beijing Women Conference of 1995. The un Commission for the Sta­ tus of Women’s decision not to hold a world conference in 2005 and the lack of innovative policy formulation produced a widespread belief among scholars and activists that the process of promoting gender equality through interna­ tional structures had started its decline, as was also confirmed by the “ambiva­ lent record on gender justice” achieved ten years after Beijing. Molyneux and Razavi (2006) explored why, along with relevant improve­ ment in women’s conditions and in formal gender equality, there had also been worrying steps back. They identified, among others, the following factors: the rise to political power of conservative forces in the us and elsewhere, and the consequent adoption of conservative policies with respect to women’s re­ productive and sexual rights supported by religious forces; the consequences of the attacks of 11 September 2001 that shifted attention and funds towards security at the expense of development and human rights; the persisting fo­ cus of the dominant policies on economic orthodoxy; anti­poverty and social protection programmes often relying on women’s unpaid or poorly paid work through the instrumentalization of caring and mothering roles. The two schol­ ars also highlighted that the same ambivalence could be found in the promo­ tion of decentralization reforms as a way to bring government and institutions 22 See footnote 21. 42 Pellizzoli closer to the people and to improve participation. In fact, they argued, decen­ tralization had in certain cases consolidated the local power of the male elites, reducing access or effective participation for women – particularly in those areas where traditional authorities continued to play a political role that could reverse the gains made in terms of gender equality or further entrench existing discriminations. Many of these factors applied to the South African situation after the first decade of democracy and remain valid today. But further elements need to be added when considering the degree of responsiveness to the gender equality commitments in the last ten years. South Africa 2004–2014: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back? What interested me first when I started to address this issue and prepare an abstract for the conference from which this chapter originates was that, since the years when I last conducted research in South Africa (2004 for my Master thesis and 2007–08 for the PhD), those feminist, engaged, scholars that I had studied, sometimes interviewed, and often quoted in my works, had signifi­ cantly reduced their publications on these issues. The literature on women’s rights, gender equality, electoral systems, state feminism, the ngm, the wom­ en’s movement in South Africa, that had flourished for little more than a de­ cade seemed to have shrunk. Many of the ngos and women’s organizations I knew in the country had disappeared, key websites had not been updated for months or even years. For an outside observant, it seemed as there had been a shift in research and activism. Attention moved from the analysis of the effects of the South African proportional representation and quota system on women’s political participa­ tion, the national gender machinery, the state of the women’s movement, to three key factors that hinder the full emancipation of women in the country: hiv/aids and health rights, violence against women (also linked to the issue of sexual identity and rights, Watson 2014) and land rights. Gouws and Has­ sim (2014: 5) had recently argued that “fortunately there are organisations that continue to raise questions of sexuality and gender and link these to an emerg­ ing feminist agenda that goes well beyond institutional inclusion and quotas for women”. I asked myself how much this shift had been produced by a sense of “mission accomplished” – either on the side of the international organiza­ tions and of the national political institutions? What seemed a priority during the transition to democracy and the first years of the anc’s government (and in the wake of the post­Beijing international discourse on promoting gender The Uneven Journey towards Gender Equality 43 equality and women’s empowerment), had lost its grasp after formal equality and numbers reached a consolidated status in the country. On the other side, that “much is still to be done”, as many of the papers and articles published after 2004 concluded, is clear from the evaluations that have been realized after the member states of the Southern African Develop­ ment Community (sadc) committed themselves to promote gender equality with the signature of the 2008 sadc Gender Protocol and the establishment of the Southern African Gender Protocol Alliance.23 According to the latest South Africa Gender Protocol Barometer published last year, several obstacles and challenges in the key sadc areas of concerns remain for South Africa to meet the target set by the sadc Gender Protocol for 2015. These include: poor women’s access to justice; the decrease of women’s representation in the lo­ cal government from 48 to 38 per cent in the 2011 local government elections; gender­based physical and sexual violence in schools; school drop­out for girls due to teenage pregnancy, early marriage, hiv/aids and care responsibilities in the household. Further data and statistics discussed in the report present a bleak picture in the area of substantive equality: with 23 per cent women in economic­decision making, South Africa ranks ninth in the sadc region; over three quarters of women in Limpopo, 51 per cent in Gauteng, 39 per cent in the Western Cape and 37 per cent in KwaZulu Natal report experiencing some form of violence over their lifetime; the mortality rate is 176 per 100,000 live births; women constitute 59 per cent of those infected with hiv/aids. With the 2014 elections, the number of women parliamentarians in South Africa dropped by three percentage points, giving the fatal blow to the sadc 50/50 campaign (Lowe Morna et al. 2014) and revitalizing the debate on the need for a legislated quota for women in parliament. Other factors hindering gender equality in the country are the persistence of patriarchy from the household to the political elite narrative;24 the lack of a coherent anti­poverty strategy; the under­resourcing of the ngm and of the national ngos; inadequate basic service delivery; the persistence of tradi­ tional discriminatory practices (Aschman 2014). Rural women, in particular, still suffer the consequences of poverty and exclusion from citizenship rights, 23 24 url: <http://www.genderlinks.org.za/page/sadc­about­the­alliance> (accessed on 10 January 2015). I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to me, highlighting how some of President Zuma’s controversial statements (on motherhood, marriage, sexual orienta­ tion, hiv/aids, among others) released over the years seem to undermine the efforts to shift from formal and legislated equality towards a more effective one. 44 Pellizzoli and of inequality and lack of control in the family sphere (Gouws and Hassim 2014: 4), and their condition remains severely affected by the unresolved land question25 and the consolidation of patriarchal traditional institutions in the communal areas (Walker 2013) of the country. It is however to be highlighted that the Traditional Courts Bill26 introduced into Parliament for discussion by the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development and that created a separate legal system for the 17 million people living in the former home­ lands, had recently been rejected. This marked a robust victory of a civil soci­ ety (including rural women’s movement) that had been vociferously opposing the Bill proposal since 2008, claiming that it was unconstitutional and that it would have created a divided citizenship and further discriminate against women living in areas ruled by traditional leaders.27 But for one step forward, there is a step back that contributes to the per­ sisting unevenness of the South African journey towards gender equality. In July 2014, Susan Shabangu, the new Cabinet’s Minister on the Presidency re­ sponsible for Women,28 had withdrawn the Women Empowerment and Gender Equality Bill (wege) promoted by former Minister Xingwana and passed at the beginning of March in the National Assembly (but still to be submitted to President Zuma for signing), calling for more consultations. The Bill aimed to give effect to section 9 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, in so far as the empowerment of women and gender equality is concerned; to establish a legislative framework for the empowerment of women; to align all aspects of laws and implementation of laws relat­ ing to women empowerment, and the appointment and representation of women in decision making positions and structures; and to provide for matters connected therewith.29 It focused on “substantive gender equality” and provided for special measures to be taken in all sectors to eliminate discrimination against women and to 25 26 27 28 29 See the following section in this volume. For resources, see url: <http://www.lrg.uct.ac.za/research/focus/tcb/> (accessed on 10 January 2015). url: <http://www.customcontested.co.za/traditional­courts­bill­dead/> (accessed on 10 January 2015). The Ministry of Women, located in the Presidency, replaced in May 2014 the Ministry of Women, Children and People with Disability. url: <http://www.parliament.gov.za/live/commonrepository/Processed/20131108/ 553400_1.pdf> (accessed on 10 January 2015). The Uneven Journey towards Gender Equality 45 progressively achieve 50 per cent of female representation at top levels of management. The Bill had indeed been met with a certain degree of criticism from wom­ en’s organization and other civil society groups as well as from the business sector and the opposition parties.30 Civil society and women’s movements, while supporting the spirit of the Bill, agreed that it failed in challenging the patriarchal value systems and the root causes of gender inequality in South Africa, “overemphasizing the need for policy development both in the public as well as private sphere” even where “a number of policies, programmes and frameworks are already in existence”.31 The problem, many argued, is not the lack of policies and plans, but their implementation and execution. The wege was also said to be too vague to adequately promoting “substantive” gender equality: each section provided for “designated” public and private bodies to submit plans for realizing the bill’s goals to the minister, followed by further plans for their implementation if the minister so requested. However, it was not clear how these plans were intended, how the designated bodies would have been selected, and what was the capacity of the government to take this project forward.32 The lack of enforcement mechanisms was another main concern, as it was the lack of harmonization between the wege and the ex­ isting legislation (including the 2000 Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act that has not been brought into force yet). With all its flaws, the wege has however revitalized the public debate on gender equality at a time when, also in the international domain, the gender equality and women’s empobwerment discourse is witnessing a fresh new start with the debate on the post­2015 agenda that has involved a series of ac­ tors, including women’s transnational organizations. However, the lapsing of the Bill and the backlash of the elections’ results have placed gender equality again on a negative trajectory, showing how resistant state and society are to radical, substantive change towards gender justice. The debate remains very much open and it has to be seen how key actors in South Africa – including smaller but solid movements (Gouws 2014), as well as feminist scholars and activists – can grab the positive international momentum to push forward “notions of substantive equality that embody socio­economic rights that will 30 31 32 url: <http://www.shukumisa.org.za/index.php/2014/01/women­empowerment­gender ­equality­bill/> (accessed on 10 January 2015). url: <http://constitutionallyspeaking.co.za/lrc­submission­on­womens­empowerment ­and­gender­equality­bill/> (accessed on 10 January 2015). url: <http://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/the­women­empowerment­and­gender­equality­bill ­can­it­live­up­to­its­name/> (accessed on 10 January 2015). 46 Pellizzoli deliver solutions to poverty, unemployment and marginalization” (Gouws and Hassim 2014: 6) – solutions that formal democratic procedures and numerical representation alone cannot provide. 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South Africa’s Beijing +20 Report Progress Made on the Implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and the Outcomes Document of the 23rd Special Session of the General Assembly in 2000. URL: <http://www.women.gov.za/attachments/article/ 52/Final%20Draft%20(2)%20National%20Beijing%20+20%20Report%20%20 26022015%20(3).pdf> (accessed 20 April 2015). Geisler, G. 2000. “‘Parliament is Another Terrain of Struggle’: Women, Men and Politics in South Africa”, Journal of Modern African Studies 38 (4): 605–630. Gouws, A. 2006. “The State of the National Gender Machinery: Structural Problems and Personalized Politics”. In S. Buhlungu et al. (eds.) State of the Nation. South Africa 2005–2006. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 143–166. Gouws, A. 2014. “Recognition and Redistribution: State of the Women’s Movement in South Africa 20 Years after Democratic Transition”, Agenda 100: 19–32. Gouws, A. and S. Hassim 2014. “Who’s Afraid of Feminism? South African Democracy at 20: An Introduction”, Agenda 100: 4–6. Hames, M. 2006. “Rights and Realities: Limits to Women’s Rights and Citizenship after 10 Years of Democracy in South Africa”, Third World Quarterly 27 (7): 1313–1327. The Uneven Journey towards Gender Equality 47 Hassim, S. 2003. “Representation, Participation and Democratic Effectiveness: Femi­ nist Challenges to Representative Democracy in South Africa”. In A.M. Goetz and S. Hassim (eds.) No Shortcuts to Power. African Women in Politics and Policy Making. London: Zed Books, 81–109. Hassim, S. 2006. Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa. Contesting Authority. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Klasen, S. and D. Schüler 2011. “Reforming the Gender­Related Development Index and the Gender Empowerment Measure: Implementing Some Specific Proposals”, Feminist Economics 17: 1–30. Liebenberg, S. (ed.) 1995. The Constitution of South Africa from a Gender Perspective. Cape Town: David Philip. Lowe Morna, C. et al. 2014. Gender in the 2014 South African National Elections. Johan­ nesburg: Gender Links, August. Mandela, Nelson R. 1994a. “Statement of Nelson Mandela at his inauguration as Presi­ dent of the democratic Republic of South Africa, Union Buildings, Pretoria, 10 May”. URL: <http://db.nelsonmandela.org/speeches/pub_view.asp?pg=item&ItemID=N MS176&txtstr=May> (accessed on 10 January 2015). Mandela, Nelson R. 1994b. “Nelson Mandela, State of the Nation Address, Houses of Par­ liament, Cape Town, 24 May”. URL: <http://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index. php/site/q/03lv02424/04lv03370/05lv03427.htm> (accessed on 10 January 2015). Marais, H. 1998. South Africa: Limits to Change. The Political Economy of Transition. 2nd ed., London and Cape Town: Zed Books and UCT Press. McEwan, C. 2000. “Engendering Citizenship: Gendered Spaces of Democracy in South Africa”, Political Geography 19 (6): 627–651. Meintjes, S. 1996. “The Women’s Struggle for Equality during South Africa’s Transition to Democracy”, Transformation 30: 47–64. Molyneux, M. and S. Razavi 2006. Beijing Plus 10: An Ambivalent Record on Gender Justice. Geneva: UNRISD (= Occasional Paper; 15). OECD 2014. Social Institutions and Gender Index 2014 Synthesis Report. Paris: OECD. RSA 1993. Interim Constitution. Act 200 of 1993. URL: <http://www.constitutionalcourt. org.za/site/constitution/english­web/interim/index.html> (accessed on 15 January 2015). RSA 1996. Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. 18 December. URL: <http://www. constitutionalcourt.org.za/site/theconstitution/english­2013.pdf> (accessed on 10 January 2015). RSA Presidency 2014. Twenty Year Review. South Africa 1994–2014. URL: <http://www .thepresidency­dpme.gov.za/news/Pages/20­Year­Review.aspx> (accessed on 10 January 2015). 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URL: <http://www.gov.za/speeches/view.php?sid=45217> (accessed on 10 January 2015). chapter 3 aids Activism and the State in Post-Apartheid South Africa at Twenty Mandisa Mbali Introduction Some twenty Twenty years ago, amidst the jubilation of South Africa’s peaceful democratic transition, lay an emerging public health crisis: an epidemic of hiv/aids (human immunodeficiency virus/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). Its extent was demonstrated by the national antenatal clinic surveys conducted in the 1990s. In 1990 the first national antenatal clinic survey pointed to an hiv infection rate of 0.7 per cent in those tested (Department of Health 2011a: 38). By 1998 the antenatal clinic survey found that 22.8 per cent of pregnant women tested HIV-positive (ibid.). Most alarmingly by 2001 a study by South Africa’s Medical Research Council study pronounced that aids was the country’s leading cause of death (Dorrington et al. 2001). Perhaps the most tragic consequence of this was the estimated 2.2 million children orphaned by aids in South Africa (unicef 2004: 30). In 2012 the Human Sciences Research Council (hsrc) has estimated that 6.4 million people were living with hiv in the country (12.2% of the population) (Shisana et al. 2014: xxiv). aids is, however, not merely a post-apartheid problem. Indeed, we cannot understand its emergence and spread in South Africa outside the social and historical context of apartheid. As the historian Shula Marks has powerfully argued, aids was an epidemic “waiting to happen” in South Africa (Marks 2002: 17). Historians and sociologists have linked the emergence and spread of aids in South Africa to a number of social factors – the migrant labour system, transactional sex and changing patterns of sexual socialisation – none of which can be understood outside the context of colonialism and apartheid (Jochelson et al. 1991; Delius and Glaser 2002; Hunter 2010). In post-apartheid South Africa, aids has proven significant not merely in its reflection and exacerbation of various forms of social exclusion and injustice – it has also been politically important as it has been an issue which has catalysed some of the first successful post-apartheid civil society campaigns against a government ruled by the African National Congress (anc). This chapter takes as its focus the Treatment Action Campaign (tac)’s successful use of “cause lawyering” and changing forms of political mobilisation around the socio-economic right to access to health care services in the context © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�6736_005 50 Mbali of the aids epidemic in post-apartheid South Africa. Central to my analysis of post-apartheid aids activism and the state in South Africa is the insight that both phenomena changed in politically crucial ways over the twenty year period examined. Activists’ campaigns during the Mandela and Mbeki administrations focused on pressing for wider provision of anti-retroviral drugs (arvs) which necessitated more government health spending. The Mandela and Mbeki administrations neither provided arvs, nor engaged in health expenditure to the degree that has been evident during the Zuma administration. In contemporary South Africa the Treasury has announced plans that there will be growth over the next few years in public sector health expenditure, with the introduction of a National Health Insurance (nhi). Activists also, however, face new challenges in engaging with the state around health policy making and implementation at a provincial level and in tackling mismanagement and corruption in the health system. This chapter tracks these changes in both aids activism and the state’s response to aids over twenty years in two main sections. Its first main section describes the tac’s constitutional litigation for the provision of the antiretroviral drug Nevirapine for Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission (pmtct) of hiv. This litigation was undertaken because the Mbeki administration had refused to provide the drug outside designated pilot stes on irrational grounds, a policy which must also be seen in the context of the relative fiscal conservatism of his administration. It argues that in support of the goals of the litigation, the tac used anti-apartheid or “struggle” symbolism in impactful ways, alongside treatment literacy programmes to generate public support for its case. Its second section points to the reasons why, and ways in which, aids activism is relevant in a contemporary context where there are still severe class-based inequalities in access to health care. This is especially the case in a context where the government is introducing a nhi scheme which aims to address such inequalities: a scheme whose successful implementation will require great oversight and vigilance by opposition parties, the media and civil society in a public health system where there is a great deal of corruption and mismanagement. It is especially important to emphasise the on-going importance of such activism in a context where the tac has faced severe funding challenges. Background: The History of Health Financing and the Emergence of aids in South Africa In the late apartheid era the National Party (np) government came to promote privatisation of health care services in South Africa from 1977 onwards, both as a means to contain state expenditure and in response to increasing demand AIDS Activism and the Post-apartheid State 51 for private health services by white patients (Price 1989). From 1994 onwards the National Department of Health (NDoH) has convened numerous committees of inquiry into the need for equitable health insurance in South Africa. As Hein Marais has noted, these efforts were, however, overshadowed by a series of aids policy scandals which robbed the government of the political capital required to confront inequities inherent to the two-tier health system (2011). Chief among these aids policy scandals was Mbeki’s aids denialism with regard to the causal link between hiv and aids. This inability to confront the profiteering and exclusionary practices of private providers must also, however, be viewed in the context of the Mbeki administration’s adoption of the Growth Employment and Redistribution (gear) strategy. This strategy had the goal of reducing government debt, but critics charged that it involved the avoidance of more expansionary social spending in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Habib and Padayachee 2000; Marais 2011). In relation to health in particular, Di McIntyre and Michael Thiede have pointed to the fact that there was very limited real growth in public health expenditure in the first decade after democracy and they have linked this to gear (2007). Even when, by early 2000, public sector health expenditure began to increase in real terms these increases did not keep pace with population growth: this meant that there was, in fact, a small decline in per capital real expenditure on public health services (McIntyre and Thiede 2007: 38). Similarly, the health sector’s share of total government expenditure declined from 11.5 per cent in 2000/01 to 10.9 per cent in 2007/08 (ibid.: 39). While it is hard to prove that this was the direct cause of Mbeki’s aids denialism, his engagement in a “debate” about the relationship between hiv and aids certainly enabled government officials to avoid being publicly drawn on the economic consequences of rolling out arvs. This was especially the case at a time when his bizarre position on the epidemic dominated the public conversation on the politics of aids in South Africa as it played out in parliament, in the media and in street protests. There were the callous comments made by presidential spokesman Parks Makahlana at the height of the mother-to-child transmission (mtct) debate that it would use less state resources to let hiv infected children die, than to have them dependent on the state as orphans (Le Roux 2000). However, it is difficult to prove that such thinking systematically guided aids policy in this period. While it is difficult to link the government’s reluctance to provide antiretrovirals in this period solely to the government’s desire for fiscal restraint, it was almost certainly a factor which made the government reluctant to provide the drugs: the sheer numbers requiring the drugs in a period where they were much more expensive than they are now made the idea seem unfeasible to many in the international community in the period (Mugyenyi 2008; Mbali 2013). 52 Mbali aids Activists’ Use of the Courts and Anti-apartheid Symbolism in Post-apartheid Campaigns, 1998–2003 Even more central to Mbeki’s adoption of aids denialism was his belief that the scientific consensus concerning aids was racist and this related to his reassertion of African nationalism as part of his vision of generating an “African Renaissance” (Mbali 2004; Posel 2005; Gevisser 2007; Myburgh 2007). arvs were revolutionising hiv prevention and treatment internationally. In the late 1990s a series of significant breakthroughs occurred in hiv medicine, not least the effective use of arvs for pmtct and for the chronic treatment of hiv. aids activists began by campaigning for azt (Azidothymidin) for pmtct and only later shifted to arguing for universal access to arvs for chronic use. The tac’s resort to constitutional litigation must be viewed against the backdrop of the failure of efforts to secure the policy change through other means. Initially, in July 1998 there had been a decision by NDoH to introduce the short course of azt for pmtct at pilot sites in Gauteng and the Western Cape. In October 1998 the-then Minister of Health, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, announced that this decision had been reversed on the grounds that the country could not afford it (Viall 1998). Medical researchers such as Glenda Gray and Robin Wood disputed this analysis that the measure was not cost-effective by pointing to the life-long benefit it offered to children who thereby avoided hiv infection (ibid.). The key events in the development of Mbeki’s aids denialism in this period have been amply documented elsewhere. However, it is worth recounting them briefly in order to understand the ways in which the tac responded. In March 1999, Anthony Brink, a lawyer from Pietermaritzburg, published an article in The Citizen arguing azt was a toxic “medicine from hell” (Brink 1999). On 28 October 1999 Mbeki addressed the National Council of Provinces (NCoP) questioning the safety of azt (Mbeki 1999). In May 2000 Mbeki convened a Presidential Panel to consider the science around aids which included an equal number of aids dissidents and scientists who adhered to the biomedical consensus on the disease (The Star 2000). Finally, in July 2000 Mbeki’s exhibited his denialism in an address at the Durban International aids Conference (Mbeki 2000). Most controversial, given his earlier remarks on the subject was his failure to explicitly mention hiv as the viral cause of both aids, as a syndrome, and the local and global epidemics of the disease. Nevertheless, there was to be some progress in the government providing arvs for pmtct in the following months. In August 2000 the national Minister of Health met with her provincial counterparts (the Members for the Executive Council, or mecs) to discuss the use of a new antiretroviral called AIDS Activism and the Post-apartheid State 53 Nevirapine for pmtct: at this meeting it was decided that the government would launch two “pilot” (research and training) sites per province where the drug would be provided perinatally to hiv positive pregnant women and their infants (Heywood 2003: 286). tac activists were, however, dissatisfied with the limitation of the intervention to the pilot sites. On 21 August 2001 the tac launched a constitutional challenge to the government’s policy of limiting pmtct to the pilot sites in the Pretoria High Court. They asked the court to determine the policy unconstitutional and that the government be ordered to make the drug available to all HIV-positive pregnant women who went into labour at public health facilities. On 5 July 2002, the Constitutional Court ordered the national and provincial governments to remove restrictions to Nevirapine being prescribed outside pilot sites and to permit and facilitate its use where medically indicated, through developing a comprehensive and coordinated plan for its provision. There is a great deal that has been written on legal aspects of the case, including that dealing with socio-economic rights elements of the tac’s arguments, but that is not the focus of the present chapter (Wesson 2004; Davis 2006; Steinberg 2006). In relation to the tac’s “treatment literacy” programme, what we can note is that it was vital in generating public support for the litigation, and the tac more generally. As part of this programme, activists gave many talks and workshops and media interviews, many of which were in African languages and made use of locally intelligible metaphors and explanations for things such as what hiv was, how pmtct occurred and the mechanisms through which arvs could reduce mtct. In this period, South African learners ranked poorly in international terms in maths and science education (hsrc 2011). Moreover, arvs and the science of aids was inadequately integrated into the school curriculum. Both social realities meant that these workshops were vital in generating public support for an otherwise poorly understood intervention. In terms of the tac’s marshalling of anti-apartheid symbolism, Nelson Mandela’s critical support for the movement in this period also facilitated the tac’s efforts at social mobilisation around the issue. The former president very publicly visited and offered his support to the movement’s leader, an AIDS-ill Zackie Achmat whose illness was exacerbated by his “drug fast” in his Muizenburg home (Sunday Times 2002). In December 2002 he also visited the tac’s pilot site which it ran jointly with Médicines Sans Frontières (msf) in Khayalitsha to demonstrate that combination arv drug therapy was possible in “resource-poor” settings in South Africa. Mandela famously removed one of his trademark batik shirts and put on one of the movement’s characteristic HIV-POSITIVE T-shirts which was given to him by Matthew Damane, the first 54 Mbali patient at the clinic (Van Zilla 2002). The next edition of these T-shirts with Mandela’s image on the back were worn by activists who participated in the movement’s second civil disobedience campaign in January 2003 – the image of one of the leaders of the defiance campaign in the 1950s was being invoked to support a new civil disobedience campaign for arv drug access (Interview 2008). Shortly after this campaign the government developed an Operational Plan for the roll-out of arvs. tac faced numerous struggles in the second five years of its history (2004–2008) to push the government to optimally implement this roll-out plan (Nattrass 2007; Geffen 2010). For the purposes of this chapter, it can be noted that the aids policies of the Zuma administration represented an important break with those of the Mbeki administration, most notably in their not being informed by aids denialism, and their novel proposals to address inequality in the distribution of resources within the health system. aids and Redistribution in the Health System in Contemporary South Africa Seven years into the Zuma administration, South Africa is currently implementing a National Health Insurance (nhi) scheme, where it is envisaged that health care services will be provided free of charge at the point of delivery – aids activists have, generally, welcomed this scheme but are concerned about the government’s lack of consultation with civil society around it. The goal of this nhi scheme is to address persistent inequalities between the public and private sectors of the health system in the country. In its Green Paper on the scheme released in 2011, the government stated that of the 8.3 per cent of gdp spent on health in the country in 2010, 4.1 per cent was spent in the private sector and 4.2 per cent in the public sector (Department of Health 2011b: 9). Close to half of the health expenditure in the country in that year was by the 16.2 per cent of the populace who were members of a medical aid (private health insurance) scheme (ibid.). In 2005, this privileged minority who enjoyed medical aid membership also obtained a tax credit for their contributions to the schemes which was equal to R 10.1 billion – a sum equivalent to roughly a third of government health expenditure that year (McIntyre et al., cited in Marais 2011: 314). The introduction of the nhi is absolutely vital in the context of South Africa’s aids epidemic – especially given many more affluent countries’ declining foreign aid for aids programmes in low and middle-income countries. This trend has been profoundly shaped by the financial crash of 2008 where large affected banks were “bailed-out” by donor country governments AIDS Activism and the Post-apartheid State 55 as they implemented austerity measures, especially in relation to social and development spending (irin 2011). More recently, a key issue in international aids financing is that while funding for global aids has increased so have new infections which translate into significant resource gaps in several heavily affected countries. In 2013 there was a three per cent reduction in funding for global aids from donor country governments compared to the previous year (unaids and Kaiser Family Foundation 2014). The United States – the world’s largest donor to global aids – has made declining funding commitments to fight the epidemic in recent years as have Canada, Italy and Japan. It is estimated that us$22–24 billion will be needed to address the global aids pandemic in 2015, meaning that it is anticipated that there will be a significant resource gap. This has had notable implications for both the South African government’s hiv programmes and also, as we shall see, aids ngos such as the tac. South Africa today largely funds its own hiv programmes – at a cost of us$1 billion per annum. It also has a substantial and growing population of people living with hiv and the biggest arv drug programme in the world as measured in terms of sheer numbers of enrolled patients. By 2012 two million people in the country were on combination arv therapy (Maurice 2014). The sustainability of this programme is also challenged by the growing demand for access to treatment in the country. The incidence rate (the rate of new infections) has hardly changed since 2005: factors behind these new infections are increases in high risk behaviours among young men – such as their having sex with multiple partners and/or not using condoms (Shisana et al. 2014). Young women also remain disproportionately vulnerable to hiv infection in South Africa (ibid.). It is in this context that the South African government has explored options to increase domestic resource mobilisation for hiv treatment and prevention. In 2010 the Costs and Financing Working Group of aids2031 (a group of health economists) working with the Department of Health and the Treasury projected that between 2009 and 2015/16 there would be a two fold increase in the resources required for South Africa’s aids response (from R16 billion to R28-35 billion). The group concluded that the sa government needed a “strong and effective financial mobilization strategy’, including considering introducing an nhi as ‘a source of expanded public funding” (aids2031 2010: 9). Whether the proposed compulsory membership in this nhi scheme is truly necessary and whether it is fiscally sustainable are controversial (Van den Heever 2011; McIntyre 2012). The disagreements are deeply ideological in character and, at a fundamental level can be seen as being over the ideal size of government and type and degree of taxation and the correct role of 56 Mbali government versus the private sector in the health system. The positions taken by the different protagonists in this debate have been profoundly shaped by their institutional positions and their economic stakes in the issue. For instance, one of the staunchest critics of nhi has been Alex van den Heever, a former Central Advisor to the Council of Medical Schemes. The health economist’s main line of critique of the proposal has been that it will dramatically increase taxation on South Africa’s relatively small middle class and fail to fix the inefficiencies in the health system (Van den Heever 2011). Similarly the South African Private Practitioners’ Forum has expressed very strong resistance to the scheme rejecting the Green Paper’s analysis of the two-tier nature of the health system as the cause of the crisis in its public sector (sappf 2011). They have also alleged that if fully implemented, the policy would infringe upon “service providers’ rights to property” (ibid.: 5). Twelve weeks after the publication of the Green Paper on nhi, the tac and Section 27 (incorporating the aids Law Project) joined civil society allies in forming the National Health Insurance Coalition (nhic) in praising key elements of the scheme. They were especially in favour of its driving principles that a health system should be built on social solidarity, realising the right to access to health services and that equity and affordability should be promoted in health care services (nhic 2011: 2). There is limited information from non-governmental sources on the progress in implementing nhi, especially from civil society or academics and the information which has been published has been largely written by senior civil servants in NDoH. In 2013 Precious Matsoso, the Director-General of the National Department of Health co-authored an article published in the South African Medical Journal (samj) on progress with the nhi policy with Bob Fryatt, a senior advisor to the department seconded from the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (2013). In April 2011, eleven pilot districts were launched for the implementation of nhi, covering all the provinces and focusing on underserved areas. The Green Paper provided for the nhi to be implemented over 14 years. The Treasury is considering a payroll tax, higher Value-Added Tax (vat) or a surcharge on taxable income or a blend of all these (Matsoso and Fryatt 2013). In the short term the emphasis has been on improving the range and quality of public services. Private sector services will be contracted to provide services under the scheme “where they add value” (Matsoso and Fryatt 2013: 156). This is being done through “experimentation and the setting up of new systems and capacities” (ibid.). In practice that has meant that there has been a heavy focus on health systems analysis and intervention (Kardas-Nelson 2013). The Treasury projects that government expenditure on health will exceed R492 billion AIDS Activism and the Post-apartheid State 57 over the next three years in order to strengthen the country’s health system to prepare to introduce the nhi (SANews 2014). In contrast, the civil society group Budget Expenditure Monitoring Forum (bmef), which is affiliated to the tac’s sister organisation Section 27, produced the following critique of the health allocation in the 2014 budget: In 2013/14 we saw the overall total consolidated provincial health budget reduced in real terms by 2.2%. In other words, the budget allocation for the delivery of health services has forced health workers to do more with less. It is without a doubt that the current crisis in health services in the Eastern Cape is a result of the year-on-year decline in real expenditure towards health services in the Province. madonko 2014 The roll-out of nhi is currently being financed through two grants: the nationally managed national health grant, and the national health insurance grant, managed by the provinces. In practice this means that there appears to be a surprising amount of diversity in the forms of, and emphases in, the provinces’ roll-outs of nhi. Unsurprisingly, in practice, reports indicate that the progress in improving health services in nhi pilot districts has been uneven. For instance, in the Eden District of the Western Cape there have been complaints that the mobile clinics being financed through the province’s nhi grant have been perceived by activists to scarcely be present in rural communities because of delays in drivers being hired, which means nurses often have to undertake the role (Kardas-Nelson 2013). In the uMgungundlovu district in KwaZuluNatal the nhi has focused heavily on developing school health teams and on developing community health worker programmes. Despite these gains, there are still long queues at public sector health facilities in the district and 14.3 per cent of facilities there ran out of tuberculosis (tb) or hiv medicine in the period from September to October (ibid.). Interestingly enough, the activists in bmef have implied that there may be a rift between the Treasury and the NDoH on nhi: “It appears that the Department of Health and the Treasury are miles away from each other in their vision of a reformed health system” (Madonko 2014). The delay in both the release of the White Paper on nhi and the Treasury’s own plan around it have stimulated these fears that the policy may be floundering (tac 2014b). Mark Heywood, the Executive Director of Section 27, has identified the shortage of health workers and the deteriorating working conditions they experience as being at the heart of the crisis in South Africa’s health system (Heywood 2014a). In particular, he has argued that 58 Mbali Unless a plan and adequate budget to rectify this social injustice is seen as the Department of Health’s top priority the prospect of equitable and improved health care under a National Health Insurance is a pipe dream (ibid.: 1). The extent to which this challenge is affecting the ability of nhi pilot districts to improve health outcomes or access to quality health care is indicated by the fact that since the introduction of the nhi pilot districts in 2012, only 114 of the 600 target additional General Practitioners (gps) have been recruited to implement the scheme (ibid.: 5). In October and November 2013, four ngos (including tac and msf) conducted a study where they found that one-in-five public health facilities surveyed reported they had experienced drug stockouts of tb and hiv drugs in the prior three-month period (msf et al. 2013). This survey viewed alongside accounts from physicians and hiv fieldworks indicates that drug stock-outs are caused by a combination of factors including: too few pharmacists in the public health system; long labour disputes at drug depots; inefficient management of drug depots; corruption and poor communication between suppliers, depots and health facilities (Bateman 2013). The worst recently documented drug stock-outs were at Mthatha depot which was called “anarchic and beyond redemption” in November 2012 by then Eastern Cape Superintendent General of Health Dr Siva Pillay (ibid.). To illustrate the extent of the impact of this crisis on the provision of hiv and tb treatment in the Eastern Cape the activists pointed to the fact that the depot served 300 facilities across 17 districts of or Tambo. The majority – 53 per cent – of the hospitals and clinics it served had suffered hiv or tb drug stock-outs in the preceding three months, resulting in 24 per cent of patients being turned away without arvs (msf et al. 2013). arvs require a very high degree of patient adherence to avoid the development of drug resistance – in the light of this, the issue of drug stock-outs is very concerning as it could undermine not only good outcomes in individual HIV-positive patients, but also the overall success of the arv drug programme in affected provinces. There is also the issue of limited public knowledge of the elements of nhi. Media reports indicate that many ordinary members of the public are unaware of exactly what nhi consists of and what its implications might be for their own health (Kardas-Nelson 2013). This points to the importance of organisations such as the tac raising awareness about the meaning and potential effects of the nhi. Matsoso and Fryatt have asserted that the NDoH has “consulted with” civil society in developing the policy (Matsoso and Fryatt 2013: 156). Activ- AIDS Activism and the Post-apartheid State 59 ists have, however, disputed this. For example, the tac put out a “manifesto” before the 2014 national elections where the organisation asked political parties questions it deemed critical in relation to health policy. In this document it expressed concern that “civil society has not been sufficiently consulted in the development of nhi – particularly in the nhi pilot districts” (tac 2014a: 15). The activists have expressed the view that the government needs to engage with the public in order for nhi to be effective in accomplishing its goals. They have also voiced the fear in that document that nhi could be “captured by narrow commercial interest groups” (ibid.). Ruiters and Van Niekerk have also argued that the nhi could have the unintended consequence of actually boosting private hospitals, some of which – such as Dr Diliza Mji’s BusaMed – are now black-owned. They have also questioned whether, and to what extent, such black ownership of private hospitals may, in turn, provide “political insurance” for the largely white-owned private medical sector (Ruiters and Van Niekerk 2012: 14). Public fears of the possibility of a growth in corruption involving the “politically connected” have been stoked by a range of allegations involving political interference in tender allocation in the health system: for instance, the former mec for Health and provincial treasurer of the anc in KwaZulu-Natal, Peggy Nkonyeni, was accused of corruption in relation to health procurement. It was alleged that she had been placed under political pressure to complete a deal with Gaston Savoi’s Intaka Technology for onsite oxygen supply in exchange for a substantial donation to the anc (Tolsi 2013). While the charges against Nkonyeni for fraud, racketeering and corruption were later dropped, the mere existence of such allegations in the past demonstrates the need for ongoing civil society and media vigilance in relation to corruption in the health system. During the Zuma administrations, the tac and allied organisations, such as msf and Section 27, have played a critical role in raising issues vital to improving the functioning of the health system and public health, more broadly. As we have seen, inadequate and declining funding for global aids has necessitated the government exploring alternative approaches to resource mobilisation such as the nhi. The funding crisis has also heavily impacted on the civil society sector. In this context, it is ironic that while the tac both remains relevant and has an admirable fifteen-year record of rights-based health advocacy it is radically under-funded. The tac has been at the sharp end of this and reports emerged that it was faced with closure at the end of 2014 (eNCA 2014). tac Board of Directors member Heywood has been quoted in a media report as having linked its funding crisis to declining levels of support from foreign donors in a context where less than ten per cent of its funding comes from inside South Africa (ibid.). 60 Mbali DfID was singled out for particular criticism for withdrawing funds from the tac. At a press conference in Johannesburg in November 2014 tac Secretary-General Anele Yawa was quoted as having highlighted the influence upon this funding decision of the idea that South Africa is a middle-income country which has been successful in combating aids (Smith 2014). This was echoed in a quotation by a DfID spokesperson who stated that South Africa has made enormous economic progress over the past two decades and it is right that our relationship has changed from one of aid to one of mutual cooperation and trade (ibid.). South Africa may be a middle-income country, yet, it has some of the highest levels of inequality measured in the world and, critically, in 2012 the country had one thousand new infections and an average of 760 people died from AIDS-related illness in the country every day (Shisana et al. 2014). Many policymakers and scientists around the world are now aspiring for an end of aids which seems increasingly, technically, in reach (Havlir and Beyrer 2012). One potential implication of the dispute between the tac and DfID over the latter’s withdrawal of funding to the former is that the globally dominant aspiration for the future end of aids with universal access to arvs and combination prevention could, on occasion, be confused with the current state of the global pandemic. Another issue it highlights is what Rebecca Davis has termed “fickle donor appetites: certain causes become celebrated and then fall away” (Davis 2013). It is also interesting to explore some potential factors behind the limited domestic commitment to funding aids activism and declining foreign donor funds for such activism. Domestically, the financial woes of the tac are far from unique. Venerable ngos such as Rape Crisis Cape Town, the Institute for Democracy in Africa (idasa) and the Out in Africa film festival have faced closure (ibid.). South Africa has yet to have an entrenched and substantial culture of philanthropy among its “black diamonds”: of the affluent new black elite, only Patrice Motsepe has signed up to the Giving Pledge initiated by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to donate 50 per cent of the funds generated through their family assets to charity (Davis 2013; Nsehe 2013). There is also the fact that the nature of the tac’s advocacy – especially around hiv prevention – may prove more controversial with conservative funding bodies. Its involvement in condom promotion and its support for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (lgbt) equality are anathema to some religions, which may impact on their access to grants from certain faith-based organisations. In this context, it is worth noting that Everatt and Solanski found AIDS Activism and the Post-apartheid State 61 that faith-based philanthropy is the most substantial type of South African giving: of the 89 per cent of religious South African respondents, 96 per cent gave time, money or goods to these types of charities (Everatt and Solanski, cited in Maharaj et al. 2007: 87). In addition, some Corporate Social Responsibility (csr) initiatives have been reluctant to donate funds for advocacy, in general. Friedman et al. have argued that current trends in csr in South Africa have favoured material development (donations of funds for good or services for the poor) over “intangibles” such as the arts, advocacy or policy formulation (Friedman, Hudson and Mackay 2007: 197). Making the case for more csr funding of these sort of projects they have argued that, … to concede the funding of creative and intellectual activity to governments (by excluding it from csr budgets) is to stultify it or risk eliminating it altogether given that the government is unlikely to support alternatives to its perspective (ibid.: 198). As we have seen, in the case of aids, the tac’s advocacy has played a critical role in challenging the government by highlighting poor policy formulation and implementation in ways which have crucial in fundamentally changed the course of the epidemic. The extent to which the arv roll-out the tac called for has improved health in South Africa was indicated by a related increase in lifeexpectancy in the country from 52 years of age in 2005 to 61 in 2014 (StatsSA 2014: 5). At the time of writing, the tac has had a relatively successful public fundraising effort called “Save tac and Save Lives”, which prevented the organisation from being threatened with imminent closure. In this campaign the organisation managed to raise an estimated 60 per cent of their budget for 2015/16 (Heywood 2014b). These funds were raised through 350 individual donations, contributions by foundations and other established ngos and two corporate donors and the conclusion of a major R11 million funding agreement in 2015. In 2015 their fundraising appeal was under the theme “Invest in Social Justice! Invest in Activism! Invest in aids prevention!”. South African musician Johnny Clegg has pledged to help the organisation raise R1 million to combat tb and multi-drug resistant (mdr) tb in 2015. Yet the organisation also cautioned that tac and other civil society organisations’ financial situation remains very difficult. There is no cause for complacency. A new funding model is needed. heywood 2014b 62 Mbali Conclusion Twenty years after South Africa’s democratic transition, having successfully combatted the denialism of the Mbeki administration, the civil society activism of the tac has catalysed creation of the largest arv programme in the world. Its activism has drawn on socio-economic rights-based legal arguments and anti-apartheid symbolism to powerfully alter the course of the epidemic in the country. The country also now has Aaron Motsoaledi, a motivated and relatively competent national minister of health, who champions access to arvs. When compared to the nadir of Mbeki’s aids denialism which is estimated to have caused 330,000 preventable deaths this arv roll-out represents tremendous social and political progress (Chigwedere et al. 2008). Motsoaledi is also driving the roll-out of an nhi scheme which could promote social justice in the country’s health system in a more fundamental way than ever before. The nhi scheme is vital in a context where foreign donor funding is declining and where inequities between the private and public health system remain: especially given that the health system as a whole faces a heavy burden of hiv cases. nhi will not, however, be a magic bullet for the problems in South Africa’s health system, there are pitfalls such as the human resource crisis in the health sector, mismanagement and corruption and the promotion of powerful vested interests over the right of the poor to access health care services. In this context, the health advocacy will likely continue to be vital in holding the government accountable in adhering to key constitutional values in developing nhi. The nhi, as proposed in the Green Paper, would involve a fundamental restructuring of South Africa’s health care financing and management, which would require both the public’s trust and their involvement to ensure the most effective possible use of funds to promote the right to access to health care services. The tac has been one of the most significant post-apartheid social movements, especially in the health sector. Its funding crisis is concerning in that it points to the impact of the financial crisis of 2008 and capricious foreign donor funding decisions upon health advocacy in relation to a serious and entrenched epidemic in a developing country. In the domestic sphere, it also sadly reflects the relative dearth of philanthropy by wealthy individuals and csr giving for pro-poor, rights-based policy advocacy within the country. aids is in many ways reflective of global and local inequalities in access to resources and incorrect prioritisation of issues by the wealthy and the powerful. In the international community, there is increasing talk of the possible end of aids. This would involve humanity conquering set of multi-year, global, political, AIDS Activism and the Post-apartheid State 63 scientific and socio-economic challenges: activism remains critically important to accomplish this goal. Bibliography aids2031 Costs and Financing Working Group 2010. “The Long-Term Costs of HIV/AIDS in South Africa”. Washington, DC: Results for Development Institute. Bateman, C. 2013. “Drug Stock-outs: Inept supply-chain management and corruption”, South African Medical Journal 103 (9): 600–602. 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Smith, D. 2014. “UK has ‘signed ... a ... death warrant’ for South Africans with HIV-Aids”, The Guardian, 5 November. The Star. 2000. “Leading figures on AIDS panel”, The Star, 5 May. StatsSA 2014. “Mid-year population estimates”. URL: <http://beta2.statssa.gov.za/ publications/P0302/P03022014.pdf> (accessed on 14 January 2015). Steinberg, C. 2006. “Can reasonableness protect the poor? A review of South Africa’s socio-economic rights jurisprudence”, South African Law Journal 123 (2): 264–279. Sunday Times 2002. “Madiba to put Aids activist’s case to Mbeki”, Sunday Times, 28 July. TAC (Treatment Action Campaign) 2003. “TAC Appeal for International Solidarity for March to Opening of Parliament on 14 February 2003”. URL: <http://www.healthgap. org/camp/tac.html> (accessed on 3 August 2011). TAC 2014a. “A people’s health manifesto”. URL: <http://www.tac.org.za/sites/default/ files/TAC_ElectionManifesto_Booklet3.pdf> (accessed on 27 November 2014). 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The influx of immigrants, especially from parts of Africa ridden by violence and political disasters, brought fears of borders collapsing in the aftermath of pass laws and influx control. The settlement of immigrants in urban centres that used to be regulated by the 1950 Group Areas Act appeared like an excess of diversity that would threaten the boundaries of even a rainbow nation. This was the case not least at the time of the 2008 violence in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, which led to some very useful discussions and clarifications as exemplified in the two consecutive rounds of analysis of xenophobia and violence delivered very promptly by the Human Sciences Research Council (hsrc 2008; Hadland 2008; cf. Coplan 2009). Paradoxically, South African citizenship claims have historically often been legitimised precisely with reference to histories of migrations and treks. As Loren Landau pointed out in the course of the hsrc debates, understandings of xenophobia often disguised the fact that – on both sides of the frontier of locals and aliens – generations of migrants, movers and invaders existed, and that often aspirations to superior rights of belonging would be of quite recent origin (Landau 2008). Xenophobic violence therefore often represented a confrontation between different generations of claims of belonging. Consequently, debates and arguments around such claims will be flat and misleading, unless an historical perspective is brought in. This article tries to add an historical perspective to debates around citizenship and claims-making by discussing different types of tactics used for selfrepresentation by earlier immigrants. It does so by comparing two groups of South African Muslim citizens with different histories of arrival and struggles for integration, and examining changes in their modes of self-presentation during the 20th century. It gives special attention to the so-called Durban Zanzibaris – a community originating in freed slaves brought to Natal in the 1870s – whose cultural entrepreneurship has been particularly effective. Zanzibari endeavours are compared to the changing identity tactics of groups of Cape 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published in Social Dynamics 38 (3), 2012, 454–466. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�6736_006 From Apartheid to the “Rainbow Nation” 69 Malay and Cape Muslims during and after apartheid. The discussion is based on archival research, on secondary sources that are not easily available, as well as on the author’s recent field research on the post-1980s history of the Zanzibaris (Seedat 1973; Oosthuizen 1982; Kaarsholm 2010; Sheriff 2008; Kaarsholm 2014). The chapter seeks to open up new perspectives on ways in which notions of diasporic identity can interact with and support claims for national citizenship within changing contexts of multiculturalism. The two historical trajectories are used to suggest continuities, but also ways in which the fixations of identity and culture at the heart of apartheid aspirations may be freed and opened up through a very different post-apartheid framework in South Africa of multiculturalism based on democracy and more flexible understandings of culture and boundaries (cf. Kymlicka [1995] 1997; Taylor 1999; Parekh [2000] 2006; Sen 2006). Changing Multiculturalisms, Diasporas and Tactics Discussions of immigrants and post-1994 xenophobia have neglected the extent to which the old South Africa was one of multiculturalism and the social engineering of diversity. In its own self-understanding, apartheid South Africa from the 1950s was a consociationalist project, aimed at building structures of governance for different “pillars” of identities and cultures to co-exist and reach “consensus” (and in this sharing Dutch roots of inspiration from Lijphart 1968, 1977, 1985). This was matched in forms of African nationalism that went along with separate development, homelands and a federalist perspective, and which provided a traditionalist counterpoint to the unfolding of a modernist secular nationalism, as represented by the African National Congress (anc). The Inkatha movement and later the Inkatha Freedom Party (ifp) are the most spectacular examples of this, which interweaved through shifts of traditionalism and modernism with the development of the anc until the 1970s (cf. Marks 1986: 42–73; Cope 1993; Hughes 2011). But also in other contexts, the multicultural engineering of apartheid accommodated actually existing needs for self-articulation and debate on morality and identity, as can be seen in popularity both before and after 1994 of local-language radio stations (see Lekgoathi 2012a, 2012b). Thus, the ethnicisation of politics and governance central to apartheid was able to relate to actually existing, strong understandings of culture, tradition and community belonging, but was also based on a systematically graduated scale of recognition of identities and cultural rights (cf. Mamdani 1999; Kaarsholm 1999). 