Rural women say the government has failed them on land reform
Tara Turkington
Diminutive yet fiery Emily Tjale was one of the first to take the stage at a historic assembly of 250 rural women, who gathered to denounce and mobilise against landlessness in Kimberley at the weekend.
Tjale is a member of the community that instituted a land claim at Boomplaats, near Lydenburg, in 1994. After six years of paperwork and delays, the community finally owns half of the land it was removed from 40 years ago.
Yet hundreds of displaced families cannot move back home because the government has successfully negotiated the purchase of only one half of the land, says Tjale. Resettlement can’t begin until a global plan for both halves of the property has been drawn up.
“The pain is still there. Even though we have the title deed, we still have no access to our land,” she says bitterly. “The government doesn’t let us know what’s going on. We’re in the dark about progress.”
Tjale uses an Old Testament story as a metaphor to express her anger at the government’s lack of delivery. From the book of Exodus she reads the story of Miriam the Prophetess, who danced and beat upon a drum, and pushed an evil horse and rider into the sea. “We need to push our horse and rider into the sea,” Tjale shouts to applause and a lively rendition of the landless people’s anthem, Jikelele (meaning turn around).
Others at the meeting don’t bother to cloak their sentiments in metaphors. Ntate Mojapelo, the chairperson of the national Landless People’s Movement, which was founded in July, is one of a handful of men at the gathering.
“Seven years after the birth of democracy, most landless communities remain landless. The government has failed us. Land reform in South Africa is moving at a deplorably slow rate, there is almost no land reform,” says Mojapelo. “Mbeki has been a bad father. Is there anyone here who disagrees?” No one raises a hand.
“The Landless People’s Move- ment urges government officials in the Department of Land Affairs to deserve their salaries. And they will only deserve them when we get our land. If we don’t get our land in an orderly fashion we have the right to take it back.”
Later, Mojapelo elaborated for the Mail & Guardian: “We support the occupation of land where people have been removed. The government should not be surprised if people take their land back. If the government can’t give the people access, they must give themselves the access.”
The assembly was organised by the National Land Committee, a network of 10 land rights NGOs working with landless communities across South Africa, to coincide with World Rural Women’s Day on Monday. The day grew out of the 1995 United Nations’ Conference for Women in Beijing and honours the 1,6-billion rural women across the world struggling to access land and other key resources.
In South Africa rural women comprise 53% of the population (about 10-million people), according to the National Land Committee. More than 70% of these women live under the R350 a month poverty line, while 62% are unemployed.
They are therefore South Africa’s most impoverished, disempowered people. National Land Committee organiser Samantha Hargreaves says the meeting, the first of its kind in South Africa, “provided space for sharing and learning. Women had the opportunity to interact with one another formally and informally. The meeting helped to break the isolation and there was a sense of solidarity.
“It’s been a real success; increasingly, we’re going to have to create spaces like this where women can come together, share and collaborate.
“Women are the backbone of the rural economy. Naturally, if you can organise women, they will be the backbone of the struggle for land. As NGOs we will be strategising about how to organise women. There are clear needs for information, gaining access to resources and skills,” Hargreaves says. “There’s also a need for a national rural women’s coalition. At the moment there are three coalitions and that will be an important focus from here. There are so many initiatives, the key is to build a coalition to pull them together.”
Apart from meeting to share and learn, the women resolved to form a women’s committee of the Landless Peoples’ Movement to ensure their demands are known in the growing land struggle. They also decided to send representatives to a government land rights conference to look at land tenure reform in November, and developed a set of demands to be added to the Landless People’s Charter, which was adopted by the movement in Durban during the recent World Conference against Racism. The charter will be presented to the national Land Summit the government has agreed to hold in April or May next year.
The demands are wide-ranging, including one that reads: “Policies that benefit the rich and marginalise the poor must be changed, including the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development Programme, the growth, employment and redistribution strategy, and market-led land reform.”
The women also ask for, among other things, equal representation of men and women in municipal councils and other decision-making bodies, better wages for women farm labourers and better basic services for rural women. Right at the top of the list is the impatient insistence: “The land restitution process must be sped up and the land should be in the hands of the people by December 2001.”
But it remains to be seen whether the horse and rider will listen to South Africa’s rural women.