No love lost in Limpopo

Land Claims Commissioner Tozi Gwanya has threatened ‘halstarrige [obstinate] boere” in Limpopo with expropriation several times. The threat highlights the deep mistrust between farmers, the land authorities and even claimants in the province, where a startling 85% of farmland is under claim.

Farmers complain that the government threatens expropriation at every turn in the process, while the Land Claims Commission insists compulsory purchase is a measure of last resort. Some claimants had even threatened to go ‘the Zimbabwean route” if restitution is not speeded up.

‘Why must we be threatened?” asks Fritz Ahrens, a farmer from Makhado whose land is under claim. ‘Are we criminals?” Stephen Hoffman, a farmer in Levubu, agrees. ‘We’re not monsters. If every one of us is chased off our farms, who will share the knowledge of farming in Levubu?”

Both farmers blame Nkuzi, a land rights lobby group, for the number of claims in Limpopo. Most were simply ‘thumbsucks”, they alleged.

‘Nkuzi took a look at the map of Limpopo and divided up the farmland among communities,” he says. ‘They told them that if they didn’t claim the land, someone else would.”

Marc Wegerif, Nkuzi’s programme manager, dismisses the complaint as ‘ridiculous”. ‘Claimants have lodged claims on land that they believe is rightfully theirs,” he says.

‘We advised them; we never suggested where they should claim.”

Wegerif says Limpopo was the last South African region to be colonised by white settlers, and that parts of the far north were only surveyed and allocated to white farmers after 1913. Under the Land Restitution Act, communities can only claim land if they were dispossessed after 1913.

Limpopo’s population is 97% black and 2,4% white, ‘but whites own over two-thirds of the land”, Wegerif says.

Ahrens is open to negotiation, saying if the claim is genuine, ‘then we must talk. I am willing to discuss options such as renting the farm from the community, or signing a 99-year lease. In my heart I am a farmer; that is my calling. What will happen to white farmers if everyone is pushed off their land?”

Hoffman bitterly recalls a response from a land claims official when he asked where he would go if he lost his farm. ‘He said: ‘Try Australia.’”

Two provincial farmers’ associations appointed ethnologists to study the region’s history and determine the legitimacy of claims. According to Hoffman, they found that no tribe or community had a right to land in that area.

‘There were a number of people living as labour tenants with the right to graze a few head of livestock and plant maize. With the consolidation of farms into an irrigation scheme in 1936, they were moved to alternative land.”

Miyelani Nkatingi, the land claims official in charge of the Levubu claims, strongly disagrees. ‘For many claims we have strong factual documents to back up forced removals,” Nkatingi said. ‘In many cases, there are the letters from the authorities of the time ordering whole villages to be removed. And then there are grave sites.”

Happy Ramakanye, chairperson of the Maguade claimants in Levubu, says before his community lodged a land claim the people often visited the graves of their ancestors on the farms without any problems. ‘But as soon as the land claims were lodged, the farmers denied us access,” he says.

Samuel Libada, chairperson of the Muhovha cluster of land claims in the Makhado area, told the Mail & Guardian his community is looking forward to farming their own land. ‘We are natural born commercial farmers,” he says. ‘But we were never given a chance to practice our art.”

Libida says if the ‘white farmers want to stay and farm with us, we will welcome them. They are also South Africans.”

Ramakanye warns that claimants are impatient with the pace of restitution. ‘They want to go the Zimbabwean route if the government does not expropriate the land of unwilling sellers and it is getting more difficult for us as leaders to quell them,” he says. ‘A carrot has been dangled in front of us.”

Commissioner Mashile Mokono is the first to admit that validating Limpopo’s rural claims has not been easy. ‘The historical and archival research that had to be done has been far more complex than expected,” he says.

Many farmers in Levubu insist they are willing to sell their farms, and the government has signed contracts with them. But some farmers say they have been waiting for four years for the sales to be finalised.

Mokono said the sale of these farms tops the commission’s agenda and will be finalised before the end of the year. He says: ‘The red tape intrinsic in all government bureaucracies has, in some instances, had a devastating effect on our ability to speedily process land.”