70 Kaarsholm The cracks in apartheid multiculturalism became manifest from the 1970s with the Soweto rebellion against “Bantu education” signalling a head-on challenge that became important in confrontations during the 1980s and early 1990s. The democratic transition of 1994–1996, however, and the extensive catalogue of rights – including cultural ones – contained in the new Constitution as an outcome of the “pacted” transition (Sisk 1995) – brought its own notions of multiculturalism with it: “If apartheid South Africa was multiculturalism writ large and abused, post-apartheid South Africa [was] multiculturalism revised” (Bangstad 2006: 41). The revision has not unfolded without tensions between the promotion of cultural rights on the one hand and more “secularist” and Jacobin understandings of national citizenship on the other (Taylor 1999: 151; cf. Baderoon and Green 2012: 170). But there can be no doubt that post-1994 South Africa and its Constitution provide radically transformed possibilities for the recognition of difference and for multicultural interaction within a shared framework of democracy. At the same time, affirmative action brought newly differentiated understandings of citizenship with it. Black economic empowerment and preferential quota systems in access to public goods were deployed in ways that implied a stratification of citizenship (Chipkin 2007; Kaarsholm 2009: 414f.). Immigrants coming to South Africa after 1994 therefore entered into very dynamic contestations between different claims to be part of the rainbow – or to be a more integral part of it than someone else. The apartheid control of population movements and engineering of residential geographies involved extensive bureaucratic provisions and technologies of classification, registration, identification and monitoring. This strategy of creating order provided a thriving setting for diaspora formation that could also provide space for manoeuvre. Migrant labourers – recruited, housed and segregated through the bureaucracies and technologies of the labour bureaux would become creators and upholders of diasporas through home associations, traditionalist courts, indunas, as well as forms of ... popular cultural performance like ingoma and is’cathamiya (Erlmann 1991, 1996). Attached to this regulated world of labour migrancy was an informal underworld of illegal migration, of bypassing and undermining influx control, building political opposition to apartheid, but also of upholding culturally mediated networks between town and countryside, between the metropolis and the homelands, and between South Africa and the southern African region. The transnationalism of informal immigration after the transition to democracy thus had its extensive precedents in the old South Africa, but has of course intensified to quite different proportions and scales – involving many more people and people coming from much further afield. At the same time notions From Apartheid to the “Rainbow Nation” 71 of diaspora belonging have also changed, and migrants’ tactics may be very far from involving a return to a homeland (Mbembe and Nuttall 2004; Kaarsholm 2010; Potts 2010). Jonathan Friedman and Sindre Bangstad have described how diaspora may be experienced as both liberation and stigma, and how it may support both tactics of “chosen hybridity” and may lead to “enforced exclusion” (Friedman 1997; Bangstad 2006: 33). Shahid Vawda has contrasted the tactics of integration and what he called the “survivalism” and “coping strategies” of Senegalese and Malawian migrants in Durban (Vawda 2000, 2002).2 Vawda dealt very specifically with the different combinations of practical steps transnational migrants take to establish a foothold, and did exploratory research among Senegalese, Congolese, Burundian, Rwandan, Somali and Malawian immigrants. There were strong and entrepreneurial groups of both Senegalese and Malawian immigrants, and both groups were predominantly Muslim, but they faced very different challenges, and dealt with them in correspondingly different ways. On the one hand, groups with a Malawian background – and long histories of interacting with South Africa – would filter inconspicuously into townships on the outskirts of town like Mariannhill or Inanda, and would gradually “melt into” the landscape and become local. On the other hand, people coming more recently from Senegal and with no local language, would establish homes in the city centre, utilise networks and facilities available there – as provided for example by mosques and Islamic ngos – and stake their claims rather through a more high-profile “flying the flag” of diaspora. In this way, two types of tactics were applied, which might represent different choices on the part of immigrants, but might also be characteristic of different generations of immigrants or of immigrants with different backgrounds. In both cases, Islam was a central ingredient within the bundles of tactics applied, but utilised in different ways as either something well-established in the South African context, or – alternatively – as a framework within which new notions of identity and transnationality might be developed. Cape Malays and Mozbiekers: Coloured Identities from Stigma to Purification Similarly contrasting sets of tactics centring on either high-profile notions of diaspora – “flying the flag” – or gradual assimilation as a way to establish 2 In contrast to Vawda, I have used “strategy” to refer to frameworks of control, and “tactics” to refer to efforts to escape or manipulate them (cf. de Certeau [1980] 1984). 72 Kaarsholm credentials as local resident and citizen – “melting” – can seen in the ways different subgroups classified as “Coloured” under apartheid have addressed identity and claims-making in the transition from apartheid to rainbownation multiculturalism. Classification as Coloured under apartheid legislation involved many contradictions. Coloured identity might signify both purity and mixedness, belonging as well as reluctant inclusion, a right to a certain level of citizenship and elevatedness above other categories, but also rootlessness and absence of homeland. The legal category of Coloured included a series of very different subgroupings from people of Khoi-San origin and Cape Malays to Other Asiatics and groups of racially mixed origin. “Indians” came under the Coloured umbrella of classification until 1961, and only then became a category of classification in its own right. Ethnographies of Coloured identity were particularly elaborate as far as the Cape Malay subgrouping was concerned as exemplified by the writings of Izak du Plessis (1944; du Plessis and Lückhoff 1953). This writing up of Cape Malay identity has been criticised as a prime example of apartheid social constructionism and the invention of cultural hierarchies – with Cape Malays being posed as a racial and cultural elite among Coloureds (Jeppie 1987). Within post-1994 rainbow-nation multiculturalism, however, “Malayism” has emerged again as a tactic of “flying the flag” and of staking a special claim to South African identity and citizenship by virtue – paradoxically – of also belonging to a diaspora (Bangstad 2006; Jappie 2011; on the globalisation of multiculturalism in a broader perspective, cf. Kymlicka 2007). Where Cape Malay in the apartheid understanding of du Plessis denoted belonging to an elite within the Coloured community of classification, post-1994 understandings of Malayism in the Western Cape seem to imply rather aspirations at moving beyond Colouredness to sets of pre- or anti-colonial belonging, and of claiming rights and recognition against this background. Bangstad thinks that such tactics should be seen as part of a broader mobilisation of Islamic identities and of Islamisation in the Cape, linking up with international movements, and with notions of Cape Muslim identity taking precedence over Malayisation (Bangstad 2006: 43). This has involved entering the competition for rights in the new South Africa through land restitution cases for reclaiming Muslim spaces in Cape Town, the identification and preservation of kramats and other holy sites, and efforts of research and commemoration of Islamic heritage (Green and Murray 2012). It has also involved controversies as to what exactly this heritage involves, and what aspects of Muslim heritage should be cultivated and preserved. In this way, the discussions around post-apartheid identity tactics have linked up with more general contestations between international agendas of Islamic From Apartheid to the “Rainbow Nation” 73 reformation and local ritual practices. Often this has taken the form of tabligh’ism or wahaab’ism confronting Sufi ritual. As an example, which brings together Islamisation and Malayisation, Bangstad mentions an episode during a visit of the Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed to the Cape in 1995, when – in a protest against impurity – Mohamed walked out of a performance of ratiep given as an example of local Islamic culture (Bangstad 2006: 46).3 Recent Malayisation has involved people’s recovering their family roots in the former Dutch East Indies and cultivating these through heritage projects. Bangstad and Jappie describe pilgrimages back to Java and meeting with immediate recognition there. Sometimes this has even involved the belonging to noble lineages or to the families of famous anti-colonial resistance leaders, who had been deported by the Dutch to the Cape (Bangstad 2006: 47ff.; Jappie 2011: 369ff.). Jappie mentions this as mediated through kietaabs – Islamic texts of Afrikaans or Malay in Arabic script – readable on both sides of the divide brought about by “colonialism and apartheid” (Jappie 2011: 370). Malayisation has also involved aspects of “big” politics and of south-south international relations. In 1994 – immediately before the first democratic elections in South Africa – the Tercentenary of the arrival of Shayk Yussuf at the Cape – an Islamic anti-colonial dignitary from Java deported by the Dutch – was celebrated in great style in Cape Town with the attendance of prominent political leaders from both South Africa and Malaysia. A year later both Indonesia and Malaysia opened consulates in Cape Town, and the Malaysian Prime Minister visited. In this way local tactics for the re-invention of identities and staking claims have resonated with Government policy and new interests of establishing southsouth international relations (Bangstad 2006: 44–45). At the same time, such tactics – besides supporting claims to a purity of descent – have established links with noble histories of anti-colonial resistance, and thus a justification of claims in terms of historical justice. Heritage projects connected with this have included kietaab preservation and scholarship, as exemplified by the Simon’s Town Heritage Museum (Jappie 2011: 392ff.).4 For other groupings, striving to become Coloured might be the expression of tactics of upliftment to avoid classification as Black or Bantu. It would therefore involve identity tactics of “melting” rather than “flying the flag”. This seems to apply to the case of the Mozbiekers, who moved from being seen 3 Ratiep is a Sufi ritual performance – controversial in the Cape from the 19th century – in which male dancers penetrate their bodies with spikes or other sharp implements. 4 Cf. the Museum’s website ulr: <http://www.simonstown.com/museum/sthm.htm> (accessed on 15 June 2015) and its video on Cape Muslim history (Simon’s Town Heritage Museum 2010). 74 Kaarsholm as “the genuine Negroes” of the Cape and representing a distinct and clearly demarcated cultural identity in the 19th century to disappearing into Colouredness in the 20th (Harries 2000: 34). The Mozbiekers originated in groups of first slaves imported directly from Inhambane and the southern Mozambique coast in the Cape from the eighteenth century onwards, and later also groups of “prize Negroes” – liberated slaves, who were brought to the Cape as indentured labourers in the wake of abolition in 1808. As the 19th century progressed the Mozbiekers were increasingly made up of people originating in northern rather than southern Mozambique (Harries 2000: 33, on slaves from Mozambique and prize Negroes in Cape Town, cf. Shell [1994] 2001: 45f. and 146–148). Harries explains the “melting” away of Mozbieker identity tactics into Colouredness as rooted firstly in Christianisation and the use being made by missionaries of freed slaves, who had been converted and educated, to proselytise among other groups of Africans (on slaves, baptism and civil rights, cf. Shell [1994] 2001: 363–365); and secondly, in the effect of the modes of racial thinking and classification coming into use at the end of the 19th century, focusing on “scientific” criteria of race and language, rather than on historical origins, and in the process making Mozbiekers part of the more general classification of Bantu (Harries 2000: 46). Becoming Coloured and Christian therefore became an increasingly attractive alternative in terms of identity. Although some families continued to recognise themselves as Mozbiekers, they abandoned the formal use of this word and no longer saw themselves as forming a separate community. Over time, the term ‘Mozbieker’ lost its currency in the English language while, in Afrikaans, it reverted to its original, historical meaning as a term of reference for a slave of Mozambican origin. harries 2000: 485 From Zanzibaris to Amakhuwa An interesting case of identity tactics involving both – or in alternation – “flying the flag of diaspora” and “melting into the local tapestry” is represented in the history of the Durban Zanzibaris. Not unlike the Mozbiekers, the Zanzibaris originated in a group of approximately 550 people of Mozambican 5 Harries says little, though, of Mozbiekers who were or became Muslims, and how this may have affected their identity tactics. On the growth of Islam at the Cape, see Shell ([1994] 2001: 356–358). From Apartheid to the “Rainbow Nation” 75 origin – predominantly Makua speakers from Northern Mozambique – who were brought to Durban as “liberated slaves” between 1873 and 1877 (Sheriff 2008; Kaarsholm 2014: 193f.). In Durban they came under contract as indentured labourers, were administered by the Protector of Indian Immigrants, and from the 1890s became residents at Kings Rest on the Bluff. They became known as Zanzibaris, because they were described in the Natal government’s advertisement of their labour and in the Natal press as “East Africans from Zanzibar” and “liberated Africans from Zanzibar”, from where the British Navy anti-slavery campaign was coordinated (Seedat 1973: 6; Sheriff 2008: 557f.; Kaarsholm 2016: 446ff.). A few of the Zanzibaris were Christians and became wards of Catholic missionaries, who trained and used them as catechists among other Africans in the Durban area (Oosthuizen 1982: 13–16; Kaarsholm 2010). Like the Mozbiekers, this group “melted away” as a distinct entity from the early 20th century and – in this case – became Zulu speakers. The majority of the Zanzibaris, however, were Muslims and from early on came under the protection of the Indian Muslim business community in central Durban, who bought the land on the Bluff for their use. In contrast to their Christian brothers, the Muslim Zanzibaris developed strong and persistent “flying the flag” identity tactics, emphasising the diasporic nature of their community identity. Importantly and paradoxically, this self-presentation as a non-Bantu “lost tribe” also included a focus on Makua language preservation (for a more elaborate discussion, see Kaarsholm 2014: 194f.). In representing themselves as Zanzibaris, the Makua-speaking ex-slaves were re-inventing themselves according to a pattern that was more general in East Africa and along the Swahili coast in the late 19th century, where the stigma of slavehood would continue to adhere to groups of liberated slaves, who therefore often sought to design new identities, names and languages for themselves as Swahili or Zanzibaris (Ewald 2000; Fair 2001). The Durban Zanzibaris’ tactics of exoticism was successful in making the community conspicuous and different, but it was also a set of tactics that fluctuated with the success or failure of the community’s struggles for recognition by the state (Seedat 1973: 36f.; Kaarsholm 2014: 196). Zanzibari diasporic self-representation alternated with a second set of identity tactics that were more clandestine, more directly based on connections with Mozambique, and through northern Mozambique also with a wider Indian Ocean world of travel and connectivities. From early on, the Zanzibari settlement at Kings Rest had been a landmark of identification and networking for African Muslim immigrants arriving in Durban, and for immigrants from Malawi and Mozambique in particular. Many of these connections were mediated through Islamic networks, which extended north through Lourenço 76 Kaarsholm Marques to Mozambique Island and Angoche (for a much more detailed discussion, see Kaarsholm 2014: 199f.). The theologies and ritual practices of the brotherhoods became an important part of the more inward-looking side of Zanzibari self-representation. This involved an understanding of Islam that gave considerable space and voice to women, and which allowed Islam to co-exist and interact with forms of Makua cultural practice, including elaborate procedures for the education and initiation of young boys and girls into adulthood. It also involved an understanding of Islam in which mawlid ritual performances were prominent as well as ziyaras (Kaarsholm 2014: 198f.).6 The Zanzibaris thus deployed a double set of identity tactics during most of the 20th century and until the end of apartheid. On the one hand, an externally directed tactic of claiming and performing a non-African, non-Bantu identity of semi-Arab Zanzibari-ness. On the other, an internal and migrants’ network-oriented one of African Muslim belonging with strong links to Mozambique. The two sets of tactics would come together, when the Makua language – as another powerful agent of community cohesion – could be presented to outsiders as a non-African language. They would come together also in the promotion of particularly powerful forms of medicines and healing as Zanzibari – though relying effectively on imports of herbs and expertise from Mozambique – a form of branding that continues to be popular and effective in both Durban and Johannesburg. Zanzibari “flying the flag of diaspora” tactics triumphed, paradoxically, in 1961 with their forced removal from Kings Rest under the Group Areas Act. At this point the majority of the members of the group were given classification under apartheid legislation as “Other Asiatics”. As such they were taken to the newly established Indian township of Chatsworth, rather than to one of the African townships. Forced removal was thus accompanied by the relative privilege of access to facilities of housing, education and health alongside South African Indians.7 After the transition to majority rule in 1994, the achievements of having been able to manoeuvre as non-Africans within the framework of the Group Areas Act became less of an asset, as affirmative action policies were in6 Mawlid can refer to the Prophet’s birthday, but also to ritual performances and poems used for the celebration of this and other important spiritual landmarks. Ziyara refers to a graveside commemoration, but is sometimes used interchangeably with mawlid. 7 This followed a complicated process during which some Zanzibaris had sought classification as “Coloured” – which was opposed by “Coloured” organisations in Durban, but which resulted in a number of them being removed to Wentworth and other “Coloured” townships, rather than to Chatsworth (cf. Seedat 1973; Kaarsholm 2010). From Apartheid to the “Rainbow Nation” 77 troduced together with possibilities of redress for victims of apartheid. Within this new historical context, Zanzibaris – as represented now by the Zanzibari Civic Association and later the Zanzibari Development Trust – managed successfully to re-orient identity tactics so that the history of the Zanzibaris increasingly was represented as one of victimisation. Being the “descendants of freed slaves” thus moved from signifying distance from an African identity to implying instead a particularly honourable variety of African-ness. In Zanzibari identity tactics, this involved a new foregrounding of the slave past as well as a focus on indenture in Natal as a virtual continuation of slave labour. It involved a playing-down of Indian patronage and of the benefits that had resulted from the Zanzibaris’ good relations with the Indian Muslim business community, sometimes even implying that this had involved exploitation by the Indians of Zanzibari Africans. Finally it involved highlighting the injustice of forced removal to Chatsworth in 1961 as something that had endangered the cultural identity of the Zanzibari community. Post-apartheid aspirations for recognition based on such a revision of tactics met with success, when in 2004 a land restitution case gave back to the Zanzibaris the land at Kings Rest, from which they had been removed in 1961 under the Group Areas Act, and which had never been fully developed into a white suburban space (Clark 2004; for a more detailed account, see Kaarsholm “..” 2014: 205f.). After apartheid, for some Zanzibaris at least, history and identity have been increasingly re-thought in terms of relations with Mozambique and of the community’s representation – not a semi-Arab, but a Mozambican diaspora of Makua speakers or Amakhuwa. In the context of South Africa and the rainbow nation, this involves both defensive and offensive tactics. Defensively, it has involved efforts to protect Makua cultural practices and the Makua language, both of which have come under pressure. One pressure has its background in the growth in numbers and physical diffusion of Zanzibaris – several thousand people in South Africa today would see themselves as being linked to the community, and many of these live outside of Chatsworth and Durban – e.g. in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Another pressure is from other subcultural identifications that attract young people and may undermine their “discipline” in adhering to Zanzibari culture and Makua language training (Moola 2010). Still another pressure is from a commercialisation of culture – of ratiep and mawlid performances, moving increasingly away from ritual practice and towards one of commercial cultural entertainment, for example at weddings. Finally there is the impact of reform movements to purify Islam of traditional cultural elements (cf. Bangstad 2006: 54). In more pro-active terms, Amakhuwa tactics have included aspirations for cultural recognition, for instance in the form of having the Makua language 78 Kaarsholm taught in primary schools. They have also involved some level of diaspora recognition from the Mozambican government – in this respect providing a parallel to the endeavours of post-apartheid Malayism in the Cape vis-à-vis Malaysia and Indonesia. Connections with Mozambique have been provided importantly through Islamic networks, and in recent years delegations of Zanzibari Amakhuwa have attended big-scale gatherings in Maputo of Makua speakers with links to northern Mozambique. These meetings have been organised through the Islamic Congress of Mozambique and the Mozambican Islamic Women’s Association. Apart from being meetings of predominantly Sufi-oriented Muslims, the meetings have offered an opportunity to bring Makua-speakers together representing both a southern African and a more widely global Amakhuwa diaspora. In the context of Mozambique, the cultural politics of Amakhuwa identity and diaspora have been closely related to discussions around the marginalisation of the north of the country, where the presence of the state since Portuguese colonial times has been fragile. The radically secularist policies of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) in the first period after Independence in 1974 contributed to the alienation of Muslims in the north, and to support for the Resistência National Moçambicana (Renamo) during the civil war from the late 1970s until 1992. The inclusion of Muslim ministers into the national government in 1994 was aimed at boosting the support for Frelimo in the north. In 2004, Frelimo won its first election victory in the north, and no Muslim ministers were subsequently appointed, which has led to a resurgence after 2004 of Islamic cultural and development mobilisation (Morier-Genoud 2007; Bonate 2010). The interface between the Zanzibari Amakhuwa diaspora in Durban and Muslim and national politics in Mozambique therefore also represents a very interesting meeting between two alternative scenarios of accommodation between nationalist secular regimes and Islam. On the one hand, a post-apartheid South African framework of multiculturalist inclusion of Muslim minorities, providing space and recognition for an Islamic public and debates within it to unfold. On the other hand, a Mozambican political approach to secularism that has so far been more restrictive and inconsistent in coming to terms with a Muslim population that represents the majority in the north of the country. Transnationalism, Islam and Citizenship This chapter has highlighted examples of identity tactics staking claims to citizenship in the new South Africa through self-representations that include From Apartheid to the “Rainbow Nation” 79 both South African-ness and transnational belonging. This does not necessarily involve dual citizenship, but requires recognition from the state and fellow citizens of diversity and multicultural difference. It also implies that a dimension of secondary transnational belonging can be an essential resource when substantiating a claim to national citizenship. The discussion has been concerned with the struggles for the recognition of groups with a long historical presence in South Africa, but the types of identity tactics deployed can be seen as models also for contemporary groups of aspiring immigrants for whom a continuation of active transnational linkages may be even more crucial. As the violence of recent years and the controversies concerning xenophobia indicate, such struggles represent a highly dynamic field of contention, as different tactics and generations of claims are confronted (Amisi and Ballard 2005; HSRC 2008; Hadland 2008; Coplan 2009; Amisi et al. 2010). Within this field of contention, the trajectories of accommodation of sets of both national and transnational belonging by Cape Muslims and the Durban Zanzibaris might be seen as exemplary. The Zanzibaris in particular have been known to provide a role model for other African Muslim groupings with a background in immigration (Kaarsholm 2011: 113). For the two groups under discussion, Islam has provided an important set of both local and transnational networks and possibilities for articulation. As Goolam Vahed, Shamil Jeppie and Abdulkader Tayob have shown, Islam in South Africa has also more recently become an increasingly important public arena, capable of providing both a common framework and giving voice to an extensive diversity of voices (Vahed and Jeppie 2005; Tayob 2007; cf. also the still very useful historical overview of “traditional” and “resurgent” Islam in Tayob 1995). It has also been an arena, which – in contrast to Mozambique – has consistently been given space and recognition within South African post-apartheid multiculturalist democracy (cf. Kaarsholm 2015). It therefore offers an important set of capabilities for dialoguing with and integrating the resources represented by large groups of transnational immigrants. As discussed, the historical examples of Cape Muslim and Zanzibari cultural entrepreneurship provide important examples of how such integration may be negotiated peacefully and practically. They give an indication of how the two sets of tactics of signalling difference and integration may be reconciled within the framework of a tolerant multicultural democracy. There is no doubt that multiculturalism in South Africa is challenged by African economic empowerment policies that can be used to discriminate against groups of population with non-African backgrounds. Also by the persistence of inequalities that leave large numbers of people, including youth, consigned to unemployment and marginalisation, and therefore experiencing themselves as 80 Kaarsholm being outside the bounds of the rainbow nation. 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Southall and J. Lutchman (eds.) State of the Nation: South Africa 2004–2005. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 252–254 and 281–282. Vawda, S. 2000. “Foreign Migrants, Governance and Local Development Strategies: A Case Study of International African Migrants in Durban”. In P. Skalník (ed.) Sociocultural Anthropology at the Turn of the Century: Voices from the Periphery. Prague: Set-Out, 105–124. Vawda, S. 2002. “Migrants in Durban: Vulnerability and Coping Strategies among Two Migrant Communities”. In A. Bouillon et al. (eds.) Governance, Urban Dynamics and Economic Development: A Comparative Analysis of the Metropolitan Areas of Durban, Abidjan and Marseilles. Durban: Plumbline Publishing, 225–241. Part 2 The Land Question ⸪ chapter 5 Dispossession, Black South African Land Ownership and Restitution in Historical Perspective, 1913–1948 and Beyond Harvey M. Feinberg Introduction Black South Africans, during the 19th century, lost substantial amounts of land in all sections of the country. Wars against the minority white population caused this rural dispossession. The whites succeeded, in part, because there was little unity among the different African societies, and the whites often had African allies. Leonard Thompson estimates that the Zulu lost about two-thirds of their land and the southern Tswana even more by the end of the 19th century (Thompson 2000: 125, 128). Consequently, most black South Africans either lived on the remaining areas left to them, often referred to as “reserves”, or on white owned land. The size of African losses was confirmed in 1913 when the new Union government passed the Natives Land Act (Act No. 27 of 1913): this law identified only about 7.3 per cent of the area of South Africa for African ownership. After 1948, the apartheid government orchestrated a new, large-scale dispossession to evict African owners and tenants from their urban homes and districts, as well as to expel rural Africans from so-called “black spots”. This policy of forced removals may have included as many as 3.5 million people and included a reorganization of rural space to accommodate the people who were removed from cities or their rural land. The Bantustans, a critical part of the apartheid policy, were also created. Thus, there were two dispossession eras: In the later 19th century, there was a sharp reduction in the amount of land African societies owned, whereas after 1948, the official aim was to achieve that elusive goal from 1913, a segregated society within the commonly referred to 13.7 per cent of South Africa. Yet, the 1990s negotiators, working to create a new South Africa, decided on a restitution process which was designed to deal with the wounds of forced removals and black spot removal during the apartheid years, but claims from the 19th century dispossession were not considered. However, in 1994, state officials and members of Parliament chose 1913 as the earliest date for claims for the return of land lost due to “past discriminatory laws or practices”. 1913 was chosen © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�6736_007 88 Feinberg because policymakers and others believed that the infamous Natives Land Act was the cause of great injustices in rural South Africa after 1913. The focus of this chapter is on the period between 1913 and 1948 when it is unclear how many Africans actually lost their rural land as a result of discriminatory actions. In 1913, it was widely known that allocating only 7.3 per cent of the land was grossly inadequate. Thus, the Natives Land Act included a clause creating a Natives Land Commission to determine how much more land should be added to the African reserves, called “scheduled areas” after 1913 and equaling about 10 million morgen. The government’s emphasis between 1913 and 1936 (when Parliament passed a new land law) was on adding land for African purchase and use. After 1936, adding land was still a goal, but with a changed focus: the state would buy most of the available land (in competition with potential African buyers) and rent that land to Africans. Buying by individuals or partnerships (syndicates) was discouraged. Finally, rural Africans were not all victims; buyers and owners exemplified agency in their efforts to buy land and their interactions with state officials. In addition to buying land after 1913, they could and did defend their ownership rights. The main aim of this chapter is to illustrate these historical developments before apartheid through evaluating the Natives Land Act and its impact. Then, I shall describe African agency in relation to African land ownership during the first half of the twentieth century. Evidence on African agency explains how selected Africans exploited the exception clause in the Natives Land Act to continue to buy land after 1913 and emphasizes the following: African initiative in identifying land for sale, their success in persuading state officials to approve purchases outside of the “scheduled areas”, their ingenuity in raising the money to meet financial obligations, and the non-violent defense of their ownership rights. I shall also evaluate the degree to which segregation, the main goal of the promoters of the Natives Land Act, was achieved by 1948. Finally, the evidence within these discussions will demonstrate important contrasts between 1913 and 1948 and apartheid policies (see Feinberg 2015). The Natives Land Act, 1913 At the same time that African dispossession occurred during the 19th century, certain Africans bought land, mainly for their tribes, especially during the last quarter. No Transvaal1 law existed to prevent Africans from buying land, but, in 1 During the 19th century, Afrikaans-speakers established two republics in the interior of what is today’s South Africa: the South African Republic, also known as the Transvaal, and the Black South African Land Ownership 89 1880, officials established a formal trusteeship system. Land bought by Africans had to be registered and transferred in the name of a public official or agency, “in trust” for the relevant African communities.2 The “in trust” system continued into the Union period until at least the 1930s (see Bergh and Feinberg 2004). After the Anglo-Boer War, Reverend Edward Tsewu challenged the unwillingness of the British colonial government (following the Afrikaner system described above) to allow him to register his land in his own name and won in court. After the Tsewu decision in 1905, Africans were allowed to transfer their purchases in their own names.3 Between 1905 and June 1913, Transvaal Africans purchased and registered at least 399 farms (Feinberg 1993: 93). The South African Parliament passed the Natives Land Act on 19 June 1913, and territorial segregation became a dominant goal among the white South African minority. This law was designed to prevent an expansion of the land Africans could own or lease in the future. The Act prohibited Africans from buying land outside of the “scheduled areas” identified in the act. This prohibition limited the land available to Africans to about 10 million morgen (about 22 million acres; out of 143 million morgen):4 7.3 per cent for almost seventy per cent of the population.5 However, rural African land purchases were still possible because Section 1 (1) of the Natives Land Act included a very important phrase, “Except with the approval of the Governor-General”. This exception clause allowed the Governor General to consent to new land purchases outside the scheduled areas for African use only. The Act also created the Native Lands Commission to identify additional land for Africans. The Commission submitted its recommendations for adding about eight million morgen to the scheduled areas, but Parliament did not enact those recommendations into law. The government then turned to administrative action after 1918 to approve African land purchases. 2 3 4 5 Orange Free State. In 1910, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State joined with the Cape and Natal to form the Union of South Africa. This identification of the four provinces continued until 1994, when new provinces were created as part of the transformation of the new South Africa. The old Transvaal was divided into four provinces, North-West, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, and, eventually, Limpopo. The Secretary for Native Affairs (to 1881), the Native Location Commission (1881–1884) and the Superintendent of Native Affairs (after 1884). Tsewu v. Registrar of Deeds 1905 ts 130. Until the 1970s land was measured in “morgen” (one imperial morgen equals 0.856 metric ha). Beinart (1994: 10) estimates that around eight percent was actually “reserved for African occupation” and owned by Africans, together with land owned by missions. I am emphazising the land identified in the Natives Land Act scheduled areas. 90 Feinberg The Natives Land Act has become infamous since 1913 and historians and African leaders have blamed the Act for a number of terrible consequences. However, the Act only applied to the Transvaal and Natal and no African landowner with a title deed and proper transfer lost his land because the Act was not retroactive. Officially, the implementation of the anti-squatting clauses in the Act was deferred until the Natives Land Commission reported and Parliament acted on that report. Nevertheless, writers point to the evictions from Orange Free State (ofs) farms of African share-croppers which were described by Sol Plaatje in his book Native Life in South Africa. Plaatje presented graphic details about the inhumane actions of some farmers and the hardships faced by people who were forced from land they had lived on for years. Large numbers of cattle died. Conditions were particularly difficult if the evictions occurred during the winter months (Plaatje 1916, chap. 4 and 5).6 Richard W. Msimang confirmed Plaatjes’ account in a pamphlet which listed the names of families evicted in Natal and the ofs, as well as narratives about evicted families in the Orange Free State (Msimang n.d.). Where did these homeless individuals and families go? Plaatje and Msimang described families wandering, attempting to find other white farmers to take them in. Msimang, however, included a newspaper article (unidentified, dated 5 October 1913) that reported that “hundreds [were] crossing northern borders” into Bechuanaland, while others migrated to Basutoland. There is also limited evidence that Native Affairs Department (nad) officials attempted to find new farms for those who were evicted, including on Crown land. No later than 1918 (and probably earlier) nad officials clearly intended to recommend that the Governor General approve “residence on another farm – whether within or without a Committee area” for rent-paying Africans who had been evicted.7 How much actual dispossession can be linked to the Natives Land Act is a matter of debate. African Agency: Challenges to the Natives Land Act There is no question that Africans acted as agents who tried to control their own destinies. Tens of thousands of black South Africans took advantage of 6 Also Willan (1984: 159–162), and especially p. 165 where Willan cites a Plaatje letter to the Christian Express (December 1913). 7 National Archives of South Africa [nasa], Pretoria, lde 726, 12473, Edward Dower, Memorandum to the Minister of Native Affairs, “Administration of the Natives Land Act, 1913”, 14 June 1918. Black South African Land Ownership 91 the exception clause to purchase over 3,300 farms and lots, with the approval of the Governor General, mostly in rural areas of the Transvaal and Natal, from 19 June 1913 to 31 December 1935.8 The actual number of purchases was greater because purchases in the Cape were not reported to Parliament after 16 February 1917 and there is no list of purchases for the time between 1936 and 1948. Properties ranged in size from a few morgen to several thousand morgen. In general, prices ranged from £1 to £3 per morgen. Depending on the size of the portion or the full farm or the quality of the land or the availability of water, Africans might pay £50 or £60 for lots or, for farms, a few hundred pounds or as much as £4,000 to £5,000 or more for their land. During this time, the Governor General granted permission for 1,502 purchases in the Transvaal; 1,644 in Natal; and 75 in the ofs.9 In addition, the Governor-General approved 1,472 mortgages and 2,849 leases, although a portion of these leases, especially in the ofs, went to whites who were renting land from the African owners for grazing.10 There were many willing African buyers both before and after 1913 and there were also many willing sellers, individual white landowners who wanted or needed to sell their land between 1913 and 1936.11 African buyers of farms fall into several categories: individuals; small groups of partners (between three to perhaps 15 in number, but frequently no more than six); large groups or partnerships (sometimes including 50 to 100 or more partners); and “tribes”.12 Only a small number of individuals could afford to buy farms in the Transvaal. 8 9 10 11 12 The source of these data is reports from the Governor General, 1913 to 1936, located in the Library of Parliament, Cape Town. The Natives Land Act specifically excluded the Cape and after a court confirmed this exclusion in 1917, reports to Parliament stopped including the number of Cape approvals. These approvals included a small number of African sales to whites in the Transvaal, and a larger number of African sales to whites and Indians in Natal. The majority was for the purchase of lots, particularly in Natal. Approval was not automatic. Officials rejected requests if they concluded that the requests did not meet the criteria established by the Native Affairs Department. Between June 1913 and 28 February 1921, the government rejected 337 requests; half of the rejections were about purchases. I have borrowed the terminology from the post-1994 period, when the South African state promoted a policy of “willing-seller” (whites) and “willing-buyer” (Africans) in order to increase the number of African rural landowners (dla 1997: vii). There were numerous examples between 1912 and 1932, at least. A portion of the sellers of farms were whites who were in significant financial distress, perhaps facing bankruptcy. Large groups sometimes signed a ‘memorandum of agreement’, which set out rules about their relationship as co-owners and created an executive committee to represent the group. An early reference to such a document can be found in a 1921 report. University of 92 Feinberg In Natal, fewer partnerships purchased farms, and the number of partners tended to be small. Small groups included the three owners of Boekenhoutkloof 146, and, inter alia, the seven owners of De Hoop 994, and the nine owners of Portion C of Buffelsdoorn 185. Examples of large groups include the 66 buyers of Bultfontein 293, Uitvalgrond 608 and Roodekuil 224 (1912), and over 200 co-purchasers of two portions of Roodekuil 206 (1922). 104 partnerships include over 3,500 men and women. There are hints in NAD letters that more people may have paid for a farm beyond the individuals identified on a deed because of the Hertzog administration’s serious efforts to limit the number of partners to six. To summarize, individuals and groups constituted more than half of the buyers.13 Almost all of their purchases were of farms outside of the scheduled areas and, in many cases, the new African owners had white neighbors, either on the farm itself or on an adjoining property. “Tribe” is a designation complicated by the different definitions associated with the word. Between 1913 and 1936, the word “tribe” usually referred to a traditional rural society, led by a “chief”. The kgosi of such societies as the Bafokeng, Bakwena ba Magopa and Bakgatla ba Makau, for example, bought land in the name of their societies.14 On occasion, a society, such as the Bafokeng, the Moloto, and the Bamosetla people led by Hans Makapan and his successors, owned a number of farms amounting to thousands of morgen. The government also imposed two additional identifications of a “tribe” and a tribe as buyer. First, nad administrators required a large group of buyers (beyond six partners) from different ethnic groups to register themselves as a “tribe”. These officials used considerable pressure, including, on occasion, the threat of disapproval of the transaction, to persuade the larger partnerships to become officially recognized as “tribes”.15 The leader of such a group was designated as a “headman”, and after 1921, the group often had to agree to a memorandum of agreement which identified the leaders and set out rules for the partners. This memorandum defined 13 14 15 Cape Town Archives, Herbst Papers, bc 79, D22.1 “Native Occupation of Land”, 24 October 1921. Based on an analysis of data in the Library of Parliament, Cape Town. The Bafokeng, Bakwena ba Magopa and Bakgatla ba Makau were, before the 19th century, independent, Bantu-speaking societies (so-called “tribes”), but were no longer independent by the 20th century. Their political structures were subordinate to the white Union of South Africa government after 1910. Section 5 (1) of the Native Administration Act (No. 38 of 1927) legitimized the practice after it had been implemented for several years. See nasa, nts 3608, 976/308, Additional Native Commissioner (nc), Pretoria, to M. Sive, 13 April 1933. The nts collection includes the records of the NAD. Black South African Land Ownership 93 their mutual rights and obligations and provid[ed] for the administration of the property by an executive committee appointed by the copurchasers and acting under the guidance of the Native Commissioner.16 The position of headman was not hereditary. The nad’s rationale for demanding the creation of an “artificial tribe” was that officials hoped that the owners would govern themselves “in accordance with tribal custom, that is by the elected headman assisted by a tribal council”.17 This requirement for heterogeneous groups of buyers continued into the 1930s.18 Second, and complicating the “tribe” identification, the state demanded that a homogeneous group of buyers from the same society, who wished to buy a farm (or portion) on their own as partners, rather than for the whole society, transfer the property in the name of the “tribe”, instead of in their own names.19 This expectation began in 1917, but was more consistently enforced from 1925 under Prime Minister James B.M. Hertzog. The incentive to accept this arrangement was the promise that those people who paid for the land would have exclusive occupation rights and use of the property and could pass these exclusive rights to their heirs. This arrangement was safeguarded because it was written into the deed of sale and the transfer deed.20 To summarize, the three groups of “tribal” buyers numbered fewer than half of the buyers of farms after 1913 in the Transvaal.21 Transvaal Africans raised money to buy farms in several different ways. They sold their cattle. Solomon Makapan agreed to buy a farm from D.J. Erasmus for 16 17 18 19 20 21 nasa, nts 3614, 1025/308, Secretary for Native Affairs (sna) to Minister of Native Affairs, Memorandum, 29 October 1932. Buffelsdoorn 185. Portion D. nasa, nts 3552, 557/308, I, sna to Additional nc, Pretoria, 2 February 1931. Vygeboschlaagte 168. In addition, the sna wrote: “Once an artificial tribe is properly constituted, it must function as a tribe”. See, for example, nasa, nts 3619, nc to Receiver of Revenue, 21 December 1934. This requirement creates difficulties for the historian (and Land Commissioners after 1998) trying to identify “ownership”. Did the property, in fact, belong to the entire society or to a sub-group within the society who were forced into a “tribal” form of transfer? nasa, nts 3438, 31/308, I. Tribal Resolution [about 26 November 1917; but before 3 December]. Wynandskraal 154: The resolution set out the terms of the purchase, including a clause recommended by the sna: “reserving actual rights of occupation and use for those members of the Tribe and their descendants who have contributed or may contribute towards payment of the purchase price”. Also, nts 3579, 780/308, sna to Dyason & Metelerkamp, 12 October 1932. Klipfontein 482. The percentages have been rounded off. Transvaal Africans rarely sold land which they had purchased. 94 Feinberg 800 cattle, valued at £4,000.22 The buyer of a portion of Kuilsrivier 12, Chief Mashung, sold cattle in 1923 for the down payment (earning £210.12.5) and again in 1924, this time for £180.23 In 1930, the African buyers of a portion of Kalkbank 112 “denuded themselves of most of their stock” to raise the money for their £1,000 down payment.24 Africans also used (or hoped to) their crop surpluses to raise money to help meet financial obligations. The co-owners of Klipfontein 196 used 229 bags of mealies to help pay a loan installment.25 The buyers of Elandsfontein 374 intended to rely on the farm’s high quality “turf soil” to produce surpluses of maize and kaffir-corn “to pay off the bulk of the purchase price”.26 Potential buyers also raised money to buy land by working for wages, either on farms or in the cities. Although details are lacking, hundreds of male co-owners from rural Transvaal districts worked in the cities at one time or another.27 Nevertheless, the most important source of funds to pay for a farm came from mortgages. Private individuals from the white population were the main source of mortgages for African buyers and landowners, equaling almost 80 per cent of the mortgages. The bulk of these people were men, but at least 98 women loaned money for at least 116 mortgages.28 In a small number of instances, Africans provided credit for other Africans or took over mortgages. One African mortgagee was Ismail Motsuenyane, who, in 1920, loaned £262.10 to Sebolon (sic) Seate, on a one-third share of portion C of Brooksby 360. The mortgage was for three years at an interest rate of eight percent.29 Melia Raborife loaned £92.10.0 to five male relatives. When 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 nasa, nts 3444, 62/308, Stegmann & Roos (Solicitors) to Acting sna, 23 January 1912. Makapan file. See also nts 3436, 45/308, Sub-Native Commissioner, Hamanskraal to sna, 10 September 1921. Witlaagte 445. nasa, nts 3450, 82/308, Detached Clerk, Rayton to Sub-Native Commissioner, August 8, 1924. Also, ibid., 29 September 1924. Kuilsrivier 12. nasa, nts 3561, 613/308, Assistant nc [L.F. Goldsworthy], Hamanskraal, to nc, Pretoria, 3 February 1930. Kalkbank 112. nasa, nts 3444, 59/308, snc, Hamanskraal, to sna, 7 April, 1921. Klipfontein 196. See also nts 3561, 613/308, Additional nc, Hamanskraal, to sna, 24 June 1939. Kalkbank 112. nasa, nts 3619, 1073/308, file 1, Additional nc to sna, 21 August 1931. Elandsfontein 374, and Additional nc to sna, 16 May 1932. Also, nts 3609, 981/308, Assistant nc, Hamanskraal, to F.J. Schikkinger (Attorney), 3 May 1934. Portion E, Buffelsdoorn 185. Twenty-one references, between 1917 and 1938, documented the migration of at least 1,450 men to the cities. At least 50 women were married and eleven were identified as “spinsters”; one was divorced. Of the identified married women, 25 were widows. Twenty of the women were married outside of community of property. Library of Parliament Data, 138, 139, 1921. See also nasa, nts 3452, 91/308, E.W. Lowe, Detached Clerk, Hamanskraal, to snc, Pretoria, 11 March 1927: George Makapan gave a Black South African Land Ownership 95 their portion was transferred to the Raborifes, Melia Raborife received a larger percentage of that land.30 Two Africans, Elias Selepe and Methusela Ntsie, took over mortgages from white mortgagees: J.C. Boltman, the mortgagee for a portion of Eerste Geluk 1863, “ceded” the mortgage to Selepe, who eventually foreclosed on the mortgagors and won control of part of that portion. Twentyone Africans owned a portion of Sjambokzynoudekraal 52; their original mortgage was £165, with an interest rate of eight per cent. The two mortgagees “arranged to cede their right, title and interest” in the loan to Ntsie in 1934.31 Repaying Debts In 1928, a Natives Affairs Department field officer referred to the attitude of certain debtors towards the risk of foreclosure: they “refuse to believe that the ground will be sold”.32 This attitude among African landowners was reinforced by the contemporary evidence which demonstrates that the inability to pay off mortgages on time rarely led to loss of land. Frequently, nad officials intervened to prevent land loss, actively engaging in negotiations to persuade the mortgagee to be patient and not to call in the mortgage, negotiations which usually led to an extension of the time for repayment by sympathetic mortgagees.33 When the mortgagee was adamant, officials or attorneys for either the lender or the Africans looked for another person willing to invest money in a new mortgage for the owners. nad officials pursued lengthy negotiations and other efforts because they strongly opposed African-owned land in African designated areas returning to white ownership; equally important, 30 31 32 33 mortgage for £442 at 5 per cent interest to the African purchasers of Legkraal 188 (Pretoria District). nasa, nts 3471, 156/308, snc, Rustenburg, to Buyers, 10 August 1926. Tweelaagte 180 and snc, Rustenburg, to sna, 2 November 1926. The original loan was in 1921, but transfer of Tweelaagte 180 did not occur until 1926; she earned eight per cent interest. nasa, nts 3493, 242/308, Additional nc to sna, 28 October 1929. Eerste Geluk 1863. nts 3585, 824/308, Sapirstein & Kuyper (Solicitors) to nad, 16 August 1934. nasa, nts 3426, 26/308, Assistant nc, Hamanskraal to sna, 8 November 1928. Elandsfontein 204. The attorneys for a mortgagee reminded a field officer that their client had been very patient and not pressed the mortgagors on Transactie 939. nasa, nts 3412, 4/308, Part 1, Budler and Meintjes, Solicitors, to snc, Nylstroom, 29 June 1921. Transactie 939. This same snc wrote to the sna about the mortgagee: “From our experience of Mr. Schultz in connection with the farm De Hoop and other farms he does not appear to wish to deal harshly with the natives and to enforce his rights of forfeiture”. nts 3412, 4/308, Part 1, snc, Nylstroom, to sna, 1 July 1921. Transactie 939. 96 Feinberg officials were particularly concerned about the consequences of a foreclosure when the likelihood was that the former African owners would be forced to move. The dominant question was always, “where were they to go?”34 There were very few reasonable options for evicted Africans and their families, especially because a large number of people could be involved: first, the reserves were overcrowded; second, state officials were opposed to the migration of women and children to the cities; third, even though white farmers regularly complained about inadequate numbers of farm workers, white farms were not perceived as a place of refuge because the Natives Land Act included provisions against squatting and sharecropping, and the state supported limits on the number of families living on a farm, even though most of these rules were not enforced. Also, many Africans opposed living on white farms if they were required to be labour tenants. Consequently, state officials intervened or, in extreme cases, the state bought the land. In short, official oversight, encouragement and intervention contributed to the security of a loan and helped to prevent foreclosures in the Transvaal, which rarely occurred before 1948. One should also note that Transvaal African owners rarely sold their land. In sum, a large number of Africans raised substantial amounts of money to buy farms. A few raised the full price of the purchase by the time of the closing of the transaction, such as the buyers of Brakkuil 893, who paid the full amount for the farm, as well as the transfer costs and their share of the surveyor’s fees,35 and the buyers of Portion D. of Buffelsdoorn 185 who were “capable of finding the money without difficulty”.36 Others negotiated a timetable with the seller, written into the Deed of Sale, for a schedule of payments, usually for one to three years, and, occasionally, the buyers could pay off the debt in this way without paying interest. The bulk of the assistance came from mortgages which practically all of the mortgagors eventually paid off on their own. Finally, during the entire period between 1913 and 1936, Africans paid, from their own resources, for acquiring an interest in land. Though there were occasional exceptions, officials would not financially help buyers and the 34 35 36 For example, a snc asked, in 1924: “What will become of the natives at present residing on Wachteenbeetjebosch and other tribally owned farms, I cannot at the moment say”, and he noted that the Moloto location could no longer accept stock owners. nasa, nts 3456, 104/308, snc [G.D. Wheelwright], Pietersburg, to sna, 8 September 1924. Wachteenbeetjebosch 1669 and 1891. nasa, nts 344, 60/308, Acting Sub-Native Commissioner to sna, 30 January 1924. Brakkuil 893. nasa, nts 3614, 1025/308, snc to sna, 29 December 1924. Buffelsdoorn 185. Black South African Land Ownership 97 state did not buy land for sale to Africans until 1936, when Parliament passed the Native Trust and Land Act, which put the government into the business of buying land, thereby competing with potential African buyers, and renting that land to Africans, a significant change in policy. A farm, in addition to food production and stock raising, could also be a source of income, whereby certain African owners earned money from their property through leasing the land; agreeing to mineral contracts for exploration; or leasing trading sites. For example, during the 1920s, the Bafokeng, among others, negotiated prospecting contracts and mineral rights leases with individuals and companies and controlled with whom contracts would be signed.37 Mineral rights contracts could be an important source of income for the landowners. Defense of Ownership Rights Owning land gave Africans a high degree of security against infringements of their ownership rights because the state did not have the legal power to expropriate African owned land until 1939.38 If the state concluded that Africans should give up their land, officials could only encourage the owners to exchange their farms for alternate land. The examples I have found related to two main reasons: first, the state sought to take over land perceived to be in the way of irrigation projects which were planned for dense white settlement and off limits to Africans because officials believed that black farmers could not successfully take advantage of irrigation. Second, the state tried to solve problems (real or imagined) between African owners and their white neighbors, especially if African owned land was surrounded by white owned land (so-called black spots). The Hartebeestpoort and the Loskop irrigation projects are good examples and include the African owners of Krokodilkraal 61 and Mamagalieskraal 413 in the Hartebeestpoort area, Vlaklaagte 284 and Toitskraal 421 in the Loskop area. Two important examples of tensions between black owners and their white neighbors leading to demands for Africans to exchange their land for alternate land are Tweefontein 529 and Klipfontein 482. Space does not allow me to discuss each example at length. Suffice to say that the most important 37 38 For example: Mineral Option, nasa, nts 6846, 38/319, 5 February 1925; Mineral Lease, nts 6845, 38/319 (A), 25 August 1927. nasa, nts 3579, 780/308, sna to The Secretary, Transvaal Agricultural Union, 30 August 1934. Klipfontein 482. 