Drew Forrest
A newly released study on a powerful Lebowa chief’s land grab before the 1994 election sheds a harsh light on the abuses and conflicts that could follow the large-scale transfer of communal land to traditional “communities”.
The study, by Aninka Claassens, analyses events in the Northern Province area of Rakgwadi, near Marble Hall, after 25 farms there were transferred to the Matlala tribe in a deal between the Lebowa homeland and the National Party government in 1994.
Claassens says the deal effectively transferred ownership rights to the tribe’s chief, MM Matlala, whose councillors believe the land belongs to him.
Matlala, finance minister in the homeland cabinet until 1994, was among those who called the defence force into Lebowa to crush the popular uprising of the late 1980s. Claassens adds that the Matlala tribe was an apartheid construct that did not exist before the 1960s.
She says residents were not consulted on the transfer and that most learned of it years later. Although the land was transferred free of charge, new tenants had to pay an entry fee of up to R500 and a range of other levies.
Matlala had since used “his” title deeds:
To threaten residents who challenged him with eviction, and to warn of the confiscation of fields from owners of 40 years’ standing and from whole villages;
To thwart a land restitution claim. Matlala urged subjects to occupy the land under claim, which was also hit by a mysterious fire;
To seize land promised to an adjacent, weaker tribe;
To stonewall a black farmers’ association wanting to buy more land for production;
To delay by two years a housing development planned by the local municipality, on grounds that it was “theft of land from the tribe”.
Business projects were crippled by fines imposed by headmen because they were using communal land, Claassens says. Matlala himself imposed a R500 fine on women collecting firewood for a bakery.
“The disputes all arose from, or were exacerbated by, the 1994 land transfers,” Claassens writes. “The main actors … are poor people [who] have in common the belief that as citizens of South Africa they are entitled to protect their rights and take steps to improve their lives.”
Matlala was not seen as a particularly bad chief, and others in Rakgwadi had a worse reputation.
Claassens suggests the self-financing nature of the traditional system, and the consequent savings for government, may be a factor in Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Thoko Didiza’s approach to communal land tenure.
She also says many provincial African National Congress leaders who emerged during the United Democratic Front’s (UDF) campaign against chiefs and homelands will not like Didiza’s policy.
Some in the ANC believed the party’s strong electoral showing in former homeland provinces was the result of alliances with chiefs; others that it flowed from revolts against Bantu authorities and UDF campaigns against traditional leaders.
“Conflicts triggered by transferring ownership of communal land to tribes may illuminate which of these two views is more accurate,” Claassens writes.