What It Takes for a Society to Reconcile with Its Past Land Grabs
Land Power “Lessons” Part 1
This is the first part of a series on “Lessons” from my new book, Land Power, on how land can be used today in service of making a better society.
In 2008, the South African government returned a swathe of some 150,000 acres of prime agricultural land to seven Black indigenous communities who had been forced off of it during the country’s racially discriminatory apartheid era. Fifteen years later, the dust still hasn’t settled. Several communities have forged a partnership with the company that had previously owned it under apartheid. Those community members are receiving modest royalties from leasing the land back to the company while some of them now work for the company and even manage farm plots. Other communities have struck out on their own. All of them are wrestling with questions of who should be eligible for benefits.
I recall a jarring contradiction I encountered last year as I shuttled between sugarcane fields and low-slung office buildings in the lush, green province of Mpumalanga talking to members of these communities about land restitution for my new book, Land Power (you can read an excerpt on this published at Foreign Policy here). One beneficiary named Petros from a partner community, who is now a farm manager for the company, vividly recalled to me signing the agreement with the government to return the land: “That was an experience that I will take to the grave. It was so emotional.” His face flashed with excitement and pride. Yet shortly after, the chairperson of a trust from another community in the region that has suffered management problems met me with a duffel bag full of land transfer documents – that he viewed as broken promises – and told me that land restitution “was a bitter pill to swallow. We can say the land did come back to us as the dispossessed. But in reality, if…I give you something back but you must partner with so and so, that means that the land didn’t really come back to me. It’s only a business transaction.”
The Tough Questions in Reconciliation and Repair
A society that aims to value the dignity and voice of all of its citizens has to grapple with any grave violations from its past. Land has been a potent tool in the construction of racial hierarchy in countries as diverse as Australia, Brazil, South Africa, and the United States. It has been appropriated, accumulated, and used to benefit some people over others in these societies. Unsurprisingly, land remains one of the most consequential and controversial arenas of restitution. It cuts to the heart of racial hierarchy, marginalization, and material and symbolic reparations.
In South Africa, the history of land reshuffling is recent – and Petros recounted to me the experiences of his community’s removal from their land by the government in 1954 as his parents and elders had told it to him:
First the government “called [the Black communities] in Komatipoort. Some of the chiefs did not go there. The only chief among the Ngomane that went there was Chief Mpoti, who was with the Lugedlane clan… When Chief Mpoti was with his people he was going there… to tell the delegation that we are not going anywhere.” Government agents invited him as the representative of the Ngomane into a room and “when they closed the door they escorted him to the other side where there was a van” to detain him and send him into exile. “By the time it was around 5, [his] people were hungry, they were waiting for their chief….Then one guy came and said, ‘Your chief has agreed that you are going to be removed.’ People were angry, and they started throwing stones.” Here Petros started loudly and repeatedly snapping his fingers to mimic the sound of throwing stones as he continued. “They asked, ‘Where is the chief now?’ The chief is gone. And they had to go back home. By the time they went home, already the trucks…started to remove these people. And it’s not like the chief agreed. That’s why it was a forced removal…My grandfather was one of the indunas [headmen], and he did not agree. [The Ngomane] Siboshwa did not actually agree, and even the Hoyi group did not actually agree. But they were all removed.” People lost nearly everything they owned during the removal as government trucks hauled them off and dumped them into a cramped and fractured smaller “homeland” in the south of the Nkomazi region.
Episodes like these have occurred around the globe during what I call “The Great Reshuffle” – the period of massive upheaval in land ownership over the last two centuries.
The few societies that have tried to use land to undo the racial hierarchies that land appropriation wrought have inevitably grappled with a mountain of quandaries. Who should qualify for land restitution or reparations? What is owed to dispossessed communities who themselves dispossessed other communities to obtain the land? Who should pay for restitution? How much restitution is “enough”? At what point, if any, do considerations of prior dispossessions fade as new generations occupy and transact in land in markets they did not create? Why should one generation pay for the past and not another? How should restitution be weighed against the prospect of social disruption, such as when major cities now sit atop stolen lands? Navigating the mountain of moral and practical questions is difficult and controversial terrain.
What’s Being Done in the US, and What To Do Next
Unlike South Africa, the US isn’t handing much land back to Native Americans – though there are precedents for that, like the return of Blue Lake land to the Taos Pueblo Tribe in New Mexico. To the contrary, dozens of Tribes in the US, like the Burt Lake Band of Anishinaabe in Michigan, are still struggling to even be federally recognized as such.
But there are plenty of experiments in recognizing and even reconciling with past land dispossession and its consequences. There are examples of recognition of Tribal authority and autonomy in certain areas, like in the landmark 2020 case McGirt s. Oklahoma that recognized Tribal jurisdiction over certain criminal cases in a massive swath of eastern Oklahoma (though aspects of that were dialed back). Or the Cobell Act, which sought to remedy the gross mismanagement of income from Native American trust land through billions in repayments and a land buy-back program. There are even a few campaigns for voluntary property taxes on private lands.
But one of the most promising approaches is a shift toward co-stewardship of land. Countries like Australia, South Africa, and Canada have begun developing partnerships with indigenous communities to give them greater land access and a role in protecting and stewarding public, and in some cases even private, land. The US is far behind, but has a few nascent partnerships, like in Bear Ears National Monument and in the new Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary. These partnerships can be replicated with state and local governments, and they can be extended through the growing trends in tribal conservation easements on private property and in land trusts and land conservancies. To be successful and meaningful, these co-stewardship arrangements have to give tribal communities a voice in resource and land management. And they could act as a bridge toward greater involvement and control over ancestral homelands, as well through material benefits like a share of recreation/use revenues (like with the Uluru rock formation in Australia) and management expenses. It could lead to a future in which tribal communities are far more central in the management and stewardship of land.
Of course, in addressing any dispossession so sweeping and grievous, there are considerable risks of tokenism. There are also no easy one-size-fits-all solutions. Over time, populations and communities shift in many ways. In addition, there are problems with approaching the project of reparation as a task that can be “completed” or “finished.” It’s one thing to reconcile or to enshrine remembrance. That in itself, however, is not enough: history can’t be erased. And we know that the shadow of history is long. But – and there is plenty more on this in my book – it is time to start a new chapter in the conversation, and that has to be rooted in the importance of the land both in the initial disruption and dispossession and in how it can be used materially and symbolically today.
Leading image is of myself at a sugarcane farm in the Tenbosch area of South Africa with a land restitution beneficiary.