98 Feinberg owner of Mamagalieskraal 413 negotiated for eight years (between 1922 and 1930) with state officials, who agreed to all his demands in exchange for his agreement to move, including exchanging more than twice as much land, constructing a new borehole with a windmill, and new fencing; and paying for all the legal costs.39 The owners of Tweefontein and Klipfontein had to contend with hostile white neighbors who sought Native Affairs Department assistance to remove them. On Tweefontein, both the whites and the Africans accused their neighbors of bad behaviour; the conflict on Klipfontein concerned legally protected water rights, which the whites resented. The Tweefontein African owners defended their rights for thirty-five years and the Klipfontein African owners (from 1932) resisted pressures and retained their land well beyond 1948. The owners of Vlaklaagte, caught in the Loskop Irrigation area, were the most affected by the new 1939 law expropriation law.40 One owner, George Masemola, a teacher, bitterly complained that he had followed the rules when he bought his farm in 1926, but now, in the 1940s, his ownership was threatened. He accused the Native Affairs Department of going “back on its word”, and said that an African “can expect no justice in this country”. At a meeting with the Secretary for Native Affairs, he rejected all the Secretary’s appeals for him to change his mind about selling his portion to the state; “no argument of mine had any effect on his attitude”.41 Ultimately, his land was expropriated, but his vigorous defense against the inevitable loss for ten years (1938–1948) led to an enhanced settlement for himself and his siblings. In general, negotiations were always an essential part of the exchange process.42 The most important negotiations were between the African owners and government officials, mainly native commissioners. In a racial situation where most power rested with the state, legal impediments prevented the government from forcing African owners off their land and made negotiations mandatory. Negotiations could go on for years, especially because officials had very little leverage to force the Africans to move. Field officers had to be particularly patient because African owners jealously guarded their assets and 39 40 41 42 See nasa, nts 3431, 36/308, 1922–1930. The Native Trust and Land Amendment Act (No. 17 of 1939). For Vlaklaagte, see nasa, nts 3535, 441/308. nasa, nts 3535, 441/308, [unclear initials], Notes of Interview, 19 October 1943. As late as July, 1940, the Secretary for Native Affairs proclaimed that his department sought to remove black spots by exchange or purchase, not by “compulsion”, which required negotiations. University of the Witswatersrand Archives, sairr, Part 2, AD843/ RJ, C2.1, Box 118, D.L. Smit to J.D. Rheinallt Jones, 4 July 1940. Black South African Land Ownership 99 were rarely in a rush to give up their land, especially if their land had better soil (for agriculture), grass (for grazing), or water resources than the land offered in exchange. The quality of the new land was very important, but some Africans also considered the location of the new land in relation to where they currently lived and to their community’s land. In addition, inspections were necessary and, when there were many co-owners, they often sent representatives to examine the proposed land for exchange and report to the co-owners. An important question as part of this process was whether the government would buy an acceptable farm for exchange or only compensate the owners for the land they were giving up and let the Africans buy new land on their own. This option was seriously debated in the 1940s, when both sides, the African owners and government officials, were confronted with rising land prices and inadequate resources. How to compute appropriate compensation was another problem. The picture that finally emerges is one of landowners standing firm for many years until the government gave in to their demands or the pressure on the owners became too strong. Delay meant retention of one’s farm. Rarely did the state actually use its expropriation power after 1939, and even if it was used, years sometimes passed before the last African left an expropriated farm. In addition, expropriation was a very slow process because the Native Trust and Land Amendment Act (1939) inserted an important state obligation: If expropriated Africans asked for new land, the South African Native Trust was obligated to find similar land for those who had lost their land (Section 7 of Act No. 17 of 1939 [see footnote 40]). There was, also, the need to identify heirs of the original owners of a farm, to determine if proper transfer had occurred, to calculate fair compensation, and to overcome the extreme reluctance of owners to sell their land to the state or accept an exchange of their good quality land for less good land. Two important themes emerged from the evidence of Africans defending their land rights: first, the general bias of NAD officials to encourage Africans, and not whites, to move when tensions arose; and second, the African nonviolent defence of their ownership rights. When conflicts arose between white owners and black owners, such as on Tweefontein and Klipfontein, particularly when both groups owned undivided shares of the same property, the Native Affairs Department encouraged the Africans to surrender their land by exchange or sale. The aim of officials was to reduce tensions by separating the races and ending ownership in undivided shares, but the African owners were targeted by state negotiators to move. I have not found evidence of similar negotiations with the white neighbors. 100 Feinberg The law enabled the African owners to stand on principle, resist exchanges, defend their rights as owners. They demanded fairness and equity and stood firm in their resolve to retain their land. They resisted pressures from two state departments as they defended their assets. While there is almost no evidence about their conversations among themselves and little evidence about their interactions with state officials, their peaceful resistance took a measure of bravery against a powerful state. Owners succeeded in retaining their land for decades after the state initiated negotiations. They worked within the system and may even have had faith in the system. The rules changed after 1939, and it theoretically became only a matter of time before owners would lose their land to expropriation, but resistance often continued for more years. Finally, the evidence demonstrates the sharp contrast between what I have described in this section of this chapter and the forced removal policy of the apartheid government after 1948, especially after 1959.43 The Natives Land Act Did Not Bring about Rural Territorial Segregation in South Africa between 1913–1948 During the 1920s, Prime Minister Jan Smuts hesitated about dividing the land in South Africa between whites and blacks. This hesitation can be seen in the cautious language of a 1923 official public statement on land policy, which declared that the Natives Land Act “gives effect to the policy approved by parliament that there should be a measure of territorial division of land rights between the Europeans” and Africans. The use of the conditional tense is of importance here: “should be” but, in 1923, not yet achieved.44 A.W. Roberts referred, in 1925, to the need for “territorial unification”, implying that the consolidation of African land had not yet been achieved. Henry Burton told a Stellenbosch University audience about the impracticability of segregation up to 1930. In addition, the creation of “released areas” meant that territorial segregation would have been difficult to achieve because whites and blacks were allowed to buy land in the “released areas” after Hertzog introduced the Natives Land Act, 1913, Amendment Bill in 1926, one of the four Hertzog Bills designed to implement Hertzog’s segregation policies (Davenport and Saunders 2000: 308). And, the continued existence of African owned farms surrounded by land owned by 43 44 For information and data on the forced removal policy, see Surplus People Project (1983), vol. 1 “General Overview” and vol. 5 “The Transvaal”. See also Platzky and Walker (1985). Published in the Cape Times, 27 August 1923, “Black and White on the Land”, found in nasa, lde 727, 12473. Black South African Land Ownership 101 whites (so called black spots) represents strong factual evidence of the mixing of African and white farmers and demonstrates that territorial segregation was not complete. Furthermore, the land recommended as “native areas” by the Natives Land Commission (1916) and the five local committees (1918) included farms owned by whites.45 The Africans usually bought their farms from whites, and new African farm owners oftentimes had white neighbors. The white neighbors were living on the same farm or on adjoining farms, sometimes with unfenced boundaries, or whites were living in the area near African owned land. In addition, government officials tried to prevent Africans and whites from owning land on a farm in undivided shares, but they were not completely successful.46 A continued white presence in the so-called “native areas” and the presence of white neighbours undermined the segregation goal. Thus, the approach of the South African government to the land issue was sufficiently different from urban and industrial segregation to constitute an exception to the general view of the period 1910–1948 as the “segregation era”. The results of the section against buying in the Natives Land Act, exaggerated by historians, were less of a threat to African interests than imagined, although I suspect that this provision slowed actual buying. The main point is that the Natives Land Act did not bring about territorial segregation in rural South Africa by 1948, confirming the impressions of the various contemporaries. Jan Smuts, once again the Prime Minister, confirmed the truth about rural segregation in January 1942 when he spoke to the members of the South African Institute of Race Relations (sairr). The printed edition of the speech included the heading, “The Failure of Segregation” in bold print, and Smuts stated that the “high expectation that we entertained of that [segregation] policy has been sadly disappointed” (Smuts 1942: n.p.). The failure of the Natives Land Act to stop African purchases meant that the legislative goals of the supporters of the Act went unfulfilled. The inability of the government to achieve territorial segregation following the passage of the Land Act also illustrates the limits of white power in the early Union period. Rhetorically, South Africa was a segregation state in terms of the government’s approach to land holding, but in actuality it was hardly that. In fact, rural segregation lost ground between 1913 and 1948, mainly because of the pattern of buying I described earlier in 45 46 The Prime Minister appointed committees to evaluate the recommendations of the Natives Land Commission, two for the Transvaal and one for each of the other provinces. See nasa, nts 344, 60/308, sna to Reitz and Pienaar, 8 October 1929. Brakkuil 893. See also nts 3448, 77/308 (1), sna to Sub-Native Commissioner, Hamanskraal, 14 March 1922. Roodekuil 206 and nts 3409, 1/308, sna to snc, 13 April 1922. Uitvlucht 815. 102 Feinberg this chapter. In addition, the Native Trust and Land Act (1936) added only 7.25 million morgen for Africans. And, buying those 7.25 million morgen was a future plan, one not achieved by 1948. Finally, there is very limited evidence of large-scale dispossession between 1913 and 1948 because of discriminatory practices, especially in comparison with the 3.5 million dispossessed people after 1948. In addition, I have been unable to find any information about the number of rural land claims filed by 31 December 1998 concerning the 1913–1948 period. One authority on restitution, Professor Ben Cousins, from the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (plaas) at the University of the Western Cape, wrote that “we have never seen any breakdown in terms of date of dispossession” in Land Commission reports.47 Cherryl Walker also writes that “No ready estimates exist for the scale of state-sanctioned land dispossessions between 1913 and 1948” (Walker 2008: 219). In conclusion, restitution became a constitutional demand (after 1994) as a result of apartheid policies and actions and because of the very unequal division of the land between the races, not because of the Natives Land Act. Epilogue There is still “unfinished business” relating to land in 21st century South Africa. Parliament passed a Restitution of Land Rights Act in 1994, creating a claims process for Africans seeking the return of land expropriated by the apartheid government or because of other discriminatory actions after 1913. The closing date for claims was 31 December 1998 and Africans submitted almost 80,000 urban and rural claims by that date. However, many South Africans complained that the closing date was unfair and political pressure led to the introduction and eventual passage of a new land law, the Restitution of Land Rights Amendment Act, which Parliament approved on 25 February 2014. The final date to submit restitution claims is now 30 June 2019. This action was not enough for the leaders of a new, radical political party, the Economic Freedom Party (EFF), who are demanding an extreme transformation of land ownership, according to the eff constitution, by means of “Expropriation of South Africa’s land without compensation for equal redistribution”. Thus, the debate about land ownership continues and the land issue remains as important in 2016 as it was in 1913. 47 Personal communication, 4 February 2014. In addition, I wrote several letters in 2013 to the Commission on the Restitution of Land Rights which yielded no results. Black South African Land Ownership 103 Bibliography The primary sources cited in the footnotes can be found in collections located in the National Archives of South Africa, Pretoria, the Cape Town Archives Repository, the University of Cape Town Archives, and the University of the Witwatersrand Cullen Library. Beinart, W. 1994. Twentieth Century South Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bergh, J. and H.M. Feinberg 2004. “Trusteeship and Black Landownership in the Transvaal During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”, Kleio 36: 170–193. Davenport, T.R.H. and C. Saunders. South Africa: A Modern History. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Department of Land Affairs 1997. White Paper on South African Land Policy. Pretoria: Department of Land Affairs. Feinberg, H.M. 1993. “The Natives Land Act of 1913 in South Africa: Politics, Race and Segregation in the early 20th century”, International Journal of African Historical Studies 26 (1): 65–109. Feinberg, H.M. 2015. Our Land, Our Life, Our Future: Black South African Challenges to Territorial Segregation, 1913–1948. Pretoria: University of South Africa Press. Msimang, R.W. (compiler) [n.d., 1914?]. The Natives Land Act, 1913: Specific Cases of Evictions and Hardships, etc. Johannesburg. Plaatje, S. 1916. Native Life in South Africa. London: P.S. King & Co. Platzky, L. and C. Walker 1985. The Surplus People: Forced Removals in South Africa. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Smuts, J.C. 1942. The Basis of Trusteeship in African Native Policy. Cape Town: Cape Town: R.L. Esson. Surplus People Project 1983. Forced Removals in South Africa. Cape Town. Thompson, L.M. 2000. A History of South Africa. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press. Walker, C. 2008. Landmarked: Land Claims and Land Restitution in South Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Willan, B. 1984. Sol Plaatje: A Biography. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. chapter 6 The South African Land Reform since 1994: Policies, Debates, Achievements Mario Zamponi The resolution of the land question … lies at the heart of our quest for liberation from political oppression, rural poverty and under-development. Minister of Land Affairs, Derek Hanekom on the occasion of his maiden budget speech to parliament in September 1994, quoted in walker 2005: 805 A national land reform programme is the central and driving force of a programme of rural development … this programme must be demanddriven and must aim to supply residential and productive land to the poorest section of the rural population and aspirant farmers. As part of a comprehensive rural development policy, it must raise rural incomes and productivity, and must encourage the use of land for agricultural, other productive or residential purposes. The land policy must ensure security of tenure for all South Africans, regardless of their system of land-holding. It must remove all forms of discrimination in women’s access to land. rsa 1994a Colonialism and apartheid were rooted in the dispossession of the African people of their land, the destruction of African farming and the super-exploitation of wage labourers, including farm workers and their families. Poverty, inequality and joblessness are the consequence of centuries of underdevelopment and exploitation …, which had its most destructive and enduring impacts on rural South Africa. Consequently, the structural faults that characterised the apartheid rural economy remain with us today. anc 2007 Introduction A long and coercive historical process resulted in the loss of land rights for African communities in South Africa: under colonialism and apartheid © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�6736_008 The South African Land Reform since 1994 105 millions of people were dispossessed of their rights on the land and, consequently, of their livelihoods. The year 2013 marked the centenary of the Natives Land Act promulgated in 1913.1 The Act has been the starting point of a number of segregation laws, which have defined a one-century history of land dispossession in South Africa and consolidated the divided past of the country. In the words of Sol Plaatje, the first Secretary General of the African National Congress (anc), in his book Native Life in South Africa, “Awaking 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” (Plaatjie 1916: 21). This history of dispossession culminated during the apartheid regime when most of rural dwellers were uprooted from their ancestral lands, often with violence and without compensation (Pepeteka 2013; see also drlr 2013). Indeed, “statesponsored forced removals were among the most flagrant human rights violations of the apartheid era” (Walker et al. 2011: 1). As mentioned in the 1997 White Paper on South African Land Policy, Forced removals in support of racial segregation have caused enormous suffering and hardship in South Africa and no settlement of land issues can be reached without addressing such historical injustices. dla 1997: 53 Therefore, in post-apartheid South Africa the land question is still a strong symbol of past injustice and oppression, and, because of the history of dispossession of rural blacks (and coloureds), together with other issues such us a high level of poverty in the rural areas, maintain a central role in the political discourse (O’Laughlin et al. 2013). In 1994, following the first post-apartheid elections, the anc launched a land reform programme in order to redress inequalities in landownership. Since then, a significant debate on the land question developed and a wide consensus coalesced around the above-mentioned White Paper. Indeed, there was an agreement on the need for land reform, given the history of inequalities (Hall 2010). In 1994, 87 per cent of the land was still controlled by about 60.000 white farms (most of them large-scale and commercially oriented), while African peasants were relegated in the remaining 13 per cent of the land in the former Bantustans. As signalled by Du Toit (2013) this consensus resulted in the definition of an agenda that seemed able to reconcile diverse 1 See Feinberg in this volume. For a detailed historical and social analysis of the Native Land Act see also Journal of Southern African Studies 40 (4), 2014, Part Special Issue: Reflections on the 1913 Land Act and its Legacies, 1913–2013. 106 Zamponi aims: national reconciliation, deracialization of land access, integration in the global economy, and poverty reduction. However, Walker (2008: 51 ff.) stressed the point that many anc militants and supporters had expected land reform policies to be more redistributive and less market-led (also including forms of nationalisation). The main characteristics of the land reform programme are based on the country’s 1996 Constitution (rsa 1996). In particular, Section 25(5) states that the state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to foster conditions which enable citizens to gain access to land on an equitable basis. Section 25(6) states that: A person or community whose tenure of land is legally insecure as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices is entitled, to the extent provided by an Act of Parliament, either to tenure which is legally secure, or comparable redress, while Section 25(7) affirms: A person or community dispossessed of property after 19 June 1913 as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices is entitled, to the extent provided by an Act of Parliament, either to restitution of that property or to equitable redress. However, if on the one hand the Constitution supports land reform, on the other hand clearly protects property rights: “No one may be deprived of property except in terms of law of general application, and no law may permit arbitrary deprivation of property” (Sect. 25.1). As affirmed by Hall (2009), the land reform has many aims and, in particular, those of equity and efficiency, two conflicting goals which have created a continuous tension between the rights of land owners and the claims of those whose rights to property have been denied. In this regard, Evans (2013: 17) suggested that the strong legal protection of property rights provided by the Constitution hampered the “efforts to redistribute land through a more aggressive policy than ‘willing buyer, willing seller’”. As mentioned above, the land reform programme was more deeply articulated by the 1997 White Paper. The discourse was based on four major elements: the first stemmed on the notions of national food security, sustainability and The South African Land Reform since 1994 107 economic efficiency. The second linked land reform with national reconciliation, restorative justice and reparation; the third dealt with injustice and the violation of human rights, while the fourth saw land reform as a way to attain the goals of equitable economic growth, agrarian transformation and rural development (Du Toit 2013: 17, italics in the original). Nowadays the key issues to be addressed in land reform and rural development revolve around: (a) … how can the demand for land in South Africa, thus the place of prospective land reform beneficiaries of land reform, be advanced to ensure economic development, food security and improved livelihoods; (b) land reform must represent a radical and rapid break from the past without significantly disrupting agricultural production and food security; and (c) the State must mobilise resources to reverse both the human and material conditions of those displaced by previous land policies. anc 2012: 2 The “Three Legs” of the South African Land Reform Programme The South African land reform programme is based on three pillars: restitution, redistribution and tenure reform as originally conceptualised by the Reconstruction and Development Programme (rsa 1994b; see Rugege 2004; Lahiff and Li 2014).2 Restitution means settling claims of land lost because of segregation laws through either restoration of land or financial compensation; redistribution is intended to transfer white-owned farms to blacks farmers; and tenure reform aimed at providing more secure access to land for “traditional communities” in communal areas, and for Africans living on commercial farms. The Land Restitution Programme The aim of the first leg – the Land Restitution Programme, based on the 1994 Restitution of Land Rights Act (rsa 1994b) – is to return land or compensate people who have been dispossessed of their land through discriminatory laws since 1913, that is “to right the wrongs of the past: to redress unjust dispossession and to heal” (Hall 2011: 17). The Act fulfils the requirement of the above-mentioned Section 25 (7) of the Constitution which entitles a person or 2 For a recent and well detailed analysis of the different elements of the land reform see: Lahiff and Li (2014). 108 Zamponi community dispossessed of rights in land, to claim restoration of those rights or equitable alternative land or compensation (anc 2012). In 1995 and 1996 the Act established a Commission on the Restitution of Land Rights (crlr) and a Land Claims Court (lcc) respectively. The former has the duty to investigate claims for land restitution and to prepare them for settlement. The latter is in charge for adjudicating claims and make orders on restitution or other form of compensation. The deadline for the submission of claims was initially established for December 1998. However, it excluded potential claimants who were not fully aware of their rights, while the 1913 cut-off date excluded many potential claimants who were dispossessed of land before 1913. The programme started at a slow pace. Hence, the target to finalise all claims was extended to 2005 and again to March 2008 (Pepeteka 2013). By 31 March 2008, 95 per cent of claims were settled. By the end of January 2013, 77,979 claims have been settled which makes 97 per cent of the total claims, translating to 1,443 million hectare and benefitting 13,968 female-headed households and 672 persons with a disability (Ministry of Rural Development and Land Reform 2013).3 Even if most of claims have been settled the question of the highly inequitable ownership of land will not be addressed by restitution as it will contribute only two per cent of land transfers (Rugege 2004). Recently, President Zuma announced during the 2014 State of the Nation Address that Government would be reopening the terms for claims for those who missed previous deadlines and would also be extending the June 1913 cut-off date in order to accommodate claims by the descendants of the Khoi and San people.4 Indeed, the President signed into law the Restitution of Land Rights Amendment Act, which reopens the restitution claims process and gives claimants five years – until 30 June 2019 – to present further claims.5 3 In its annual report 2012–13, the crlr reports the figure of a total of 77,334 claims have been settled (crlr 2013). Recent data are provided by Walker (2014: 657): “the Chief Land Claims Commissioner reported to Parliament in August 2013 that 58,990 claims had been ‘finalised’ nationally, 59,415 were ‘settled (claims as lodged)’, while 79,582 counted as ‘settled (claims as settled)’. That same month, a report commissioned by the drdlr put the number of outstanding claims at ‘approximately 8,000’”. 4 State of the Nation Address By His Excellency Jacob G Zuma, President of the Republic of South Africa on the occasion of the Joint Sitting of Parliament Cape Town, 17 June. ulr: <http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/pebble.asp?relid=17570> (accessed on 15 September 2014). 5 See ulrs: <http://www.southafrica.info/services/rights/land-010714.htm#ixzz3HGGFtRR2> as well as <http://mg.co.za/article/2014-07-01-sensitive-reform-policy-sees-reopening-of-land -claims> (both accessed on 25 October 2014). The South African Land Reform since 1994 109 Some critiques argue that restitution – as well as land reform broadly speaking – has not been a priority of anc government (Walker et al. 2011). In particular, even if the restitution is a central part of the reform, most of settlements have been in the form of compensation and not in the restoration of the land (crlr 2007: 61; see also crlr 2013).6 As affirmed by Pepeteka (2013: 6), some of the challenges experienced during the implementation of this programme are related to: exorbitant land prices and protracted negotiations to settle claims; complexities of settling rural land claims in the absence of documented evidence; fraudulent claims; and competing claims on the same piece of property. We can agree with Hall (2011: 38) when she affirms that restitution was a fairly rapid process with most of claims settled. However, she points out that “the opportunity to use land claims process to bring about both far-reaching economic transformation and reconciliation … may have been missed” (italics in the original). The Land Redistribution Programme The second leg of the land reform is land redistribution. In 1994, the Government committed itself to redistributing 30 per cent of white-owned farmlands to the poor and landless people over a period of five years (Hall 2004). The major aims are: to address the legacy of racial inequality of land ownership in the country, to improve the livelihoods of the rural poor, and to contribute towards economic development. The specific objectives and approaches of the redistribution policy were defined in the 1997 White Paper (dla 1997). Redistributive land reform aimed to attain both direct benefits to beneficiaries of the programme and indirect benefits to the rural economy as a whole. These purposes were enlisted in the White Paper: Land reform aims to contribute to economic development, both by giving households the opportunity to engage in productive land use and by increasing employment opportunities through encouraging greater investment. We envisage a land reform which results in a rural landscape consisting of small, medium and large farms; one which promotes both equity and efficiency through a combined agrarian and industrial strategy in which land reform is a spark to the engine of growth. dla 1997: 31 6 These information are confirmed by crlr annual report 2012–13, which states that the majority of beneficiaries have chosen financial compensation as their preferred form of restitution (crlr 2013). 110 Zamponi However, as suggested by Walker (2007: 134) land redistribution to landless and marginal people cannot guarantee in itself enhanced incomes and livelihoods, while at the same time the inability of non agrarian economic sectors to absorb workers is increasing the potential relevance of land for the poorest social groups. The redistribution programme is characterized by a market-based approach, that is the willing buyer-willing seller principle. Indeed, as Jacobs (2012) reminds, a neoliberal agrarian reform framework has emerged, in particular since the adoption in 1996 of the Growth Employment and Redistribution Programme, which strengthened neoliberal macroeconomic principles with a focus on market-led reform rather than redistribution to dispossessed households (see also Lahiff 2007). As mentioned by Hall and Cliffe (2009: 5) mechanism for acquisition are considered to be “market-assisted”, by negotiating with owners, “subsidized” by the provision of state grants to beneficiaries, “demand-led” given that applicants would initiate the process, and “community-based” given that groups can pool their efforts and resources to obtain farms on a collective base. During the 1990s the targeted groups were: landless people, labour tenants and farm workers, women, rural poor, and also emerging farmers (Hall and Cliffe 2009). Until late 1999, the redistribution programme was based largely on the provision of the Settlement and Land Acquisition Grant (slag; see dla 1997, chap. 4), a programme offering grants to qualifying households. Most projects under this programme involved groups of applicants pooling their grants to buy formerly white-owned farms for commercial agricultural purposes. Through slag poor families were provided with grants to buy land (Hall 2004). This model was criticised due to complex group dynamics that emerged, overcrowding and the failure to link land acquisition with support and resources to enable beneficiaries to use land to generate livelihood. The pooling of grants resulted in the acquired farms being too crowded or beneficiaries to farm the land productively. pepeketa 2013: 7 Since 2001 was operating the Land Reform for Agricultural Development (lrad) programme,7 which put more emphasis on the commercial use of transferred land. lrad was a grant system too, but it provided higher amount compared 7 For details see ulr: <http://www.ruraldevelopment.gov.za/tenders/archived-bids/file/838> (accessed on 15 September 2014). The South African Land Reform since 1994 111 to slag and targeted better off individuals (Hall 2004). lrad was based on the assumption that the main shortcomings of the land reform were dependent on the wrong identification of beneficiary and on inappropriate usages of the land. For these reasons, “it thus proposed a focus on ‘emerging farmers’, rather than the neediest, and on a strong ‘commercial’ orientation” (Hall and Cliffe 2009: 7). This represented a partial shift in land policy priorities, started in 1998 and developed in the following years. It was also expression of a new cycle of land reform within the Department of Land Affairs (dla) representing, according to some analyses, the different individual visions of the two Ministers of Land, that is “Hanekom versus Didiza” (Hall 2010: 180). lrad is particularly based on a grant system offered to beneficiaries. Indeed lrad stated that “all beneficiaries are required to make a contribution, in cash or in kind, the size of which will determine the value of the grant for which they qualify” (Jacobs, Lahiff and Hall 2003: 4). The fact that beneficiaries had to contribute and that they have to meet commercial criteria meant that lrad was particularly suited for the better off rather than for the poor, implying the idea of establishing a new class of black commercial farmers (Jacobs, Lahiff and Hall 2003; Lahiff 2007; Pepeteka 2013; on sub-programmes of land redistribution see also: Anseeuw, Mathebula 2008). According to Lahiff (2010)8 sizable sums have been allocated for land reform, but probably not enough to engage in a successful market-based program … There can be little doubt that a more robust policy of intervention in the market … could achieve a lot more within the available budget. Moreover he stressed the fact that “support for land reform beneficiaries after they settle on their new land has been a consistent weak spot in the land reform program …” (ibid.). Currently, while the targets were not met, the land redistribution programme is encountering many problems and challenges to its economic rationales and its implications for justice and equity. As O’Laughlin et al. (2013: 8) indicated “in relation to land redistribution, the initial target was to redistribute 24.6 million hectares (i.e. 30%) of white-owned agricultural land by 1999, through both grants-based redistribution and a rights-based restitution 8 Interview with Edward Lahiff (2010), in occasion of the launch of the 2012 film Promised Land, accessible at: <http://www.pbs.org/pov/promisedland/land_reform.php> (accessed 15 October 2014). Most of the issues discussed in this interview have been elaborated in other academic Lahiff’s papers (see, for instance, Lahiff 2007, 2011). 112 Zamponi programme …” (on this see also Pepeteka 2013; Lahiff 2007). Since 2009, it was announced that the targets would be shifted back to 2014; indeed the issue is not so much about trying to reach an arbitrary target, especially given the problems already experienced with ‘chasing hectares’, as it is about highlighting the wide gap between plans and the resources available to realise them. greenberg 2010 While by March 2009 only 5 per cent of land had been transferred to Blacks (dla, Strategic Plan 2008–2011 quoted in Pepeteka 2013: 9), by September 2009 just 5.67 million hectares (6.9% of agricultural land) had been transferred, ostensibly to 1.78 million beneficiaries (Greenberg 2010), and “by March 2011 only 7.2 per cent (6.3 million hectares) had been transferred, and the official target date for achieving the 30% target has now been set at 2025” (O’Laughlin et al. 2013: 8). By 2012, the land redistributed amounts to only 7.5 per cent of white-owned agricultural land (Walker and Dubb 2013). As Bernstein (2013: 26) suggests, the about 60,000 commercial (white) farms existing in 1994 had reduced to 45,000 by 2002 – according to that year’s Census of Commercial Agriculture (published in 2005) – and, according to recent news, the current number is about 37,000 while is predicted to reduce to 15,000 in twenty years. These data suggest a trend of concentration of landed property rather than an effect of redistribution. Indeed, according to Lahiff (2010),9 large-scale white commercial agriculture has since the early 1990s been undergoing a process of consolidation and concentration, with perhaps half of all white-owned farms now effectively falling outside of the core food economy. High value land, typically under irrigation, is priced beyond the means of most land reform beneficiaries and rarely comes on the market. Thus, it is clear that government cannot meet the 2014 redistribution target as it was acknowledged by President Zuma during the 2013 State of the Nation Address (Pepeteka 2013). Moreover, as Jacobs (2012) mentions these low figures reflects only quantitative indicators (the number of hectares transferred) and they do not consider qualitative indicators such as the quality of land transferred, and the availability of water. Empirical evidence in relation to the impacts of land reform on the income and livelihoods of beneficiaries, show a great variety of results (Hall 2009: 40–44).10 Indeed, South African agricultural 9 10 Lahiff, Interview. See note 8. For a detailed analysis see also: Journal of Agrarian Change 13 (1), 2013, an issue dedicated to the land question in contemporary South Africa. The South African Land Reform since 1994 113 policy and rural development after 1994 has done little to support adequately the dispossessed people who still remain trapped in a system of “racialized inequality” (Bernstein 2013: 43). Land Tenure Reform The third pillar is the land tenure reform which aims at providing more secure access to the land in the former bantustans. The issue of the security of land tenure is included in the Constitution, as already mentioned in Section 25 (6). However, the Constitution does not give further details about the models of security of land tenure. Land tenure is still a highly contested issue in the country. Indeed, as we will see, of the three pillars of land reform, tenure reform has demonstrated to be the most difficult to tackle with. The 1997 White Paper stated that: all tenure reform processes must recognise and accommodate the de facto vested rights which exist on the ground. Vested interests would include legal rights, as well as interests which have come to exist without formal legal recognition. dla 1997: 84 As indicated by the anc itself: Tenure reform is directed towards two distinct objectives. The first is to address the state of land administration in the communal areas of the former homelands and coloured reserves … The communal areas are home to nearly one third of all South Africans and the site of the deepest concentrations of poverty in the country. Many residents have insecure or illegal forms of tenure, which is both a potential source of conflict and an impediment to investment and development. The second objective is to strengthen the security of tenure of farm dwellers living on commercial farms … ANC 2012: 6 Land tenure reform, amongst others, has the aim of guaranteeing the weak land rights of people living in the rural areas of the former bantustans, who have for decades resided on land that they do not own and which is administered by unaccountable traditional authorities. Various laws have been enacted to this end, yet reforming tenure relations has been the least developed of the three pillars of land reform. The Communal Land Rights Act (clra), No. 11 of 2004, was an attempt to address the historical problems in the access to the land in 114 Zamponi African rural areas. That law stimulated a wide debate within the country for more than a decade and was eventually repealed by a Constitutional Court decision on 11 May 2010.11 The historical legacies have a tough impact on the management of communal lands and, therefore, on reform policies. The management of the land is still a mixed system of institutional relations characterized by uncertainty and ambiguity about the security of access to the land and the relations with local authorities – traditional in particular (Cousins and Claassens 2005). The process of approval of clra has been a long and complex one, debates were widespread both in Parliament and within the country. The law was criticized by many analysts (see Zamponi 2011), especially in relation to the powers assigned to traditional leaders (Claassens and Cousins 2009). Millions of South Africans living in communal lands, which still bear the effects of discriminatory laws and practices of the past, were confident that the clra would give them legal rights to use the land on which they lived. The core aim of the law was to transfer land rights to traditional communities, the registration of individual rights on communally owned land, and the use of traditional councils or modified structures of traditional authorities as representatives of the community owner of the land. These aims would also help in redefining customary law and traditional councils (Smith 2008). Since 2006, however, rural communities started to challenge the constitutionality of the law, arguing that it was jeopardizing their rights of access to the land. As mentioned, these challenges brought to its abolition in 2010. Because of this, land rights of people living in communal areas remain unclear. Furthermore, in the absence of a new law traditional authorities continue to hold significant powers concerning land administration. The Constitutional Court asked the Parliament to urgently enact a new legislation able to offer secure land tenure for people living in communal areas (Pepeteka 2013). Among the critical voices, Ntsebeza (2005) discussed the role of the clra and other related laws such as the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Act of 2003 by defining this process as “Democracy Compromised”. In his opinion the democratic project in the post 1994 period is compromised, particularly for those residing in the rural areas, both on white owned farms and in former bantustans. As mentioned by Du Plessis and Pienaar (2010: 89), after sixteen years of land tenure reform in South Africa, the Legislature is yet again forced back to the drawing board. The story of communal 11 See ulrs: <http://www.customcontested.co.za/rural-people-remain-in-limbo-waiting -for-claras-replacement/> and <http://www.customcontested.co.za/laws-and-policies/ communal-land-rights-act-clara/> (both accessed on 15 September 2014). The South African Land Reform since 1994 115 land tenure is indeed a never-ending story – a story of misunderstanding, of governmental interference and, recently, of constitutional challenge. More recently Ntsebeza (2013) reminds that because of the difficulties and failures encountered by the land reform a significant number of South Africans are still locked in the former bantustans and are still subject to unaccountable institutions such as chieftainship. The Land Reform since 2004: Debate and Challenges12 As mentioned by Pepeteka (2013), in the 2000s frustrations about the slow pace of the land reform process emerged in the country and were expressed by civil society organisations. At the same time the government itself acknowledged difficulties, poor achievements and critiques about the land reform: therefore, a National Land Summit, which brought together a range of stakeholders, was convened in July 2005. As Jacobs (2012) highlighted the assembly critically assessed the results of land reform and suggested that government would change a reform that was clearly inserted in neoliberal policies. The overwhelming majority of participants in the Summit rejected the notion that the land reform process should be based solely on the notion of willing seller-willing buyer (Report of the National Land Summit 2005, point 3.3.1). In particular, the Summit declared that Realising the goal of redistributing 30% of white-owned agricultural land by 2014, requires a well planned, efficiently managed and adequately funded plan that will enable fundamental social transformation to take place without disrupting food security or the broader economic goals that South Africans have set themselves (ibid., point 3.4.1), and that “The beneficiaries of land and agrarian reform should be previously disadvantaged, with specific emphasis on the poor, women, people living and working on commercial farms, the disabled and the youth and other previously disadvantaged people” (ibid., 3.4.2.1), adding that “Reform should aim to restructure the dominant models of land use and agricultural production” (ibid., 3.4.2.2). In response, the government took several steps. Two strategic interventions to accelerate the pace of redistribution were developed. The first was the 12 See also Walker and Andrew in this volume. 116 Zamponi Pro-Active Land Acquisition Strategy (plas).13 In contrast with the previous applications-driven approach, through this strategy the state actively identified and purchased land (based on the land needs trends) and leased out this land in terms of these established needs. The second was the Land and Agrarian Reform Programme (larp),14 which was a joint programme between the then Departments of Land Affairs and Agriculture in collaboration with the provincial Departments of Agriculture and Local Government. Proactive state purchases of land and area-based planning were introduced through the larp. The aim of larp was to deliver 5 million hectares of white owned agricultural land to 10,000 new black agricultural producers (Pepeteka 2013). At present, the land redistribution programme is confronted with two major challenges. The first is to speed up the transfer of land. The second is to support productive use of transferred land, given that, as mentioned, the land reform programme has failed to meet its delivery targets. The problems notwithstanding, we can affirm that over the past decade the land question has become an explicit goal of government policy. It was strongly emphasized in the Resolution on Rural Development, Land Reform and Agrarian Change adopted by the ruling anc at its Polokwane National Conference in 2007 (anc 2007). Since then, rural development has been one of the five key priorities identified by the Zuma government (anc 2009). According to Blade Nzimande, Secretary-General of the South African Communist Party (sacp), rural development was identified at the conference not just as a sector in need of more “delivery”, but as a priority area requiring radical, systemic transformation and as a catalyst for wider societal transformation. greenberg 2010: 12 Indeed, despite the idea that current policies are ineffective and have resulted in the maintenance of existing land inequalities, the anc has reaffirmed that addressing land inequalities is a priority. In February 2012 the anc SecretaryGeneral Gwede Mantashe commented that 13 14 For detailed information about plas see url: <http://www.ruraldevelopment.gov.za/ phocadownload/Land_Acquisition_Warehouse/manual%20for%20the%20implementation%20of%20the%20proactive%20land%20acquisition%20strategy.pdf> (accessed on 15 September 2014). For detailed information about larp see url: <http://www.nda.agric.za/doaDev/ topMenu/DoAProgrammes/LARP_25Feb08.pdf> (accessed on 15 September 2014). The South African Land Reform since 1994 117 if we remove the land question from the centre of the anc’s agenda, we will be betraying what was the immediate challenge after the formation of the African National Congress. The dialogue must continue.15 More recently, President Jacob Zuma has suggested that the clauses in the Constitution allowing for the possibility of land to be expropriated will be used (Zuma 2014).16 Given this commitment, the presence of the tension between market-led approach and equality is once again evident. In 2007 the Polokwane resolution had acknowledged problems and challenges by affirming (anc 2007): We have only succeeded in redistributing 4% of agricultural land since 1994, while more than 80% of agricultural land remains in the hands of fewer than 50,000 white farmers and agribusinesses. The willing-seller, willing-buyer approach to land acquisition has constrained the pace and efficacy of land reform. It is clear from our experience that the market is unable to effectively alter the patterns of land ownership in favour of an equitable and efficient distribution of land. Regarding policy interventions, the resolution affirmed that the anc’s aims are to “redistribute land to a modern and competitive smallholder sector”, “re-build the culture of agricultural livelihoods and rural entrepreneurship” and “integrate smallholders into formal value chains and link them with markets” (anc 2007). To address these challenges the Polokwane resolution considered rural development as a pillar for struggling against unemployment, poverty and inequality. Rural poverty and inequality inhibit the growth of the economy and undermine the efforts to ensure that growth is more equitably shared by all South Africans. The resolution resolved “to embark on an integrated programme of rural development, land reform and agrarian change …”. The document considered also vital to “build stronger state capacity and devote greater resources to the challenges of rural development, land reform and agrarian change” (ibid.). 15 16 “No abandoning land reform”. See ulr: <http://www.iol.co.za/business/news/noabandoning-land-reform-1.1239139> (accessed on 15 October 2014). “State of the Nation Address by Jacob G Zuma, President of the rsa on the occasion of the Joint Sitting of Parliament”. February 14, 2013, <http://anc.org.za/show.php?id=10074> (accessed on 15 October 2014). 118 Zamponi However, according to Jacobs (2012) the document is not promoting a real pro-poor agrarian change. Indeed, Lahiff17 affirms in an interview that: “Land reform has been plagued by the imposition of unfeasible ‘business plans’ that require levels of capital and skills far beyond the capacity of most participants”. The resolution also commits the anc to implementing “large-scale programmes to establish new smallholders and to improve the productivity of existing small-scale and subsistence farmers and to integrate smallholders into formal value chains and link them with markets” (anc 2007). However, Greenberg (2010: 40) reminds that, even if in Polokwane “rhetorically, a renewed emphasis is being placed on a smallholder strategy”, there is insufficient financial support for the agricultural sector as a whole. Therefore it would be very unlikely to carry out adequate support initiatives. A land reform aimed at supporting hundreds of thousands of existing and new small farmers, and promoting accumulation from below, faces huge challenges. The redistribution of land is still insufficient, given that farming requires capital, equipment, labour, inputs, markets and skills in order to use the land productively (Cousins 2013: 136). Bernstein (2013: 43) supports this view by arguing that forms of further capitalist development of agriculture since 1994 reinforce the obstacles to the viable growth of production by small-scale farmers – their prospects of “accumulation from below”. Thus, since the 2009 elections, the anc has made agrarian reform and rural development one of its key policy priorities. The executive has made several public promises to overturn inequalities in land ownership and address the deep structural poverty of most of rural communities. In this regard in May 2009, President Zuma announced the establishment of a new Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (drdlr). The establishment of the new Department has also re-confirmed “Government’s commitment to revitalise and develop rural areas and that land should be seen as a catalyst for poverty alleviation, job creation, food security and entrepreneurship” (mrdlr 2009: 17). In August 2009 a Comprehensive Rural Development Programme (crdp) was approved by the government. The creation of decent work and sustainable livelihoods lies at the heart of the crdp: “the strategic objective of the crdp is to facilitate integrated development and social cohesion through participatory approaches in partnership with all sectors of society” (mrdlr 2009: point 17 Lahiff, Interview. See note 8. The South African Land Reform since 1994 119 4.2). Furthermore, the drdlr has produced a series of policy statements: various iterations of its crdp and its strategic plans on rural development. The Green Paper on Land Reform (gplr) approved at the end of August 2011 is of particular interest. This programmatic document has the following vision for land reform: A re-configured single, coherent four-tier system of land tenure, which ensures that all South Africans, particularly rural blacks, have a reasonable access to land with secure rights …; clearly defined property rights …; secure forms of long-term land tenure for resident non-citizens engaged in appropriate investments which enhance food sovereignty and livelihood security, and improved agro-industrial development; effective land use planning and regulatory systems which promote optimal land utilization in all areas and sectors … drdlr 2011: point 3, italics in the original A single land tenure framework has been fashioned out, integrating the current multiple forms of land ownership – communal, state, public and private – into a single four-tier tenure system: (a) state and public land: leasehold; (b) privately owned land: freehold, with limited extent; (c) land owned by foreigners: freehold, but precarious tenure, with obligations and conditions to comply with; and, (d) communally owned land: communal tenure, with institutionalised use rights (ibid.: point 6.4). Section 4 indicates the “Principles Underlying Land Reform”: (a) de-racialising the rural economy; (b) democratic and equitable land allocation and use across race, gender and class; and, (c) a sustained production discipline for food security. The gplr acknowledges the historical significance of South Africa’s agrarian question and the conciliatory spirit in which it has to be resolved and reiterates that land dispossession forms a compelling rationale for the restoration of land rights. However for some critics “the document lacks the vision of a new agrarian future and pathways towards the radical restructuring that is needed” and that the “single land-tenure regime that it outlines, consisting of four tiers, is not different from the existing structure of land ownership and control” ( Jacobs 2012: 177). Greenberg (2010: 42) remarks the quest of alternatives by saying that “an alternative has to confront the existing economic power of commercial agriculture and agro-industry with the aim of transforming it. Deracialisation is necessary but not sufficient to realise this”. Therefore, there is the necessity that smallholder farming would constitute the focus of the government’s land reform and agricultural development initiatives in the future (Hall 2009). 120 Zamponi Notwithstanding the Government commitment to land reform, many are the critical voices, as mentioned. Among them we have to remind the strong opposition of Economic Freedom Fighers (eff). eff party intends to support redistribution of land through expropriation without compensation.18 What’s Next Since 1994 the land reform was on the agenda of South African government, even if attaining contradictory results, as discussed in this chapter. While the process of land restitution has scored fairly well (even if it has been reopened to give new opportunities to people excluded in the past), this was not the case neither for land redistribution – as mentioned, the initial target of redistributing 30 per cent of the land by 1999 was now postponed to 2025 – nor for land tenure reform. We can agree with Hall and Cliffe (2009: 248) when they observe: “The more commercial end of land reform can be expected to have a much more limited impact on poverty reduction, and also to attract more support from the private sector than smallholder options”. They continue by suggesting that what is needed is a proactive approach that is people-led, needs-based and statesupported. Interventions should include the following priorities: identify land needs; clarify national targets; prioritise land needs: identify land for redistribution; prioritise land needs of farm dwellers (Hall and Cliffe 2009: 254–255). A recent World Bank’s publication reckons that market-based reform alone doesn’t work: a more attention to land use is needed, instead of a focus on land acquisition and ownership. Specifically: the current approach-based on acquisition of land through the open market, minimal support to new farmers, and bureaucratic imposition of production models … is unlikely to transform the rural economy and 18 Broadly speaking eff affirms that “Central to our programme is a struggle for democratic ownership and control of the key means of production by the people”. See <http://effighters .org.za/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/EFF-ELECTIONS-MANIFESTO.pdf> (accessed 20 December 2014). More specifically on land, eff declares: “The eff’s approach to land expropriation without occupation is that all land should be transferred to the ownership and custodianship of the state” (…) The transfer should happen without compensation, and should apply to all South Africans, black and white”. See <http://effighters.org .za/policy/on-land/> (accessed on 20 December 2014). The South African Land Reform since 1994 121 lift people out of poverty. What clearly is missing at present is any small farmer path to development that could enable [rural households] … to expand their own production and accumulate wealth and resources in an incremental manner. lahiff and li 2014: 49 Another element of debate is agriculture productivity, and more specifically, the highly debated issue of productivity of smallholder African agriculture. A smallholder path for agriculture in South Africa is certainly a new path. However the country is currently still reliant on large-scale commercial agriculture for food security. Even if the government is considering these challenges, its responses seem still oriented towards simply seeking to deracialise the existing agrarian model while keeping intact its core (Greenberg 2010; see also Jacobs 2012). Moreover, it is still open the vexata quaestio of customary land tenure and access to the land in former bantustans after the repeal in 2010 of the longdebated clra, leaving land rights in former bantustans unclear. On this point, Walker (2014) signals the way in which recent policy documents are consolidating the power of traditional leaders over land and people, maintaining a high level of continuity. These developments “deprive the poor of the possibility of land ownership, and reinforce the distorted power of former Bantustan elites” (Claassens 2014: 772). Even the Draft Land Tenure Security Bill of 2010 (rsa 2010) which in the preamble affirms that its aims are: to provide for the continued protection of rights of persons who live and work on farms; to provide support framework for sustainable livelihoods of persons who live and work on farms; to provide for State assistance in the settlement of interested and affected persons on alternative land; to provide measures aimed at security of tenure, sustainable livelihoods and production discipline…, and which is a further step in order to enhance security of tenure for farm dwellers, does not commit itself to solve the question of security in the former Bantustans. Meanwhile, the government is proposing a communal land tenure model that seems to be very similar to the model contained in the repealed clra. According to this model, titles of land ownership would apply to each communal area and is to be held by a traditional council. The traditional councils’ 122 Zamponi roles as single titleholders would include land allocation and adjudication of disputes on the land.19 In addition, as stressed by the 2013 Communal Land Tenure Policy (cltp) (drdlr 2013), the reforms are based on the 2011 Green Paper’s suggested land tenure system, which can be illustrated through the “wagon wheel” concept. This model of communal tenure is developed around traditional forms of African tenure systems that were in place prior to their co-option and distortion by colonial and apartheid governments. Critically, the Centre for Law and Society (2013: 2) affirms that the “wagon wheel model – land ownership and decision making power” will be problematic because the transfer of the control on the land to traditional councils will have relevant social and political implications for rural dwellers and farmers. As suggested by O’Laughlin et al. (2013) many are the issues to be discussed and analyzed in the next steps of rural policies in South Africa, questions concerning what the land reform can attains, what impact can have on rural livelihoods – both of farm workers and peasants in communal lands –, what forms of authority and land ownership should govern the relations on the land, how address rural poverty, etc.20 These themes are discussed in a recent position paper prepared by plaas questioning the government landholding policy discussed in the National Land Tenure Summit held at the beginning of September 2014.21 In particular, the plaas document analyses the current discussion about the definition of land tenure systems and which policy would be more appropriate for freehold tenure (with particular attention devoted to the issue of possible ceilings on landholding). According to Cousins (2014) alternatives must be searched for because “South Africa urgently requires practical agrarian reform policies that transfer land to black farmers who can use it productively to both sustain their livelihoods and to supply markets”. Therefore “small and medium-scale black capitalist farmers and larger numbers of market-oriented smallholders should be key beneficiaries, but additional land for supplementary food production/food security by the poor should be provided as well”. However we have to consider that the general assumption that the promotion of smallholder 19 20 21 For a discussion on these matters see ulr: <http://www.plaas.org.za/news/communal -landrights-cls> (accessed on 15 October 2014). On this discussion see: “Journal of Agrarian Change”, Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2013. See ulrs: <http://www.ruraldevelopment.gov.za/component/content/article/357-summit/898-land-tenure-summit>; <http://www.ruraldevelopment.gov.za/publications/ land-tenure-summit-2014/file/2877-concept-note>; and <http://www.ruraldevelopment .gov.za/publications/land-tenure-summit-2014/file/2878-final-policy-proposals-on -strengthening-relative-rights-of-people-working-the-land> (accessed on 15 October 2014). The South African Land Reform since 1994 123 faming is an anti-poverty strategy is a matter of debate, given that evidence cautions against these expectations (Marais 2011: 217). Land reform has not been able to reach the ambitious goals set by the state. “However, the focus of Government is no longer on achieving quantitative targets but rather on delivering productive land. This does not meet the needs of landless people and potential beneficiaries as well as farmers who are frustrated by the slow pace of land reform …” (Pepeteka 2013). Lahiff22 reminds us that: “… the state should abandon the laissez faire market-based approach”. In conclusion, the historical contradictions between land access and productivity, between efficiency and equitable distribution, between agricultural commercial development and food security, are still unsolved and remain the major challenges the South African government has to confront with, in the nearest future. Bibliography ANC 2007. Polokwane Resolution on Rural Development, Land Reform and Agrarian Change, Resolution adopted at the 52nd National Conference. ULR: <http://www .anc.org.za/show.php?id=2536#rural> (accessed on 23 September 2014). ANC 2009. ANC Electoral manifesto 2009. ULR: <http://www.anc.org.za/elections/2009/ manifesto/policy_framework.html> (accessed on 15 September 2014). ANC 2012. Land Reform Policy Discussion Document, June. ULR: <http://www.anc.org. za/docs/pol/2012/landpolicyproposals_june2012v.pdf> (accessed on 27 September 2014). 