As India and South Africa cooperate in multiple forums, including BRICS and G20, what is it like for an academic to revisit South Africa after 25 years? Both exhilarating and depressing!
I first came to Cape Town in 1997 and returned this July, some 25 years later. Much had changed, yet much had remained the same. For a start, 1997 represented a political high point under Nelson Mandela’s presidency. It was also the year when South Asia lost its last cheetah in Balochistan, India having lost its last one 50 years earlier. Today, in 2023, South Africa’s political climate is very different and India is now hosting South African cheetahs.
My visit in 1997 came a few years into post-apartheid South Africa, and soon after the publication of my 1994 book, A Field of One’s Own, I was invited by the Centre for Legal Studies at Stellenbosch to give two keynote addresses and actively participate in a three-day conference on ‘Gender Policy Research on Land Reform and Development’. Some 70 participants from 27 NGOs, working on land reforms and development across the country, discussed the issue of gender and land inequality in policy and practice.
It was a time when the air was abuzz with debates on effective ways to undertake land reforms. And there were high expectations that land would be restituted (returned, or financially compensated for) to most of the 3.5 million Black people, estimated by the Surplus People Project (SPP) to have been forcibly removed from their land. SPP was established in the 1980s to support communities who were struggling against forced removals by the apartheid state.
That trip also took me to Durban, Pietermaritzburg, Johannesburg and Pretoria. As an Indian, it was an emotional journey, as I met many anti-apartheid activists, and visited museums with pictures of Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha and the historic connections between the Indian Congress in South Africa and the African National Congress.
Apart from the Stellenbosch conference, some meetings were especially memorable. One was with a group of black women at a restitution site near Cape Town where I was taken by SPP activists. The women I met in 1997 had recently returned to reclaim their land in their ancestral village, leaving their city jobs. They had brought with them their washing machines and refrigerators, even though the electricity supply was very erratic. I asked them why they had left their jobs to return to a more difficult life. Their answer was simple: “This is where our roots lie.”
Equally memorable was my discussion with 25-30 black women farmers at a land resettlement site in the Cramond area, some distance away from Pietermaritzburg. The meeting was organised by Sizani Ngubane, a dedicated grassroots activist working for the Association for Rural Advancement (AFRA) in Pietermaritzburg.
The women I met were growing vegetables and poultry on small plots, while their husbands were away in other jobs. When I asked the group in whose name these plots would be registered, they replied, “Our husbands, after which our oldest sons will inherit the land, under the customary practice of primogeniture.” I then asked them: “Shouldn’t the land be in your name, since you are the ones cultivating it?”
After a long silence, one woman smiled and said: “We are taking so long in answering because no one has ever asked us this question before – it seems like a dream that we might have land of our own.”
Following this visit, AFRA took up the matter of women’s land claims as a significant component of their programme. It appeared that my contributions at the Stellenbosch conference and my engagements with NGOs had a noticeable impact.
Sociologist Cherryl Walker, in a 2002 paper, noted that my argument had been “extremely influential in South Africa where the Department of Land Affairs… incorporated it [the suggestions] into its gender policy documents and training materials, and many gender activists echoed the call for women’s independent rights in land. (sic)”
Economic apartheid
Beyond the groups, I also met some remarkable individuals – in particular, the late Fatima Meer and Mamphela Ramphele. Both were legendary anti-apartheid activists. Meer, a Sociology professor, of part Indian descent, was the first woman to be elected as executive of the Natal Indian Congress in 1950. She joined the protests against apartheid, organised support for activists in jail, and was herself imprisoned for six months without trial. In 1977, she survived an assassination attempt at her home in Durban. The bullet marks from the attack were still visible on her front wall when I visited her in 1997.
Mamphela, a physician, was similarly deeply immersed in the anti-apartheid movement and had been the partner of Steve Biko, a strong proponent of the Black Consciousness Movement. He was killed in police detention in 1977. When I met Mamphela in1997, she was serving as the first woman and first black vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town.
At a dinner she gave for me, I also met some of her colleagues who were working for economic justice for black South Africans. Not only had thousands of black farmers been divested of their land, but those who continued to cultivate in “the Homelands”, as in KwaZulu, or in situ elsewhere, had faced economic apartheid, being starved of government support and funds which went basically to white commercial farmers.
In contrast to political apartheid, economic apartheid and its long-lasting impact has received inadequate attention.
A 1997 newspaper piece on Mamphela Ramphele. Photo: Bina Agarwal
Racial bias in business
In this context, an unusual cyclostyled document ― shared with me by Helena Dolny in Pretoria ― was very revealing.