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Ntsebeza, L. 2013. “The More Things Change, the More they Remain the Same: Rural Land Tenure and Democracy in the Former Bantustans”. In F. Hendricks, L. Ntsebeza and K. Helliker (eds.) The Promise of Land. Undoing a century of dispossession in South Africa. Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 54–75. O’Laughlin, B. et al. 2013. “Introduction: Agrarian Change, Rural Poverty and Land Reform in South Africa Since 1994”, Journal of Agrarian Change 13 (1): 1–15. Pepeteka T. 2013. Reversing the Legacy of the 1913 Natives Land Act: Progress of Land Reform, Research Unit, Parliament of the Republic of South Africa, 27 May. ULR: <http://www.parliament.gov.za/content/land%20act%20bochure%206.pdf> (accessed on 30 August 2014). Plaatjie Sol T. 1916. Native Life in South Africa. London: PS King. RSA 1994a. Reconstruction and Development Programme: A Policy Framework. ULR: <http://www.polity.org.za/polity/govdocs/rdp/rdp2.html#2.4> (accessed on 5 September 2014). RSA 1994b. Restitution of Land Act. ULR: <http://www.justice.gov.za/lcc/docs/1994022.pdf> (accessed on 15 September 2014). RSA 1996. Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. ULR: <http://www.justice.gov. za/legislation/acts/1996-108.pdf> (accessed on 5 September 2014). RSA 2010. Draft Land Tenure Security Bill, 2010. ULR: <http://www.ruraldevelopment. gov.za/phocadownload/Bills/landtenure%20securitybilldec2010.pdf> (accessed 15th October 2014). Report of the National Land Summit 2005. Nasrec, Johannesburg, July. ULR: <http:// www.pmg.org.za/docs/2006/060822nls.htm> (accessed on 5 September 2014). Rugege S. 2004. “Land Reform in South Africa: An Overview”, International journal of Legal Information, 32 (2): 283–312. ULR: <http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/LandReformIn SouthAfrica.pdf> (accessed on 5 September 2014). Smith H. 2008. “An Overview of the Communal Land Rights Act 11 of 2004”. In A. Claassens and B. Cousins (eds.) Land, Power and Custom: Controversies Generated by South Africa’s Communal Land Rights Act. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 35–71. Walker, C. 2005. “The Limits to Land Reform: Rethinking ‘the Land Question’”, Journal of Southern African Studies 31 (4): 805–824. Walker, C. 2007. “Redistributive Land Reform: For What and for Whom”. In L. Ntsebeza and R. Hall (eds.) The Land Question in South Africa. Cape Town: HSRC, 132–151. Walker C. 2008. Landmarked: Land Claims and Land Restitution in South Africa. Johannesburg, Jacana Media. Walker C. 2014. “Critical Reflections on South Africa’s 1913 Natives Land Act and its Legacies: Introduction”, Journal of Southern African Studies 40 (4): 655–665. The South African Land Reform since 1994 127 Walker, C. et al. 2011. “Introduction”. In C. Walker et al. (eds.) Memory, Reconstruction, and Justice: Perspectives on Land Claims in South Africa. Scottsville, University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 1–16. Walker, C., and A. Dubb, 2013. The Distribution of Land in South Africa: An Overview, Bellville: University of the Western Cape (= Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), Land Reform. Fact Check; 1). ULR: <http://www.plaas.org.za/sites/ default/files/publications-pdf/No1%20Fact%20check%20web.pdf> (accessed on 5 September 2014). Zamponi M. 2011. “Governance locale in Sudafrica. Regime fondiario comunitario e autorità tradizionali: una nuova ‘tribalizzazione’?” Meridiana 68: 143–163. chapter 7 Elusive or Illusory? Property Relations and the Constraints on Rights to Land for South African Farm Labour Nancy Andrew Introduction Land and agrarian reform is a revealing benchmark in regards to what has changed for the rural poor in South Africa and what has remained virtually unchanged over the past two decades. It provides a lens on one of the main conflicts in society and a central pillar of social organisation – property relations – even where contestations and debates are not always focused directly on land. A series of shortcomings – institutional, financial, capacity and others – has plagued the realisation of state-assisted market-based land reform, but the failure is much more comprehensive than these difficulties. The fact that the state has not been able to deliver significant land reform has not diminished the social need for land in a society like South Africa. In many ways it only underscores the importance of land – “the conflict that won’t go away” (Andrew 2009). But the reality is that these two decades since apartheid also show that the struggle for land needs to be part of much farther-reaching social change and a different conception than the very limited scope and possibilities within formal liberal democracy. So it is important to ask, what is unfinished? The agrarian political economy is a key departure point for uncovering the material underpinnings of the problem areas the state has aimed to democratise and the real obstacles to social transformation. Increasingly one hears nearly everyone in South Africa claiming to be in favour of rural transformation, but for whom and for what is less clear. At the same time, it is essential to look at the actual relations between people rooted in this political economy, the social and political institutions “sitting on top of it”, the debate over ideas to change society and the dynamic role of people in doing so, or we risk remaining passive critics of the state that is unable to fulfil its vast social and economic promises. Such promises are a very common feature of liberal democracies, even if they take a particularly “left” populist form in South Africa, given both the participation of the African National Congress (anc) as one of the movements © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�6736_009 LAND RIGHTS FOR FARM LABOUR 129 in the long struggle against apartheid and the huge expectations from the black population. The anc’s 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme (rdp) pledges to end inequality, poverty and injustice and to redistribute the land seized from the black population (anc 1994) without challenging the commodity system that is the source of those social problems. Different anc presidents over the past 20 years have regularly renewed these promises. Liberal democracies correspond to and reinforce the status quo – that is, capitalism – including in countries that have developed under the shelter and domination of foreign capital and/or which retain pre-capitalist aspects. Very important formal changes have taken place through the reform process in South Africa, particularly in the legal sphere, and there has been a battle to implement them in every social and political sphere. What appears to many to be an uneven or “unfinished” transition to liberal democracy actually is the path of uneven development and its resulting sharper social polarisation: it is not an aberration of or deviation from this transition. While undeniably facilitating some development, it is a path that operates against deep social, economic and political transformation of the society that is so needed, and in which so many people had high hopes. It is in this context that this chapter examines contention over rights to land and tenure security reform for farm dwellers – people working and living on commercial farms still primarily owned by white individuals and agribusinesses, or forced to leave for a range of reasons. The social conflicts over this segment of land reform focus the question of whether and to what extent solving the land issue involves fundamentally changing the property relations that govern access to land and related resources, agricultural production and other land uses. The chapter considers these relations and impediments to tenure reform on commercial farms, comparing research mainly in the provinces of Mpumalanga and the Eastern Cape during two different periods between 1994 and 2014. Property Relations on White Farms South Africa is not a peasant economy but its capitalist agricultural sector is not like Europe or the United States, partly because of the land question and the holdovers of backward social relations in the rural areas developed under settler colonialism. Two components of the countryside make up the single agrarian economy shaped and dominated by commercial agriculture and the inherited monopoly of land by white farmers. On the one hand, the former bantustans remain home to four million small and subsistence producer 130 Andrew households, forming a subordinate part of this agrarian economy. On the other, while in 2003 some three million blacks lived on commercial farms, today there is not an accurate count of farm dwellers still living on-farm, as many have been expelled or have left since then. Children, spouses and elderly family members may live on-farm and not work. A large number of people live in these commercial farming areas in nearby rural towns and informal settlements some of whom are employed on the farms.1 Commercial farming, and the land question, have their roots in the massive and violent dispossession of African peoples and harnessing of their labour. After the official end of slavery, the development of commercial agriculture through feudal-like arrangements to attract and oblige Africans to provide labour on white farms – mainly through shareholding, rent and labour tenancies – was facilitated by primitive white settler colonial states. They awarded whites property “title” and protected a staggering set of social and economic of privileges for the white settler minority through multiple forms of repression and control of the African population. Partly to channel labour for developing capitalism in the mines and fields and also to try to curb the expansion of an independent African peasantry, this colonial control was increasingly systematised after the turn of the 20th century under the aegis of the “unified” Afrikaner-led state, and more so with formal apartheid in 1948. Inspired in part by the ideology of white supremacy, Master and Servant laws unleashed harsh social practices on the farms integrated into exploitative commercial property relations, which despite developing towards capitalism, were not fully capitalist in nature. The uneven development of capitalism in agriculture – like South Africa’s agrarian history in general – remains a lively subject of debate among scholars, which radical historian Helen Bradford referred to as a “battlefield”.2 While today many farm owners’ operations and lifestyles are modern, with real-time computer consultation of commodity markets and, for those who can afford it, modern production methods and technology, for farm dwellers it is the opposite. The formal agricultural sector continues to function on the basis of a whole ensemble of social and racial inequalities on which colonial society was built and the mostly white private land ownership that anchors it. The social relations in agriculture have evolved in some ways, as have some 1 What constitutes rural and urban (especially in the countryside) is part of debates. 2 For discussion of capitalist development in agriculture see among others Bradford (1990, 1987), Morris (1976), Bundy (1979), Mafeje (1981), Keegan (1986), Murray (1987), Beinart et al. (1986), Bernstein (1996), Andrew (2005). See also Feinberg, Walker and Zamponi in this volume. LAND RIGHTS FOR FARM LABOUR 131 practices on the farms, but many of the oppressive and backward features from the apartheid era are still starkly evident. In other words they are part of the lifeblood of the contemporary capitalist sector – the advent of capitalism has not wiped them away and in fact it reproduces many of them, while modifying some aspects.3 Labour Tenants and Farm Workers Black farm worker families and a decreasing number of labour tenants are still in many ways the most vulnerable people and occupy the bottom rung of the social ladder in South Africa. Combined with low wages and difficult living conditions, many continue to have one foot on the land, but it is a precarious footing. The arrangements governing labour and access to land vary by province, reflecting particularities of dispossession and colonization, and today depend to some extent on the size of the farm owner’s operation, his capital resources and overall position within the sector. The line dividing labour tenants from farm workers has become increasingly blurred as the terms of labour arrangements evolve. While wage labour has become generalised, important pockets of labour tenancy remain – particularly in Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal – resulting in overlapping features of what are very similar relations.4 Labour tenants are tied to the land and to the farm through contracts (whether written or verbal), and have historically required succeeding generations to commit their labour to ensure the security of the family. Typically, the whole family is subordinate to the white owner and their labour is usually organised by the male head of the household who receives the remuneration. Some arrangements have changed over the years allowing men to work outside the farm for part of the year, leaving women as head of household, which can be a source of conflict over payment, and sometimes within the family (ibid.; Andrew 2005: 234). While partial payment in kind has been more common for labour tenants, contributing to their being paid below the value of their labour, some farm workers in the Eastern Cape said in 2011 and 2012 that they still received part 3 For further discussion by Andrew (2005), see Chapter 4 on women’s labour and social relations on white-owned farms and Chapter 5 on labour tenancy in commercial farming areas. 4 Marcus et al. (1996: 43–53); Andrew (1999: 405–418); Forsyth (1994: 7); and interview Shone/nau 1996. 132 Andrew of their low wages in kind.5 In addition, many of them still had access to small pieces of land, or the right to graze cattle, like labour tenants in the other provinces. It appeared that family members were paid individually, and women often still earned less than men or were hired only for harvesting local crops. However, like labour tenants in Mpumalanga, there was pressure on younger family members to keep supplying labour so that the parents or women and children might not be evicted from their homes. Relations between black families and white farmers remain very tense given the on-going threat of expulsion (or sale of the farm). Similar to labour tenants’ stories in Mpumalanga in 1996–1999, during research in the Eastern Cape fifteen years later farm workers expressed anger at the ways they were treated, but said the farmers punished them less often with physical beatings than before. There were also indications that the arbitrary and unregulated debt system continues to function in the Eastern Cape; in Mpumalanga research showed this system binds the tenant to the farmer, evocative of pre-capitalist relations the world over: he ran the shops and low standard schools on the farm, demanded “duties” from the wives and children at will, deducted various purchases and “services” from their pay, collected fines for punishments, exacted fees for grazing cattle, and sometimes imposed small taxes on the houses.6 A Labour Department official confirmed that many of these practices still exist in several provinces (interview Mali, 11 March 2011). ngos, community-based groups and scholars have written extensively about the continuing inhuman living conditions on commercial farms over the years, which have not changed significantly.7 Farm workers continue to report having to share contaminated water with animals, and complain about the lack of toilets, electricity, leaky roofs and locked farm gates restricting residents’ movement in and out of the farm (Manganeng 2005). While there are exceptions, such conditions are typical. And change does not always mean for the better. When the minimum wage (“sectoral determination”) was introduced 5 Interviews with farm dwellers on private game reserves as well as family members working on white-owned commercial farms but now living in informal settlements and townships in the area between Port Elisabeth and Grahamstown were conducted in 2011 as part of my participation in a Dutch nwo wotro-financed research project on the consequences of commercial farmers’ conversions from agriculture to wildlife production. Independent research and further interviews continued after June 2012. 6 Interviews in south-eastern in 1996 and north-central Mpumalanga in 1999; Molani (mllc) 1996; trac n.d.: 1–13. 7 See among others, pmg (2011, 2012), Naidoo (2011), Manyathi (2010) and sahrc (2003) as well as the websites of Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (Plaas.org.za), Association for Rural Advancement (Afra.co.za), Eastern Cape Agricultural Research Project (Ecarp.org.za) and Southern Cape Land Committee (Sclc.co.za). LAND RIGHTS FOR FARM LABOUR 133 for farmworkers in 2002,8 one of the lowest among all wage categories – owners were slow to comply or simply expelled black families. ngo studies show that in 2001–2005 farmers retaliated in several ways: taking away land for crops or letting their cattle out to destroy any gardens farm dwellers had planted since there was no fencing, raising the rent on their houses and increasing other deductions from their wage bill (Naidoo 2005). Eastern Cape farmworkers in 2011 described the on-going deterioration of their situation and open conflict over the steady whittling away of their access to small patches of land to grow food, the possibility of grazing cattle, and the “right” to bury family members on the farm. Yet the bigger drama behind these “cost-cutting measures”, as farmers detachedly refer to them in their press, has been the waves of displacements and outright evictions, with major consequences for farm dwellers.9 Whose Land – and Do Farm Dwellers Want it? Although the farm owner, the baas, dominated nearly every aspect of their lives, labour tenants in Mpumalanga in 1996–1999 somewhat contradictorily often considered the land they worked and lived on as theirs. Yet very few were familiar with the law and land reform. Field research during that period tended to corroborate a national study in 1995 by the then Land and Agricultural Policy Centre, which concluded that nearly 100 per cent of labour tenants wanted land. A much smaller sample in the Eastern Cape ten years later found similar demand among farm dwellers (Manganeng 2005). In 2011–2012 farm workers who had grown up or been born on a particular farm in the Makana area of the Eastern Cape said they considered it “home”, including some of those already evicted, depending on the size of the “scar” left by their removal. But they didn’t usually consider the land their own, although some thought the black government should be giving them land, without knowing much about their rights as farm dwellers.10 8 9 10 At that time the minimum was officially R600–650 per month, with farmers able to deduct 10 per cent if they provided lodging and food. But the actual average wage was estimated at between R300 and R400 in 2003, women often earning R100 less than men. The Labour Department has established regular small yearly increases and a bigger one from R1,503 per month in 2012 to R2,273 per month in 2013 after the major 2012 strike in the Western Cape. In March 2016, the monthly sector minimum rose from R2,606.78 (2015) to R2,778.83, up 40 rand (2.3 Euros per week) (http://www.labour.gov.za, accessed on 1 March 2016). Ibid.; Wegerif et al. (2005); interviews ecarp, 30 March 2011 and September 2012; Nongwe 2011. Interviews Paterson, informal settlements, Grahamstown townships, game farms, March 2011; Salem, Grahamstown, September 2012. 134 Andrew Using almost the same words as women labour tenants in Mpumalanga and “subsistence” producers in KwaZulu-Natal in 1996 expressing their desires for land, a woman and her husband, former farmworkers, in a large rural township near Port Elisabeth said in 2011: We don’t need a big farm. I want to plant things, keep stock. Not a big one, but big enough for planting” (interview Paterson, 27 March 2011). Land demand is difficult to measure as it is subjective and closely related to whether farm tenants and labourers think they have a chance to really access and develop land of their own when the social barriers have prevented it for so long. Not everyone wants to farm and many think it beyond their reach. Age too is a factor, but not universally, as is commonly argued. At the same time strong demand for rural land among these strata trapped in private property relations they have no control over is one indication that the land question is not only far from solved and does not represent “romantic” attachment, but rather inchoate aspirations for a differently structured quality and way of rural life. The material inequalities that are completely intertwined with racial oppression in the backward relations in the countryside continue to limit social development and tend to maintain women in an even more subordinate position, despite their resilience (Andrew 2005: 206–241; Marcus et al. 1996: 89–94; Ntsedi and Waldman 1997). The Market-based Land Reform Framework for Minimal Rights The modest South African land reform programme – the White Paper on South African Land Policy (dla 1997) – was the offspring of a political process of negotiations before 1994 within the historic compromise to share political power between the old National Party (np) and the incoming anc. The policy stated several objectives: political stability, protection of existing private farmland while redistributing a portion of it, preserving the basic structure of the commercial agricultural sector, as well as expanding the rights of black citizens and improving housing, tenure security, reducing poverty and developing the rural areas. To finance social promises – services, infrastructure, jobs, education and healthcare for all, as well as returning 30 per cent of arable land within five years to the black population – the goal of macro-economic growth centred on greater liberalisation, expanding export-oriented agriculture, assuring low-wage labour, and the privatisation and reorganization of some public structures, partly because the state was now freed of the burden of artificially supporting the white minority social base as under apartheid. LAND RIGHTS FOR FARM LABOUR 135 As part of the recomposed state, the anc believed that conflicting interests could be accommodated within the rdp platform and the neoliberalised economy, and this begins to explain why the party never sought to seriously redistribute resources or to restructure landholding and production for the benefit of the dispossessed population as its discourse to the black population implied. Land redistribution was formulated as a “willing buyer, willing seller” policy assisted by the state, which then purchased pieces of private farms at market prices that white farmers would release (or that were unviable). The initial narrative targeted the “poorest of the poor”, women and other social groups in need, including labour tenants. Yet over the years state programmes were reformulated one after the other, with a clear focus on integrating better-off black farmers into the mainly white commercial sector, referred to as “de-racialisation”.11 The strained political consensus around market-based land reform included two ostensibly rights-based programmes: for land restitution, by evaluating the circumstances of the candidates’ dispossession as a result of apartheid law and practices, and for tenure security for people living in communal areas and on commercial farms, discussed below. The state also bought farms at market prices for the restitution land claims, although many were settled in cash (crlr 2003). Land Concentration and Minimal Redistribution Land reform has not only been non-redistributive quantitatively, it has not served the most disadvantaged among the rural population, including women and other small-scale farmers or farm tenants. In many ways the position of large landowners and agribusiness has been strengthened, in line with the logic of capitalist agriculture leading to land concentration. The process of consolidating land into larger units and streamlining inefficient farms that the apartheid state had subsidized for decades began in the late 1980s and postapartheid land reform did not move away from that pattern.12 Nearly two decades later, the results of land reform have been very modest:13 about 7 to 8 per cent of private white-owned land was transferred through all 11 12 13 Not aimed at farm workers: obtaining the smallest state assistance grant within the 2001 Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (lrad) programme required the input of almost a year of farm labour wages. See VanZyl et al. (1996), Viljoen (1995) and Greenburg (2003) for more on changes in agriculture. Among the many evaluations of land reform, see drdlr (2010a), anc (2009), Andrew (2009, 2005), Lahiff (2008), and Ntsebeza and Hall (2007). 136 Andrew three programmes, and nearly one-third of that was resold to white owners through private transactions (Masinga 2012). The decrease in number of white commercial farms from 60,000 in 1994 to approximately 36,000 today also reflects this concentration: nearly the same proportion of rural land (arable and non-arable farmland) is controlled by fewer (mainly) white owners.14 Deregulation and removal of subsidies and price controls as well as stiffer rules of global competition have continued to sift out inefficient white farmers who no longer could profitably compete. However, most sold their assets to other white property owners or changed activities. Some white farmers moved into livestock production on marginal land while others converted grazing and arable land into private wildlife ranches within a broader drive to diversify their operations.15 For farm labour these changes revolving around “neo”-liberalisation have meant accelerated job shedding, an increase in casualised labour and, after displacements and removals from their homes on the farms, a loss of access to land and greater food insecurity. In addition, one of the gendered aspects of poverty is the continuing feminization of rural labour in some subsectors, often on both a casual and seasonal basis, paying women less. Concentration in land, social differentiation, and change in land use as well as the very limited scale of land reform itself all weaken instead of enhancing the potential to develop local farming among the black population in South Africa, including farm dwellers who spend their lives producing for someone else. Land tenure security and potential rights to land must be seen within this dominant framework shaping the agrarian economy and the relationships within it. Tenure Security and Land Rights for Farm Dwellers: Political, Legal and Extra-legal Opposition Land is a commodity, an asset and source of revenues for its owners, but political and social factors are also crucial in controlling land and agricultural 14 15 The last census in 2007 (StatsSA 2009) reported 40,000 units, 83 per cent belonging to individual farm owners; although there is debate over current figures, ranging from 35,000 to 39,000, based in part on annual sampling methods aimed at projecting sector revenues, the trend of concentration of rural land in fewer farms and owners is indisputable. One of the major shifts to non-productive land uses has been the consolidation of farm properties for breeding wildlife for leisure hunting and high-end tourism. Individual farmers sell part or all of their farms to larger investors or join with them in wildlife-based partnerships. See Andrew et al. (2013) for a study on these conversions to game farms in the Eastern Cape and the consequences for farm dwellers. LAND RIGHTS FOR FARM LABOUR 137 labour. White farm owners continue to exert influence in society well beyond their numbers through the media, the legal profession as well as political and agricultural organisations. In addition, as numerous farmers and farm labourers testified, many belong to armed farm patrols or networks. The prospects of land reform in the commercial farming areas of South Africa in 1995 heightened the tensions inherent in the political transition between the fragility of new rural local government and the tenacity of the old authority structures that had served white farmers’ interests for decades. Two main laws – the 1996 Land Reform (Labour Tenants) Act (lta) and the 1997 Extension of Security of Tenure Act (esta) – were designed to stop facile and arbitrary evictions of farm dwellers and to enable some categories of these families to purchase land they have occupied and worked on, by defining long-time occupiers’ land rights (rsa 1996, 1997). These acts had the effect of accelerating both evictions and threats of evictions. In the decade from 1994 to 2004, a national study found that close to one million evictions had taken place out of the total of 2.7 million displacements of people on farms during that same period. According to the same study, less than one per cent was carried out legally (Wegerif et al. 2005: 162).16 Farmers’ agricultural unions testified in Parliament meetings that evicting farm dwellers by esta rules took too long and was too expensive (pmg 2011). After these laws were introduced I witnessed the swift and violent reactions by farmers to the perceived threat of potential land rights during field research in 1996–1999 in the extremely conflictual countryside of the newly-created province of Mpumalanga (part of the old Transvaal). This is an area where the local political power of white farm owners, magistrates and local police was still in force.17 While some farmers mounted organised legal opposition to the two Acts, the political and intimidation pressures in that province were also palpable. Labour tenants interviewed described regular harassment in the form of the farmer “shutting off the water, locking the gate so we couldn’t get to our house, and breaking the windows of our son’s car …” (interview Rooikraal, 25 February 1996 in Andrew 1999: 403). 16 17 Of the 645 eviction orders the Land Claims Court had reviewed in 2004, 75 per cent were confirmed and 25 per cent set aside. See the in-depth study by Wegerif et al. (2005) for greater detail. Among the young workers at a timber plantation I visited in 1999 in northern Mpumalanga, some were children or Mozambicans without papers, all paid so little they couldn’t afford transport to leave. The owner’s friends in the police regularly rounded up foreigners just before pay time to deport them. In addition, he was a member of the Transitional Local Council, part of the new local government in that area (interviews S&T Timber Farm, near Belfast, March 1999). 138 Andrew Both farmers and farm dwellers asserted unequivocally in interviews in Mpumalanga that virtually all farmers were armed. One owner pulled up in his bakkie and told us researchers to get off his property, waving his pistol. The African family he had just thrown off his farm was camped down the road. The farmer had fired his rifle at the labour tenant for “talking back to me”. The family lost not only their patch of land and jobs, but all of their belongings, because the owner then bulldozed their shack, gardens and 70 chickens. “We had 500 rands in that house but he told us he would shoot us if we came on his farm again” (interview near Amsterdam, Mpumalanga, 27 February 1996). Many farm owners in that part of the province were organised into commando units, led by army officials which operated with nearly total impunity, their authority focused in local areas.18 A number of farm tenants organising for land rights and tenure security were tortured or killed.19 When asked whether such networks were still operating to defend the farms in 2011, a municipal land official who had been in a commando in the Western Cape replied that networks exist,20 but not commandos as such. He said that it used to be considered part of military service to protect white farms against theft and attacks, and that they did a good job (interview Bates, March 2011). In another illustration of how these “old” social institutions in the commercial white farm countryside are incorporated into today’s property relations from a different angle, a local official described in 2012 how Limpopo farmers hire a private security service that “brutalises people at night, sometimes to 18 19 20 In 2003 183 different commando units operated officially under the sa National Defence Forces for the official purpose of protecting the country in times of war. Unofficially they were hired to protect farm owners, like other private security forces and army reservists, and a quarter were farmers themselves. Ironically because of their link to sandf, the state paid the bill to defend perpetrators of violence against black farm dwellers before local judges set them free (sahrc 2003). A former (black) commando member from south-eastern Mpumalanga recounted, “[We] punished workers on the farms”, crippling some and murdering others in night raids on their homes. “We all wore balaclavas and the victim would be blindfolded … We would do anything we wanted …” (SamaYende 2000: 7–8). These incidents are far from just a remnant of South Africa’s “violent past”: in February 2016 two farm workers in the Free State visited their employer, seeking back pay owed them. The farm patrol response was instantaneous, as an organized posse of 40 to 60 white farmers’ vehicles chased them down country roads and across fields; 8 km later, the two men were reportedly beat to death by four farmers. See <http://www.newsjs.com/url .php?p=http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2016/02/19/Killing-of-two-black-farm-workers -exposes-South-Africas-faultlines> (accessed on 1 March 2016). LAND RIGHTS FOR FARM LABOUR 139 death”, speculating that these might have their origins in the former bantustan militias in that area.21 The statement in 1994 by a well-known spokesman for the Natal Agricultural Union that turning “the frog of a labour contract into the Prince Charming of a land right” could hardly be expected of a South African court (McIntosh 1994: 6), reflects a prevailing view of farmers in that period. If they chose to oppose laws through legal rather than (or in addition to) extra-legal means, in some areas they systematically contested both restitution and labour tenant claims (Cook 1995). This was quite effective in blocking land claims in the courts or using them to win “justifiable cause” for evictions. Farmers’ frequently masked their fears of tenure security or land rights for farm dwellers by shifting the terrain to labour disputes. One strategy was to challenge the legal status of labour tenants by claiming they were just farm workers, which gave owners the right to terminate them on the basis of one or another violation. The burden of proof to file claims fell on labour tenants, who rarely had documents to show in the context of this whole relationship of domination-subservience mentioned above (interviews Mashego 1997, 1999). In fact it was not uncommon for farmers to hold labour tenants’ identity papers, or for the “contract” to be informal and undocumented (interviews south-eastern Mpumalanga 1996 and near Belfast 1999); such verbal arrangements persisted most frequently among smaller farm operators. Only a very modest number of esta and lta applications by farm dwellers and settlements of their cases led to alternative land for farm dwellers.22 One ngo 21 22 One article reports that South Africa’s private security companies represent a huge “growth industry”, one of the largest in the world, and that farmowners rely on them more than the South African Police for protecting their property since the commando system was formally dismantled, supposedly phased out by 2009 (sapa 2014). According to the 2014 sahrc “Report on Safety and Security Challenges in Farming Communities”, this process in fact took more than nine years (until 2013 or 2014) and the Rural Protection Plan that apparently replaced them was largely based on the existing commando structure (pp. 30, 41, 47). See ≤http://www.sahrc.org.za/home/21/files/SAHRC%20SAFETY%20AND%20 SECURITY%20IN%20FARM%20COMMUNITIES%202015%20pdf.pdf≥ (accessed on 1 February 2016). For more on private security assaults on farm workers during the earlier period, see Human Rights Watch 2001, Unequal Protection: The State Response to Violent Crime on South African Farms. ≤https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2001/safrica2/≥. For information on commando organisation and rural defence systems, see D. Mistry, “Ploughing in Resources, The investigation of farm attacks, Institute for Security Studies”, Crime Quarterly No. 6, 2003. Wegerif et al. (2005) provide numbers of claims, showing discrepancies with government reports. Although the drdlr minister stated labour tenant claims were a priority for 140 Andrew report emphasises that the esta clause requiring agreement between farmers and farm dwellers on alternate land did not take into account the basic conflict of interest (Naidoo 2005). These examples show not only the multiple ways that property owners defied the law, but also that the state did not and seemingly could not enforce it, its lack of authority in effect reinforcing the status quo on the white farms. Labour and Land Conflict Intertwined, Separate Governmental Mandates Dominant trends continue to push people off commercial farms by one or another means, to reduce labour, and there is no unified body or jurisdiction either to handle the situation of farm dwellers as a whole, or of the huge numbers already evicted. Government is certainly aware that despite the formal adoption of legislation and occasional departmental inspections no real functioning monitoring mechanisms for farms exist and that in some ways things have deteriorated under the anc’s watch. Government fieldworkers noted the painful consequences of the state’s separation of land and labour (and housing) problems for farm dwellers. Labour inspectors say they are restricted to checking basic employment conditions but if they let farm dwellers talk about land disputes they would step on the land reform department’s toes. Nor do land reform officials venture into the hazards of farm dwellers’ uncertain employment or housing predicaments. One official from the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR), speaking anonymously, emphasised in 2012 the political limits of “solving” tenure security with more state funds: “Should the housing department give money to a farm worker to build a house when a farmer could evict him the next day?” Farm inspections represent one form of applying new labour laws, according to an Eastern Cape Labour Department official: To farm dwellers it’s a land owner; to us, it’s an employer … If you don’t notify, he will lock the gate…and then he sifts through his employees, 2014/2015 (pmg 2014), the department failed to comply with a series of court-imposed deadline, to give a full report on 19,000 claims that have been waiting for 15 years. In January 2016 the Land Claims Court agreed to revisit the class action suit that the Association for Rural Advancement (afra) and Legal Resources Centre filed against the drdlr on behalf of all labour tenants. See <http://afra.co.za/2016/01/08/farm-dwellers -demand-land-claims-court-act-against-contemptuous-minister/#more-499> (accessed on 28 February 2016); personal communication afra March 2016. LAND RIGHTS FOR FARM LABOUR 141 putting aside the “bad ones” and you get a bunch of “yes, yes”, “no-no” problems with the farmer … A couple of weeks later, people would come in (to our office) from the same farm complaining about the inspection. They said they were placed in another area of the farm, so we wouldn’t see them… We have a checklist. But the farm owner can easily manipulate your checklist. And in some areas you find labour inspectors speeding away to avoid confrontation with the farmer. We send transgressions to the Labour Court – there’s only one in the province. You’re lucky if you get a call back from them within a year. I used to criticise the Department of Labour too about what they did and then I worked there and saw how private property limits what you can actually do. Interview mali, grahamstown 11 March 2011 Asked what they tell people who are facing threats of evictions23 or who want land, he answered: “We have to tell them to go to the land reform department. Or we describe the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration to them but we don’t get involved”. A local ngo explained that if farm workers go to town to explain their case to someone, when they get back to the farm, the farmer harasses or punishes them (interviews ecarp 2011, 2012). The unexpected and tenacious strike by mostly non-unionised farm workers’ in the Western Cape table grape and wine fields in November 2012 riveted attention on the precarious position of farm dwellers and the conflicts with farm owners over employment and other issues. Increasing casualisation, shifts to seasonal, off-farm and migrant labour and the use of labour brokers have all tended to drive wages down. While the strike resulted in a badly needed raise to R105 per day, farm workers reported that owners have taken revenge with longer working hours, more piece-rates, and charging various fees for maintaining houses and for family members staying on the farm. Some say their situation has barely improved or even worsened. In addition to cutting jobs partly due to the higher costs they incur, nearly 2,000 farm employers filed for exemptions to delay payment of the new wage (see Capazorio 2013; Kleinbooi 2013; Sikhula Sonke 2012). 23 Land disputes on farms, particularly eviction cases, have been handled by a national departmental “hotline” and a private Cape Town law firm serving as an interim (medium-term) Land Rights Management Facility over the past several years (interviews A. Mahomed March 2011, March 2013). 142 Andrew It is noteworthy that farm workers literally had “no one to negotiate with”, no government body, and employers refused to talk to them directly while barring organisations access to the farms to avoid unionisation. In classic terms, employers threatened that farm labour had to choose between higher wages and losing their jobs (Kleinbooi 2013: 11). In other words, low-paid and already vulnerably positioned farm workers are expected to absorb farm operators’ increasing production costs by competing with each other to accept less stable conditions and by continuing to live far below a liveable wage. And although this was the leading edge of the strike, farmworker communities were “fed up” with their whole situation.24 Wage increases are badly needed, but without tenure security they will be undermined. And conversely, in today’s shrinking agricultural landscape dominated by agribusiness, farm dwellers interviewed say they want tenure security and land but don’t see how they can live without at least someone in their family working on white farms. The state’s impotence in intervening effectively in these conflicts is another illustration that improving farm dwellers’ lives cannot be limited to “stabilising” the highly fragile and exploitative nature of relations on the farms as they are. Moving Farm Dwellers Off-farm Establishing new “agri-villages” is one of the key solutions that government and farm owners have proposed for housing farm dwellers off-farm. The Draft Land Tenure Security Bill conceived of them as fulfilling the provision of “adequate alternative accommodation” for evicted farm labour (drdlr 2010b: 26). A number of clauses describe such resettlement as an equitable and suitable alternative, perhaps hoping to distinguish it from the image of large-scale removals under apartheid that critics have raised. Other more recent proposals prefer to call them “Sustainable Rural Settlements” (drdlr 2014). Secure and decent housing is of course a central preoccupation on many accounts for farm dwellers who continually live under the danger of evictions with nowhere to go. In seeking to minimise its conflicts with owners over land tenure rights on farms, the state tends to reduce land needs to housing, while land access itself is left vague. Farmers generally approve of the idea of 24 Researcher J. Wilderman refers to the strike as a sort of an all-out “community rebellion” (personal communication, October 2014); and interviews with farmworkers, Ceres, October 2014. LAND RIGHTS FOR FARM LABOUR 143 agri-villages exactly because it involves moving tenants off private farm premises and leaving the state to deliver and pay for housing and services elsewhere. Then the threat of land rights being recognised on their property(ies) essentially disappears, together with farm dweller families. If proposals for future green, sustainable, vibrant communities producing for local food needs, etc. were truly part of imagining a different structure and quality of life and production in the countryside, they might be a contribution. However in the context of land and agrarian reform that first and foremost protects private farm property and capitalist relations, many consider this a fairy tale given the harsh realities that will continue to determine how and where poor rural people can live – and die – in South Africa. So unfortunately even the most innovative ideas will be irrelevant or have a microscopic social impact if they don’t address the transformation of the agrarian economy as a whole and the property relations upon which it is based. A drdlr official told me soberly, Look around – we still have shacks – Khayaleitsha, Alex [Alexandra Township] need services and roads. If government can’t change even the townships over the past 20 years, and if it doesn’t service rural areas now with electricity or clean water, how will farm dwellers become a priority for building new agri-villages? … You can’t insist people stay on farms, but agri-villages don’t solve it. And what about their rights – they won’t have land (2012). That is closer to reality. Critics are afraid these villages may well become dumping grounds similar to apartheid days or cheap labour reservoirs – or both. In fact, some local landowners think that what is required is elevating the status of existing rural shack settlements (which serve now as cheap labour reservoirs), perhaps adding basic municipal services. In 2012 a Grahamstown newspaper, the Grocott’s Mail, was already referring to some of these in the area as agri-villages. Many such settlements have become “day labour centres” in the Western Cape, where unemployment is high and people compete for farm jobs very similarly to the situation in many other countries in the world. Farmers’ use of labour brokers to hire workers at lower wages has added to this conflict. A government employee interviewed in 2012 talked about how desperate people are for work, knowing that they may not be picked up tomorrow if there is someone better or cheaper. He described the “craziness” at the edge of settlements and the frequent accidents caused by trucks arriving and leaving to pick up workers. 144 Andrew “Relative Rights”? The “Proposal on strengthening the relative rights of people working the land” (drdlr 2014, 2015) centres on the purchase by government of a portion of private white farms – up to 50 per cent of each property, according to the farmworkers’ length of “disciplined service there” (10, 25 and theoretically up to 50 years) – so that the farm’s equity would be “shared” by farm owners and people who have worked there for at least ten years. Commercial farmers would continue to own a minimum of 50 per cent of the land but would be subject to the state purchasing 10, 25 or 50 per cent of the other half of their farms. The money does not go directly to farmers’ pockets (hence their outcry of “expropriation”), but is placed in an investment fund or trust managed jointly by shareholders for developing the farm and paying out people who want to leave. The proposal says it aims to present a more integrated approach to rural development, new agricultural employment, land reform, and land rights. However, it is to be based on the National Development Plan 2030 (ndp), the government’s current vision of generalised neoliberal growth, which projects a highly dubious figure of one million new jobs in agriculture (npc 2011: 219); the ndp prioritises particular high-value subsectors, large-scale agriculture, and hopes to boost a better-off section of black commercial farmers through expanding the same concept of land reform that has failed for nearly twenty years. This “relative rights” proposal for what the government called “collective ownership” of private land was timed just before 2014 national elections25 and appeared to be rhetorically pushing the boundaries of the modest reform process, since among other problems, it muddies the concept of rights to land with farm equity-sharing schemes that have not generated real benefits for farm workers up until now in South Africa. Owners’ interests and control over land will likely continue to trump any moral or paternalistic concerns for the well-being of long-term tenants. And farmers’ representatives mainly responded in that way.26 During field research farm managers and owners repeatedly shrugged and said, “It’s not my problem”. White farmers’ language has changed somewhat, the open racism is 25 26 See Engel in this volume. Angry reactions promised civil war and a new Volkstaat, while many speaking on behalf of established agriculture dismiss it as “unworkable” or, with barely veiled racism, insist that the “rest” of their property would be “devalued” Williams (2013). See also TLUsaTAU (2014) and Dardagan (2014). The Democratic Alliance called it “expropriation by stealth” (Mileham 2013). Ten commercial farmers are to participate in a modified pilot project. See 2016 government press release at http://allafrica.com/stories/201604270726.html LAND RIGHTS FOR FARM LABOUR 145 toned down in some areas, and they too evoke the need for change, while more corporate operators talk of “social responsibility”.27 But generally landowners continue to strongly oppose “sharing their land” in any form with farm dweller families, arguing that the government must use state land rather than private farms for reform and thus “evacuate” this tenure security problem with its own public funds (by providing alternative land and housing). Farmers will probably terminate workers long before they earn any right to part of this “share equity scheme” at the ten-year mark. Worse, is the likelihood that people will be evicted as preventive action just from white farmers’ apprehension about the pilot plans underway, as has occurred in previous rounds of land reform debate. Diminished or Vanishing Rights for Evicted or already Displaced Farm Dwellers Legislative proposals do not squarely address the thorny but mostly ignored problem of how to treat land rights for the millions of already displaced or evicted farm dwellers. For those very recently removed, expelled, who left for a range of reasons or who will be evicted, a state official admitted that their democratic rights are diminished (interview 2012). Actually, their potential rights to land on the farms where they worked and lived appear to be effectively ended. The rights of large numbers of people “stuck” in rural settlements with few future prospects, many of whom are absorbed neither by the formal or informal economy, are not even really being considered, and especially not their right to land. Farmers dismiss this social problem just as easily as they dismissed their tenants, sympathetic government officials shake their heads as though powerless, and expressions of outrage seem to be confined to the displaced families themselves as well as local ngos, political organisations and community associations, which continue to agitate about conditions and basic rights in general. These concentrations of unemployed or underemployed farm labour are, in other words, more or less officially relegated to being part of the growing rural South African shack landscape, and if not seasonally picking fruit, may at best get a temporary job cleaning roads for the state or share an old-age pension or other social grant across an extended family. 27 Eastern Cape luxury game reserves devote some public relations attention to csr, although the impact on the local communities is contested, since they also use labour trapped in rural informal settlements described above. 146 Andrew The laws may redirect stubborn commercial farm tenure cases to other mechanisms of land reform – to redistribution or to the re-opening of the land restitution process as they did in the past with labour tenant claims – but it is quite likely this would cater to only a relatively small number of people with ties to ngos or other forms of legal assistance. Farm Dwellers’ Tenure Security and Land Rights – Illusory and Elusive? Post-apartheid laws have been used by powerful interests in agriculture to block tenure security and new rights to land in commercial farming areas. The inability of the state to pursue and enforce laws governing them is one reflection of the limits and nature of liberal democracy. But more than that, farm dwellers’ rights to land – implying a form of stable tenure or ownership, not just occupation – have vividly been shown over the past twenty years to encounter different types and levels of resistance because they potentially infringe upon the right to private property and the land ownership relations at the heart of South Africa’s social organisation. Twenty years have shown that they are not just another political right within the framework of formal equality before the law, such as one person, one vote and the principles of freedom of movement, religion, speech, assembly, and again, in formal terms, non-discrimination by race, gender, sexual orientation and so on. The fact that the national (anc-led state) discourse on land and rural development has been and continues to be wrapped in the social need for and aspirations to formal equality, doesn’t by itself settle the problem of land and dominant property relations, and indeed sidesteps it. It is evident that liberal democracy serves and protects the system of private property – throughout the world. This is true in spite of the will and efforts of well-meaning individuals within the state (and a section of the anc) advocating and fighting for greater equality and access to land under the rubric of rights – and in spite of very dedicated ngos and progressive lawyers trying to win court decisions and assist farm dwellers to use the law to improve their prejudicial situation. In South Africa there is equality before the law but real inequality is everywhere. Formal equality is vital, but experience again shows that any radical transformation will require a fundamental change in land ownership. The unequal property relations based on the dispossession of the black majority is one of the main “non-democratic” features of South Africa and one which was not changed by the “transition to democracy”. Said otherwise, while the LAND RIGHTS FOR FARM LABOUR 147 land question is a democratic problem and is closely linked to the national oppression still deeply dividing South African society and marking its ownership system, it can only be solved by thoroughgoing transformation and will not be solved by regular liberal democratic procedures. Radical social change involves seeing the rural population not as an obstacle to development but as a base for bringing about such change in their interests – not in a discursively populist way as has been the case since 1994, but with a very different social goal in mind involving the real dismantlement of the structures of inequality and breaking up the old property system inherited from apartheid and colonialism, and with a different kind of land reform playing a central role in mobilising the rural poor. One of the main effects of liberal democratic rule is to fuel illusions about what can be changed within the parameters of the existing social order and economic system. While by themselves democratic openings don’t necessarily activate frustrated sections of the population holding high expectations to advocate sweeping social change, the fostering of illusions does tend to encourage them to engage in struggle for what continues to elude them – to try to make these illusions come true, repeatedly and from different angles. And some things that do not fundamentally challenge the social order will be won … while others will be taken away. Formal democracy helps to conceal, to mask the reality that property relations underlying the organisation of society as a whole are standing in the way of change. It also gives “space” and encouragement to scholars, journalists, political organisations and government departments to debate the causes and consequences of uprooting and further marginalising farm labour and tenants. Without challenging the framework, laws may be improved and the state is solicited to be more democratic or more developmental, to devote more resources to other priorities. The flip side of not clearly unmasking the realities of the system can also be seen: resignation to the inevitability of these destabilising and decidedly un-democratic and un-developmental processes worsening farm dwellers’ situation as the result of capitalist expansion, globalisation and “modernisation”. All that is true, because South Africa is part of a global capitalist system, but merely acknowledging it can encourage inertia and provides little scope for seeking genuine thoroughgoing alternatives. Tenure security may be improved within proposals the state continues to explore and test, while remaining relative and precarious – partially protecting some categories of farm dwellers, while further jeopardising others. Given the constraints and conflicts examined in this chapter, it appears most likely there will be a political and “practical” thrust to formalise alternative off-farm 148 Andrew settlements in order to attempt to reduce further conflict in the commercial farming areas and to resettle some of the large numbers of those who have been forcibly removed. In addition, the workings of the capitalist market upon which growth targets rely will continue to have a sharply socially polarising effect – both strengthening established large-scale agriculture and pushing down the rural poor – intensified by the impact of global dynamics inside countries of the continent, including “richer” ones like South Africa. 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Viljoen, M. 2005. “South African Agricultural Policy 1994–2004: Some Reflections”, Agrekon 44 (1): 1–16. Wegerif, M., B. Russell and I. Grundling 2005. Still searching for security: The reality of farm dweller evictions in South Africa. Polokwane: Nkuzi Development Association and Johannesburg: Social Surveys. Williams, M. 2013. “Farmworker land plan ‘won’t work’”, Cape Argus, 5 September. Selected Interviews in Mpumalanga, Eastern and Western Cape and Pretoria cited in this chapter comparing the period 1996–1999 and 2011–2014. Eastern Cape: 2011 (March) and 2012 (September): farmworkers and former farm dwellers in Paterson, Grahamstown townships, on private game reserves or hunting farms, informal settlements near Grahamstown, Salem and Alicedale. Mpumalanga: South-eastern, 1996 (February); north-central, 1999 (March): Labour tenants and farm workers either still on the farm working, retired on the farm, facing eviction, or waiting for land in informal settlements: Amsterdam, Belfast, Dirkiesdorp, Groblersdal, Iswepe, Rooikraal, Roossenekal, Piet Retief, Zaaihoek. Western Cape: 2014 (October) Breede Valley: farmworker families in several farms or townships in the Ceres area, Farmworker Advice Office, J. Wilderman. K. Bates, Grahamstown Municipal Land Manager, 25 March 2011. 152 Andrew Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (Capitalisation & Development; Tenure Systems Directorates), Pretoria, April 2012. Eastern Cape Agricultural Research Project: February, 2011, and September 2012. Land rights and legal aid centre, Belfast, March 1999. A. Mahomed, Cape Town, attorney for interim Land Rights Management Facility (at Cheadle, Thompson & Haysom), March 2011, and March 2013. M. Mali, Department of Labour, Grahamstown, 11 March 2011. S. Mashego, Farmworkers Research and Resource Project, July 1997; Land and Agricultural Policy Centre, February and March 1999. H. Molani, Mpumalanga Land & Labour Commission, Pretoria, February 1996. N. Nongwe, Environmental Manager, Grahamstown, 8 March 2011. S. Shone, spokesman for the Natal Agricultural Union NAU/Kwanalu, Pietermaritzburg, January 1996 and March 1999. chapter 8 Does it Matter? Reflections on Twenty Years of Land Reform Cherryl Walker Does land reform matter in contemporary South Africa? Twenty years after the transition to democracy this may seem a ridiculous question to pose. Most political commentators take it as self-evident that “land”, in the abstract and as a placeholder for land reform, does matter – significantly. An editorial in South Africa’s daily tabloid, The Times, went so far as to state in August 2014 that “Land and how the black majority gets access to it is the biggest challenge this government faces” (14 August 2014). Given the prominence accorded South Africa’s grievous history of land wrongs in contemporary political discourse, it is perhaps easy to see why a newspaper editor might make such a claim. Since 1994 the post-apartheid land reform programme has redistributed less than one third (just over 7 mn hectares) of its initial target of transferring 30 per cent of white-owned commercial farm land to black ownership by 2014, and the problems with many land reform projects are well-documented, including by the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (drdlr) (Mail & Guardian 2010). The history of land dispossession and continued racial inequities in land ownership were in the political spotlight throughout 2013/14 as a result of the commemoration of the centenary of the 1913 Natives Land Act and the emergence of the Economic Freedom Fighters (eff) as a vocal, mediasavvy political presence during the national elections of May 2014. The eff has placed land ownership at the centre of its political programme, calling for the expropriation of white-owned land without compensation, along with the nationalisation of mines, banks “and other strategic sectors of the economy”, also without compensation (eff 2013). The decision by the Zuma government to re-open the land restitution process to a further round of land claims in 2014 – a process that will only close in June 2019 and is likely to produce many thousands of new claims – has also pushed the issue of land dispossession under colonialism and apartheid to the fore. In part this far-reaching decision can be seen as a pre-emptive move to undercut the eff. More rarely probed in the public debate, however, are important followup questions about the relative importance of land reform. Accepting that marked racial disparities in land ownership remain an unresolved challenge and political lightning rod twenty years after the transition to democracy, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�6736_0�0 154 Walker one is still faced with a string of difficult policy questions. In what respects does “land” matter, for whom, and by how much? Which land matters – is it ancestral land, or good farm land, or mineral-rich land, or well-located urban land? What about locality and ecology? How far do aggregated national totals for black and white land ownership go in measuring the actual distribution of wealth and well-being in the present juncture? Is land reform the most important land challenge facing the country – what about climate change, for instance? And just how important is land relative to other matters of pressing public concern, such as jobs, housing, education, energy supply, crime, the future of mining, and more? Once one begins disaggregating “land” as a grand, mobilising construct, its significance becomes a lot more difficult to compute. Media coverage generally fails to engage the relative unimportance of land-based livelihoods in the second decade of the 21st century, compared to 1913 or even 1994. While the eff hogs the headlines as a brash new political street-fighter, its share of the national vote in the 2014 elections was only 6,35 per cent (News24 2014). Ready assumptions about the centrality of rural land reform in national affairs are daily contradicted by the primacy accorded metropolitan and non-agrarian preoccupations in the national media. This does not simply reflect the urban bias of most journalists and editors, but also the relative insignificance of the agrarian sector in the political economy of contemporary South Africa. Too often the term “land” operates as an empty signifier in national political discourse – something that “absorbs rather than emits meaning” (Buchanan 2010: 173). In part this is because of its extraordinary plasticity as a referent, able to work symbolically across different scales of social life – national, ethnic, regional, community, familial, and individual – while simultaneously invoking the material basis of life, both past and present. Its materiality also manifests itself at different levels of aggregation, from the very general (“commercial farms”) to the very particular (“the plot from which my family was evicted”). In the national debate on land reform the symbolic authority and economic value of land get yoked together as mutually reinforcing, with little attention to the actual relationship between land, redress and economic development for differently located groups of people in different regions of the country. By conflating redress with land, land with the countryside, and the countryside with farming, the political debate on land reform obscures rather than clarifies the multiple meanings and uses of land. This is to the detriment of effective policy development in which land redistribution is but one mechanism among many for building a more equitable and sustainable socio-economic dispensation for the future. Twenty Years of Land Reform 155 In this chapter I build on earlier reflections on these themes (Walker 2008). I begin with an overview of the land reform programme of the past twenty years and the misinformation that surrounds much of the political-policy debate on the distribution of land and its social and economic significance. After a brief discussion of the disjuncture between the symbolic and material dimensions of land I return to my concern with the plasticity of “land” as a signifier, and the implications for developing a more appropriately grounded land reform programme. An Overview of Land Reform since 1994 Democratic South Africa was founded on the acknowledgement that the land injustices of the past had to be addressed and that securing a more equitable land dispensation was an imperative. Section 25 of the South African Constitution (rsa 1996) lays out the basis for a three-pronged programme of land reform, encompassing land restitution for those unjustly deprived of land rights after the enactment of the Natives Land Act in June 1913, land redistribution to boost black ownership of land, and tenure reform to achieve tenure security for those with legally insecure access to land (primarily farm workers/dwellers on privately-owned commercial farm land and people living on state-owned communal land in the former Bantustans). At the same time, the commitment to land reform was tempered by a constitutional undertaking to respect existing property rights, which in 1994 were overwhelmingly in white hands (largely individual, some corporate). Contrary to what is popularly believed, however, the state’s subsequent reliance on the market to acquire land for land reform, through the “willing buyer/willing seller” principle, was not constitutionally mandated but was a product of post-apartheid government policy. The Department of Land Affairs (dla) justified this in terms of concern about the negative effects of a more radical programme of expropriation (which the Constitution allows) “on the land market and investment in South Africa” (dla 1997: vii). Since 1994 land reform has been constrained by consistently small budgets, reflecting its actual status as a relatively minor programme of government, albeit one capable of producing a powerful political charge from time to time. While fluctuating over the years, its share of the national budget has never exceeded one percent (Cousins n.d.; National Treasury 2014: xiv). In the 2014 budget the total allocation to the drdlr was less than a third that allocated to the Department of Human Settlements, responsible for national housing policy and delivery (ibid.). In this time, however, the focus of land reform has 156 Walker shifted in revealing ways. It is possible to identify three broad periods in the post-apartheid land reform programme, each associated with the incumbent president of the country and, more particularly, his term as president of the ruling African National Congress (anc). Table 8.1 summarises key features of each period. Significant here is the noticeable shift away from the initial focus on poor, land-hungry households as the primary beneficiaries of land redistribution that characterised the Mandela era, in favour of greater support for financially better-off emerging black commercial farmers. Calculations by Michael Aliber on the size of the land redistributed through the state in 2010/11 reveal that “the average per beneficiary household was 500 hectares or more, at an average expense in the order of R2 million” (Aliber et al. 2013: 29). Pro-poor rhetoric is still widely deployed in public pronouncements but this obscures the extent of the de facto support for aspirant commercial farmers and the underlying policy concern with maintaining the overall productivity of the large-scale farming sector (still commonly defined as “white commercial agriculture”), in the interests of food security and agricultural exports, and to the benefit of more advantaged sectors of the black population. Another significant shift concerns the increasingly prominent but politically controversial “turn to tradition” in land reform policy, more particularly the legislative and other policy interventions promoting the authority of traditional leaders over land in the former Bantustans and in rural restitution projects. Evidence of such a “turn” has become increasingly visible from the early 2000s. It has been fiercely contested by civil society organisations, including through constitutional litigation, as undemocratic, gender-insensitive and cementing rather than undoing old apartheid dualisms. “Now, as in the past” Claassens has argued, operating “under the cloak of timeless custom”, “the state is using law to re-impose tribal boundaries and a segregated systems of land rights for those living in the former Bantustans, insisting that ‘custom’ is co-terminous with unilateral chiefly authority over both land and people” (Claassens 2014: 778). The anc’s decision under President Jacob Zuma to re-open the restitution programme to a further round of land claims in mid-2014 can also be partly linked to this development. The decision represents a reversal of earlier insistences that the original cut-off date for lodging land claims (31 December 1998) would not be amended. Although it is likely that many new claims will be for urban and privately owned rural land, the opportunity for traditional leaders to extend their authority through the re-opened restitution programme is being actively promoted by senior politicians, including President Zuma. In February 2014 he urged the National House of Traditional Leaders to “find good Twenty Years of Land Reform 157 lawyers” and “look at the claims on behalf of your people, so that no-one is left outside” (quoted in Walker 2015: 235). In the 1990s, ngos voiced anxieties about the extent to which the land redistribution programme was simply “growing” the Bantustans of the apartheid era, by focusing on acquiring land for black beneficiaries on marginal farm land on the borders of the former Bantustans. Under the Zuma administration a similar dynamic is animating the restitution programme. While many land ngos and potential claimants have welcomed the promise of land and/or financial compensation that the re-opened restitution process holds out for ordinary people, there are well-founded concerns about the state’s capacity to deliver on expectations. The drdlr estimates there could be as many as 397,000 new claims, yet the budget to support this is not forthcoming from the National Treasury. A major category of potential claims resulting from the imposition of “betterment” planning in the former African reserves can be expected to produce a dense web of cross-cutting, competing and differently constituted claims to both communal land and rural service delivery that the restitution process is ill-equipped to address. There are also concerns about the impact of the flood of new claims, many likely to be poorly documented, on the 20,592 claims from the first round of restitution claims that the Chief Land Claims Commissioner reported in late 2013 were still “in process of being implemented” (Gobodo 2013: slide 6; on these issues see Walker 2015.) By the end of 2015 some 121,000 new claims had reportedly been lodged (Mabasa and Khumalo 2016). Twenty years after the transition to democracy the drdlr has introduced a host of inconsistent mid-level land policies but no coherent, overarching policy framework to replace the now disregarded 1997 White Paper on South African Land Policy. Publicly the drdlr is more comfortable invoking the symbolic significance of land reform as a political imperative than in unpacking its actual contribution to rural livelihoods and national development. While the National Development Plan (National Planning Commission 2012) contains ambitious projections for both smallholder and commercial agriculture as drivers of rural job creation and agrarian revitalisation, the drdlr insists that land reform’s primary purpose is “[i]nstilling national identity, shared citizenship and autonomy-fostering service delivery” (drdlr 2011: slide 3) – goals that appear more elusive today than in 1994. The drdlr justifies these goals in terms of the “enduring demand for land” that is the outcome of South Africa’s history of “accumulation by dispossession” (ibid.) but makes little attempt to disaggregate that land demand, or to factor into its analysis the complex matrix of present-day forces (both local and global) that are re-shaping relationships to land. Table 8.1 Overview of land reform policy, 1994–2014 Redistribution Restitution Tenure reform The Zuma years, 2008–2014 Pro-poor focus Willing buyer-willing seller policy Reconciliatory stance towards commercial farmers Initial target of redistributing 30% of white-owned land, which later not actively pursued Focus on group projects aimed at poor and land-hungry Establishment of dla & provincial offices Land Claims Court adjudicating all claims Cut-off date for lodging claims set at 31 December 1998 Policy decision not to accept “betterment” claims Policy development aimed at recognising communal tenure and nested rights of households and individuals within the former Bantustans Legislation introduced to secure land rights for labour tenants and prevent illegal evictions from commercial farms Emphasis on emerging farmers Willing buyer-willing seller under scrutiny but retained Stronger role for traditional leaders in communal areas 30% target reconfirmed, first for 2014, then for 2025 Stronger focus on emerging commercial farmers Strong support for black market-oriented farmers in redistribution coupled with significant “turn to tradition” in promotion of traditional institutions in former Bantustans Concern with “productivity” on land reform projects Strong support for commercial black farmers State leasehold policy for smallholder beneficiaries Shift to administrative settlement of claims by Minister Cut-off date of 31 December 1998 confirmed in May 2007 Re-opening of restitution programme to mid-2019, including for “betterment” claims Traditional leaders mobilising around restitution claims, with support of state Legislation introduced to strengthen the role of traditional leaders in rural local government and land administration in the former Bantustans. Communal Land Rights Act of 2004 declared unconstitutional Attempts to strengthen judicial powers of traditional leaders through Traditional Courts Bill dropped in Parliament as a result of strong civil society opposition Proposals floated that if adopted could compel farmers to share their land with workers (see Hall and du Toit 2014) Walker The Mbeki years, 1999–2008 158 Overall thrust The Mandela years, 1994–1999 Twenty Years of Land Reform 159 Mapping the Distribution of Land In order to disaggregate land demand one first needs to understand the distribution of land in contemporary South Africa. Table 8.2 summarises the available information and points to the lack of precision in the aggregated data in the public domain. It is quite extraordinary that after twenty years of often fierce national debate there is still confusion about the actual extent and ownership of something as tangible and eminently measurable as land. We know the total area of the country, more or less – approximately 122 mn ha, although even here there are disconcerting inconsistencies across official sources. Thus in 2011 the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (daff) put the total area of South Africa at 122,320,100 ha, while a 2003 dla report put the area at 121,208,793 ha, over a million ha smaller. In percentage terms the difference may be negligible, but it is not inconsequential when translated into actual land. Nor is it without political effect, depending on how it is combined with other discrepancies concerning key sub-categories of land. A clear example of misleading political claims based on incomplete information is the familiar assertion that at the end of the apartheid era 87 per cent of South Africa’s territory belonged to whites and only 13 per cent to blacks, with very little having changed since then. This claim featured prominently at commemorative events around the centenary of the 1913 Natives Land Act during 2013. The 87/13 per cent ratio derives from the 1936 Native Land and Trust Act, which built on the 1913 Natives Land Act and made provision for up to 13 per cent of the country to be set aside as “native reserves” (the basis of the future “Bantustans” or “homelands” of apartheid policy). As Table 8.2 illustrates, most of the land that was not designated as “reserves” was in private white ownership before (and after) 1994, but there were also quite extensive tracts of state-owned land allocated to various public purposes, including National Parks, military bases and the like, along with small amounts of land owned by entities such as churches and South Africans not classified as white. Critically, the 87 per cent has always encompassed urban as well as rural land, including all the metropolitan centres where most of the privately owned wealth in the country and the overwhelming majority of individual property owners have long been concentrated.1 In 2003 the number of registered title deeds in South Africa was 6,996,658 (Augustinus 2003: 1). At that stage there were some 40,000 commercial farm units in the country. 1 1 The eight metropolitan areas encompass some 2 per cent of the total area of the country. 160 Table 8.2 Walker A broad-brush overview of the distribution of land in South Africa since 1994 % sa Ha actual Total area, South Africa (sa): 122,000,000 ha (rounded) 100% 122,320,100 121,208,793 122,081,300 State-owned land Total, 2003 (includes reserves) Total, 2013 • “unaccounted extent” 2013 Former reserves: Total former “reserves” • Former Bantustans • Former “coloured” reserves Agricultural land (all) Total area: agricultural land • “Commercial” agriculture • “Reserves” agriculture 24% 14% 29,109,890 17,061,882 17% 7% 20,428,544 8,360,527 15% 14% 1% 17,112,800 16,745,176 1,277,926 82% 70% 67% 12% 100,665,792 86,186,026 82,209,571 14,479,766 Sources 1991 (daff 2011) 2003 (dla 2003) 2011 (Statistics South Africa 2012) (dla 2003) (drdlr 2014: slide 6, 7, 12) (drdlr 2014: slide 8) (South African Government 2013) (daff 2011) (dla 2003) (dla 2003) 1991 (daff 2011) 1991 (daff 2011) (dla 2003) 1991 (daff 2011) Privately owned land (individuals, companies, trusts, churches, etc.) Total area: agricultural & other 79% 96,550,791 (drdlr 2014) • Private agricultural land 67% 82,209,571 (dla 2003) • Other (urban, mining, etc.) 12% 14,341,220 own calculation Total land awarded through land reform (redistribution and restitution) since 1994 Total, 2013 (official data) 6% 7,134,315 total of figures below • Redistribution 4,123,000 (Nkwinti 2013) • Restitution 3,011,315 (Gobodo 2013) Twenty Years of Land Reform 161 Also relevant for the development of land policy that is sensitive to actual rural conditions is that the 87/13 per cent ratio conceals significant provincial variation in the distribution and quality of land, the result of complex regional histories of settlement, conquest and resistance, in which ecology has also played a part. Thus over a third of all commercial farm land lies in the arid Northern Cape (accounting for 82% of that province) where less than 2 per cent of the total population reside. In contrast, commercial farm land accounts for under half (in the region of 44%) of the far more densely settled and agriculturally more promising KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo provinces (see Walker 2008: appendix 2 for details). Trying to sharpen the analysis of the distribution of land in contemporary South Africa and what it means for land policy is, however, not an easy task. Currently a confusing range of figures are available with regard to the extent of state land, the amount of land allocated to commercial agriculture, the amount of land in white ownership, the amount of land in corporate ownership (and who that represents) and the amount of land transferred to black ownership since 1994. Some of the differences relate to changing land use – for instance, the area determined as “commercial agriculture” amounted to 86,186,026 ha in 1991 (daff 2011) but by 2003 this had contracted by almost 4,000,000 ha, to 82,209,851 ha (dla 2003). The difference is equivalent to the total area claimed to have been handed over to black South Africans as a result of land reform’s redistribution programme between 1994 and 2013. Table 8.2 also points to the confusion around how much of South Africa is owned by the state. In 2003 dla data indicated that at that stage 24 per cent of the country was state-owned, with well over half of this land (nearly 58%) comprising the former Bantustans of the apartheid era. Ten years later an official state-run audit, which received wide media coverage, reported that only 14 per cent of South African land (little more than what was allocated to the “native reserves” in 1936) was state-owned (RSA Government 2013). This report did, however, come with an important but less well-reported caveat, to the effect that a further 7 per cent of the total area of South Africa was classified as “unaccounted extent”; much, if not all, of this can be assumed to be state land.2 2 2 Much of this was un-surveyed land in the former Transkei, with a further substantial piece located in the northern Kruger Park (RSA Government 2013). If this land is added to the state land disposed of through land reform, then the 2013 figure ends up being largely compatible with the figure of a decade earlier. Also of note is that a drdlr presentation on the audit in 2014 contained discrepant figures on the total area of state land (shown on Table 8.2). 162 Walker More serious, given the racial tensions around this land, is that two decades after the transition to democracy there are still no robust figures for how much commercial farm land is in exclusive white ownership. A range of more or less informed estimates are in circulation, supporting a range of different political pronouncements and policy prescriptions. In May 2014, for instance, the eff’s Andile Mngxitama used the state’s land audit figures to claim, erroneously but with considerable effect, that 40,000 white families (a figure deriving from the number of commercial farmers operating in the country) owned 80 per cent of South Africa’s land (Mngxitama 2014). Disregarding urban land, as it appears Mngxitama intended (where, of course, the number of white families owning plots of land is considerably larger than 40,000), the story around farm land is much less clear. In 2007, the last year for which such figures have been sourced, the proportion of commercial farm land owned by individuals, as opposed to corporations, stood at 83 per cent (see Table 8.4 below.) For analysts such as Mngxitama the presumption is that the racial profile of commercial farming has not changed since 1994, when almost all the approximately 70 per cent (not 80%) of South African land allocated to commercial agriculture was in white hands. However, a disputed but not insignificant proportion of this land has certainly shifted into black ownership since 1994. Officially 6 per cent of South Africa’s total land area – much but not all of this in the “white countryside” – had been transferred to black owners through land reform by late 2013, benefitting perhaps 250,000 households.3 If corporate ownership and private sales of land are factored into the equation, then the amount of formerly “white-owned” land in black ownership increases, possibly quite significantly in selected parts of the country (for instance, Kwa-Zulu Natal), although aggregated data is sketchy. In 2012 agricultural economist Johan Kirsten argued that there was evidence to show that 25 per cent of white agricultural land was already black-owned, with even higher proportions in some districts (Kirsten 2012). Unfortunately he then clouded the issues by suggesting that if one added the land transferred to black owners through land reform to that transferred through the market, one could argue that the anc’s target of redistributing 30 per cent of South Africa’s land to blacks had already been met: here appearing to disregard the concern with equitable access to land for poor (black) South Africans that originally informed the target of 30 per cent, while also setting 3 3 In 2013 the Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform claimed 230,886 people had benefitted from land redistribution – perhaps 60,000 households in all, assuming four people per household (Nkwinti 2013). The restitution beneficiaries are generally not broken down between land and financial compensation categories, but amounted to just under 370,000 households in 2013 (Gobodo 2013). Twenty Years of Land Reform 163 up a contested interim land target as, in effect, an even more contentious land ceiling. The reason for raising these difficulties and qualifications is not to dispute the enduring racial inequities around access to land and tenure security in post-apartheid South Africa, nor the need for redress. However, credible information is a prerequisite for effective policy development, and from that perspective the softness and malleability of the publicly available data has to be a matter of concern. Some of the problems with numbers reflect technical challenges around collecting, classifying and standardising land information, others reflect weak information management. Regardless of the reasons, careless and/or opportunistic readings of soft land data are undermining both the quality of the political debate and the state’s capacity to play an effective leadership role in policy development. The Changing Context for Land Reform Further undermining the quality of the debate is a misreading of the current context for land reform. In assessing both how much and which land matters in South Africa, demographic and economic developments since 1994 also need to be mapped out and interpreted. Tables 8.3 and 8.4 below highlight important issues to consider. Together they confirm significant demographic trends in terms of overall population growth, ongoing urbanisation and the declining share of the total population of the white sector of the population over the last twenty years. Well over 60 per cent of South Africans are now classified as urban, with little reason to expect that the proportional growth of the urban population will be reversed in coming years.4 In large part post-1994 processes of urbanisation can be understood as a strong catch-up phenomenon among black South Africans, with the abolition of influx control and the “displaced urbanisation” policies of the apartheid era (Murray 1988). At the same time, the decline in the population classified as rural since 1994 has been driven largely by developments in the former white commercial farming areas. The Bantustan population has remained relatively stable as a proportion of the total population, at just under a third, while the actual number of people living in these areas has increased. This highlights the urgent need for the development of strong land policies that can boost livelihoods and 4 4 Urban growth is not only a metropolitan phenomenon but is also impacting (unevenly) on small and intermediate urban areas as well, including towns in the former Bantustans (Geyer n.d.). 164 Table 8.3 Walker The urban/rural distribution of the South African population since 1994 (% rounded) Mid-1990s Population: South Africa 40,583,000 [1996] % white 10,9% [1996] Urban population: % 54% [1996] Rural population: % 46% 91% White population: % [1991] urban Bantustan population: ca. 12,7 million % total sa population 31% 44% % black South Africans Non-Bantustan rural 15% population: % Rural share of poverty 70% 2013/14 Sources 54,000,000 [2014] 8,4% [2014] 63% [2012] 37% >91% Statistics South Africa 1999, 2014 16,5 million 32% 40% Statistics South Africa 1999; World Bank calculated from above Beinart, 1994 Statistics South Africa 1999; Claassens 2014 own calculation 6% 57% npc 2012 tenure security in these areas – both issues that have been seriously neglected since 1994. Considerable attention has focused in recent years on communal tenure systems as important in terms of social identity and providing a social safety net for poor households. What is also pertinent for the purposes of this overview, however, is the recognition that only a small minority of Bantustan households are active smallholder farmers; for the great majority agricultural land is a residual though not irrelevant economic resource. The decline in household agriculture in the former Bantustans has been accompanied by the emergence of social grants as a major contributor to household income, a social policy intervention which lies behind the drop in levels of absolute poverty in these areas since 1994. The declining proportion of the total of the rural population thus reflects major structural changes in the historically white-owned countryside. The economic significance of agriculture as a proportion of the country’s Gross Development Product (gdp) has declined steadily throughout the 20th century, 165 Twenty Years of Land Reform Table 8.4 South African agriculture since 1994 Commercial farm units % individual owner % company5 Average farm size Gauteng KwaZulu-Natal Limpopo Northern Cape Western Cape Farm workers Agriculture as % total employment Agriculture as % gdp “Small-scale farmers” in former Bantustans “commercially oriented” “subsistence-oriented” 1993 1996 2007 57,980 82.4% 5,1% 60,938 76.1% 7,3% 39,966 83.2% 5,4%6 323 808 755 4,418 1,000 1,093,300 914,500 10,5% 5,9% 4,6% [1994] 1,292,600 [1991] 2011 Sources daff 2011 427 1,138 1,871 5,798 1,468 628,200 821,967 5.1% [2010] 2.5% [2010] 1,200,000 [2009] daff 2011 daff 2011 daff 2011 daff 2011; Sandrey et al. 2009 150,000 Aliber et al. households 2013 2,600,000 to around 3–4 per cent today. Ongoing changes in the commercial agricultural sector pose serious challenges to the npc’s ambitions for this sector as an important source of rural job creation. These changes include the consolidation of farming enterprises across all agro-ecological zones, along with the shedding of permanent labour and a corresponding shift to a greater use of seasonal labour; they reflect global dynamics around agricultural trade and restructuring and not simply local processes (Bernstein 2015). The developments have been gathering force since before 1994 – i.e. they cannot be attributed solely 5 6 5 Public and private; other categories of owners are partnership, cc’s, cooperative and, in 1991, government. 6 Only “private company” is specified for 2007, making comparisons with previous years difficult. 166 Walker to pre-emptive responses by commercial farmers to attempts to strengthen farm workers’ rights to land and housing through post-apartheid land reform – but there is evidence of an upsurge in the eviction of farm workers since 1994. Of note here is that much of the commercial agricultural sector is considered economically marginal, with less than 2,500 farmers nationally producing over half the output, according to one 2011 study (Sandrey et al. 2011). This is not a hospitable environment for those dependent on farming to make a decent living. The Disjuncture around Land and the Plasticity of “land” As a Referent The preceding discussion points to the disjuncture between the importance accorded land reform in much contemporary political and academic debate and its relatively minor status as a programme of government. This is matched by the disjuncture between popular demands for land redistribution at scale and the actual take-up of rural land for farming purposes. A national survey conducted in 2003 found 85 per cent of respondents agreeing with the statement that “Most land in South Africa was taken unfairly by white settlers, and they therefore have no right to the land today” (Gibson and Lombard 2003). A similar survey conducted in 2004, and repeated in 2007, found some three quarters of black (African) respondents agreeing with the statement that “all land whites own they stole from blacks” (74.5% in 2004, 78% in 2007), with (not surprisingly) sharply divergent positions between black and white respondents on this issue (Swart 2013). More recently the 2012 South African Social Attitudes Survey found that 64 per cent of the adult population agreed that the government should pursue land redistribution as a form of redress (although no details were given as to how), while “only 23% expressed satisfaction with the way the government was handling land reform” (Roberts et al. 2013: 2). Yet, critically, the importance attached to land reform in the abstract does not convert into an equivalent importance attached to land as an economic resource in most South Africans’ daily, but also future-oriented, calculations. In the former Bantustans, as already noted, land plays a relatively small part in the livelihood strategies of the rural poor, and is far less significant than social grants as a bulwark against absolute poverty. For the great majority of South Africans the history of land dispossession carries a powerful emotional sting but in their day-to-day struggles it is not the most pressing concern. Thus in the 2012 South African Social Attitudes Survey land reform did not feature as one of the top challenges facing the country Twenty Years of Land Reform 167 that respondents were asked to identify. The issues raised spontaneously by respondents (i.e. no prompts) were, in order of priority (with the percentage of respondents identifying the issue in brackets): • • • • • • • • unemployment (identified by 76% of respondents) crime and safety (48%) poverty (33%) hiv/aids (31%) corruption (28%) service provision (17%) education (13%) affordable housing (9%) (Roberts et al. 2013). The apparent inconsistencies in popular attitudes towards land have been commented upon since the early days of the land reform programme but their implications for land policy have never been sufficiently integrated into the policy debate. People approve of land reform as a general programme of government but are unlikely to see farming as a desirable route to a better life. (This does not mean, of course, that many would not accept an opportunity to acquire land through the redistribution or restitution programme.) Here understanding the plasticity of “land” as a referent becomes useful. It is possible to identify at least seven main clusters of meaning around land in contemporary debates on land reform: • Land as a measure of black dispossession and/or liberation at the national or sub-national/ethnic level; • Land as “place” and site of belonging/marker of identity at the local level (family, community, clan); • Land as an aesthetic and/or spiritual resource, as in landscape; • Land as a place to stay and basis for shelter (in both rural and urban contexts); • Land as a source of individual and/or household livelihoods, most commonly through farming but also through the utilisation of natural resources such as firewood, wild food and water; • Land as factor of production in capitalist agriculture, mining and other enterprises; • Land as the natural environment, here involving considerations around biodiversity, eco-systems services and nature conservation. The above list is not considered exhaustive and it can, no doubt, be extended and refined in numerous ways. There is not space to delve into how these 168 Walker meanings are invoked individually and in combination in the political debate on land reform, beyond noting that different constituencies work with different combinations of them at different times: the meanings attributed to “land” are not fixed, with context of major significance. While the first three clusters of meaning identified above can be thought of as operating largely in the symbolic realm, the remaining four position land primarily as a material resource, albeit at different scales of value and generality (that may also be inflected with symbolic meaning to varying degrees). Commonly analysts urge the importance of understanding how the symbolic and material domains of meaning come together in land reform (e.g., Kepe et al. 2008). Here I am pointing to the value of separating them out analytically (even though in practice these different registers of meaning intersect in complex ways), so as to consider their different implications for land reform and the development of land policy more generally. As already suggested, the first instance of meaning, land as a measure of black dispossession at an aggregated level, has been accorded central authority in the anc’s land reform programme, through what I have elsewhere termed the “master narrative of loss and restoration” (see Walker 2008). Here the symbolic function of land operates primarily at the level of a collective black identity, most prominently at a national level but also, not infrequently, at a subnational level. (An example of the latter can be found in the mobilisation of ethnic identities in support of the large land restitution claims that have been launched by traditional leaders.) While drawing deep moral authority from history, this signification also lends itself to more immediate, opportunistic ends. In line with this assessment, Andries du Toit (2014) has argued: … the discourse of land reform has increasingly served as a channel for the racialization of South African politics and the articulation of a narrow, populist and chauvinist African essentialism … In this context the land question becomes increasingly conflated with the national question. … it symbolises the marginalisation and disenfranchisement of our entire poor and black population – including those who have been urbanised for more than a generation and who have no prospect or desire of ever putting a plough to the ground. Although land as “place”, in the second instance, is often thought of as subsumed within the first, in practice it operates differently. Here the difference in scale is important. Significantly, even though “land” also functions symbolically in this instance, its invocation of relationships and identities works with memories, emotions and experiences that concern an actual place and actual Twenty Years of Land Reform 169 people. To that extent it is more bounded as a referent than “land” as a marker of national identity – its symbolic power potentially more capable of being constrained by knowledge of the land’s materiality as well, including its physical limitations and relative standing compared to other resources. This may partly explain the apparent disjuncture between popular support for land reform as a national objective and reduced interest in working actual land at household level. How much, then, does land reform matter twenty years after the transition to democracy? In the aftermath of the populist politics surrounding the commemoration of the centenary of the 1913 Natives Land Act and the national elections of May 2014, the drdlr still defends its rural land reform programme as first and foremost a matter of social justice from which the “milk and honey” dream of rural prosperity and harmonious well-being will flow. However, while the idea of land reform continues to resonate powerfully with the majority of South Africans as a response to past dispossession, after twenty years of less than impressive results from land reform as a programme of government, land itself is less attractive than it was in 1994 as a perceived route to prosperity and “development”. If people were asked to choose between land and a job, or land and decent education for their children, the great majority would be unlikely to choose land. Much depends on the context. Some of the land at stake in land reform struggles is extremely valuable and worth fighting for – mineral-rich land, high-end agricultural land, well-situated urban land. Overall, however, farm land is not a particularly valuable economic prize. As urbanisation increases the contribution of agricultural land to livelihoods nationally is likely to decline still further. As already noted, this is not an argument against land redistribution for those who want to farm, nor against redress for past land injustices. It is, rather, an argument about the need for a much more nuanced and well-informed debate on the actual contribution of land reform to national development and household well-being. Bibliography Aliber, M. et al. 2013. Land Reform and Livelihoods. Trajectories of Change in Northern Limpopo Province, South Africa. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Augustinus, C. 2003. ‘Comparative Analysis of Administration Systems; African Review. With special reference to Mozambique, Uganda, Namibia, Ghana, South Africa’. Unpublished paper prepared for the World Bank. Beinart, W. 1994. Twentieth Century South Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 170 Walker Bernstein, H. 2015. “Commercial farming and agribusiness in South Africa since 1994”. In B. Cousins and C. Walker (eds.) Land Divided, Land Restored: Land Reform in South Africa for the 21st Century. Johannesburg: Jacana Media: 104–119. Buchanan, I. 2010. A Dictionary of Critical Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Claassens, A. 2014. “Denying Ownership and Equal Citizenship: Continuities in the State’s Use of Land and ‘Custom’, 1913–2013”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40 (4): 761–779. Cousins, B. n.d. ‘Land reform in post-apartheid South Africa – a disappointing harvest’. URL: <http://www.lalr.org.za/news> (accessed on 14 November 2014). DAFF (Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries) 2011. Abstract of Agricultural Statistics, 2011. Pretoria: Department of Agriculture, Forest and Fisheries. DLA 1997. White Paper on South African Land Policy. Pretoria: Department of Land Affairs. DLA 2003. Extent of State Land in the Republic of South Africa. Pretoria: Department of Land Affairs. DRDLR 2011. Green Paper on Land Reform. Presentation to Parliament, 20 September 2011. Pretoria: Department of Rural Development and Land Reform. DRDLR 2012. Mid-term Review of the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform. Pretoria: Department of Rural Development and Land Reform. DRDLR 2014. ‘Land Audit Report’. Presentation to the Portfolio Committee on Rural Development and Land Reform. 17 September. Pretoria: Department of Rural Development and Land Reform. Du Toit, A. 2014. “Land reform – cloud cuckoo land or calculus of power?” Daily Maverick, 11 August. URL: <http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2014-08-11-op-ed-land -reform-cloud-cuckoo-land-or-calculus-of-power/> (accessed on 14 November 2014). EFF 2013. “Economic Freedom Fighters Founding Manifesto. Adopted July 2013”. Np. Geyer, H. nd. “The analysis of disaggregated subpopulation migration trends in South Africa”. CRUISE. URL: <http://www.statssa.gov.za> (accessed on 27 April 2014). Gibson, J. and K. Lombard. 2003. “Land Injustice in Contemporary South Africa”. Research paper version 1.7, 27 2003, Washington University, St Louis and Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, Cape Town. Gobodo, N. 2013. “Report to the Ad Hoc Committee on Coordinated Oversight on the Reversing the Legacy of the Native [sic] Land Act”. Power-Point presentation. Pretoria: DRDLR. 19 August. Hall, R. and A. du Toit 2014. “Smoke and mirrors in government’s farm worker policy”. URL: <http://www.plaas.org.za/blog/smoke-and-mirrors-government-farm-worker -policy> (accessed on 18 November 2014). Kepe, T., R. Hall and B. Cousins 2008. “Land”. In N. Shepherd and S. Robins (eds.) New South African Keywords. Johannesburg: Jacana Media: 143–156. Twenty Years of Land Reform 171 Kirsten, Johan 2012. “South African has already met its 30% land redistribution target”. URL: <http://www.kwanalu.co.za/uploads/files/PressReleaseLandReformTarget. pdf> (accessed on 15 November 2014). Mabaso, Bulelwa and Anele Khumalo 2016. “Where restitution landed at the State of the Nation Address”. Fin24 finweek. URL: <http://www.fin24.com/Finweek/ Opinion/where-restitution-landed-at-the-state-of-the-nation-address-20160219> (accessed on 29 February 2016). Mail & Guardian 2010. “No intention to nationalise land, says Minister”, Mail & Guardian, 25 March 2010. Mngxitama, A. 2014. “You’re buying stolen land, Mr Branson”, Mail & Guardian, 23 May 2014. Murray, C. 1988. “Displaced Urbanisation”. In J. Lonsdale (ed.) South Africa in Question. London: James Currey: 110–133. National Treasury 2014. The Estimates of National Expenditure 2014. Pretoria: National Treasury. News24 2014. ‘2014 National Elections; National Results for South Africa’. URL: <http:// www.news24.com/elections/results> (accessed on 13 November 2014). Nkwinti, G. 2013. Speech by the Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, Mr Gugile Nkwinti (MP) during the debate on the State of the Nation address. URL: <http://www. anco.org.za/caucus/show.php?ID=2887> (accessed on 18 November 2014). NPC (National Planning Commission) 2012. National Development Plan 2030; Our Future – Make it Work. Pretoria: The Presidency. Republic of South Africa (RSA) 1996. Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Act 108 of 1996. Cape Town: Parliament of South Africa. Roberts, B., J. Struwig and S. Gordon 2013. “The Nation States …”. In HSRC Review, 11 March 2013. RSA Government 2013. “Rural Development welcomes approval of Land Audit Report by Cabinet”. URL: http://www.gov.za/rural-development-welcomes-approval-landaudit-report-cabinet (accessed on 29 February 2016). Sandrey, R. et al. 2011. ‘Agricultural Trade and Employment in South Africa’. URL: <http://www.oecd.org/site/tadicite/48707890.pdf> (accessed on 18 November 2014). Statistics South Africa 1999. 1996 Census in Brief. 3rd edition. Pretoria: Statistics South Africa. Statistics South Africa 2009. Census of Commercial Agriculture 2007 (Preliminary). Statistical Release P1101. Pretoria: Statistics South Africa. Statistics South Africa 2012. Census 2011. Statistical Release (revised) P0301.4. Pretoria: Statistics South Africa. Statistics South Africa 2014. Mid-year population estimates. Statistical Release P0302. Pretoria: Statistics South Africa. 172 Walker Swart, C. 2013. “Public Opinion on Land Reform”. Paper presented at conference on “Land Divided: Land and Society in South Africa, in Comparative Perspective”, 24–27 March 2013, University of Cape Town. The Times 2014. “Calculation not populism, needed for land reform”. The Times Editorial, 14 August 2014. Walker, C. 2008. Landmarked; Land Claims and Land Restitution in South Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, and Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Walker, C. 2015. “Restitution Unbound”. In B. Cousins and C. Walker (eds.) Land Divided, Land Restored: Land Reform in South Africa for the 21st Century. Johannesburg: Jacana Media: 232–249. World Bank. ‘Urban population (% of total)’. URL: <http://Data.worldbank.org/ indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS> (accessed on 18 November 2014). part 3 South Africa in Southern Africa ⸪ chapter 9 South African Influence in Zimbabwe: From Destabilization in the 1980s to Liberation War Solidarity in the 2000s Timothy Scarnecchia and David Moore South African responses to crises north of the Limpopo in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe can tell us a lot about the changing nature of South African diplomacy and politics, while also revealing just how similar the relationship remains between the two countries, whether it was Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa in the 1970s, or newly independent Zimbabwe and what is referred to as highapartheid South Africa in the 1980s, or the New South Africa and Zimbabwe in the 2000s. Such comparisons would seem to allow us to control for different variables – whether it be race, the Cold War, or globalization and the neo-liberal ascendency – variables that are often seen as shaping a relationship that may, in the final instance be more realistically seen as a relationship where both South Africa and Rhodesia/Zimbabwe have used rhetoric about their relations for domestic and international support, while remaining fairly consistent in terms of their continued “love-hate” relationship always tempered by the unequal economic relationship between the two nations. Furthermore, we can conclude that in apparently quite distinct political situations, South African efforts to mold the Zimbabwean political environment to its needs have met with little success. Regional and Cold War Influences Leading Up to 1980 Independence In order to make a comparison of the late 1970s early 1980s period with the more recent past, it is important to remember that South Africa provided a great deal of financial, military, and moral support to Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (udi) government through most of the Liberation war. However, after the Cuban and Soviet successful intervention on the part of Angola’s Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (mpla) in 1975, the Cold War priorities of the United States in particular played a much more important role. Wanting American support for its goals to put into power a pro-South African government in Namibia, South Africa worked with the © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�6736_0�� 176 Scarnecchia and Moore Americans and British to bring Ian Smith to negotiations in an attempt to end the war there and to stop the Cubans and Soviets from intervening directly in Rhodesia. The importance of the anti-Soviet and anti-Cuban campaign gave more influence to Presidents Julius Nyerere (Tanzania), Kenneth Kaunda (Zambia) and Samora Machel (Mozambique) in shaping Zimbabwean nationalist politics (see Pallotti 2011). The Peoples Republic of China’s ties to the region, and the failure of Chinese and American support in the Angolan conflict helped the us and other western powers to see the Zimbabwe African National Union’s (zanu) cooperation with China as less of a risk than cooperation with the Soviets. From 1976–1980, the historical narrative mostly revolves around the skills of nationalist leaders to consolidate their own power over their respective nationalist armies while courting regional support (Front Line States, the oau’s Liberation Committee, Commonwealth), as well as American and British assistance. In the end, Mugabe and zanu were more successful than Nkomo and zapu in consolidating power to create an army (the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, zanla) that would guarantee electoral victory in the 1980 election. South Africa, with the largest and most powerful military in the region, cooperated with western Cold War powers to dismantle Ian Smith’s udi government in this period, hoping to replace it with an African led government that would cooperate with South Africa and avoid “another Angola”, or even another Mozambique, on its northern border. In order to carry this out, the South Africans continued to help Rhodesia militarily although making it quite clear to Smith’s udi government that they would not finance the war indefinitely. During the period leading up to the elections in 1980, however, South Africa continued to have troops either embedded with Rhodesian troops or stationed in remote areas should they be needed to protect South African interests. British estimates claim that there were 5,800 South African soldiers in Rhodesia at the time of the March 1980 elections (tna 1980d). South Africa also worked to assist Bishop Muzorewa’s United African National Congress (uanc) to campaign against the two main African nationalist parties with their own liberation war armies, Robert Mugabe’s zanu and Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (zapu). The South African government, during and after the Lancaster House talks, were reassured by the British, and in particular Rhodesian General Peter Walls – who was led to believe that he had the full trust and confidence of the British – that Mugabe would not be permitted to win (Flower 1987: 266). This was largely believed because the popularity of Bishop Muzorewa’s uanc was overestimated, and South Africa was convinced they were doing enough (financially and strategically) to South African Influence in Zimbabwe 177 guarantee a Muzorewa victory. In addition to financing and supporting Bishop Muzorewa’s uanc campaign in the March 1980 election, South Africa also assisted the uanc’s paramilitary group known as the “Auxiliaries”. As Ken Flower argues in his account of the 1980 elections, the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation (cio) became less and less optimistic of a Muzorewa victory as they realized the number of zanla forces who were either sent to the demobilization camps (called “assembly points” in the jargon of the day), or most importantly those who were in the country but not demobilized. South African intelligence was also aware that Muzorewa’s uanc was barely able to hold rallies in the rural areas, as people were kept from attending rallies. As Flower recalls his response to Bishop Muzorewa’s call to the British to ban Mugabe and zanu from the election, the realities of the balance of forces pointed to a Mugabe victory: I believed that the election was running away with itself, that the British were committed to it come what may, and that the Frontline Presidents would loudly denounce any move which might obstruct the course of Mugabe and Nkomo. I began to feel that the British would rather accept the worst result than no result at all …. flower 1987: 263 Flower would have most likely informed the British of the increasing likelihood of a Mugabe victory as cio intelligence were well aware that the number of zanla troops in Zimbabwe outnumbered the number of zanla troops demobilized in the assembly points.1 The British sources, particularly as expressed in the telegrams sent back to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office by Lord Soames – serving as Governor of Zimbabwe during the transition to majority rule and overseeing the March 1980 elections – demonstrate the lack of interest the British had in supporting South Africa’s and most white Rhodesian’s claims that Muzorewa, or a Muzorewa/Nkomo alliance, should win the elections. Mugabe and zanu-pf (Patriotic Front) managed to use their regional and international networks to turn attention on the role of South African troops in Rhodesia, and the violations of 1 There has long been speculation that Flower worked for the MI6 British intelligence organization. David Moore has located an interesting handwritten note in 1978 by then deputy under-secretary of state John Graham, indicating that it would not be a good idea to add Ken Flower to a “stop list” of Rhodesian officials prohibited from entering the uk, because, as Graham put it, “The visits of Messrs Flower and Robinson in fact serve our purposes, but we should [underline] not [end underline] say this” (tna 1978). 178 Scarnecchia and Moore Muzorewa’s auxiliary forces, to put South Africa and the British on the defensive, while also helping to make zanu-pf abuses of the cease-fire and election campaign rules appear to be “on par” with those of Muzorewa. Before the election, when the international media picked up the story of South African troops stationed in Zimbabwe to protect the Beit Bridge, the main access point between South Africa and Rhodesia, Mugabe and his allies had found an issue to gain international sympathy. The British and Americans, knowing full well that there were far more South African troops in Rhodesia than only those protecting the bridge, saw this emphasis only on the Beitbridge troops as a minor victory for South Africa. Still, when the United Kingdom’s main negotiator, Sir Antony Duff, meet with P.K. Botha and Prime Minister P.W. Botha, Foreign Minister P.K. Botha expressed his anger toward requests from the British to remove their troops from their Beitbridge defences. Mr. Pik Botha said that the terrorist incident at Silverton on the previous day … has hardened attitudes throughout the white community in South Africa. There was even less disposition than ever to make concessions to terrorists. The Russians’ surrogates would have to be taught a lesson. In forcing through policies of reform the Prime Minister had made himself more unpopular in Nationalist circles than any previous leader. He had only been able to do so because he was also Minister of Defense. But he had to be careful. He (Pik Botha) had warned the British weeks ago that Bishop Muzorewa would lose ground; and this was now happening. Patriotic Front intimidation was widespread, and the Bishop was thinking of pulling out of the agreement. The South Africans had done nothing of which they could be accused, though they had had approaches both from Nkomo and Mugabe. The whole of Southern Africa was moving into a situation of conflict. The South Africans had considered closing all external routes. What was there for South Africa in going on as present? … After some repetition of previous points Mr. Pik Botha then said that following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the South African Government expected a friend like Britain to take action to prevent the Soviet Union seizing Namibia. He would like to see Britain oppose swapo and bring in “the democratic parties”. It would be to South Africa’s advantage in Namibia to pull all their troops and equipment out of Rhodesia. The British could wash their hands; South Africa could not.2 2 The reference to Silverton is to the Silverton bank siege, which is described by the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s Truth Commission special report as follows: “On 25 January South African Influence in Zimbabwe 179 When zanu-pf’s victory was made official, it was therefore perhaps less of a shock to South Africans than previously assumed (Onslow 2009: 126). Some of the diplomatic shock expressed by the South Africans may have had more to do with their desire to press the British and Americans for more cooperation on Namibia, to avoid a similar outcome, after having played their role in pressuring Smith to accept the Lancaster House agreement. British Ambassador Sir John Leahy met with both Foreign Minister Pik Botha and Prime Minister P.W. Botha to let him know the results before they became public. Leahy writes, I have spoken to Pik Botha three times on the telephone this evening, twice when he was with the Prime Minster, and have given him a preview of the likely result. He was at first predictably excitable, claiming that there must have been cheating over the ballot boxes, we ought to call another election, and this kind of result was bound to provoke “a coup”. But on the last occasion when I was able to talk to him at greater length and he was alone, he was more philosophical about it. After saying that the result showed how the West was losing out everywhere to the Russians and that there were rough times ahead, he went on to say that he had learned in life that one does not always understand a given situation immediately and that after a lapse of time it looks differently. “In a hundred year’s time no one will remember it”. I encouraged him in this line of thought by saying that it was a new situation which none of us had contemplated and that we would need to think together carefully about how to react to it. He said that he had warned me last October that the procrastinations at the Lancaster House conference might lead to this. I said that this remark might have been justified had Muzorewa lost by a narrower gap but this could not possibly explain such a sweeping victory, any more than suggestions of cheating in the election could. We all had to face up to a new situation. He did not dispute this. tna 1980a As Sue Onslow (2009) as argued, the South Africans had wanted a short transition period in order to make it more difficult for Mugabe and zanu-pf to organize for the elections. Still, the British had done their best to make the elections quick, even to the point of not having voter registration, because they estimated that the creation of voter rolls would have taken too much time. But 1980, mk operatives held people hostage in a raid on a bank in Silverton, Pretoria. In a shootout with the police, three operatives and two civilians were killed” (sabc 2015). 180 Scarnecchia and Moore in the end, the time factor was a canard as zanu-pf won the election by a very large majority of votes. After the elections, South Africa soon found it necessary to show its economic and military dominance of the region. It pushed the new Zimbabwean state into line through economic steps such as not returning Rhodesian rail stock to make sure that Zimbabwe’s new government did not act rashly. The reality of South Africa’s dominance in Zimbabwean trade and transport routes meant that the Government of Zimbabwe needed to take a conciliatory approach to the behemoth to its south. As the first years of the 1980s were to show, South Africa’s overt and covert actions in Mozambique and Angola, and its continued attempts to deny swapo’s election to power in Namibia, meant there was little room for Zimbabwe to take counter measures against the South African state. If anything, Mugabe’s victory made the situation more difficult for swapo: South Africa’s argument for excluding swapo from further negotiations was all the more convincing to the Americans and British. One interesting comparative aspect of the 1980 election in Zimbabwe is the way international observers ultimately decided it was a “credible” election, if not “free and fair”. This foreshadows what was heard from observers of the African Union and the Southern African Development Community (sadc) after the recent 2013 elections in Zimbabwe. The Commonwealth Election Observers Group sent their interim report to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on 2 March 1980, stating: The Group recognizes that it is difficult, if not impossible, to make clear and unqualified judgements about every aspect of the electoral process carried out, as it has been, in the immediate wake of a protracted and bitter civil war. Various factors have sustained or created conditions where political activity was not always devoid of violence, where freedom of movement, assembly and expression were restricted in varying degrees in parts of the country … The suspicions and hostility dividing different sections of Rhodesian society, exacerbated by years of armed conflict were not, and could not reasonably be expected to be, dissipated within a few weeks of the ceasefire. It is a matter of some satisfaction, however, that in a society as heavily armed as Rhodesia’s, the level of violence during the campaign has not been higher than it was. tna 1980c The American and British responses to Mugabe’s victory were much more optimistic than the South African response. Jimmy Carter took pride in his defence of the Patriotic Fronts’ demands to not recognize the 1979 elections that had South African Influence in Zimbabwe 181 brought Bishop Muzorewa to a short-lived rule (Saunders and Onslow 2009; Mitchell 2007; DeRoche 2000). Margaret Thatcher did the same, taking credit for the peaceful transfer of power. She especially commended her own foresight at the Lusaka Commonwealth Heads of Government meetings in 1979 where she also committed to Nyerere’s and Kaunda’s demands that sanctions remain and constitutional talks be called by Britain rather than recognizing Muzorewa’s and Smith’s ill-fated internal settlement government. Of course, Thatcher’s embracing of Mugabe’s election in 1980 as her first major foreign policy victory goes against her suggestion only nine months earlier, to Lord Carrington and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser in July 1979, “… that the worst problem remained how to get rid of Nkomo and Mugabe; the Prime Minister [Thatcher] commented that they had nowhere to go other than Rhodesia” (tna 1979: 5). Regardless of her initial intentions, the Lancaster House Agreement and the subsequent cease-fire and elections ushered in a potentially radical change in the region, one personified by Prime Minister Mugabe, who was constantly referred to, by the South Africans, the British, the Americans and the Front Line State Presidents, as better than more radical alternatives within zanu-pf. The inability of the South Africans to influence the outcome in the election does, however, suggest continuity with previous and future disappointments over Rhodesia and Zimbabwean politics. Once again, as in Angola in 1975, the apartheid state felt let down by the Americans and the British. The intelligence channels, both in terms of overly optimistic reports of Muzorewa’s popularity and General Walls’ confidence that he had Lord Carrington’s and Prime Minister Thatcher’s word that they would not permit Mugabe and zanu-pf to win if he objected, added to the realization that South Africa would have to take care of Zimbabwe themselves, and renegotiate the relationship with Mugabe’s ruling party.3 This led to a mixture of strategies from South Africa. On the one hand it wanted to normalize relations and guarantee economic cooperation, while on the other hand it relied on threats of military action, sabotage, and infiltration to keep Mugabe from offering bases within Zimbabwe to either the anc or pac, from where they could attack South Africa. The number of covert operations 3 For General Wall’s “let down” on 2 March 1980, by Sir Antony Duff and Robin Renwick, see Renwick’s own account. After Walls repeated that he was still waiting to hear back from Prime Minister Thatcher to his appeal for Lord Soames to void the elections because of intimidation, Duff and Renwick informed Walls that this was not going to happen, and the Governor and Electoral Commission were going to conclude “that the overall result broadly reflected the wishes of the people of Rhodesia” (Renwick 1997: 98). 182 Scarnecchia and Moore directed at Mugabe himself, zanu-pf headquarters, and Zimbabwean military installations and equipment during and after the elections showed South Africa’s power quite effectively.4 Interestingly, Ellis notes that the anc and sacp reactions to Mugabe’s victory were almost as negative as those in Pretoria, as they had hoped for a victory for their allies in zapu. South African communists were at first inclined to regard Mugabe’s victory as “a conspiracy with international capital”. “Progressive forces should reject elections”, a Party meeting heard. “[The] slogan of one man one vote is wrong”. The South African comrades soon came to accept the truth, however, which was that zanu had snatched victory not by collusion with international imperialism, but by a ruthless use of intimidation. ellis 2012: 134 As Tor Sellström has pointed out, there had never been a strong tie between zanu-pf’s leadership and the anc leadership, because the anc had been zapu’s ally since the mid-1960s (Sellström 2002; see also Shubin 2008). Mark Gevisser, in his biography of Thabo Mbeki, suggests, however, that Thabo Mbeki, with Oliver Tambo’s blessings, had maintained good ties with Mugabe and zanu, particularly through Emmerson Mnangagwa. Gevisser notes, however, that Thabo Mbeki’s hunch that Mugabe would be important in a free Zimbabwe given the ethnic majority equation, remained an “apostasy in the South African Communist Party (sacp) and Umkhonto we Sizwe (mk). And certainly contributed to the branding of Mbeki as “‘unreliable’ at the time” (Gevisser 2009: 300). Mugabe’s and Thabo Mbeki’s friendship would be important during the 2000s, when Mbeki’s diplomacy during the Zimbabwean crisis sided mostly with zanu-pf, leading to the less than equal conditions of the 2008 Government of National Unity. In the early 1980s, however, Zimbabwe became, along with Angola and Mozambique, one of South Africa’s potential enemies to confront in the total strategy of the high apartheid period. As Stephen Chan has noted, Zimbabwe was not the main interest of South Africa’s military and covert operations, but Zimbabweans were made well aware of how damaging South Africa could be when necessary (Chan 2011: 35–36). The South Africans found Zimbabwe fairly easy 4 Perhaps the best brief account of the accumulated South African attacks on Zimbabwe during the first two years, and then during Gukurahundi, can be found in Paul Moorcraft’s brief chapter on post-Independence Zimbabwe in Moorcraft (1990). South African Influence in Zimbabwe 183 to infiltrate. The assassination of Joe Gqabi, the anc’s representative in Harare in 1981, by South African hit squads showed the ease with which South African covert agents were able to act in Zimbabwe. The Thornhill Air force base sabotage in 1982, where Zimbabwe’s newly received British Hunter fighter jets were destroyed by explosives placed by former Rhodesian and European members of the Zimbabwean air force, with South African help, also showed the weakness of Zimbabwe’s new military and cio to prevent South Africa from acting on Zimbabwean soil. Perhaps the most destructive acts of South African destabilization was the infiltration of South African trained “super zapu” dissidents. They were ordered to cause chaos and carry out civilian killings – including white farmers – with the intent of making it more difficult for the anc’s Umkhonto we Sizwe (The Spear of the Nation; mk) to operate from bases, helped by ex-Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (zipra) forces in the southwestern region of Zimbabwe. The coexistence of ex-zipra dissidents willing to fight against the state with the “super zapu” element created and armed by South Africa set the stage for Mugabe’s Operation Gukurahundi, which further destabilized Zimbabwe during the period 1982–1985. The use of state violence against civilians was often justified because of the presence of South African trained dissidents, making the violence of the Zimbabwe National Army 5th Brigade more acceptable amongst both regional and international supporters of Zimbabwe – who chose to hold back major criticisms of these civilian killings in exchange for Zimbabwe’s continued role as an anti-Soviet and Cuban state – and, on the other hand, the international anti-apartheid movement, who saw Mugabe and zanu-pf at the forefront of the Front Line States efforts to fight against apartheid South Africa (see Scarnecchia 2011). Files in the South African Department of Foreign Affairs archives show that the Zimbabwean cio and the South African Defence Forces met regularly during the Gukurahundi period to discuss security issues and share intelligence. The main theme of these meetings was that the Zimbabweans would not allow mk to establish bases in Zimbabwe if South Africa would help to stop the infiltration of ex-zipra or newly trained dissidents from entering Zimbabwe. Much of the shared intelligence was that of former Rhodesian cio officers who continued to work in the Zimbabwean cio (Scarnecchia 2011). As well, zanu leaders realized that cooperation with the sadf was more important for their survival than commitment or solidarity with the anc. The relationship between zanu and the sa anc did improve over the 1980s, and after the military reintegration program paid for by the British had ended, Mugabe consciously shifted Zimbabwe’s foreign policy to a more confrontational stance with the us in particular. In the mid-1980s, the Americans who had so strongly defended Mugabe through the early revelations of state-sponsored atrocities 184 Scarnecchia and Moore in Operation Gukurahundi, began to distance themselves from Mugabe and zanu-pf. For example, during a visit of former President Carter to Harare in July 1986, David Karimanzira, Minister of Youth Sport and Culture gave a speech attacking us foreign policy. The content of the speech was so anti-us that acting Ambassador Gibson Lanpher and President Carter both walked out. As a result, us Ambassador David C Miller requested the termination of us aid funding to Zimbabwe (Schwartz 2001: 116).5 This historical discussion around the 1980 elections is presented as context for the following section, which brings the story into the 2000s. As this chapter is a collaborative effort, the historical section has attempted to establish some of the structural relations between South Africa and Zimbabwe during its transition to majority rule. The most important elements to keep in mind are the ways that the seemingly important bond of white minority rule during the 1970s was ultimately sacrificed for larger South African interests, regarding Namibia and Mozambique particularly. At the same time, as much as zanu-pf built its rhetorical campaign around non-cooperation with apartheid South Africa, it was forced to concede rather quickly the need to cooperate on the economic and security fronts. Let us now turn to a political scientist’s interpretations of the more recent years of political crisis that have tested South Africa’s ability to pressure its northern neighbour. The 2000s: South Africa and Zimbabwe’s Crisis The literature critical of South Africa’s inability to fix up Zimbabwe’s fifteen year crisis tends to blame the active connivance of the two countries’ predatory elites, Thabo Mbeki’s ideological propensity to an out-dated Pan-Africanism or his fear of the wrong lessons reaching his country and the trade unions taking the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions’ (zctu) example of starting up a new party (Mbeki 2007), deep-seated ideological differences between the drafters of human rights accords and the authoritarianism inherent in the sadc 5 Asked in 2003 for his views of Mugabe at the time he served as us Ambassador (1984–1986), former Ambassador Miller replied “As an impending premier disaster. He showed all of the characteristics that really led to the disaster that occurred. He was arrogant, very isolated in many ways, did not know how to use the diplomats that were stationed there, was just an outrageous critic of the United States. We were the largest aid donor to Zimbabwe at that time. I’m pleased to say that I recommended that we terminate the aid program, which we did shortly after President Carter visited and walked out on a national day speech in which the United States was vilified” (Kennedy 2003: 65). South African Influence in Zimbabwe 185 regimes (Pallotti 2013), or in the Zuma era to the new presidency’s inability to win diplomatic battles against the canny zanu-pf.6 The following words will challenge these explanations with one emphasizing the structured contingency of the moment(s) when one or another decision in the foreign policy realm could change history. In many cases the problems of “consolidating democracy” (to use the problematic jargon of the democracy donor community and its epistemic followers) lay not with South African efforts to gain hegemonic power or economic advantage but with the constraints of regionally mediated sovereignty (that the zanu-pf party-state could manipulate almost at will), the desire for “order” versus the chaos that could have come about in the aftermath of a difficult decision, and in the final case particularly the inability of the main opposition party – the Movement for Democratic ChangeTsvangirai (mdc-t) – to grasp the chance offered by South Africa to challenge the poorly executed electoral reforms promised in the 2009 Government of National Unity (gnu) – or Transitional Inclusive Government (tig) – and call zanu-pf’s bluff on the 2013 election. Structural and ideological explanations for foreign policy and practice can only go so far7: politics is the art of the possible and the appetite for risk. If there is a structural reason for the difficulty 6 See on the crisis Raftopoulos (2009) and also Moore and Raftopoulos (2012). On the structural explanation for regional collaboration see Southall (2013) and also McKinley (2006). See Phimister and Raftopoulos (2004) on pan-Africanism and the efforts to bolster sovereignty. 7 Adam Habib’s (2013) chapter on foreign policy argues that South African foreign policy (and he forgets about the Zuma phase: if it were included it might disprove the theory) is determined by its moorings in “second generation nationalism” articulated by South African nationalists who have witnessed the problems of the Nyerere-Nkrumah-Mugabe and Cold War era. Furthermore South Africa is in its post-honeymoon stage and also becoming a “regional hegemon”. Its shifting position in the global order has Habib blending second-generation nationalism with neo-realism, Waltz’s perspective that “the structural location of nations in the international system [is] the key to their foreign policies”. The second generation nationalists now in one of the brics try to subvert the international order in a “nationalist” way, but rather than challenge the imperialists outright their “balancing involves both engagement and subversion” with a “fine line between engagement and appeasement, and for that matter between subversion and marginalisation”. Habib doesn’t deal with South Africa’s economic position in the African economy – taking up about a third of it, with its very small population of active capitalists – which makes the notion of “marginalization” far-fetched, even if it is an economic minnow relative to other brics and the advanced core’s economy. What Habib interprets as taking on a “meaning and a coherence which, even if one disagrees with it, nevertheless has to be applauded for its sophistication and nuance” could be placed in Ibbo Mandaza’s Zimbabwean context of the post-settler-colonial state. Mandaza has called this a “schizophrenic” position (Mandaza 1986a, 1986b). Habib recognises that this sort of policy making is “frequently misunderstood and perceived as arbitrary, unprincipled and 186 Scarnecchia and Moore of a democratic dynamic to take root in Zimbabwe it can hardly be placed at the feet of a neighbour, no matter how powerful: the contradictions and conflict inherent in the long march to progress are more profound than that (see Moore 2004, 2003). Indeed if there are similarities between the South African efforts in the era of apartheid and now they rest in an almost congenital inability to read the political dynamics of its northern neighbor (Mbeki did not act in time to either assist the movement for progressive change or to halt regressive violence, and by the time the Zuma regime was ready to so do the local engine for change had lost its steam), thus leaving its neighbour to find a place between larger global forces and its own dialectic. As evidence for the argument that contingency rather than ideology or structure offers one a better view of South Africa’s engagement or lack thereof three abbreviated “case studies” will follow. The first will discuss a long paper written in 2001 by the then South African president Thabo Mbeki analysing the Zimbabwean situation – and Mbeki’s subsequent actions. The second will assess the first indications of a change of approach – away from “quiet diplomacy” – with the new South African regime led by Jacob Zuma since 2009. Finally, the chapter will discuss the incident before the 2013 election in which the South African “facilitators” offered their assistance to the opposition party if it refused to participate in an election marred by the incomplete state of the electoral “road map” devised by the parties to the 2008 agreement for the tig. This indicates that the South African actors in 2013 can certainly not be blamed for the last of many flawed elections in Zimbabwe that have consolidated zanu-pf’s powerful combination of accumulation networks (Kriger 2012) constructed on an ever firmer foundation of consent and coercion (Moore 2014c). Thus zanu-pf could carry on well into the next political generation – if it survives its own factional divisions that will be exacerbated with its leader’s death and that were illustrated clearly in the December 2014 zanu-pf congress installing Emmerson Mnangagwa, with the help of Robert Mugabe’s wife Grace, as vice-president to replace incumbent Joice Mujuru (York 2014; Moyo 2014). South Africa will not have a key role to play as these events unfold, just as it could do little but bend history a little in the last fifteen – or fifty – years. As Linda Freeman opined near the beginning of this particular odyssey, for most of the Zimbabwean crisis South Africa has resembled little more than a Gulliver in Lilliput (Freeman 2005, 2002). When it finally gained the nous and will to advance the cause of democracy it was stymied by another actor of small stature. incoherent” but he insists on its logic, merging neo-realism with second-generation nationalist ideology. South African Influence in Zimbabwe 187 Mbeki’s Ideology and Practice As early as 1998 then Deputy President Mbeki encouraged western and multilateral donors to attend a conference that would usher in a new era of land reform in Zimbabwe. To what extent South African and other intelligence organisations knew Mugabe had promised the “war vets” at an August 1997 meeting that he would push ahead land reform in addition to awarding them their large pensions is unknown. Certainly all parties were aware that in November the bill was gazetted promising that the state would take nearly 1,500 white farms, compensating owners for “improvements” only. Thus the whole edifice of private property in Zimbabwe had been destroyed: knowledge of this began the slide in Zimbabwe’s currency that would end up with its disappearance in just over a decade. Land reform experts advised the British Department of International Development (DfID) to enter into a second phase of Zimbabwean land reform quickly, but this idea was rejected at around the same time as the minister for development Clare Short responded with a firm no to a Zimbabwean request for funding such (Palmer 2014).8 The 1998 conference ended at an impasse never to be resolved: the same year saw the birth of a civil society organisation devoted to constitutional change, and a year later a trade unionand civil society-based political party came to life. A February 2000 constitutional referendum rejected zanu-pf’s attempts to respond to initiatives from below in the constitutional realm, and Zimbabwe’s famed land invasions were unleashed before the mid-2000 parliamentary elections. Many observers felt the new party won the June 2000 electoral contest, but zanu-pf’s own counting methods prevailed. On the eve of the presidential election in early 2002, Thabo Mbeki penned a blistering critique of Robert Mugabe’s efforts to manage Zimbabwe’s economy and polity.9 Zimbabwe’s “revolutionary party”, Mbeki wrote, had managed to complete the first stage of the National Democratic Revolution by enabling the democratic rule of the heretofore disenfranchised African majority, but failed miserably to fulfil the socio-economic promise of the ndr’s next phase. 8 Short’s letter can be found at the following url: <http://www.theguardian.com/politics/foi/ images/0,9069,1015120.00.html> (accessed on 1 March 2016). 9 There are two versions of this document, first circulated to anc branches as “How Will Zimbabwe Defeat Its Enemies!” on 10 July 2001 (anc 2001). Seven years later the magazine New Agenda published the paper under the title “The Mbeki-Mugabe Papers: A Discussion Document” although there is no evidence that Mugabe ever read or replied to the essay. Quotes in this chapter will come from the original document (i.e. anc 2001). One of the changes between the two texts was a paragraph on the first page of the second version that said “the challenges that zanu-pf has faced over the last 20 years are qualitatively no different from the situation we face”. Moore (2010, 2012c) has discussed the paper in various contexts. 188 Scarnecchia and Moore Mbeki condemned Mugabe’s 1980s as a decade of profligacy in order to buy off a people alienated from the party’s promised thoroughgoing revolution, spending state resources instead of developing the social formation’s productive forces. The resultant situation was that of a withered ruling party with no support from below save the lumpen-proletariat (i.e. the “war-vets” who had forced Mugabe, with no other allies available, to agree to their plans for land). This is about as blistering an insult as a Marxist can mete out. After his Marxist critique, in the true tradition of the National Democratic Revolution Mbeki advised Mugabe to co-operate with the International Monetary Fund’s plans (unfortunately the imf had already left, upset at Zimbabwe’s conversion of its structural adjustment loans to military spending in aid of Laurent-Desiré Kabila’s efforts to stave off the drc’s “second rebellion” ably assisted by Paul Kagame’s Rwanda) and the white farmers (also unfortunately, a good number of them had already disappeared after their lands had been taken).10 A good indicator of Zimbabwe’s road to recovery, Mbeki opined, would be to have fully free and fair elections in 2002. The prescriptions of tough love, however, were tempered by a conspiratorial note: the last committed racists in Zimbabwe still had the support of those who valued “property rights over the very right to life” all over the world – they are the kith and kin who “control the means of communication”. The success of the Movement for Democratic Change (mdc) success had encouraged “the erstwhile colonial forces to oppose the party of revolution”, although if zanupf followed the correct economic policies their material interests would militate against them fomenting counter-revolution (anc 2001: 391, 393).11 Mbeki’s analysis veers in and out of the subjective realm of racism and ideology and the objective ones of economic interests, but in any case the latter had already collided with the land invasions: racist or not, white capitalists and much of the economy linked with their commercial farms were in peril. Regardless of the accuracy of Mbeki’s attempts to steer his way through the rocks of Zimbabwe’s political rapids, in 2002 he failed summarily to criticise the elections he had advised be executed in good taste. Instead, according to 10 11 In conversation Stephen Gelb informed Moore that Mbeki wrote this document as he was developing his plans for the New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad), often criticised as a “neo-liberal” map for African progress, with a $6 billion bill he hoped donors would cover. It should be noted that just over a decade later, having read the latest apologias for fast track land reform in Zimbabwe, and no longer president, Mbeki (2013) changed his tune and regretted his advice: “fortunately the Zimbabweans didn’t listen to us, they went ahead … The programme succeeded and has this direct benefit on these huge numbers of Zimbabweans”. South African Influence in Zimbabwe 189 guests in the hotel room in which Mbeki’s observation team was housed, he dictated their report to them: the election was deemed to have reflected Zimbabweans’ will. Most independent observers challenge that interpretation, and indeed even Mbeki sent a second team to investigate and write a report. That report was only released twelve years later after a long journey through the courts pursued by South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper (Evans 2014: 10; John 2014; de Wet, Benjamin and Harare Correspondent 2014; Winks 2014; Mbeki 2014; Louw-Vaudran 2014). As well, during the first years of the mdc’s existence, many of Morgan Tsvangirai’s closest colleagues felt that Mbeki was attempting to undermine the party’s unity by bringing its secretary-general, Welshman Ncube, and some of his accomplices, to meetings to Pretoria and Johannesburg instead of Tsvangirai and his associates. A few years later they left amidst intra-party violence to create another party, thus sundering opposition unity. Zimbabweans have also criticised South African efforts to support one-time zanu-pf economic technocrat Simba Makoni’s New Dawn in 2008, too, although supporters of that party contended it indicated to wavering zanu-pf supporters that it was “safe” to leave: it is hard to say if the few votes that went to New Dawn from zanu-pf would have gone to the mdc. In any case, many Zimbabwean’s believe that their southern neighbours have not hesitated to weaken the opposition, hardly a stance consistent with the tone of Mbeki’s 2001 epistle encouraging “the Zimbabwean people” to make their own decisions. By early 2007, when the ruling party’s security operatives attacked opposition party leaders at a March “prayer meeting”, presenting the world with Morgan Tsvangirai and others’ bludgeoned faces, sadc appointed Thabo Mbeki as its facilitator. He pushed an election for 2008, speeding the parties to the “Kariba Draft” constitution creating “harmonized” elections to combine presidential, parliamentary and municipal contests in one day. Apparently Mbeki also demanded that ballot results for the next election would be posted on polling stations’ walls, thus enabling observers to note the count before the ballots reached the central counting station. Thus it was that an opposition party won an election for the first time in Zimbabwe’s history: the mdc’s count (after six weeks!) for the March 2008 presidential election was just over 47 per cent to the ruling party’s 43 per cent. That may well not have been accurate – estimates from a range of sources figure the mdc got at least 58 per cent – but the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, with very little statistical justification, had announced the same numbers just a few days after the election: the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission could not fudge the numbers beyond that. Some South African sources recall that a significant faction within Mbeki’s foreign policy advisors predicted zanu-pf 190 Scarnecchia and Moore inspired civil strife and advised he push for a government of national unity at that time, but the side that counselled sticking to the constitution’s requirement for a run-off election for the presidency won the argument. The resultant campaign – Operation Makavhoterapapi (Where Did You Put Your Vote?), directed at zanu-pf supporters who voted for their party in parliament but not for President Mugabe, as well as at carefully targeted mdc security personnel and with militia base camps spreading violence to ordinary supporters – was marred by so much violence that the mdc’s Morgan Tsvangirai pulled out and the normally supine Southern African Development Community and the African Union condemned Mugabe’s subsequent nearly total “win”. On his way to sadc’s post-election meeting, which Mugabe declined to attend, Thabo Mbeki dropped in to visit his neighbour and opined publicly that there was no crisis in Zimbabwe. Within a matter of weeks Mbeki had crafted the “government of national unity” decried by many to award zanu-pf the victory it had been denied in the March vote but gained again with violence was executed unprecedented since Gukurahundi killed between six- and twenty-thousand residents of Matabeleland. Thus began a four and half year period of co-governance – just what Mbeki wanted all the time, given South Africa’s gnu of 1994 to 1996, said many critics. The pale Zimbabwean version registered some economic gains, mostly due to the fact that Zimbabwe’s dollar, rendered useless by inflation and some of the zanu-pf élite running the parallel foreign exchange market for their benefit, was replaced by a basket of currencies dominated by the American marker of value. It also gave zanu-pf time to rebuild. The Zuma Effort President Jacob Zuma took over South Africa’s reins after a tumultuous period between his ascendance to the anc headship in December 2007, through Thabo Mbeki’s un-ceremonial demotion from the state presidency in September 2008 and his election in April 2009 – just after Mbeki’s tig handiwork in Zimbabwe was established in February (although the mdc-t had signed an understanding in July 2008 that it would join tig early in the next year, many fiery youth in the party and some among western supporters were convinced until the last moment that the party would not participate). With Zimbabwean dollar gone, inflation nosedived and the economy picked up slightly. There were great expectations that Zuma the democratic conciliator would do wonderful things for Zimbabwe. He had once said, referring to Zimbabwe, that sovereignty was not sacrosanct! He frightened a couple of Mbeki-affiliated writers to warn Zuma, who had sinned by discussing Zimbabwe with Gordon Brown, then prime minister of the United Kingdom – that South Africa should not South African Influence in Zimbabwe 191 veer from Mbeki’s “revolutionary path” regarding their northern neighbour. Eddy Maloka and Ben Magubane’s twenty-two-page Zimbabwe: An International Pariah – What are the Revolutionary Tasks of the South African Democratic Movement, which was widely circulated and informed many seemingly spontaneous newspaper opinion pieces, warned that the “west” was so eager to perform “regime change” that that it might even turn “the President of the anc into their agent!” (Moore 2011: 67–68): South Africa would be the next target. As if to prove the revolutionary Stalinists (and the liberal hopefuls) correct, early into Zuma’s first term he and his diplomats spoke the language of human rights and civil society loudly, and had high expectations that they could take sadc with them at Kinshasa’s summit in September 2009, on a path that would put Zimbabwe’s crisis in the past. Zuma had consulted with Morgan Tsvangirai and us Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and admonished Mugabe at the August Harare Agricultural Show that he must carry on a human rights oriented agenda and follow the tig “road map” to the destination of a popularly mandated constitution and clean electoral institutions in five years: this was the only way the much hated western “sanctions” could be lifted.12 His highfliers sang in the same tune. But the slightly new kids on the block were out-manoeuvred: they were expected to raise issues ranging from the mysterious disappearances of mdc-t mps to the improper appointment of the Reserve Bank governor. Not one of these issues was written up in sadc’s communiqué: all it did was note progress on the Global Political Agreement (gpa, for the tig) and call for “sanctions” removal. Whilst Zuma’s Zimbabwe team was licking its wounds he appointed a group of three as his technical advisors – Mac Maharaj may not have been the best choice as he was widely known to had been earlier advising the Zimbabwean opposition how to deal with the machinations of his enemy Mbeki, and Charles Ngcakula was busy with his ambassadorship to Mozambique, but the fiery Lindiwe Zulu, an mk and Patrice Lumumba University graduate, former ambassador to Brazil, and an unabashed articulator of both Pan-African and civil society ideals, seemed to all democrats the perfect choice. She was given an office in the Presidential suite to handle the Zimbabweans, while Maharaj worked behind the scenes (while also taking up the cudgels as Zuma’s spokesperson). By the time of the Livingstone sadc meeting in April 2011 South Africa’s peers condemned Mugabe roundly for misusing the inclusive government: in return the Zimbabwean state’s media manager Jonathan Moyo began his campaign of insults against South Africa by wondering how such a “junior” as 12 This material is culled from Moore’s contributions to salo (2009), the first section of which is published as salo (2013). 192 Scarnecchia and Moore Zulu could be seen as representative of the South African state in such weighty matters. Such matters raised their heads again in Maputo’s August 2012 sadc meeting, where South Africa raised issues of a deposed minor party “leader” being part of tig and zanu-pf’s rejigging of the new constitutional proposals in order to bolster presidential power. Unfortunately for South Africa’s pristine human rights image, thirty-four striking and protesting miners at Marikana were killed in cold blood by its police just before the meeting: information minister Moyo had a field day. Firstly, he said Zuma was interfering in Zimbabwean party politics to protect his son-in-law Welshman Ncube. But his fire was reserved for the Marikana issue, when he wrote that the “trigger-happy South African police … whose lack of professional restraint was nauseatingly palpable as they unleashed an unnerving volley of gunfire from their state-of-the-art automatic weapons” caused “legitimate and growing public concerns about President Zuma’s leadership or lack thereof [with] wider cross-border implications on matters of the rule of law, constitutionalism, non-violence, accountability and respect for human life”. South Africa’s repression annulled its claim to come to Zimbabwe’s aid: “the integrity of mediation to foster non-violence is credible only when it is done by those who practise what they preach” (Moyo 2012).13 Whatever love had existed between Zimbabwe’s ruling group and the representatives of South Africa’s under Mbeki was quickly getting lost. The real test came close to nine months later in the same city. zanu-pf was set to go ahead with a new election in a few weeks’ time, but very few of the electoral reforms promised in the tig “roadmap” had been institutionalised. This took place just as the anc was going through a policy review process, the foreign policy component of which illustrated confused paranoia about liberal-western conspiracies mixed with fears vis-à-vis Zimbabwe that if elections failed the 2008 violence would be repeated this would “attract the hawkish external powers’” interventionist propensities.14 At the June 2012 Maputo meeting the mdc-t was given assurances that if it chose to pull out of the elections on the grounds that they could not be free and fair due to inadequate preparation and failure to follow the “roadmap”, it would get support from South Africa.15 The offer was repeated at other meetings in Cape Town and Pretoria. Some sources suggest that South Africa had raised R6 billion from 13 14 15 More on this moment can be found in Moore (2012b). anc Foreign Policy Discussion Document, March 2012, cited in Moore (2012a). The following is based on field interviews carried out by Moore after the 31 July 2013 election in Zimbabwe and later in South Africa, with at least six Zimbabweans and South Africans in a position to offer accurate information on this intervention. One newspaper South African Influence in Zimbabwe 193 private sources to compensate the farmers whose lands had been taken during the Fast Track Reform Programme: this would only be offered if the elections were carried out above board, no matter which party won, and would thus ease problems of dealing with the imf and World Bank, itching to re-engage. However, the mdc-t’s confidence was such that it refused: most of its executive members thought victory was for the taking, that zanu-pf would not dare resort to the violence it used in 2008 (for one reason, the United Nations tourism conference to be held soon after the elections in Victoria Falls would militate against this), that if it pulled out the minor parties or zanu-pf would continue to campaign and get untrammeled power, and they could not be sure that South Africa could convince the rest of sadc to follow suit. Apparently the South Africans then told the mdc-t that it could henceforth expect no support whatsoever from it or sadc. When news of these discussions reached zanu-pf the attacks on South Africa reached their crescendo: Mugabe wondered aloud why a “stupid idiotic street woman” could hold such sway in South Africa: would Zuma please shut her up? Zuma did so promptly. At a Llongwe meeting soon after zanu-pf’s election victory, Zulu smiled gamely and accepted a kiss from Mugabe while Zuma joked that the Zimbabwean president was stealing his woman: he would need to negotiate bride-price (Moyo 2013).16 With that rather patriarchal patching of relations, South Africa’s efforts to spread democracy beyond its borders ended. The election – marred by equal components of zanu-pf chicanery and mdc-t hubris – was a clean sweep for the tried and true “revolutionary party” that vexed Mbeki and Zuma both (Moore 2014b, 2014a; Raftopoulos 2013; Zamchiya 2013). Conclusions This chapter has examined the relations between South Africa and Zimbabwe in two very different periods. It is worth considering whether or not a historian and a political scientist can reach some of sort of common ground in terms of our ability to identify some similarities between these two periods. Others have also tried to see the current relations between zanu-pf and the anc in historical terms. Merle Lipton has asked whether 16 that took up the story as it was revealed in the first instance is de Plessis and Masondo (2013). See also Nicolson (2013). As of October 2014 Zulu is the minister of a newly created small business development portfolio. 194 Scarnecchia and Moore Another possible explanation of South Africa’s perplexing policy relates to its capacity to exercise leverage over Zimbabwe: has this declined since the time when South Africa’s apartheid Prime Minister John Vorster pressured white-ruled Rhodesia into accepting majority rule? lipton 2009: 340 What was it about that particular historical conjuncture that pushed Vorster to accept Cold War interests to pressure Smith? The answer would seem to be “Kissinger” and the Cold War (Moore 2009: 10).17 Kissinger had a lot to do with Vorster’s move. In 2003, in contrast, George W. Bush told Mbeki that the latter would be his “point-man” in the region: Zimbabwe was not nearly as important to the “west” as it was in the Cold War, and South Africa was more important as a bulwark of liberal democracy’s hesitant progress and capitalism’s more robust thrust. Relatedly, Zuma’s failure in 2013 has resonance with the Botha government’s inability to influence the outcome of the election that brought Mugabe to power and allowed the British and Americans to walk away satisfied that they had succeeded in stopping the spread of Soviet and Cuban influence. Zuma could not influence the mdc to postpone its expectations of victory. The British, too, may have acted to stymy Zuma’s efforts: they backed the mdc to the hilt, even disregarding a series of public opinion polls (and private surveys done for South Africa by an American firm) predicting trouble for the largest opposition party.18 After 1980, Botha’s total strategy destabilized Zimbabwe and helped to influence the Gukurahundi period, but again here Zimbabwe was careful to not spar with South Africa. In fact it cooperated on the issues of anc and ex-zipra operatives in Zimbabwe, using South Africa’s acquiescence on Gukurahundi to their advantage. We cannot foresee what the future will bring, but if it is a repeat of zanu-pf’s historical propensity to implode with faction fighting during a leadership vacuum (and these tendencies are very evident at the time of writing in early 2016), South Africa’s – and the “west’s” – failure to assist in a new mode of democracy emerging at the most or a smooth leadership transition at the least will be shown to have lasting effects. Again, the “local” in such matters transcends international meddling efforts. They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Poorly thought interventions and none at all can both increase disorder: so can well thought moves, but the latter may pre-empt even worse crises down the road. Thus in the post-colonial, post-cold war context of the new South Africa the defence of Zimbabwe’s sovereignty – and its order – is projected as it was 17 18 See also Saunders in this volume. Moore conversation with British ambassador, Harare, 31 May 2014. South African Influence in Zimbabwe 195 in the past. Now though it is portrayed both as an African defence and a racial defence: in the past it was race too, coloured by the Cold War and the disorder it portended. Now as then South African political elites see defence and order as less risky than promotion of human rights, the rule of law, and democratic institutions. Poor tactics and strategy makes things worse. Locally, Botha appealed to white popular opinion: now does the threat posed by the ideological and rhetorical appeal for many South Africans of zanu’s co-optation of radical land demands and Black sovereignty mean that it would be harmful domestically to take a critical stand on Zimbabwe’s lack of democracy? Or, to take Roger Southall’s (2013) view, have the business and personal relationships of anc and zanu-pf elites become so valuable that they now outweigh any need to criticize Zimbabwe’s political violence and abuses of the democratic process? It could be a combination of both of these processes, but the anc knows that little that it does on the foreign policy front affects local votes: it thus remains in the midst of all “middle power” actors, muddling through ideology, the sovereignty instinct, fear of disorder, and all are combined with a bit of meddling at the edges (Booysen 2012). As argued in the second half of this chapter, the collusion between elites may not be the key answer, nor, as Lipton suggested, is it mainly a function of a lessening of South Africa’s power in the region after the Cold War. It is possible to suggest, as evidenced by the back-room deals in the last election and during the formation of the gnu, that the global context, in which emphasis on “democracy” is much less than it was in the 25 years after the Cold War (Stephens 2014: 13; Moore 2016), that South Africa now concentrates on the “realist” paradigm of “security” more than the effort to promote democracy – practiced in any case with only a modicum of enthusiasm by Mbeki and perhaps too erratically and openly by Zuma too late in the day. Even this point must consider just how elastic the concept of “democracy” was for the British and Americans in the run up to the 1980s election. Then, as now, attention to the distribution of real power in Zimbabwe is what counted. As one Zimbabwean insider has related to us, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, who flew into Harare to give the African Union’s final word on the 2013 elections, reportedly expressed the choice in ways similar to those heard in Salisbury in 1980, that there was a choice between war and peace, and the African Union wanted peace. If we could return far enough back to an imagined world where the political and economic interests in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa shared a common defence and common racialised solidarity, say in the late 1960s, we could then argue that the intervening contingencies of the Cold War, decolonization, and global human rights agendas forced a break in this earlier common 196 Scarnecchia and Moore defence. It may therefore seem that the period 1976–1994 was an important anomaly. Since 2000 South African-Zimbabwean relations have returned to the status quo ante, in a certain sense. South African elites benefit from their relationship with their northern neighbours, especially when they can defend Zimbabwean elites as victims of international campaigns for regime change. In this way Zimbabwe, like Rhodesia before it, continues to exercise a sort of strange hyper-sovereignty, which the state constantly uses “land and sovereignty” as a rallying cry, but with the understanding that this sovereignty always remains contingent on South Africa’s goodwill. The revelations that the South Africans were willing to back the mdc-t in the last elections in what would have been, with hindsight, a rather smart decision to avoid the elections, shows more importantly that as much as zanu-pf’s message resonates with vocal sections of the South African population, it is not necessarily a rhetoric that the current anc leadership would like to embrace, caught as it is between the Scylla of global ratings agencies and the Charybdis of ever more radical populists (McGroarty 2016; Booysen 2015, 2016). Ironically, as Zimbabwe prepares for the end of a long Mugabe-led era, it faces the same rocks and whirlpools of neo-liberal orthodoxy versus heterodox ideologies searching for a new centre. During such long transitions, finding a status quo of regional and national security betwixt either racial or liberaldemocratic solidarity is near impossible. 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Masondo 2013. “SADC told Morgan to Withdraw”, City Press, 4 August. South African Influence in Zimbabwe 197 De Wet, P., C. Benjamin and Harare Correspondent 2014. “Morgan Tsvangirai: Khampepe Report is ‘12 years too late’”, Mail & Guardian, 21 November. URL: <http:// mg.co.za/article/2014-11-21-morgan-tsvangirai-khampepe-report-is-12-years-too -late> (accessed on 1 March 2016). DeRoche, A. 2000. “Standing Firm for Principles: Jimmy Carter and Zimbabwe”, Diplomatic History 23 (4): 657–685. Ellis, S. 2012. External Mission: the ANC in exile, 1960–1990, London: Hurst. Evans, S. 2014. “Constitutional Values Hinge on Khampepe”, Mail & Guardian, 24 October. URL: <http://mg.co.za/article/2014-10-23-constitutional-values-hinge -on-khampepe> (accessed on 1 March 2016). Flower, K. 1987. Serving Secretly: Rhodesia’s CIO Chief on Record. Johannesburg: Galago. Freeman, L. 2002. “The Gulliver Position: South Africa and Zimbabwe in the PostApartheid Era”, Paper presented to the Economic History and Development Studies Programme, University of Natal, Durban, 25 October. Freeman, L. 2005. “South Africa’s Zimbabwe Policy: Unravelling the Contradictions”, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 23 (2): 147–172. Gevisser, M. 2009. A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Habib, A. 2013. South Africa’s Suspended Revolution: Hopes and Prospects, Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press. John, V. 2014. “Can Khampepe Change How Elections are Monitored?” Mail & Guardian, 15 November. URL: <http://mg.co.za/article/2014-11-15-can-khampepe-changehow-elections-are-monitored> (accessed on 1 March 2016). Kennedy, C.S. 2003. Interview with David C. Miller, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Foreign Affairs History Project, 6 January. 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Socialist Register 2016: The Politics of the Right, London: Merlin Press, 193–212. Moore, D. and B. Raftopoulos 2012. “Zimbabwe’s Democracy of Diminished Expectations. In S. Chiumbu and M. Musemwa (eds.) Crisis! What Crisis? Exploring the Multiple Elements of Zimbabwe’s Crisis. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 241–267. Moyo, J. 2012. “A bad week for troubled Zuma”, Sunday Mail, Harare, 19 August. URL: <http://www.newzimbabwe.com/news/news.aspx?newsID=8812> (accessed on 1 March 2016). Moyo, J. 2013. “Mugabe’s charm wins over SADC”, Mail & Guardian, 23 August. URL: <http://mg.co.za/article/2013-08-23-00-mugabes-charm-wins-over-sadc> (accessed on 1 March 2016. Moyo, J. 2014. “Zim: The clock is ticking for the crocodile”, Mail & Guardian, 19 December. URL: <http://mg.co.za/article/2014-12-18-zim-the-clock-is-ticking-for -the-crocodile> (accessed on 1 March 2016). Nicolson, G. 2013. “Zulu down: SA diplomacy or Bob’s puppetry?” The Daily Maverick, 23 July. 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Raftopoulos 2004. “Mugabe, Mbeki and the Politics of AntiImperialism”, Review of African Political Economy 31 (101): 385–400. 200 Scarnecchia and Moore Raftopoulos, B. 2009. “The Crisis in Zimbabwe: 1998–2008”. In B. Raftopoulos and A. Mlambo (eds.) Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from the Pre-colonial Period to 2008. Harare: Weaver, 201–232. Raftopoulos, B. 2013. “The 2013 Elections in Zimbabwe: The End of an Era”, Journal of Southern African Studies 39 (4): 971–988. Renwick, R. 1997. Unconventional Diplomacy in Southern Africa. New York: St Martin’s Press. SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) 2015. “Silverton bank siege”, Truth Commission Special Report. URL: <http://sabctrc.saha.org.za/glossary/silverton_ bank_siege.htm?tab=victims> (accessed on 1 March 2016). SADC (Southern African Development Community) 2009. “Communique of the 29th Summit of SADC Heads of State and Government”, Kinshasa, 8 September. 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Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa, Vol II: Solidarity and Assistance, 1970–1994. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute. Shubin, V. 2008. The Hot “Cold War”: The USSR in Southern Africa. London: Pluto Press. Southall, R. 2013. Liberation Movements in Power: Party and State in Southern Africa. London: James Currey. Stephens, B. 2014. “What Samuel Huntington Knew”, Wall Street Journal, 24 April. TNA (The National Archives of the UK) 1978. “Miss R J Spencer, memo on ‘Bingham Rhodesia Debate’”, FCO 36.2300, Rhodesia Stop List: Policy CP (343/1 Part B), item 71, 10 November. TNA 1979. “Notes of the Prime Minister’s discussion with the Rt. Hon. Malcolm Fraser, Prime Minister of Australia, at Horizon House, Lusaka, on 31 July 1979”, PREM 19/1, Prime Minister’s Bi-Lateral meetings at the CHGM in Lusaka, August 1979. South African Influence in Zimbabwe 201 TNA 1980a. “Leahy to FCO”, PREM 19/346, The Situation in Rhodesia Part 16, 2 March 1980. 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The anc and swapo: Aspects of a Relationship Chris Saunders Introduction The African National Congress (anc) of South Africa and the South West Africa’s Peoples Organisation (swapo) of Namibia are rarely discussed in any detail within the covers of the same book. When they are – and the most sustained examination of them, together with the Zimbabwe African National Union (zanu), is now to be found in Roger Southall’s recent Liberation Movements in Power (Southall 2013)1 – they are discussed separately, or their histories compared, but the links between them over time are not drawn out, nor the way in which what happened to the one may have influenced the other. This chapter considers relations between them, including such influences, as they developed historically. I do not here follow Southall and attempt to compare the two organisations systematically. From 1960 their histories are remarkably similar in key respects: both went into exile at the same time, both adopted armed struggles, both turned to Moscow for military and financial aid, and both waged, alongside armed struggles, remarkable diplomatic campaigns against the same enemy, the apartheid state, South Africa. In the late 1980s both were involved in moves towards negotiated settlements for their respective countries. My focus here will not be on analysing similarities and differences between either their struggles for liberation or their histories postliberation, but on relations between the two liberation movements over time.2 Zuma, Mbeki and Mandela Historians usually tell a story going forward, but let me begin with the Zuma presidency and go back in time from there. In November 2013 President Jacob Zuma visited Windhoek to put relations between the two countries on a new 1 Other books that discuss both organisations include Trewelha (2009), Shubin (2009) and Sellström (1999, 2001). 2 I began to sketch the comparisons between the two struggles in Melber and Saunders (2001). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�6736_0�� ANC and SWAPO 203 and more substantial footing, by inaugurating a bi-national commission between South Africa and Namibia.3 On becoming state president in 2009 Zuma priortised relations with sa’s immediate neighbours and former liberation allies: his first visit to another country as head of state was to Angola, where the anc had had its military bases in the 1980s. In December 2008, after becoming president of the anc, he had led an anc delegation to Namibia. In Windhoek the anc delegation met the Central Committee of swapo and Zuma spoke of “warm ties between the anc and swapo that were forged in the trenches” Without elaborating on such ties, he then claimed that the two organisations had a special relationship emerging from a common history: “The history of our liberation movements has placed a special responsibility on the anc and on swapo to ensure that the goals of our respective national democratic revolutions are realized”. He called for more party-to-party interaction to meet the challenges facing the two counties, adding: “Ruling parties often go through certain challenges after the first decade, when the interests of different strands within the broad liberation movement begin to diverge”. There was, he said, “a recurring reactionary debate around the need to reduce the dominance of liberation movements”, and he asserted that “political analysts…who claim to know Africans better than they know themselves tell us that it is good for African democracy if the majority of former liberation movements was reduced” (Zuma 2008).4 The joint communiqué issued at the end of the meeting said that it had been resolved that there should be “formal and regular interaction between the two parties through their Secretaries General” and that a memorandum of understanding would be developed “to structure the relationship in the future” (anc 2008). The 2008 meeting was designed to help improve relations between the anc and swapo, which under Zuma’s predecessors had not been close, despite the existence of formal channels of co-operation.5 Thabo Mbeki had tended to focus on the continent as a whole, transforming the Organisation of African Unity (oau) into the African Union, creating the New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (nepad) and the African Peer Review Mechanism (aprm), and he had spent much time bringing peace to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (drc), but all this was at the cost of relations with South 3 There were few such bi-national commissions (cf. Hengari and Saunders 2014). 4 Though over time the anc’s parliamentary majority has fallen: in the May 2014 election it obtained 62 per cent of the vote. swapo won almost 75 per cent in the 2009 election and 80 per cent in the November 2014 election. 5 A series of Heads of State Economic Bilateral Meetings had taken place, and a Joint Permanent Commission on Defence and Security existed (see Hengari and Saunders 2014). 204 Saunders Africa’s immediate neighbours, especially the other countries in the Southern African Customs Union (sacu), which included Namibia. Besides the brief attempt at Caprivi secession in 1998–99, Namibia seemed stable and relatively unimportant for South Africa. Despite the existence of sacu, South Africa went ahead unilaterally and signed a trade agreement with the European Union in 1999, then was unhappy when in late 2007 Namibia initialed a draft Economic Partnership Agreement (epa) with the eu. Only more recently has Namibia, having refused to sign an epa, been part of a joint approach by the sacu countries, plus Angola and Mozambique, to conclude a so-called Southern African Development Community (sadc) epa with the eu.6 That Mbeki did not prioritise relations with Namibia may well in part have been because of his first-hand knowledge of earlier tensions between the anc and swapo. These pre-dated the transfer of power in South Africa. Before I come to them, let us notice that Nelson R. Mandela, a month after his release from imprisonment, attended Namibia’s independence celebrations (Sampson 1995: 413). In early 1994, as leader of the anc, he sanctioned the decision by the Transitional Executive Council to transfer Walvis Bay to Namibia at the end of February that year.7 After becoming President he announced, in December 1994, his government’s decision to write off Namibia’s colonial debt to South Africa of over R700 million. But as President his time was mainly taken up stabilizing South Africa through a policy of reconciliation, when he was not striding the global stage as a moral icon. Namibia was very low on his priorities, he never developed close relations with President Sam Nujoma, and, having been in jail during the three decades of armed struggle, he had no direct experience of solidarity with the exiled leadership of swapo in those years. The Namibians, for their part, were still emerging from a colonial relationship in which South Africa had long been the oppressor, and sought to keep their distance even from the new regime in that country.8 Relations during the Decades of Struggle While South Africa’s relative neglect of Namibia after 1994 is partly to be explained by Namibia’s seeming unimportance to South Africa’s new rulers, 6 The agreement was signed in July 2014 (Melber 2014; Tjihenuna 2014). 7 South Africa and Namibia established a Joint Administrative Authority to manage Walvis Bay after Namibian independence. 8 Initially the new Namibian government had to deal with representatives of the apartheid government in South Africa, when diplomatic relations were established and when Namibia formally joined sacu. ANC and SWAPO 205 despite close economic relations – 90 per cent of Namibia’s imports came from South Africa, which bought 30 per cent of Namibia’s exports – and common membership of sacu and sadc, the nature of relations since 1994 can also in part be explained by the previous history of relations between the anc and swapo in the decades of struggle. That struggle was, after all, against a common enemy: apartheid South Africa. One might have thought they would have worked closely together in opposing the same enemy. If they did not, one should ask why. Tensions between the anc and swapo come out most clearly in a key meeting held between the two organisations in Lusaka, Zambia, in January 1989. The meeting was called because the Namibia/Angola accords of December 1988, signed in New York between South Africa, Angola and Cuba, had provided that, along with implementation of the process leading to Namibian independence, and the withdrawal of the Cuban military forces from Angola, the anc, which had been entirely excluded from the negotiations, had to remove its military bases from Angola.9 When they heard of this requirement, some in the anc’s armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe (mk), were very angry and suggested that swapo had sold out the anc in agreeing to the removal of the mk camps from Angola. Though the anc’s National Executive Committee issued a statement that saw the independence of Namibia as a strategic victory for the forces of freedom in southern Africa, and said that the anc was happy to support this victory through a tactical retreat from Angola (anc 1989), some anc members in Angola blamed swapo for having to leave. One, who did not want to be relocated from Angola because of what he had termed swapo’s “treacherous” stance towards the anc, went on the rampage and killed a colleague, while another went to a nearby swapo camp and raped a female resident. Some in the anc now anticipated that when swapo came to power in Namibia it would not allow the anc to operate there. From the transcript of the January 1989 meeting in the anc papers at the University of Fort Hare, we learn that Alfred Nzo led the high-level anc delegation, which included Joe Modise, commander of mk, Joe Nhlanhla, then head of anc’s intelligence, and Thabo Mbeki. Hage Geingob, who headed the swapo delegation, was to become independent Namibia’s first Prime Minister and in November 2014 swapo’s candidate to take over as President of the country. In Lusaka Geingob said the meeting with the anc was long overdue and that the failure of the two organizations to brief each other had resulted 9 The relevant clause provided that “the Parties shall respect the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of the States of south western Africa”. On the Namibia/Angola agreements see, for instance, Gleijeses (2014). 206 Saunders “in a vacuum” which “would create a wedge which neither party could afford in a situation in which things were happening”. Other members of the swapo delegation underlined the point that they “could not afford misunderstanding with the anc. It was essential they had open lines of communication” because they “were entering a new stage [of struggle] and should not be outmaneuvered” by enemies of the revolution (ufh 1989a). Karikutuke Tjiriange, swapo’s legal affairs secretary, emphasized the defects in United Nations Security Council Resolution 435 (1978), the key document on the way in which the un agreed that Namibia should move towards independence, and bemoaned the exclusion of swapo from the 1988 negotiations between South Africa, Angola and Cuba over the withdrawal of the Cuban forces from Angola parallel to the implementation of unsc Resolution 435. He protested that swapo had not been party to what he called a “Nkomati agreement in disguise”, referring to the accord that South Africa had signed with Mozambique in 1984 and was seen by the anc as a South African imposition. In that case, too, the anc had had to withdraw from the country concerned. Tjiriange protested that swapo had been treated in 1988 as if it was merely an observer of the process. TheoBen Gurirab, who for long had been the leading swapo official at the United Nations, had not been invited to the official signing ceremony in New York. It may well be that leaders of the anc drew the lesson from swapo’s experience in 1988 that it should not allow itself to be sidelined in any future negotiations for a new South Africa (cf. O’Malley 2007: 315).10 Tjiriange told the 1989 meeting that the United Nations mission to be sent to Namibia, following the signing of the Namibia-Angola accords, was being reduced in size by the Western members of the Security Council in order to appease South Africa.11 In such ways he sought to show that the anc and swapo were both up against a duplicitous enemy which had friends in the West. He then went on to raise issues that threatened relations between the two organizations. In response to what some anc members were saying about the anc having to leave Angola because of swapo’s selfish quest for independence, at the expense of the anc and its liberation struggle, he denied that swapo had been involved in the decision. It was the government of Angola, he said, that had taken the decision, pursuing its own national interests at the expense of the liberation struggles in Namibia and South Africa. The swapo delegation confirmed its support for the anc’s struggle, but said the anc must 10 11 Tambo saw the anc’s Harare Declaration of August 1989 as a “kind of ‘435’ for South Africa” (O’Malley 2007: 315). The Western countries said it was for financial reasons. The un Transitional Assistance Group was reduced to 4,500 personnel. ANC and SWAPO 207 “find a way of easing tensions by way of consultations, not unilaterally as leadership” and that “We need to politicize our people so they can understand the situation”. Nzo said the anc leadership was unaware that the anc rank and file in Angola believed that they were being thrown out of their country because of swapo, adding: When we knew we would have to leave Angola, we sent our people to Angola to discuss [the matter] with our comrades, and the reports we received were positive. There wasn’t the slightest hint [that there was a danger] of the situation you have described. Even our anc rep from Angola has not told us that the anc [people] in Angola are blaming swapo. He admitted that the anc “might have to be blamed for not having made better political education” and for not informing its cadres about the subtext of this strategic victory: “maybe, we haven’t canvassed questions better with our own members”. He also mentioned the possibility that the mk camps in Angola might have been infiltrated by enemy agents and this might well have resulted in the incidents. Modise confirmed that it had come as a surprise to him that “our removal from Angola is being blamed on swapo”, and also claimed that “enemy agents” were involved. The reports that mk cadres had said that “scores are going to be settled with swapo” were, he said, “viewed by us as a serious threat which we need to investigate”. Solidarity between the two liberation movements was of the utmost importance, and they needed “to address other problems regarding coordination of our actions”. Concluding the meeting, Geingob thanked the anc for clarifying its position and accepting that, as fraternal organizations, they should “embark on a new level of coordination, focusing on specific problems” (ufh 1989a). At the Lusaka meeting the anc’s Nhlanhla said that the independence of Namibia would bring the anc’s own victory nearer. If swapo were to suffer a setback in Namibia, “we [ourselves] would be defeated”. Mbeki suggested that what he said were defunct joint anc-swapo committees – about which the present author has not been able to find any information – should be resurrected to build a united front in support of solidarity between the anc and swapo. Democratic forces inside South Africa should work for a swapo victory. He reported that “comrades in Windhoek are in contact with cosatu [the Congress of South African Trade Unions] and so it is possible to build a united front”. The anc and cosatu did support swapo in the 1989 Namibian election campaign, the latter by providing a fleet of vehicles and drivers (Cliffe et al. 1995: 147). The anc drew up a document – submitted to the Front Line States in Lusaka on 10 August 1989 and to a meeting of the oau’s Ad Hoc Committee on 208 Saunders Southern Africa in Harare on 21 August, and later approved by the Non-Aligned Movement (nam) in Belgrade in September and, in revised form, by the un General Assembly in December – that spoke of the need to “continue to mobilise assistance for swapo in the struggle for independence for Namibia”. In November Oliver Tambo, the anc President, warmly welcomed swapo’s victory in the election, which he saw as contributing to the anc’s struggle against apartheid. He told the swapo President, Sam Nujoma: This is a joyful moment for the African National Congress and the overwhelming majority of people of South Africa as we witness the progress of Namibia towards her long overdue independence. We join you, Comrade President, other leaders and members of swapo and the people of Namibia in celebrating your outstanding and historic victory at the polls which has confirmed swapo as the leader of the Namibian masses. We are very mindful of the fact that you have scored this victory despite obstacles placed in your way. We wish you success as you prepare the constituent assembly to draw up the constitution of an independent Namibia. The path of struggle you have followed and continue to chart, serves both as an inspiration and example to the anc, the democratic movement and the fighting masses of our country … Your future victories will make an invaluable contribution to our struggle for the birth of a genuinely independent, united, democratic and non-racial South Africa. They will strike a mighty blow for the course of peace [in] the region of Southern Africa. ufh 1989b In late 1989, however, before it was unbanned, the anc did not know how its long struggle would end, and with the relocation of its military even further from South Africa, to Tanzania and Uganda, there was inevitable frustration in anc ranks. As swapo moved towards its goal of Namibian independence, an end to apartheid in South Africa itself still seemed elusive. Part of the explanation for why relations between the two organisations were not closer in the decades of struggle is of course that their goals were different: swapo fought to end apartheid rule in Namibia, the anc to overthrow apartheid in South Africa itself. The Namibians wanting to expel a colonial power, the anc to obtain majority rule. That swapo was from its founding in 1960 a nationalist movement, dedicated to winning the independence of Namibia, was spelt out most clearly by Andimba ya Toivo in his famous speech when on trial on terrorism charges in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1968: ANC and SWAPO 209 We are Namibians and not South Africans. We do not now, and will not in the future, recognize your right to govern us; to make laws for us in which we have no say; to treat our country as if it were your property; and us as if you were our masters. We have always regarded South Africa as an intruder in our country … We claim independence for South West Africa. We do not expect that independence will end our troubles, but we do believe that our people are entitled – as are all peoples – to rule themselves … I am a loyal Namibian and I could not betray my people to their enemies. I admit that I have decided to assist those who have taken up arms. I know that the struggle will be long and bitter. I know that my people will wage that struggle, whatever the cost. legum and drysdale 1969: 349–351; cf. tambo 1968 swapo’s goal, then, was the end of South African occupation of its country, and as a Namibian nationalist organization, swapo wanted to keep its distance from the anc. While many in both organisations (along with, say, Fidel Castro of Cuba; see Gleijeses 2014) hoped that Namibian independence would help lead to the end of apartheid in South Africa, it was not necessarily the case that it would, and the two organisations waged separate diplomatic and armed struggles, as we shall see. When key people are asked about relations between the anc and swapo in the decades of exile, they usually respond that individuals in the two organizations worked well together, as was undoubtedly the case.12 At the United Nations in New York Gurirab developed close relations with his anc counterparts, most notably Mfanafuthi Johnstone (Johnny) Makatini. swapo and the anc both worked with the Africa Group at the United Nations and attended nam meetings. Both established offices in Lusaka, Zambia, in the months before Zambian independence in October 1964, and from 1969 both had their headquarters there, using the Liberation Centre in the Zambian capital for offices, until it was bombed by the Southern Rhodesian air force in April 1979 (cf. saho n.d.). That year swapo moved its headquarters to Luanda, Angola. Though the leaders of the two organisations were then no longer in the same city, for the anc’s headquarters remained in Lusaka, Zambia, they continued 12 Those I have asked about anc-swapo relations include, say, Ronnie Kasrils, leading figure in mk, and Berit Rylander, who worked with both organizations for the Swedish Development Agency. Individual anc members were helped by supporters of swapo and vice versa: e.g. for Bandile Ketelo of the anc being helped by a swapo sympathiser see Myers (1997: 53). 210 Saunders to meet on occasion, and when they did they often spoke in public about solidarity in the struggle and of the fraternal relations that existed between the two organisations. Numerous audiences were told that the two organisations were fighting the same struggle, and in other ways identifying with each other. Nujoma was often among the speakers when on 8 January each year the anc, in various cities in Europe and Africa, celebrated the anniversary of its founding. swapo officials expressed solidarity with the anc on numerous occasions, such as the meeting held on 21 July 1968 at the Africa Liberation Centre in London to commemorate the first anniversary of the death of Chief Albert Luthuli. Addressing the International Conference of Solidarity with the Struggle of the Namibian People in Paris in September 1980, Oliver Tambo, the anc President, told Sam Nujoma, the founding President of swapo: You have sacrificed lives already to defeat the enemy – the exploiter and oppressor of the people of South Africa. You … have corroded the apartheid power structure in Namibia, which within South African itself remains relatively unshaken … By your actions you have forged bonds of unity between yourselves and us, the Namibian people and the people of south Africa, bonds of brotherhood and comradeship forged in blood, and for that reason indissoluble. quoted by jacob zuma in zuma 2008 Similar sentiments were repeated in many of the publications the two organizations issued from their exile headquarters, especially in swapo’s The Combatant and the anc’s Sechaba. Kader Asmal of the anc remembered relations between the two organizations as having been “close and fraternal” (Asmal 2012: 94).13 But while in some countries in both Europe and Africa the two worked closely together,14 in others this was not the case: in Britain, for example, while the Anti-Apartheid Movement tried to bring them together in a common fight against apartheid (e.g. Anti-Apartheid News 1986), the Namibians wished their campaign for independence to remain separate, and the cause of Namibian independence was championed by a separate organization with close links to 13 14 Asmal served as legal adviser to swapo (Asmal 2012: 95), but he is wrong to say that he participated in the only bilateral between swapo and the apartheid regime in 1980 (ibid.). When he asked swapo to join the anc in adopting the Geneva Convention, he did not hear from swapo (ibid.). In the German Democratic Republic for instance: Anja Schade, e-mail to the author, April 2014. In Zambia, a Zambian Association for the Liberation of Southern Africa (zalsa) was formed in 1980 to support both the anc and swapo (cf. Macmillan 2013). ANC and SWAPO 211 swapo, the Namibia Support Committee (see Saunders 2009; cf. Fieldhouse 2005: 287–89). After being sentenced to twenty years imprisonment in 1968, Ya Toivo was sent to Robben Island, where he was placed in solitary confinement for a year and then jailed in a single cell in B section of the prison, along with Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and other anc leaders. But he kept his distance from them, believing he, as a Namibian, had no place in a South African jail, and the other Namibian prisoners on Robben Island were housed separately in Section D of the prison and there was relatively little interaction between them and members of the anc (Buntman 2003).15 Guerrilla fighters from both the anc and swapo lived at the Kongwa camp in central Tanganyika in the late 1960s, but their quarters were separate and there was only a limited amount of socializing between them. swapo members were the first to arrive at Kongwa in April 1964, followed soon after by anc refugees, who set up a separate but nearby encampment.16 In 1969 the Tanzanian government asked both swapo and anc fighters to leave the country,17 and though some returned to Kongwa some years later, the many new recruits that joined swapo’s military wing, the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (plan), from 1973 did not go there, but to swapo’s camps in western Zambia or, from 1975, to those in southern and central Angola. Not only did both swapo and the anc have military bases in Angola, they also both received training from the Cubans and from military advisers from the Soviet Union, and both were from time to time engaged in fighting the rebel Union for the Total Independence of Angola (unita). Yet there was also little interaction between the two organisations in Angola. The Angolan authorities gave swapo and the anc different areas in which to set up their camps, many of the swapo camps being for refugees, the anc ones for mk. Only in the so-called engineering camp outside Luanda, and in the respective offices of the two organisations on Liberation Avenue in that city, was there some mingling between individuals from the two liberation movements (Ngcula 2009). From 1976 swapo in Zambia was riven by a major internal dispute that led to the breakaway of those who began calling themselves swapo Democrats, and in the early 1980s swapo’s camps in Angola were the scene of a major 15 16 17 Ya Toivo was released in March 1984, after which he joined the swapo leadership in exile. Sandi Sijake (who lived in Kongwa in the late 1960s), personal communication, 2013. See also Sijake (2014) and Williams (2011). James Ngcula, another mk veteran of Kongwa, refers to the swapo members there as “reserved and disciplined” (Ngcula 2009). Some swapo fighters then accompanied mk members to the Soviet Union, where Oliver Tambo found them together in a camp when he visited in April 1970 (Fonseca 2013). 212 Saunders “spy scandal” in which thousands of swapo supporters were imprisoned and some were killed.18 Whether the anc was influenced by the brutalities shown in swapo, first in the mid 1970s and then again in Angola from the early 1980s, remains unclear, but by 1983–84 the anc’s security department, Mbokodo, was using similar techniques in the mk camps in Angola and in Lusaka to those employed by swapo.19 Though the mk and swapo camps in Angola were separate, with little communication between them, knowledge of what was happening in the camps of the one organisation may have spread to the other and encouraged similar actions. Both were increasingly fearful of being infiltrated by spies and agents of the South African government, and such fears were not entirely groundless.20 Most importantly, there was no common action, no co-ordination of strategy between the two organisations; they waged separate struggles. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some in swapo were disparaging about the anc’s military struggle, which they did not regard as a serious one. While swapo sent guerrillas directly from Angola over the border into Namibia and from the 1970s pinned down tens of thousands of South African Defence Force (sadf) troops in northern Namibia and Southern Angola, the joint mission that mk had launched with zanu into what was then Rhodesia in 1968 had failed, suggesting to the anc that joint operations with another liberation movement were not a good idea. In the course of time swapo’s armed struggle would prove more successful than the anc’s, in part because it was from 1976 able to operate from southern Angola directly into northern Namibia, whereas mk cadres had to travel through other countries to reach South Africa. Many in swapo saw the South African struggle as different from their own because of the nature of the anc as a movement, one heavily influenced in exile by its ally the South African Communist Party (sacp). Though swapo also had relations with Moscow, which Nujoma visited frequently,21 swapo had no communist ally – no communist party ever emerged in Namibia – and swapo retained more ties with Western countries than the anc. swapo, more nationalist than the anc, did not appreciate the anc’s alliance with the sacp or its 18 19 20 21 Dr Kenneth Abrahams, a swapo refugee, who had been working as a doctor for four years in Zambia, was forced to leave the country and he went to live in Sweden. Some claimed both learned these from the Stasi of the German Democratic Republic (Ellis 2013). See e.g. Trewhela’s chapters on “The anc Prison Camps: An Audit of Three Years”, and “A Namibian Horror: Swapo’s Prisons in Angola”, both in Trewhela (2009). By mid-1976 swapo’s prestige in Moscow was high enough for him to meet a three star general there (Shubin 2009: 219). ANC and SWAPO 213 commitment to multi-racialism. Some whites were to be found in mk camps in Angola (Ronnie Kasrils and Barry Gilder, for example, were members of mk, the academic Jack Simons was a mk instructor); there were no white members of plan.22 On the other hand, many in the anc looked down on swapo as relatively unsophisticated. Though ideologically the two movements appeared to become closer when in 1976 swapo, because of its new relationship with the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (mpla) adopted a new political programme that spoke of it being a vanguard party concerned to bring about scientific socialism in Namibia, swapo did not have intellectuals in its movement and there was none of the debate that went on in anc circles in exile.23 The anc was always conscious of its long history, beginning with the founding of the South African Native National Congress in 1912. swapo, which had only came into existence under that name in 1960, was from an anc perspective a late-comer in the struggle against apartheid. The anc’s sense of superiority was derived not only from its own history, but from South Africa being a larger, more complex and more important country.24 Though the anc had from its early days a pan-African perspective, as its very name, adopted in 1923, suggested, it had long seen Namibia, though under South African occupation, as a separate country. When the South African government had, on a number of occasions, wished to incorporate what it called South West Africa (swa) into South Africa, the anc had opposed any such move.25 22 23 24 25 Henning Melber was the first white to join swapo. Anton Lubowski became the most important white member, and was assassinated in September 1989. No swapo publication had it the kind of debates to be found in Sechaba and the African Communist. Such views were shared by the Cubans (cf. Shubin 2009: 226) and by the Reagan administation. Chester Crocker, the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, would not meet swapo, regarding its leadership as weak and unsophisticated and relatively unimportant, despite it not being “tainted” by an alliance with a Communist Party, as was the case with the anc. Founded three years before what became Namibia was occupied by South Africa in 1915, the anc had campaigned for an end to South African occupation of Namibia in 1946, when Alfred Xuma, the then president of the anc, lobbied at the United Nations against the incorporation of South West Africa into South Africa, after South Africa formally asked the General Assembly for permission to incorporate the territory into South Africa. Xuma told the un that he had been “in close touch with the Native Africans in South West Africa and have received direct information from the Africans themselves from time to time … against incorporation of their country as a fifth province of the Union of South Africa”. After the General Assembly in December 1946 rejected South Africa’s proposal for the incorporation of swa, Xuma urged that the territory be transferred to the un Trusteeship 214 Saunders In the early 1960s, moreover, the anc had had closer relations with swapo’s main rival, the South West Africa National Union (swanu), than with swapo.26 The anc saw swanu as the more intellectual organization and seemingly the more radical, and swanu was the anc’s main Namibian partner in the short-lived South Africa United Front (uf), formally launched in London in May 1960 to mobilise against the apartheid regime (uwc 1960).27 Though for a time in the early 1960s swapo members in Dar es Salaam used the same office building as the anc, the anc then moved its exile headquarters to Morogoro in the interior of Tanganyika. Though both organizations held consultative congresses not far from each other in 1969 – the anc at Morogoro from 25 April to 1 May, swapo at Tanga from 26 December 1969 to 2 January 1970 (Gorbunov 1988: 19–22; Legum and Drysdale 1970: B311–316) – neither meeting promoted closer co-operation between the two organisations.28 Crucial for swapo, in its rivalry with swanu, was gaining the support of the oau and its Liberation Committee. swapo’s commitment to an armed struggle enabled it to emerge as Namibia’s leading liberation movement, and to win international legitimacy as such.29 From the late 1960s Namibia was recognised internationally as the United Nations’s “special responsibility”, and because of Namibia’s international status swapo became involved in much more diplomatic activity than the anc. While both struggles against apartheid won international support, that for Namibian independence was more widely supported by the international community in the 1970s. With Namibia a “special responsibility” of the United Nations, swapo was able to get the oau and then 26 27 28 29 Council, “as a buffer against the extension and the expansion of the non-European policy of South Africa” (Xuma 2012: 339; cf. Reddy 2008: 43–45). The anc’s Defiance Campaign of 1952 had influenced a few African students from swa then studying in South Africa to form a student association, from which emerged in 1954 the South West Africa Progressive Association and in 1959, swanu. Namibian workers in Cape Town, influenced in part by two members of the Communist Party there (the academic Jack Simons and his wife Ray Alexander, who had been involved in labour issues relating to Namibia for some time), formed the Ovamboland Congress, which evolved into the Ovamboland People’s Organization (opo) and then, in 1960, swapo (cf. Katjavivi 1988: 4). Oliver Tambo of the anc and Fanuel Kozonguizi of swanu were among its founders. swapo was only briefly a member of the uf in 1961 before it collapsed the following year. The anc was represented at the opening session of the Tanga congress (uct n.d.). The oau Liberation Committee set aside an initial grant of twenty thousand British pounds for the liberation of South West Africa. The money could have gone to both swanu and swapo, but only swapo provided plans for an armed struggle, so it got the lot. ANC and SWAPO 215 the un General Assembly in 1976 to declare it to be the “sole and authentic representative of the Namibian people”, a status the anc was never able to achieve. swanu was successfully side-lined and swapo was given observer status at the United Nations and its constituent bodies, such as the Council for Namibia,30 and membership of many international bodies. The anc was unable to score such victories in international fora, in part because its status as a South African liberation movement was challenged by a rival, the PanAfricanist Congress (cf. Thomas 1960). Because of Namibia’s international status, and being a “special responsibility” of the United Nations, swapo became involved in much diplomacy in which the anc could not participate. The anc, long isolated from the leading Western countries because of its alliance with the South African Communist Party, was until the late 1980s heavily dependent on its relationship with the Soviet bloc. Though swapo developed similar ties to the Soviet Union, it was at the same time actively involved in negotiations with the leading Western countries. Whereas Nujoma met Henry Kissinger in New York in 1976, it was over another decade before Oliver Tambo was able to meet a us Secretary of State (uct 1987). Nujoma led swapo delegations in numerous consultations with the so-called Western Contact Group and with Martti Ahtisaari, the un Commissioner for Namibia, in Luanda and elsewhere. The anc only participated in the long-drawn out Namibian negotiations peripherally.31 And swapo was ready to hold direct talks with the apartheid regime before the anc began thinking seriously of engaging in such talks. swapo met with South African officials in Geneva in a meeting arranged by the un in January 1981 and with the South African appointed administrator of South West Africa in May 1984 in Lusaka, Zambia, and in Cape Verde in July that year. The following month it announced that there will certainly be no need or justification for swapo to continue with the armed struggle once the South African government has agreed to a concrete time frame for Namibia’s independence, through the fixing of a date for the commencement of the implementation of [unsc] Resolution 435. swapo 1984 30 31 Established in 1967, the un Council for Namibia comprised 11 (later 30) countries and was in theory to administer Namibia until it gained its independence (cf. Saunders 2014). Alfred Nzo, for example, attended the abortive “pre-implementation” conference held in Geneva, Switzerland, by the un in January 1981 (ufh 1981). 216 Saunders In Conclusion It can be seen, therefore, that there were many reasons for considerable tension and even animosity between the anc and swapo in the years of struggle. Might apartheid in South Africa have ended sooner had the two liberation movements worked together, say planning common operations? There can be no definitive answer to such a hypothetical question,32 but the reasons why this never happened are worth exploring, and this chapter has begun that task. There are other aspects of a complex relationship to examine, and more research is needed to tease out the full story. What is undoubtedly the case is that the history of relations in the years of struggle influenced relations after Namibia gained its independence, as the anc moved into power in South Africa, and in more then twenty years that have passed since 1994. Subsequent to Zuma’s visit to Namibia as anc president in 2008, the two movements did not actively pursue the interaction he called for on that occasion, and, the bi-national commission has not worked effectively to minimize tensions between the two very unequal countries. South Africa remains the regional hegemon, with a much more diversified economy than Namibia’s, but has suffered more than Namibia from the recent economic crisis, while the anc was in early 2016 absorbed by the leadership crisis brought on by Zuma’s ineffectiveness as president. In both countries the dominant role of the former liberation movements is likely to fade, if not disappear altogether, in the decades to come, and this too is likely to mean that relations between the two movements will not grow closer. Bibliography ANC 1989. “Statement by the National Executive Committee of the ANC”, 8 January. ANC 2008. “Joint Communique between the SWAPO Party and the African National Congress”, Windhoek, 9 December. URL: <http://www.anc.org.za/show. php?id=5783> (accessed on 1 April 2016). Anti-Apartheid News 1986. “Unity the key to ANC and SWAPO”, Anti-Apartheid News, January-February 1986. URL: <http://www.aluka.org> (accessed on 1 April 2106). Asmal, K. 2012. Politics is In My Blood. Cape Town: David Philip. 32 The end of apartheid came about thanks primarily to internal resistance in South Africa, but the changed international context, the winding down of the Cold War, was a crucial factor, which also made Namibian independence possible (cf. Saunders 2015). ANC and SWAPO 217 Buntman, F. 2003. Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cliffe, L. et al. 1995. The Transition to Independence in Namibia. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Ellis, S. 2013. External Mission. The ANC in Exile 1960–1990. New York: Oxford University Press. Fieldhouse, R. 2005. Anti-Apartheid. A History of the Movement in Britain. London: Merlin Press. Fonseca, H.A. 2013. “Ideas of Southern Africanism: Portugal and the Movements of Liberation (1961–1974)”, Paper presented at the 24th biennial conference of the Southern African Historical Society, University of Botswana, Gaborone, 27–29 June. Gleijeses, P. 2014. Visions of Freedom. 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Xuma, A.B. 2012. “Memorandum Outlining the Views of the Africans in the Union of South Africa, South West Africa and Bechuanaland Protectorate concerning the Incorporation of the Mandate Territory of South West Africa and its Bearing on the ANC and SWAPO 219 Treatment of Non-Europeans in South Africa”. In P. Limb (ed.) A.B. Xuma: Autobiography and Selected Works. Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 334–336. Zuma, J. 2008. “Opening remarks by ANC President Jacob Zuma in the official talks between SWAPO and he ANC”, Windhoek, 8 December. URL: <http://www.anc.org. za/show.php?id=3787> (accessed on 1 April 2016). chapter 11 Twenty Years after: Post-Apartheid South Africa, the brics and Southern Africa Arrigo Pallotti and Lorenzo Zambernardi Introduction While in the years immediately following the demise of the apartheid regime the analyses of South Africa’s foreign policy mostly focused on Pretoria’s economic and security relations with the other Southern African countries, in the last decade scholars have been increasingly concerned with the role played by South Africa within continental and global institutions and organizations such as the African Union, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (imf), the World Bank, and the brics grouping (le Pere et al. 2008; Alden and Shoeman 2013; Bond 2013; Kagwanja, 2006; Melber 2014). The recent shift in scholarly attention reflects a concrete change in South Africa’s foreign policy. After some initial hesitations (Neethling 2003) and diplomatic fiascos (Inegbedion 1997; Ajulu 2009: 257), in the last decade the South African government has been playing a more active role in Africa, promoting the transformation of the Organization of African Unity (oau) into the African Union, drafting and then directing the implementation of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (nepad), and taking actively part in peacemaking activities and peacekeeping operations. Furthermore, its inclusion in the brics countries (together with Brazil, Russia, India, and China) in 2011 has apparently legitimized South Africa’s role as a spokesperson for Africa at the global level. The recent official documents of both the South African government and the African National Congress (ANC) emphasize the political relevance of the country’s inclusion in the brics grouping, and argue that Pretoria can now play a more prominent and effective role in reforming the global political and economic agenda. Pretoria’s rising international status has been further enhanced by South Africa’s two terms as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (unsc). However, Pretoria’s role on the unsc did not go without controversy. While during its first term (2007–2008) South Africa’s position on the violations of human rights in countries such as Zimbabwe and Myanmar provoked stern criticism from Western governments and civil society organizations, during the second term (2011–2012) Pretoria was heavily © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�6736_0�3 Post-Apartheid South Africa, the BRICS and Southern Africa 221 criticized for its contradictory policy towards the conflict in Libya, having first voted unsc Resolution 1973, which authorized the use of force against the Gaddafi’s regime, and then voiced its opposition to the military intervention in the country. While some scholars have celebrated South Africa’s new role in international affairs, others have sounded a note of caution and highlighted the limits of South Africa’s external projection. For example, Elisabeth Sidiropoulos has labelled South Africa as “a leading country of the South” that, having entered the brics group (until April 2011 Brazil, Russia, India and China), is now “playing in the premier league” (Sidiropoulos 2014: 432, 434). Likewise Adam Habib has recently argued that “South Africa is a regional power [and] it should be recognized as such, and given responsibility for stabilising and underwriting the continent’s development”, and concluded that “in many ways, South Africa has already begun to play a hegemonic role” in Africa (Habib 2013: 180–181). It is precisely the latter role that has been questioned by some scholars. According to Alden and le Pere, “while having many of the trappings of a hegemonic power, South Africa is nonetheless experiencing difficulty operationalising these attributes into concrete policy gains in the region” (Alden and le Pere 2004: 294–295). This difficulty is rooted in a number of factors, such as the (initially) confused articulation of Pretoria’s foreign policy priorities, the economic and social problems of South Africa, the criticism aroused by South African investments in other African countries (Daniel, Naidoo and Naidu 2003), and the legacy of the destabilization policy pursued by Pretoria in Southern Africa during apartheid. Chris Landsberg has argued that while these factors “negate any role of hegemony [that South Africa] may wish to play”, because of its influence at the regional level the country should still be considered a “pivot” state (Landsberg 2004: 3). However, South Africa’s capacity to promote progressive (and effective) partnerships between the (Southern) African governments with the aim of strengthening democracy and fostering development on the continent has also been questioned (Alden and Schoeman 2003; Pallotti 2013). Thus, ASS: while some scholars have argued that post-apartheid South Africa has played with some success the role of “middle power” in global affairs (Cornelissen 2006), others have come to the conclusion that Pretoria is still far from being an “emerging middle power” because of the many difficulties its foreign policy has encountered in Africa and especially in Southern Africa (Schoeman 2003). This chapter examines the regional conditions of South Africa’s global projection and highlights the risk that a number of unsolved problems and contradictions in post-apartheid South Africa’s relations with the other African and 222 Pallotti and Zambernardi Southern African countries could undermine regional stability and weaken Pretoria’s global reform agenda. After considering the rationale for South Africa’s inclusion within the brics and discussing some of the limits and ambiguities of South Africa’s global and continental roles, the chapter focuses on post-apartheid South Africa’s relations with the other Southern African countries within the framework of the Southern African Development Community (sadc). In particular it addresses the following questions: have conditions for stability and security been established in Southern Africa during the last two decades? What’s the role that Pretoria has played in the process? What are the main obstacles and difficulties that the normalization of post-apartheid inter-state relations has encountered in Southern Africa? Because regional factors related to peace and security might put at risk economic development and political stability in Southern Africa, addressing these and similar questions is a necessary step towards a broad appreciation of Pretoria’s role in the coming global system. The chapter concludes that in spite of the many significant changes and improvements in inter-state relations in Southern Africa during the last two decades, some critical factors still hamper the effectiveness of security cooperation in the region and put at risk the political stability of the entire sadc area. South Africa and the brics The historically prominent economic position of South Africa in the African continent found an official endorsement when in April 2011 Pretoria attended its first bric summit in Sanya (China), which turned the grouping into the enlarged and current brics. As the brics are considered a powerful bloc of emerging economies, South Africa’s membership of the grouping has been portrayed by Pretoria as an outstanding achievement for the country, which can now further its global reformist agenda and pursue a more effective economic diplomacy (rsa 2011a: 26; anc 2012: 10, 22–23). In particular, South African officials have repeatedly stated that South Africa’s membership of the brics will allow it to promote both a significant transformation in North–South£ relations and the reform of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the unsc. The need to modify the composition of the latter has been repeatedly stressed by the South African government. As Ebrahim Ebrahim, Deputy Minister for International Relations and Cooperation, recently declared: Post-Apartheid South Africa, the BRICS and Southern Africa 223 the way the [un Security] Council is formed [is considered by Pretoria] unfair to developing and small states, and disenfranchises the majority of the Member States of the United Nations, who form the majority of the General Assembly. ebrahim 2014 The South African government has portrayed its membership of the brics as an important accomplishment not only for the country, but also for Africa as a whole. In the words of Maite Emily Nkoane-Mashabane, South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and Cooperation: Wherever South Africa finds itself in a forum … where other African countries are not represented, we do not speak for South Africa alone but also for all other African countries. nkoane-mashabane 2011 In other words, according to the South African government, the membership of the brics can contribute not only to furthering Pretoria’s economic and political interests, but also to repositioning Africa in the global agenda. In so doing, South Africa represents itself as a bridge between Africa and the rest of the world, with the explicit implication that its membership in the brics grouping could “encourage inter-African trade and help accelerate regional economic integration” (ibid.). In January 2012 Minister Nkoana-Mashabane went even further and described South Africa as the champion of Africa’s interests at the international level: We have defined ourselves as a progressive agent for positive change. In practice, we have assumed the role of peacemaker and negotiator in Africa, and a champion Africa’s interests abroad. Quoted in alden and shoeman 2013: 116 In spite of these public statements, one may argue that there is still a significant gap between South Africa’s global role and aspirations on the one side, and the limits and contradictions of the country’s international projection on the other side. Indeed, South Africa is a rather peculiar member of the brics. Its membership reflects more the economic importance of the country in Africa rather than its weight at the global level. Actually, South Africa is far from clearly fitting into the brics grouping. The size of its economy is significantly smaller than the one of the other members. Actually, South Africa is no more the largest Africa’s economy. Although it remains the most 224 Pallotti and Zambernardi industrialized country of the continent, Nigeria’s gdp is now larger than South Africa’s one. Moreover, not only Pretoria has the smallest economy among the brics states, but its domestic economy is marked by deep fragilities and contradictions (Marais 2011). Indeed, President Zuma’s foreign policy priorities seem to result from a pragmatic understanding of South Africa’s domestic challenges and problems. As a consequence, Thabo Mbeki’s pan-African vision and his emphasis on the African Renaissance have been put aside, and “economic diplomacy” has become the top priority in the country’s foreign policy. The latter is now primarily conceived as an instrument to tackle domestic issues like poverty and unemployment, and to boost exports and the industrial sector. The National Development Plan: Vision for 2030 discusses foreign policy mainly in terms of economic diplomacy and, like the anc’s Policy Discussion Document on International Relations (March 2012), considers foreign policy as an instrument for addressing domestic economic concerns (anc 2012). Thus, while the other brics states, and in particular China, wanted to include an African country in the bloc, in order to make the grouping more representative of the developing world, South Africa has considered its membership primarily as a means to address its own economic challenges (ibid.). Doubtless, the membership of the brics might bring a number of diplomatic and economic benefits to South Africa, such as fostering its trade with the other brics states and strengthening its bargaining power in international fora. However, it remains to be seen whether these benefits will effectively help to reduce poverty in South Africa (Bezuidenhout and Claassen 2013) and will translate in better economic opportunities for Africa as a whole. Actually, South Africa’s inclusion in the brics might constrain rather than enhance the implementation of Pretoria’s global reformist agenda. Henning Melber has recently underlined this risk by arguing that what can be observed is a somewhat misled patriotic pride among office bearers over the relative importance of South Africa as a middle power, giving preference to playing the role of a pseudo-hegemon in Africa, basing foreign policy on strategic interests for building alliances not with like-minded human rights advocates but with the brics or with African leaders who use anti-imperialist rhetoric to protect dictators. melber 2013: 139–140 Possible tensions between the policy agenda of the brics and the global reformist agenda of Pretoria should not be downplayed, as they could undermine Pretoria’s efforts to promote democracy, security and development in Africa. Post-Apartheid South Africa, the BRICS and Southern Africa 225 South Africa in Africa While South Africa’s membership of the brics presents the country with significant challenges, during the last two decades relations between South Africa and Africa “strengthened both” politically and economically, but “were also marked” by tensions and difficulties (Alden and Le Pere 2004). After the end “of” the apartheid regime, a process of normalization of relations between South Africa and Africa was set in motion. Already during the transition, Nelson Mandela identified Africa and Southern Africa as the main priorities of Pretoria’s post-apartheid foreign policy. Indeed he remarked that “South Africa cannot escape its African destiny. If we do not devote our energies to this continent, we too could fall victim to the forces that have brought ruin to its various parts” (Mandela 1993: 89). He also argued that Southern Africa commands a special priority in our foreign policy. We are inextricably part of southern Africa and our destiny is linked to that of a region, which is much more than a mere geographical concept (ibid.: 90). While during the 1990s South Africa somehow hesitated to play a leading role in the resolution of armed conflicts in Africa – and when it played (in Lesotho) or tried to play (in Zaire) such a role it came under severe criticism from other African governments –, during the last decade Pretoria has exerted a more active role in peacemaking and peacekeeping activities in Africa (i.e. in Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo [drc], Zimbabwe, Libya, and the Central African Republic). However, these activities have not gone without limits and contradictions (Miti 2012; Saunders 2013). For instance, in Burundi and the drc, where Pretoria played a central role in mediating a diplomatic resolution to the military conflicts, effective post-conflict reconstruction and peace building continue to pose a challenge to African and South African diplomacy (Bentley and Southall 2005; Ajulu 2006). Likewise, while Pretoria remains committed to the promotion of security and development in Africa (rsa 2011: 20–23), South Africa’s economic activism on the continent has not gone without controversies. Not only the drafting of the nepad sparked political tensions among the oau member states, as some African governments contested Mbeki’s self-appointed role of spokesperson for Africa with the G8 governments, but some doubts have also been expressed concerning nepad’s effectiveness in promoting Africa’s development (Keet 2006; Moyo 2006; Saul and Bond 2014: 197–208). In addition, the surge in South African investments in Africa not only has raised questions about their impact on local labor and producers (Miller 2005; Southall and Comninos 2009), but 226 Pallotti and Zambernardi in some cases “South African penetration of local economies” has met the “resistance [of] African governing elites” (Alden and Soko 2005: 387). The contradictory nature of South Africa’s economic role in Africa could be further deepened by Pretoria’s inclusion in the brics. It is still unclear what kind of “alternative” development vision South Africa and the brics intend to promote for the global South and, in particular, for Africa. To date, the economic activism of countries such as China and Brazil in Africa has mainly focused on the extraction and exploitation of natural resources (Moore 2012) and on the building of large infrastructures, generally financed through new debt. The limits and contradictions of South Africa’s relations with Africa raise a number of questions regarding the legitimacy and the effectiveness of Pretoria’s role as spokesperson for the African countries in the global arena. Within Africa, Nigeria has sometimes acted as a counterbalance to South Africa’s political influence and is also contending to South Africa the possibility of getting a permanent seat in a possibly reformed unsc. Contrary to early expectations of a South Africa-Nigeria partnership aimed at promoting security and development on the continent (Adebajo and Landsberg 2003), during the last decade relations between Pretoria and Lagos have sometimes been marked by political tensions. Frictions between the two countries surfaced during the process of transformation of the oau into the au, and were later fuelled by Mbeki’s diplomatic intervention in the conflict in the Côte d’Ivoire, the appointment of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma as chairperson of the au Commission, and the recent South Africa’s proposal concerning the creation of an African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crises (acirc). As we shall see in the next section, South Africa’s prospects of being recognized as the legitimate spokesperson for Africa at the global level are not only constrained by its peculiar status as a brics member and by the limits and contradictions of its security and development role in Africa, but are also put into question by a number of regional factors that threaten to exacerbate political and social tensions in Southern Africa. South Africa and Southern Africa: Putting the Dust under the Carpet? Important changes have been recorded in inter-state relations in Southern Africa after the demise of the apartheid regime. In order to fully appreciate the depth and relevance of “both” these changes and the challenges ahead, it is necessary to devote some attention to the complex evolution of inter-state political cooperation in Southern Africa since the early 1990s. Post-Apartheid South Africa, the BRICS and Southern Africa 227 From the Front line States to the Organ on Politics, Defence and Security The end of the apartheid regime in 1994 removed one of the major obstacles to military security and political stability in Southern Africa. Since the late 1970s Pretoria had pursued a policy of destabilization in Southern Africa, fuelling the civil wars in Angola and Mozambique, and undermining the development efforts and threatening the political stability of the Southern African countries (Hanlon 1986). Soon after the first democratic elections in South Africa, the Front line States decided to disband and to kick-start a process aimed at establishing a new collective mechanism for conflict prevention and resolution in Southern Africa, which included post-apartheid South Africa (Front line States 1994: para. 6). However, deep divisions soon emerged among the Southern African governments over the powers, functions and institutional setting of the new regional security mechanism. While the sadc Secretariat pushed for the establishment of a new sadc sector responsible for peace and security, some sadc member states proposed the creation of an Association of Southern African States (asas), with the objective of keeping as much distinct as possible inter-state security cooperation on the one side, and the promotion of regional economic development on the other side. The official inauguration of the sadc Organ on Politics, Defence and Security (opds) at the sadc Summit in Gaborone in June 1996 turned out to be a “premature” step (Nathan 2012: 38). In spite of the fact that president Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe was appointed chairman of the opds, the latter remained inoperative until 2002, pending the definition of its goals, powers, and structure. The final communiqué of the 1996 sadc Summit put the opds under the institutional umbrella of sadc (even if the document stated that the odps would “function independently of other sadc structures”), but also framed the objectives of the opds in accordance with the emerging consensus on the need to promote human security in Southern Africa (Zacarias 1999). The communiqué committed the opds “[to] promote and enhance the development of democratic institutions and practices within member states, and to encourage the observance of universal human rights as provided for in the Charters and Conventions of the au and the United Nations”, and “[to] promote the political, economic social, and environmental dimensions of security” (sadc 1996).1 1 A link between development, democracy and security was already established in the sadc Treaty of 1992, which listed among the objectives of the new regional organization both “[to] achieve development and economic growth [and to] alleviate poverty”, and “[to] promote 228 Pallotti and Zambernardi Echoing the post-Cold War international political and academic debate on the notion of human security (undp 1994; ul Haq 1995; Khong 2001; Paris 2001), since the early 1990s the scholarly debate on post-apartheid security cooperation in Southern Africa put special emphasis on the need for the governments of the region to adopt an expanded notion of security, which linked security, democracy and development (Thompson and Lysens 2000). As Lisa Thompson explained, in Southern Africa “the conceptualization of security as military/political security of the state itself (as a bounded entity) obscures the dynamics of structural violence within the state system, which are found at the societal level” (Thompson 1995: 15). While Peter Vale stressed the need for inter-state security cooperation in Southern Africa to promote democracy and the respect for human rights (Vale 1992: 15), Rob Davies argued that South Africa had to ensure that the insertion of the economies of Southern Africa into the global market would not result in further insecurity for the peoples of the region (Davies 1995: 9). The impasse over the operationalization of the opds during the late 1990s was either attributed to a clash of personalities between Nelson Mandela and Robert Mugabe (Zacarias 2003: 37), or to the “absence of common values” among the governments of Southern Africa. According to Laurie Nathan, the pacific/militaristic divide within sadc, that hampered the definition of a regional agenda for conflict prevention and resolution, had its roots in the different national approaches to democracy, governance and human rights (Nathan 2006: 614). In fact, while Zimbabwe’s claim for the leadership of the opds fed South Africa’s fears concerning the aims and scope of the regional security cooperation agenda (Kagwanja, Rupiya 2009: 304–305), Pretoria strenuously opposed the adoption of draft Protocol of Politics, Defence and Security in the Southern African Development Community (sadc) Region tabled at the 1997 sadc Summit, since it committed all sadc member states to take part in a peacekeeping or a peace-enforcement operation when “the majority” of them had voted for it (sadc 1999). At the 1997 sadc Summit in Blantyre (Malawi) Mandela threatened to resign from the chairmanship of the sadc if the Summit had adopted the draft protocol. Contrary to the vague provisions of the draft protocol, the South African government maintained that any regional peace operation had to be undertaken within the framework of the United Nations Charter (rsa 1996: Chap. 5, para. 24). and defend peace and security” (sadc 1992: §5). The revised sadc Treaty adopted in 2001 added some new objectives, such as “[to] promote common political values, systems and other shared values which are transmitted through institutions which are democratic, legitimate and effective” and “[to] consolidate, defend and maintain democracy” (sadc 2001: §5). Post-Apartheid South Africa, the BRICS and Southern Africa 229 The outbreak of a military conflict in Zaire (today the drc) in 1998 brought to the surface the deep political divisions among the sadc member states. While the governments of Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia sent their armed forces to the drc to defend the regime of President Laurent Kabila, Pretoria insisted on the need for a diplomatic solution for the conflict in the country. The signing of a Defence Protocol by the governments of Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and the drc in April 1999 clearly showed that the sadc member states were split into two opposing camps. Not surprisingly, some commentators suggested that sadc was on the verge of collapse (Beregu 1999). The Protocol Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation and the sadc Mutual Defence Pact Since 1999 a number of factors facilitated the slow and gradual emergence of a consensus on a regional security agenda: the mediation efforts undertaken by the government of Swaziland (Nathan 2012: 45–48); the Zimbabwean government’s interest in reducing tensions in the region so to avoid the risk of finding itself isolated within sadc (a concern shared by Pretoria, which was trying to promote a dialogue on the land issue between the Zimbabwean government and the Western donors); and the determination of the new South African president Thabo Mbeki to strengthen the sadc mechanism of conflict prevention and resolution in order to provide South Africa with a multilateral framework through which to promote a common understanding of the aims and principles of inter-state security cooperation in the region. Through the “multilateralization” of its regional policy South Africa could downplay the accusations of acting as a hegemon in Southern Africa (Kagwanja 2006: 53). It was within this context that the sadc Summit finally adopted the Protocol on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation in August 2001. The Protocol not only clarified the Organ’s objectives, structure and functions, but also lessened South Africa’s fears of being unwittingly dragged into an armed conflict in Southern Africa. As in the case of the Economic Community of West African States (ecowas 1999, 2001), the sadc Protocol, too, adopted an expanded version of security, as it stressed the need for the sadc member states to promote military security, the respect for human rights, and democracy in Southern Africa (sadc 2001: §2). At the same time, the Protocol reaffirmed the principles of sovereign equality, political independence and non-interference in the internal affairs of a member state, and established a new structure for the opds. The chairman of the Organ, whose term would last for one year, would operate in consultation with both the outgoing and the incoming chairperson (sadc 2001: §4). 230 Pallotti and Zambernardi In addition, and contrary to the draft protocol of 1999, the 2001 Protocol not only put a strong emphasis on peaceful means of conflict prevention and resolution, but also stated that: Where peaceful means of resolving a conflict are unsuccessful, the Chairperson … may recommend to the Summit that enforcement action be taken against one or more of the disputant parties. The Summit shall resort to enforcement action only as a matter of last resort and, in accordance with Article 53 of the United Nations Charter, only with the authorization of the United Nations Security Council. sadc 2001: §11 In August 2003 the sadc governments signed a sadc Mutual Defence Pact, which aimed at fostering regional “efforts towards collective self-defence and the preservation of peace and stability” (sadc 2003: preamble). As the 2001 Protocol, also the sadc Mutual Defence Pact lessened Pretoria’s fears of having to commit itself to a security cooperation agenda that was beyond its control. Indeed, on the one side the Pact states that: An armed attack against a State Party shall be considered a threat to regional peace and security and such an attack shall be met with immediate collective action; collective action shall be mandated by Summit on the recommendation of the Organ. But, on the other side, it specifies that: “Each State Party shall participate in such collective action in any manner it deems appropriate” (ibid.: §6). In spite of the high expectations nurtured by the signing of the sadc Mutual Defence Pact, the latter has not been ratified by a majority of sadc member states yet, and the Angolan government has not even signed it. The Pitfalls of (Human) Security in Southern Africa and the Role of South Africa During the last decade security cooperation within sadc has experienced a significant evolution. Within the framework of the au’s peace and security architecture, the sadc member states have kick-started a process aimed at establishing a sadc Brigade (sadcbrig). According to the Memorandum of Understanding adopted in August 2007 by the sadc Summit, the sadcbrig will perform a variety of tasks, such as monitoring missions, “intervention in a Post-Apartheid South Africa, the BRICS and Southern Africa 231 state party in respect of grave circumstances or at the request of that State Party, or to restore peace and security in accordance with article 4(h) and (j) of the Constitutive Act [of the African Union]”, preventive deployment and activities of peace-building and humanitarian assistance (sadc 2007: §4). According to some analysts, the consensus on the establishment of the sadcbrig has its roots in the sadc member states’ belief that regional military cooperation will strengthen their independence and curb West’s interference in their internal affairs (Kagwanja and Rupiya 2009: 325). While in recent years “some” joint military exercises have been conducted by the armed forces of the sadc member states, a note of caution has been expressed by some commentators and policy-makers. Anthoni van Nieuwkerk has talked of “an obsession with the sadcbrig” (van Nieuwkerk 2006: 15). Paulino Macaringue has detected a lack of vision behind the sadc’s military cooperation activities, and has argued that: “sadc has not yet clarified neither what type of security cooperation concept it has put into place, nor the normative values and principles that underlie regional cooperation” (Macaringue 2006: 116). He has also warned of the dangers of continuing to define security primarily in military terms [as] there is increasing evidence that preventative policies that are grounded in human security concepts, addressing poverty, fostering democracy and the rights of peoples, are more effective instruments of conflict resolution rather than relying solely on the interventions of standby brigades (ibid.: 119). As noted above, post-conflict reconstruction is one of the most relevant problems that still beset security in Southern Africa. The drc, where former South African President Thabo Mbeki played a central role in mediating an end to the civil war in 2002, is a case in point. While in the Eastern regions of the drc outbreaks of armed violence are still recorded, national state institutions are still deeply fragile and development still lags behind expectations. Strangely enough, much academic research has been devoted to the analysis of South Africa’s and sadc’s policies towards the crisis in Zimbabwe, but only scant attention has been paid to South Africa’s support for post-conflict reconstruction and peace-building in the drc (Kabemba 2006; Ajulu 2009). The lack of research on this theme is even more puzzling if we consider both the regional spillovers of violence and political instability in the drc, and the death toll of the conflict in the country. With a prominent input from South Africa (van Nieuwkerk 2012: 5), sadc has also articulated an extensive programme of security cooperation through the adoption in 2004 of the Strategic Indicative Plan for the Organ on Politics, 232 Pallotti and Zambernardi Defence and Security (sipo), “which would provide guidelines for the implementation of the Protocol on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation for the next five years” (sadc 2004). Both sipo and sipo ii – a revised version of the sipo adopted in 2010 – subscribe to a broad notion of human security. According to both documents, insecurity in Southern Africa is fuelled not only by armed conflicts, but also by factors such as economic underdevelopment, poverty, climate change, unequal access to natural resources, illegal migration, the hiv/aids pandemic and terrorism (sadc 2004: 17; sadc 2010: 25). In order to address the multiple challenges to security in Southern Africa, sipo and sipo ii have stressed the need for the sadc member states not only to strengthen sadc’s capacity for conflict prevention and resolution, but also to collectively promote democracy, good governance, the respect for human rights, sustainable development, poverty reduction, and food security in the region (sadc 2004: 18, 19 and 45; sadc 2010: 26, 28 and 47). Although both sipo and sipo ii have been the target of some criticism for their broad lists of aims and objectives, the lack of clear priorities and the absence of an effective implementation mechanism (van Nieuwkerk 2006: 15; van Nieuwkerk 2012: 11), “the two documents” echo the broad consensus among scholars and policy-makers in Southern Africa over the need for the sadc’s security agenda to go beyond the search for military security, in order to promote democratization and inclusive development. Recently the White Paper on South Africa’s Foreign Policy of 2011 and the anc Policy Discussion Document on International Relations published in 2012 have also put a strong emphasis on the need for Pretoria to promote a model of inter-state political cooperation along the lines of an expanded version of security (rsa 2011: 4, 21; anc 2011: 19), and to promote a strategy of developmental regionalism in Southern Africa (rsa 2011: 22; anc 2011: 14, 19). In spite of the broad consensus on the need for sadc to promote a human security agenda, and notwithstanding the deep economic and social cleavages within the Southern African countries, to date security cooperation within sadc has seemed unable to effectively address the human security challenges facing the region (Zondi 2012). While political relations among the sadc member states have recorded some improvements – as in the case of the relations between South Africa and Angola – inter-state security cooperation has not effectively contributed to address the deep historical causes of state fragility in Southern Africa, nor to promote or consolidate democratization in the region. Although sadc has adopted the sadc Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections in 2004 and has been active in monitoring elections in Southern Africa, the reports of the sadc monitoring missions have been Post-Apartheid South Africa, the BRICS and Southern Africa 233 sometimes criticized by political activists and observers and even by some sadc member states for their biased conclusions, to the point that the government of Botswana has recently declared that it will not take part in any sadc election observer mission in the future. With the exception of Lesotho, a state where South Africa’s military intervention in 2008 helped to restore some degree of political stability (Southall 2003), sadc has been unable to promote the respect of democratic principles in countries such as Swaziland and Zimbabwe. After five years of sadc pressures and mediation, presidential and parliamentary elections were held in Madagascar in December 2013, but the political situation in the country remains precarious. And, recently, some worrying signals of political instability have been recorded in Mozambique and Lesotho. It has been within this context that Pretoria has found itself paradoxically trapped between the call from some quarters “to assume a more active leadership role in cases like Zimbabwe and Swaziland” and “the condemnation of such leadership … in the case of Lesotho” (Selinyane 2006: 78). How to explain the limits and contradictions of post-apartheid regional cooperation in Southern Africa? First, sadc member states have been historically wary of any external interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign country. Thus, while during the last decade inter-state military cooperation has been strengthened in Southern Africa (in 2005 South Africa has signed bilateral defense and security cooperation agreements with both Zimbabwe and Angola), cooperation on politically sensitive issues like democracy, good governance and human rights remains limited. Second, the sadc poverty reduction agenda still lacks a coherent political vision, is highly fragmented and remains severely underfunded (Pallotti 2012). In spite of the regional (and international) consensus on the need to address the historical problems of deep inequalities and social marginalization in Southern Africa, since the early 1990s sadc has concentrated its development activities on the establishment of a sadc fta, in the belief that market integration would foster economic growth and promote poverty reduction in the region (Pallotti 2004). While most sadc member states have recorded high rates of economic growth during the last decade, it is doubtful that the sadc integration agenda has contributed to this outcome. In addition, recent data show that South Africa is still recording a high and increasing trade surplus with the other sadc countries (Sandrey 2013: 12–14). So, as most sadc member states still record unacceptably high poverty rates, sadc has still to win the challenge of fostering democracy and inclusive development in Southern Africa (Lamb 2007). 234 Pallotti and Zambernardi Third, democracy is still a contested notion in Southern Africa. According to Maxi Shoeman: [one] explanation … for the difficulty South Africa experiences in finding its place and playing a leadership role on the continent … might lie in the fact that liberal democratic values are usually associated with the West. A commitment to these values on a continent with a rather flawed history of respect for democratic pluralism and human rights, combined with the vested interests mentioned above, would then almost inevitably elicit accusations of being un-African and pro-Western. schoeman 2003: 364; see also alden and soko 2005: 388–389 This explanation of the regional difficulties encountered by Pretoria, with its emphasis on a irreconcilability of political values between South Africa and the other Southern African states, runs the risk of downplaying not only the anti-imperialist stance that at times the South African government has taken at the international level, but also the limits and contradictions of South Africa’s democratic transition, and more generally the poor delivery record of neoliberal democracy in Southern Africa (Saul 1997; Marais 2011; Southall 2013). It is this poor record that has made it very difficult for South Africa and sadc to counteract Mugabe’s claim that social justice has to take precedence over the respect for human rights and democratic principles (Pallotti 2013). Thus, the challenge for South Africa seems to be neither to impose nor to restore democracy by force in the countries of Southern Africa, but rather to pursue and promote an effective model of democratic and inclusive development internally and within the sadc region. Conclusions The “unfinished business” of simultaneously promoting security, democracy and sustainable development in Southern Africa raises a number of questions concerning South Africa’s post-apartheid regional and continental policies and the country’s role as spokesperson for Africa within the brics group. In 1995 Peter Vale argued that: “a failure to implant a series of functioning and effective democracies on Southern Africa is the recipe for deepening regional chaos” (Vale 1995: 15). Twenty years after, Vale’s remark still seems to hold true. In spite of the fact that Southern Africa is generally considered a conflict-free zone, and although inter-state relations in the region have improved after the demise of the apartheid regime, this chapter has shown that the uncertainties surrounding the democratization processes and the limits Post-Apartheid South Africa, the BRICS and Southern Africa 235 and contradictions of the current patterns of economic growth risk to nurture political tensions and instability in Southern Africa. Such a challenge does not only weaken South Africa’s attempt to pursue a foreign policy aimed at addressing its internal economic problems, but it puts also under strain Pretoria’s role as spokesperson for Africa at the global level, especially in light of the political difficulties the South African government has encountered in its relations with the other African countries. Within this context, it remains to be seen if Pretoria’s membership of the brics grouping will contribute to the definition and promotion of an alternative development model for the global South, Africa and Southern Africa. If not, South Africa’s membership of the brics could exacerbate the contradictions of Pretoria’s African and Southern African policies. Bibliography Adebajo, A. and C. Landsberg 2003. “South Africa and Nigeria as Regional Hegemons”. In M. Baregu and C. Landsberg (eds.) From Cape to Congo: Southern Africa’s Evolving Security Challenges. Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner, 171–203. Ajulu, C. 2009. “South Africa and the Great Lakes: A complex Diplomacy”. In P. Kagwanja and K. Kondlo (eds.) State of the Nation: South Africa 2008. Pretoria: HSRC, 253–274. Alden, C. and M. Shoeman 2003. “The Hegemon That Wasn’t: South Africa’s Foreign Policy Towards Zimbabwe”, Strategic Review for Southern Africa 25 (1): 1–28. Alden, C. and G. 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Southall, R. 2003. “An Unlikely Success: South Africa and Lesotho’s Election of 2002”, Journal of Modern African Studies 41 (2): 269–296. Southall, R. 2013. Liberation Movements in Power. Party and State in Southern Africa. Oxford: James Currey. Southall, R. and A. Comninos 2009. “The Scramble for Africa and the Marginalisation of African Capitalism”. In R. Southall and H. Melber (eds.) The New Scramble for Africa: Imperialism, Investment and Development in Africa. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 357–385. Thompson, Lisa 1995. Beyond Borders and between States: (Re)visions of Development and Security in International Relations – A Southern African Perspective. Bellville: University of the Western Cape (= Centre for Southern African Studies. Southern African Perspectives; 48). Thompson, L. and A. Leysens 2000. “Changing Notions of Human Security in the Southern African Region”, Transformation (43): 1–24. ul Haq, M. 1995. Reflections on Human Development. 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Maputo: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (= Africa Peace and Security Series; 8). chapter 12 South Africa and the Southern African Regional Police Chiefs Cooperation Organisation: The Dialectic between “National” and “Regional” Safety and Security? Nicholas Dietrich Introduction The end of apartheid saw the opening up of borders in the Southern African region, allowing for the increase of both licit and illicit movement of people, goods and effects across sovereign jurisdictions in and around this sub-region. In order to safeguard sovereign territories from the effects of cross-border crime in the wake of regional conflict and instability, police forces/services from Southern African countries have had to negotiate terms of cooperation as their internal and external security priorities overlap around transnational crime. In 1995 the Southern African Regional Police Chiefs Cooperation Organisation (sarpcco) emerged as a positive step towards forming cooperative partnerships amongst Southern African law enforcement agencies in this regard. South Africa has, since its democratisation, been playing a central role in building regional relationships through sarpcco, with the South African Police Service (saps) extending the South African government’s international and regional agenda by advocating its law enforcement interests and activities. What has 20 years of cooperation within sarpcco produced in terms of regional cooperation? What role does the saps play within its regional neighborhood? What capacity does the saps have to act as a leader in deepening regional cooperation? Working around these questions, this chapter briefly explores different facets of the evolution of regional police cooperation in Southern Africa. By focusing on the lesser known regional organisation sarpcco, particular entanglements between “national” and “regional” spheres of security are exposed that should be taken into consideration when thinking further about safety and security in the broader sadc environment. The chapter is divided into two sections: Section 1 elaborates on sarpcco’s institutionalisation and highlights the processes that have come to characterise regional police cooperation within sarpcco. Section 2 focuses on the dialectic between the “regional” and the “national” by placing the saps at © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�6736_0�4 South Africa and the Southern African Regional Police Chiefs 241 the centre of sarpcco’s project. This section contrasts some of the saps’s interests and capabilities with regards to regional cooperation with important contradictions that emerge at the national level that hamper the saps’s central role in sarpcco. The chapter concludes that, while positive steps have been taken to place crime and policing on the regional agenda through sarpcco, the contradictions that emerge regarding the functioning of South Africa’s police service highlight the need to take more seriously the role that national institutions play in the consolidation of international and regional projects. sarpcco: Twenty Years of Policing across Borders in Southern Africa The Emergence of sarpcco With the end of the Cold War approaching in the late 1980s and the gradual demise of the apartheid, not Apartheid partheid regime in the early 1990s, a space opened up for a profound shift in the relationship between states in Southern Africa. This shift importantly saw a movement away from a “realist paradigm of war, destabilization and distrust” (Baregu and Landsberg 2003: 4) towards cooperative partnerships in relation to regional security. As the politics of regional economic integration were being negotiated between states in the Southern African Development Community (sadc), sarpcco emerged in 1995 as a semi-autonomous police association bringing together eleven Chiefs of Police and their national police forces/services under the new sarpcco emblem. These included Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Swaziland, Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe (sarpcco 2005: 4). sarpcco emerged out of relationships fostered between police executives in the framework of the Front Line States Chiefs of Police within the Interstate Defence and Security Committee (isdcs) (sarpcco 2005: 2). Regional cooperation in a post-conflict environment saw the erstwhile aggressor South Africa emerge as a new partner in regional peace and security. Police executives had to therefore renegotiate a regional policing context characterised by inter-state competition and mistrust, towards one where a shared interest in curbing cross-border and transnational crime would allow information, intelligence and personnel to move across borders. In 1997 sarpcco was officially recognised as a regional organisation and further institutionalised with the signing of an inter-governmental Agreement in Respect of Cooperation and Mutual Assistance in the Area of Crime Combating (sarpcco Agreement) and the adoption of the first sarpcco 242 Dietrich Constitution (sarpcco 2005: 2). The sarpcco Agreement afforded police forces/services a legal framework around which multilateral and bilateral joint operations and investigations across sovereign jurisdictions could be built. Importantly it identified the sharing of information, expertise and skills between countries as central in achieving the goal of regional cooperation against common agreed upon priority crime areas (sarpcco 1997). By the end of the first decade of the organisation’s existence, after Mauritius and the Democratic Republic of Congo both joined, sarpcco had managed to collect a complex mix of police forces/services under its banner, each with their own colonial criminal justice legacies, varying degrees of development and resources, and including English, French and Portuguese as official working languages. Central to understanding sarpcco’s autonomy is its symbiotic relationship with the International Criminal Police Organisation (Interpol).1 Emerging already in 1923, Interpol describes itself as the world’s largest police organisation (Interpol 2014a). With no police powers on the ground, Interpol provides products and services to its member states through its “high-tech infrastructure of technical and operational support” (ibid.), allowing members to stay on par with the evolution of crime and policing on a global level. Most importantly, the “neutrality” of the organisation is paramount in its efforts to extend law enforcement beyond sovereign jurisdictions, with Article 3 of its Constitution forbidding any activities of a political, military, religious or racial character (Interpol 2008a). Neutrality has been one of the key means through which Interpol has been able to extend its reach and power as it strategically situates itself within the space where it can facilitate cooperation “even where diplomatic relations do not exist between countries” (Interpol 2014b). sarpcco’s secretariat is housed at the Interpol Sub-Regional Bureau (srb) established in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1997. The Interpol srb coordinates sarpcco activities, such as the planning of and logistics around training workshops as well as operations. It also centralises information and intelligence on regional crime trends in the form of the Regional Organised Crime Threat Assessment (rocta)2 and facilitates communication and cooperation between countries. Personnel from the various member countries are seconded to the Interpol srb who, during the time of their service, are under the employ of Interpol. The srb thus offers a space in which different police professionals are exposed to a law enforcement landscape beyond their national borders. Figure 12.1 1 Interview, saps Legal Services, Head Office, Pretoria, South Africa, 10 January 2014. 2 Interview, Regional Specialised Officer, Interpol srb/sarpcco Coordination Office, Harare, Zimbabwe, 6 February 2014. South Africa and the Southern African Regional Police Chiefs SARPCCO Motor Vehicle Theft INTERPOL Corruption Drugs and counterfeit pharmaceuticals Drugs Economic and Commercial crimes Crimes against children Firearms and explosives Firearms Trafficking in gold, diamonds and other precious Trafficking in illicit goods and counterfeiting metals Pharmaceutical Crime Crimes against women and children Financial crime Illegal immigrants and forged travel documents Cybercrime Wildlife crime and endangered species Environmental Crime Stock Theft Fugitives investigations Trafficking in human beings Integrity in Sport Anti-terrorism Trafficking in human beings Cyber Crime Maritime Piracy Maritime Piracy Organised Crime Illegal Sports betting and match fixing Terrorism Vandalism of railway and telecommunications Vehicle Crime infrastructure War Crimes Figure 12.1 243 sarpcco and Interpol priority crime areas in 2014 Source: sarpcco. 2014c. “Activities”. http://www.sarpcco.org/ index.php/activities and Interpol. 2014c. “Crime Areas”. http:// www.interpol.int/Crime-areas. illustrates the common crimes which sarpcco and Interpol have identified in order to marry global priorities with sarpcco’s specific regional context. The negotiation between the Zimbabwean government and Interpol to establish an Interpol srb (Interpol 1994, 1996) must be understood in the context of the emergence of a regionalisation policy in Interpol in 1985 (Interpol 1985, 1995). Interpol has since established six regional bureaux in various parts of the world acting as central nodes supporting the international network of National Central Bureaux (ncbs) in each of its now 190 member states. Moreover, the global actor gains a regional presence through which it can offer its products and services – technical tools, 24-hour response, investigative skills and police training (Interpol 2008b) – as well as propose regional operations focused on global priorities. On the level of sadc, the Organ on Politics, Defence and Security was established in 1996 and formalised in 2001 through the signing of the Protocol on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation. Until 2007 the relationship 244 Dietrich between sarpcco and the sadc Organ was characterised by “a lack of cooperation” (Van der Spuy 2009: 245). Although this might have kept sarpcco out of the way of political interference (Shaw 2000), it also left the organisation to work forward with minimal political backing (Van der Spuy 2009: 245). In order to “enhance the fight against organised crime and cross-border illegal activities” (sadc 2012), a process was set in place to integrate sarpcco into the isdsc under the Strategic Indicative Plan for the Organ (sipo), launched in 2004. sipo acts as the tool that enables the implementation of the sadc security agenda and has played a role in identifying transnational crime as a regional priority (sadc 2002). Four sectors – Political, Defence, State Security and Public Security – are demarcated through which the protocol can be operationalised. The Public Security sector aims at addressing threats associated with organised crime syndicates through coordinating the activities of law enforcement, public safety, correctional services and prisons, immigration, parks and wildlife, customs and refugee agencies (sadc 2002: 35–45). In 2009 sarpcco was formally brought under the fold of the isdsc with a revised sarpcco constitution setting out the new relationship. Due to sarpcco’s prior autonomy and aforementioned relationship with Interpol the integration process was not smooth, requiring a longer period of negotiation already starting around 2006. In 2012 the revised sipo ii was launched, with a new stand-alone Police sector, headed by sarpcco, to support the four sectors already established under sipo i. Yet, while sarpcco seems to have gained important political recognition on the sadc level, its specific position remains hazy as the purpose of the standalone Police sector is not clearly differentiated from that of the Public sector (Van Nieuwkerk 2012). Furthermore, sadc has thus far not found the resources to fully support sarpcco, while the police organisation has had to become part of a bigger organisational structure that dilutes its specific interests.3 It is therefore not too clear what function sarpcco fulfills in sadc’s long-term security outlook. While cooperation between regional law enforcement agencies against cross-border crime seems to be a growing priority, sadc has failed to make a clear distinction between law enforcement and the much broader issue of crime prevention. The ability of the Chiefs of Police to reposition adversarial relationships between security agencies in a post-conflict environment must be seen as a positive occurrence of multilateral cooperation in the sub-region allowing for the pooling of resources directed at mobilising around a common agenda. On the other hand sarpcco is not a developmental organisation (Van der Spuy 2009: 245). Integration has therefore revolved around police operations, and 3 Interview, saps Detective Services, Head Office, Pretoria, South Africa, 10 January 2014. South Africa and the Southern African Regional Police Chiefs 245 more recently training police peacekeepers, rather than a holistic approach towards tackling the root causes of crime. While the merging of sarpcco and sadc intends on providing an integrated approach towards dealing with regional crime in a development context, the task of sipo ii will be to merge law enforcement interventions directed at transnational crime with a broader human centered approach linked to socio-economic development and respect for human rights, an area sadc and its members rhetorically commit to but have been struggling to operationalise. The Institutionalisation of Regional Police Cooperation sarpcco is driven by the notion that effective and successful cross-border cooperation is built upon the harmonisation of legislation, the construction of a regional policing culture, the nurturing of mutual trust, and effective communication and information exchange. The sarpcco Agreement sets the principles of cooperation as well as regulations on police mobility across sovereign territories. It furthermore outlines the following areas of cooperation: the regular exchange of crime information; planning, coordination and execution of joint operations/follow-up operations; cooperation with respect to border control and crime prevention in border areas; control over the delivery of illegal objects and substances; as well as technical assistance and expertise (sarpcco 1997: 6–8). To achieve these objectives the architecture of sarpcco, as set out by its latest constitution (sarpcco 2009),4 consists of: the Chiefs of Police Committee (cpc); the Interpol Sub-Regional Bureau/sarpcco Coordination Office, the Permanent Coordinating Sub-Committee (pcsc), the Legal Sub-Committee (lsc), the Training Sub-Committee (tsc), and the Women’s Network (wnsc). The cpc made up from the Chiefs of Police of member countries is the highest decision-making body, the face of the organisation and where policy is approved. Each sub-structure can be thought of as a “think tank”5 in which police professionals from member countries meet in different locations and at various times to rationalise strategies in order to operationalise trans-border crime control and law enforcement mobility across the region. The work culminates in the Annual General Meeting (agm), hosted by the incoming elected Chairman. The agm is a grand event where the substructures report to the Chiefs, the new head is inaugurated in the “ceremony 4 sarpcco has had two constitutions. The second constitution was drawn up when sarpcco officially became part of sadc in 2009. 5 Interview, saps Detective Services, Head Office, Pretoria, South Africa, 10 January 2014. 246 Dietrich of the sword” and the calendar for the next year is established.6 The agm, the sarpcco calendaring, the decision-making procedures and the inauguration ceremony all represent key practices through which sarpcco is constructed, enacted and institutionalised. As an operationally oriented organisation, sarpcco has been successful in negotiating priorities amongst members to mobilise action on the ground through joint, simultaneous and bilateral operations. The pcsc, consisting of the heads of Criminal Investigative Divisions, represents an important institution through which these strategies are formulated and priorities set from the bottom up. On the other hand, operations involving members of various law enforcement agencies across the 15 sovereign territories regularise and normalise practices and relationships in multinational environments. In keeping with international norms and regulations regarding sovereignty as set out in the sarpcco Agreement, only the host country has the power to police in its territorial jurisdiction. Extraterritorial actors thus play supportive roles offering expertise, knowledge and technological support. Multilateral operations therefore do not merely represent the alignment of objectives, priorities and practices but furthermore serve as sites of informal networking and training.7 While sovereign jurisdiction remains the key obstacle to international law enforcement mobility, different colonial histories across the regional space has led to a variety of criminal justice systems that emerged after independence. Differences in legal traditions therefore also constitute boundaries to transborder law enforcement harmonisation and operationalisation. According to the sarpcco Agreement: The parties shall consult with each other as to legislative or administrative steps that may be necessary to … remove any legal obstacles or impediments that may be found to exist in the execution of the provisions of the agreement. sarpcco 1997: 3 The Legal Sub-committee (lsc), which is comprised of the heads of legal units, supports the pcsc through attending to legal matters that may hamper police cooperation, and lobbies for harmonisation of regional legislation (sarpcco 2009). While the lsc can only make recommendations by producing model 6 Interview, Regional Specialised Officer, Interpol srb/sarpcco Coordination Office, Harare, Zimbabwe, 6 February 2014. 7 Interview, saps Detective Services, Head Offices, Pretoria, South Africa, 10 January 2014. South Africa and the Southern African Regional Police Chiefs 247 laws that must then be negotiated at the national level to become effective, Figure 12.2 highlights some of the lsc’s successes. Importantly, the sarpcco Agreement, Constitution and Code of Conduct represent key documents setting out principles and guidelines that standardise relations between different national agencies as well as minimum standards for professional conduct. In the case of the Code of Conduct, the lsc was supported by the Geneva based Association for the Prevention of Torture (apt) and the Human Rights Trust for Southern Africa (sahrit), then located in Harare. The Code of Conduct draws on various international and regional human rights mechanisms that act as the minimum professional standards for police forces/services in the region. sahrit has supported the dissemination of the Code of Conduct through the development of training materials for courses on Human Rights and Policing (Van der Spuy 2008: 250). Finally the Code of Conduct offers a measuring staff with which regional police forces/ services can be measured against a common set of principles regarding democratic policing. In this regard the African Police Civilian Oversight Forum (apcof), and its continental network of academics and policy professionals, has played a central role in forwarding research in this regard (Dissel and Tait 2011). Another obstacle on the operational level relates to lack of expertise and knowledge in investigating complex specialised forms of crime. The Training Sub-Committee (tsc), made up of the directors of training institutions, plays a supporting role by coordinating and conducting regional police training needs analyses and by implementing capacity building interventions (sarpcco SARPCCO Constitution (1997) Multilateral Cooperation Agreement (1997) SARPCCO Motor Clearance Certificate (1999) Standard Operating Procedures on Clearance of Motor Vehicles and Repatriation of Exhibits (1999) SADC Protocol on the Control of Firearms, Ammunition and other related Materials (signed by heads of state 2001) SARPCCO Code of Conduct and Human Rights (2001) Best Practices in Combating Counterfeit and Expired Pharmaceuticals (2008) Standard Operating Procedure on the implementation of the SADC Protocol on the Control of Firearms, Ammunition and Other Related Materials (2008) Figure 12.2 Legal harmonisation in sarpcco Source: sarpcco, 2014b. “Harmonisation of Legislation”. http:// sarpcco.org/index.php/achievements/legislation 248 Dietrich 2009). Figure 12.3 highlights some of the needs-based training courses that have been developed, along with curricula, to bolster regional capacity. An important method supporting this diffusion of knowledge is the “train the trainer” method, where the focus is on educating specialists who are then able to further diffuse knowledge nationally. Training and education thus serves to enhance capacity and therefore works towards promoting the standardisation of practices, strengthening professionalism, enhancing specialisation, building trust, as well as potentially relieving the police forces/services that are more experienced from having to elaborately support their partners. While specialisation is thus promoted on the regional level, however, what happens on the national level is outside of the control of sarpcco. Gaps between the national and the regional scale become problematic. While specialist knowledge may be developed on the regional level, shifts in the working environment on the national level may mean that trained individuals are subsequently moved to another division. Furthermore, professionals sent to take 1. Train the Trainers Course 11. Command and Leadership Course for Senior Police Women 2. Vehicle Crime Investigators Course 12. Stock Theft Investigators Course 3. Counter Terrorism Course 13. Code of Conduct and Human Rights Course 4. Firearms and Cross Border Operations Course 14. HIV and AIDS course 5. Criminal Intelligence Gathering and Analysis Course 15. Middle Management Course 6. Generic Commercial Crimes Course 16. Trafficking in Human Beings Course 7. Computer Crime Investigators Course 17. VIP Protection Course 8. Generic Detective Course 18. United Nations Police Officer’s Course 9. Diamond, Gold and other Precious Minerals Course 19. Laboratory Management for Middle Managers Course 10. Small Arms and Light Weapons Course 20. Emerging Women Leadership Course Figure 12.3 Example courses offered through sarpcco Source: sarpcco, 2014c. “Training: sarpcco Courses”. http:// sarpcco.org/index.php/activities/training South Africa and the Southern African Regional Police Chiefs 249 part in training or operations may not be of that particular expert field. Further obstacles therefore accumulate, as knowledge that is supposed to be diffused amongst colleagues may be lost due to personnel or structural changes on the national scale.8 To sum up, regional cooperation within or through sarpcco has therefore not only been visible on the macro level through the rhetoric of regional integration and joint policy formation. More importantly, processes are strongly centred in mid-level cooperation between police executives on the substructural level where policy is implemented. Furthermore, this reaches down to the operational level where police cooperate on the ground. Through training and joint operations police personnel on various levels meet and take part in the broader sarpcco project, being able to make their own contacts as well as being exposed to the working environments of colleagues in other countries. This informal networking is probably one of the most important microlevel instances where regional partnerships are formed, ideas are diffused and trust is built. The sarpcco Games that take place biannually is another important attempt at facilitating the interaction of police professionals through the avenue of sports and recreation. sarpcco has therefore been successful in terms of producing a sustainable approach towards operationalising regional police cooperation. This has been strengthened through establishing an institutional memory, ensuring continuity, as well as facilitating the construction of a regional collegiality among police professionals engaged in region-level planning and operationalisation. On the other hand, sarpcco still represents a regional project in the making, very much dependent on dynamics on the various national levels. The next section will take as example developments in the South African Police Service over the last 20 years that expose challenges that emerge at the national level that have implications for effective regional cooperation. The Dialectic between the “national” and “regional” – South Africa in sarpcco? South Africa in sarpcco Since democratisation South Africa’s engagement with its regional neighbours has been based on the ruling party’s particular stance towards Africa and the 8 Interview, saps Human Resources and Development, Head Office, Pretoria, South Africa, 10 January 2014. 250 Dietrich sadc region. In the 1994 document “Foreign policy perspective in a democratic South Africa” of the African National Congress (anc), it was stated: The region sustained us during our struggle and our destiny is intertwined with the region; our peoples belong with each other. Southern Africa is, therefore, a pillar upon which South Africa’s foreign policy rests … closer regional co-operation and economic integration after apartheid will benefit the entire region. Defining the terms, conditions and principles on which this should be constructed, is of fundamental importance. anc 1993 The continuity of such a perspective can be seen more recently in the Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Maite Nkoana-Mashabane’s reflection on the last 20 years of South African foreign policy at Witwatersrand University in April 2014: Indeed, the foreign policy of post-apartheid South Africa is determined in the structures of the ruling anc … In 2004, the anc manifesto declared to hasten and strengthen democracy, peace, stability and economic growth and development in Southern Africa and the rest of the continent, to prevent conflicts and ensure the peaceful resolution of such conflicts, to enhance south-south cooperation and north–south dialogue, and to promote a multilateral approach to global challenges. dirco 2014 With the end of apartheid, not Apartheid partheid in 1994 fighting crime also became a central priority for the South African government as it grappled with high crime rates in a context of total transformation. Opening Parliament in 1995, the late President Nelson R. Mandela stated: The situation cannot be tolerated in which our country continues to be engulfed by the crime wave which includes murder, crimes against women and children, drug trafficking, armed robbery, fraud and theft. We must take the war to the criminals and no longer allow the situation in which we are mere sitting ducks of those in our society who, for whatever reason, are bent to engage in criminal and anti-social activities. Instructions have therefore already gone out to the Minister of Safety and Security, the National Commissioner of the police service and the security organs as a whole to take all the necessary measures to bring down the levels of crime. Mandela quoted in rauch, 2001 South Africa and the Southern African Regional Police Chiefs 251 Domestically crime threatened the stability of the fledgling democracy, while internationally South Africa came under the spotlight for being, as the journalist Padraig O’Malley (1997) observed in 1997, “the world’s most murderous country, according to the World Health Organisation”. With the South African state’s interest in securing its national assets, attracting foreign investments and tourism, as well as playing a more prominent role in the international sphere by hosting international events such as the Non-Aligned Movement Summit in 1998 (Van der Spuy 2009: 252), it became clear that international and regional partnerships needed to be forged to assure domestic safety and security. The South African Police Service’s active participation in sarppco has thus bolstered both South Africa’s national interest in fighting crime and its foreign policy objectives of promoting regional partnership and cooperation in Africa and sadc. The saps has been a highly active member of sarpcco, taking on the financial and human resource burden of hosting a large proportion of the training workshops and meetings, three out of eight sarpcco Games, as well as cooperating extensively in joint operations (sarpcco 2005: 38–43). While the interaction within the organisation has been based on principles of partnership and equal ownership, the participation of the saps cannot be understated. In a region displaying huge differences in levels of economic development the saps commands a far bigger resource base than any of its regional counterparts (Dissel and Frank 2012: 121–122). Its human capital – in terms of expertise and specialist knowledge – is moreover central in advancing sarpcco’s objectives. It has the possibility of engaging in cross border operations, with over 20 Memorandums of Understanding in areas of police cooperation, while the ability to finance a network of over 20 police liaison officers around the world further broadens the Service’s reach (Kadwa 2013).9 Additionally, Pretoria hosts international liaison officers from the United States, Britain, Canada, China, Taiwan, Germany and Australia, thus creating a hub where law enforcement information and intelligence permeates. South Africa, through the saps, thus represents one of the most important partners within the sarpcco project. The saps furthermore benefits for its part by both extending its own law enforcement interests regionally and supporting domestic security, as noted by the South African Minister of Police Nathi Mthethwa in 2012: As modern and progressive world, we need to intensify our globalised approach in the fight against crime and criminality in general … South 9 In 2013 the saps had about 26 international police liaison officers stationed within strategic embassies across the world, 8 being in Southern Africa. 252 Dietrich Africa further acknowledges the pivotal role that sadc member states play in showing support to major events and matters of regional cooperation being undertaken by South Africa. We have seen this during the 2010 fifa World Cup and more recently the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (unfccc) held in Durban during November 2011, which was deemed a huge success. Polity 2012 While sarpcco has been able to meet objectives and overcome challenges to a certain extent, the entanglements between national and regional scales are important, the implication being that sarpcco’s own health and vision is related to that of its member forces/services, and vice versa. This section has thus far attempted to demonstrate both South Africa’s interest in extending the institutional reach of its police into its regional neighborhood as well as the assets the saps is able to mobilise in this regard. South Africa is therefore an important part of the sarpcco project. Due to lack of readily available information it has been difficult to assess the actual internal relationships between members of sarpcco, the conflicting positions actors may hold or the actual processes through which agreement is reached. Questions therefore abound regarding the internal politics of the organisation and the position of South Africa within sarpcco vis-à-vis other members. It is hoped that more research directed at the role of police in regional relations will help to expose some of these aspects in the future. On the other hand, due to South Africa’s pivotal role in the sarpcco project one may then consider looking at how the saps has been internalizing sarpcco principles and asses what role the saps can play in consolidating sarpcco and further regional cooperation. The next sub-section therefore briefly explores some of the contradictions that emerge within the saps that, through its entanglement with sarpcco, should be of regional importance with regards to safety and security. The South African Police Service: What Kind of Leadership? South Africa’s interest and central role in sarpcco in effect connects its domestic sphere with relation to crime and policing to regional and global spheres. While the saps has been central in building relationships in the sarpcco region through institutionalising police cooperation against cross-border crime, questions arise as to what kind of leadership role it can/should play within the organisation. What image of policing is it extending across its borders? At the 2013 Institute for Security Studies (iss) Crime Conference held in Johannesburg, the saps was described as “… facing rising complaints of brutality, South Africa and the Southern African Regional Police Chiefs 253 with a reputation for corruption”. Moreover mass recruitment was seen to have weakened systems and put poorly trained police on the street (ISSAfrica 2013). The root causes of the problematic situation in the saps and the broader criminal justice system are obviously set deep in the transformation of the country itself. The advent of democracy in 1994 saw the reordering of an authoritarian and politicised police force built on colonial practices of policing race relations (Van der Spuy 1989) and maintaining regime security to a professional police service based on international tenets of democratic and human rightsbased policing (Malan 1999: 3). This process also entailed amalgamating the previous sap with ten other “homeland” police organisations, as well as ensuring that the new saps was demographically representative of the population (Faull 2011: 12–13). Since this period of transition the South African government has struggled to marry long-term commitments to crime prevention – embodied in the National Crime Prevention Strategy (1996), the White Paper on Safety and Security (1998) and the more recent National Development Plan (2013) – with short-term aggressive law enforcement interventions that attempt to satisfy popular fears of rising crime (Rauch 2002). According to the criminologist Andrew Faull (2011: 12), a contradiction emanating from this situation has emerged where two “conflicting narratives” have affected the way in which police personnel have had to interpret their role and conduct. The first is the tough and populist narrative of a “war on crime” that contradicts international conventions on principles of policing codified in the sarpcco Code of Conduct. The second discourse is “primarily concerned with respect for human rights, due process and law”. Faull (2002: 12) observes: The hardline rhetoric detracts from the emphasis in internationally recognized principles of police practice and the agreed ethics and values in the South African Police Service (saps) and suggests a “catch them at all costs” approach that trumps respects for human rights and professional policing … The police aim to communicate a message of fear to the citizenry by creating a criminal “other” … a contradiction occurs with regards to non-discrimination and respect for all persons, as it creates a space in which entire groups can be labelled criminal and so exposed them to police abuse. According to Gareth Newham (in ISSAfrica 2013) of the iss Crime and Justice Programme, brutality cases recorded against saps officers had increased by 313 per cent in the ten years between 2001/02 and 2011/12, with only one percent of criminal cases opened against police officials ending up in a conviction. 254 Dietrich Moreover, the number of disciplinary hearings in the police that ended up in dismissals decreased from 12.2 per cent to 9.6 per cent between 2009/10 and 2011/012. This, according to Newham (quoted in ISSAfrica 2013), points to a situation where “police misconduct has been met with impunity”. Such impunity does not only negatively affect the image of the police in the eye of the public, but also shatters “the morale of honest and professional officers in the service” (Newham quoted in ISSAfrica 2013). Reports of victimisation of African migrants or lack of action in the face of xenophobic violence (Dissel and Frank 2012: 128), not to mention the extensive use of force in public order policing as particularly exemplified by events at Marikana on 16 August 2012 (Burger 2014b), paint a problematic image that the saps extends beyond its borders. The saps, and by extension the South African government, therefore struggles to maintain an image of a strong and professional leader with regard to the principles it would like to stand for in the regional community. This does not only damage the image of the saps domestically, but negatively impacts on South Africa’s interests at the regional level. According to Faull (2011, 12) the most important challenges for the saps revolve around discipline, leadership and corruption. Mismanagement and decision-making practices that negatively effect domestic stability also act contrary to the needs of regional partnership. Parallel to the vast increase of police brutality, the retired saps executive and now researcher Johan Burger (2014a) attributes “ten years of turmoil for the police in general, and specialized investigative units in particular” to the appointment of Jackie Selebi as National Commissioner of the Service. As the first civilian to head the saps, Selebi’s initial strategic plan in 2000 looked promising, focusing on four key priorities that also reflect global and regional interests: organised crime, serious and violent crime, crimes against women and children, and improving service delivery. However, the implementation of the plan manifested in a tactic of mass recruitment with a focus on putting more police on the street and included “crack-down” operations that decreased the importance of detective services and crime intelligence. Both detective services and crime intelligence, integral components in formulating a proactive onslaught against organised crime, were left with a lack of resources. Moreover, a double movement of consolidating specialised investigative units into only three broader units and then decentralising them to police stations, according to Burger, negatively impacted the saps’s specialised investigative capacity. Importantly, Burger (2014, np) cites that informal networks among specialists were destabilised and the specialised knowledge and experience retained and carried over through mentoring was not consolidated. Apart from later being found guilty of corruption due to his dealings with a convicted drug-trafficker, Glenn Agliotti (Letsoalo South Africa and the Southern African Regional Police Chiefs 255 and Roussouw 2012), Selebi (at the time president of Interpol) therefore left a legacy that has seriously destabilised the Service’s public perception as well as its ability to bolster the management and operationalisation of sarpcco priorities. Yet, the problems briefly highlighted thus far must be seen in a broader environment of the “re-politicisation” of the police in South Africa since 1994. A central tenant forwarded in the sarpcco constitution is that, for regional cooperation to be a success, police must remain independent from political interference. Tom Lodge (2014) maintains that symptoms of neo-patrimonial behaviour can be seen in the evolution of the anc from a rule-regulated mass based organisation into one where internal politics is shaped by personal interests. An important indicator that Lodge cites is the emergence of factionalism where the internal dynamics of the ruling party is shaped by personal loyalty, rather than ideological beliefs. The neo-patrimonial tendencies of the anc are up for debate. On the other hand, controversies around political manipulation of the saps, elite crime fighting units such as the Hawks, and even the South African Revenue Service (sars) more recently point to a problematic situation where independent institutions are drawn into political conflicts in order to protect personal political interests (De Vos 2014). How do the issues briefly outlined above relate to the success of sarpcco? Firstly, they are important with regard to the human capital that South Africa has been able to mobilise to export its priorities to the regional level and in so doing protect its own territory from criminal exploitation. Secondly, sarpcco is dependent on the value placed on it by its members in order for its stated goals to be achieved. Serious problems across the whole criminal justice system in South Africa, which directly or in effect bolster criminal entrepreneurialism through destabilising the police, are detrimental to any coherent action against organised crime on the regional scale. Finally, allegations of widespread corruption around the ruling party in general and the Service in particular negatively effects trust across borders, notably in terms of sharing information and intelligence. Two broader themes may also be drawn out from the brief examples noted in this section: the commitment to human rights and democratic principles of policing and the consolidation of professionalism and specialisation among the personnel of police forces/services. These themes directly connect the saps’s own contradictions with the stated objectives of the regional neighbourhood. Under the sadc Organ’s sipo ii, Objective 3 is “to consider enforcement action in accordance with international law” (sadc 2010, 63). The strategies directed at achieving this objective are to “design and implement professional police training programmes for rapid response capability and ensure and 256 Dietrich promote professional accountability within police services/forces”. The activities outlined are to “continue implementing joint training programmes of Police Officers on Special Operations and strengthen the implementation of the code of conduct within the police services/forces”. Objective 4 is: To promote the development of democratic institutions and practices within the territories of State Parties and encourage the observance of universal human rights as provided for in the Charters and Conventions of the au and un. sadc 2010: 64 Achieving this objective again centres on promoting the sarpcco Code of Conduct and capacitating personnel from police services/forces. In the case of South Africa, contradictions therefore persist between regional commitments and domestic practices pertaining to professionalism, specialisation, democratic principles of policing and the centrality of human rights. South Africa has been and will remain a central actor in the sarpcco project, as its national interests directly relate to its regional neighborhood. Furthermore, as sarpcco becomes more important through its formal inclusion into the regional security architecture of sadc, South Africa gains a more prominent position regionally through the important position the saps holds in the organisation. However, South Africa’s capacity to fight organised crime on the domestic front and steer the deepening of regional cooperation through sarpcco is brought into question by the serious internal problems the organisation faces. Conclusion In order to safeguard their sovereign territories from the effects of transnational crime, state police forces/services need to negotiate terms of cooperation as their internal and external security priorities become entangled with those of other states. International police cooperation is therefore an important area of international relations. However, the international geopolitical order that defines international boundaries based on the protection of sovereignty over the internal security domains of sovereign territorial states hampers cooperation. International police cooperation against cross-border and transnational crime is therefore fraught with difficulties that include, inter alia, sensitivities related to sovereignty, differences in criminal justice systems, and varying levels of state police capabilities and human resources, to mention a few. South Africa and the Southern African Regional Police Chiefs 257 The emergence of sarpcco in 1995, and its evolution over the last 20 years, must therefore be seen in a positive light. sarpcco’s success cannot be fully grasped by only measuring whether it has succeeded in creating a “crime-free zone” in sadc’s boundaries. Rather, sarpcco represents a positive example of regional cooperation because it showcases the ability of actors to formulate innovative strategies directed at implementing shared policy objectives across national borders and facilitate extensive contact and engagement between police professionals from different state police systems in a variety of domain-specific areas. In terms of international police cooperation, sarpcco represents an important conduit through which cooperation can be extended and innovative responses to transnational crime can be conceived. In Southern Africa, regional police cooperation has become a day-to-day concept for the regional police community (on the executive level, at least), and an architecture that facilitates police mobility and cross-cultural learning has been put in place on which future interventions can be built. Finally, the organisation brings police executives together to construct a shared image of interdependence in the sadc region around issues of safety and security, rather than a military focus on peace and security. However, sarpcco’s own health and useful life is directly related to the health of members, their ability to keep their own houses in order and the value they place upon the organisation’s vision, goals and activities. In considering the case of the saps in sarpcco, one is aware of the contradictions that persist around regional police cooperation in the sarpcco region. More specifically, corruption and mismanagement within police forces and collusion between public authorities and criminal entrepreneurs remain the most pertinent threats to sarpcco’s mission to protect the region from cross-border and transnational crime. The case of the saps’s struggles with management, corruption and political interference highlights the need for more attention to be given to the entanglements between national and regional spheres of safety and security. If the end-game is to engineer sadc to be a “crime-free zone”, and if sarpcco is the vehicle through which this is to be achieved, then the hard work will be for sarpcco as an organisation to not only rhetorically commit to principles of professionalism and service, but to make sure that member forces adhere to these principles. The saps remains the pivotal partner in the sarpcco project in terms of financial and human capital that can be mobilised to bolster the organisation’s activities. Furthermore, the saps is well connected in the broader international law enforcement community through its ability to finance international police liaison officers. 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Mbeki, T. 19, 22, 51–52, 62, 203–204, 205, 207, 224, 225, 226, 229, 231 Mngxitama, A. 162 Modise, J. 205, 207 Mohamed, M. 73 Motlanthe, K.P. 15, 22 Motsoaledi, A. 62 14 Selebi, J. 254f. Simons, J. 213 Sisulu, W. 211 Tambo, O. 208, 210, 215 Tjiriange, K. 206 Tutu, D. 20 ya Toivo, A. Xingwana, L. 208f., 211 32 Zenawi, M. 12 Zille, H. 13f. Zuma, J.G. viii, 2, 15, 22–24, 108, 112, 117, 118, 156, 202, 216, 224 Subject Index anc vii–viii, 1, 6f., 11, 13–30, 36–37, 69, 113, 116–118, 128f., 134, 140, 156, 162, 168, 202–216, 220, 250 anc Women’s League 37 See also sacp, swapo, Umkhonto weSizwe African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance 11 African Union 11–12, 220, 230–231 Afrobarometer 16–17, 23 Agang 14 Angola 205, 206, 211–212 aprm 2, 12f., 16, 24 brics 7, 220–239 cope 14 Corruption 2, 22–24 cosatu 13, 15, 207 Cuba 205, 206, 211–212 da 13–15 See also dp, Zille dp 14 See also da, Zille Df ID 60–61, 187 See also hiv/international donors eff 14, 102, 120, 153, 154, 162 See also Malema, Mngxitama Elections 1, 11, 13–18 European Union 204 ff Plus 14 fhi 17, 19 fls 207, 227 Gender inequality 31–46 See also women’s rights Government of National Unity hiv/Aids 3, 43, 49–63 arv 3, 50, 52–54 International donors Df ID 13 54–55, see also nhi 50, 54–59, 62 pmtct 3, 50–53 See also msf, Section 27, tac ifp 13, 69 Immigration 3, 68–80 Amakhuwa 77–79 Cape Muslims 3, 71–74 Durban Zanzibaris 3, 74–78 Mozbiekers 73–74 See also xenophobia Interpol 242–243 See also sarpcco Land question 4, 5, 87–102, 104–127, 128–152, 153–172 Communal Land Rights Act (2004) 113–115, 121 Constitution (1996) 106, 107f., 113, 155 dldlr 118–119, 153, 155f., 157, 169 Green Paper (2011) 119 Farm labour 128–152 Land and Agrarian Reform Programme 116f. Land redistribution viii, 109–113, 135, 154, 158 Land Reform for Agricultural Development 110–112 Land restitution viii, 87, 102, 107–109, 158 Land tenure reform 4, 5, 88–95, 97–100, 113–115, 137–140, 142–143, 146–148, 158 Natives Land Act (1913) 4, 88–95, 100–102, 105, 153, 155, 159, 169 Native Land and Trust Act (1936) 159, 161 White Paper (1997) 105, 109, 113, 134, 157 lgbt 60 Local government elections vii Macro-economic policy programmes 1, 41, 51 asgisa 1 gear 1, 41, 51, 110 merg 1 rdp 4, 41, 107, 129 See also land question 265 Subject Index msf 58, 59 See also hiv/Aids, Section 27, tac Namibia 6, 202–219 See also swapo nepad 220, 225 np 13, 134 numsa 15 oau 214, 220 sacp 13, 212, 215 See also anc sacpo 13 sacu 204–205 sadc 6, 7, 21, 204–205, 220–239, 240–245, 251, 255f. Mutual Defence Pact 230 Organ on Politics, Defence and Security 227, 243f Protocol 229–230 sipo 231f., 244–245, 255 See also saps, sarpcco saps 8, 240–241, 251–252, 252–256, 257 See also sarpcco sarpcco 7, 240–261 See also Interpol, sadc, saps Section 27 56, 57–58, 59 See also hiv/Aids, Section 27, tac swapo 6f., 202–216 See also anc, Namibia tac 3, 49, 52–54, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62 See also hiv/Aids, msf, Section 27 Tanzania 214 udm 14 Umkhonto weSizwe 7, 205, 212 See also anc United Nations 214–215, 220 unsc 206, 220f. Violence 2, 18–20, 79 Women rights 2–3, 39–40, 43–46 wnc 3, 32, 37–39 See also gender inequality World Value Surveys 17 Xenophobia 2, 3, 21–22, 68–80, 254 See also immigration zanu pf 6, 202, 212 Zimbabwe 6