Dolny, wife of anti-apartheid activist Joe Slovo, was then the managing director of the Land and Agricultural Bank of South Africa. The Bank was responsible for providing crucial agricultural finance to farmers during apartheid. The document Helena shared, dated November 12, 1997, contained two submissions by the Land Bank to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). One of them was titled “Revised Land Bank Submission”, authored by Dolny and a few colleagues. It was effectively a dissent note to the original submission by the bank.
The “Revised” submission contained a series of remarkable acknowledgements, including the Bank’s “distinct racial bias in its business practices” and “its role in supporting the displacement of black South Africans off the land during the darkest years of apartheid”. The bank ended it by “apologising unreservedly” for its biased policies.
However, the bank’s original submission to the TRC claimed the opposite, namely that during 1960-1994, the Bank had “never declined loan applications on the basis of race, gender or political orientation of an applicant.” Clearly, the Land Bank was deeply divided, and as Dolny put it, needed “a lot of reconciliation of its own”.
The dark chapters
By 2023, I had expected a great deal of change. In many ways it had. Cape Town is a much safer and racially integrated city. I did not encounter any overt racism as I had on some occasions in 1997. And I went on my first South African safari. While many of the cheetahs gifted to India by South Africa have tragically died, they are thriving in their native country, and are much easier to spot than the tigers in Ranthambore.
Cheetahs – the swiftest of the wild cats – are not counted among the “big five” – the lion, leopard, rhino, elephant, and African Buffalo. These animals are labelled as the most dangerous and difficult to hunt. Cheetahs, by contrast, are delicate, even shy, built for speed rather than ferocity. Most cheetahs can run 40 kilometre per hour (the fastest touching 58 km). We managed to see cheetahs, zebras, and four of the “big five” on our two-day safari to the Garden Route Game Lodge, located 350 km from Cape Town.
We also visited Cape Agulhas, where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet, just as many of the countries bordering these two oceans are meeting in Delhi, as India hosts the G20.
Cape Town itself remains a beautiful city, but this time I was even more aware of its dark past. This past lingers not only in Robben Island, 12 km off the city coast, where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated in a maximum security prison for 18 years (1964-1982) during apartheid. It also lies in one of the darkest chapters of the city’s history ― the history of District 6.
In February 1966, the apartheid government declared that only whites would be allowed to reside here, and under the Group Areas Act, an estimated 60,000 non-white residents were forcibly pushed to townships outside the city centre. The District 6 museum, established in 1994, vividly depicts this. Some members of the evicted families walked us through the museum with its news cuttings, photographs, and even a reconstructed room of a home prior to the evictions.
A short walk away from the District 6 museum is the Slave Lodge Museum located inside a 1679 building – one of the oldest buildings in Cape Town. Historically, it lodged some 9,000 slaves, including children who were taught to read and write and be good Christians to increase their usefulness to slave owners. The museum traces South Africa’s history of slavery and the countries and routes from which the slaves came in the 17th to 19th centuries, including from South India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, via the Indian Ocean. The museum also commemorates the slaves who sought to escape or led rebellions against their masters.
A map of the slave routes. Photo: Bina Agarwal
Land rights for women and black farmers
These visits to the Safari and the museums were side trips to my main purpose for visiting Cape Town this year. My primary objectives included speaking at the annual conference of the International Association of Feminist Economics and conducting a workshop for approximately 28 activists and scholars working on land-related issues. This workshop was organised by Ruth Hall from the Institute of Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) and Carmen Louw from the Women on Farms Project. Additionally, I hoped to get a feel of the changes since my last visit.
I found that the dream, which was so dominant in 1997, of black farmers reclaiming their land, remains shockingly distant today. By the 2017 Land Audit Report, published by the Government’s Rural Development and Land Reform Department, 72% of farmland is still owned by whites and only 4% by black South Africans, even though the latter constitute 80% of the population. By gender, women own only 13% of the land individually and are joint owners in another 13%.
Institutionally, many organisations across South Africa are working to promote land rights for women and black farmers, but few see easy ways forward. At the NGO workshop, chaired by Colette Solomon, we had a long discussion on the obstacles women face in accessing land in South Africa. This was a follow-up to my online talk organised by PLAAS in June 2023. We then debated my suggestion of promoting group farming (with small groups of women pooling land and labour to cultivate jointly) to enhance farm productivity and empower women, as had been done successfully in parts of India, especially Kerala.
Mamphela Ramphele. Photo: Bina Agarwal
Some participants argued that previous attempts at collective approaches to farming in South Africa had largely failed, but we agreed that the reasons for failure needed analysing.
Were the initiatives appropriately designed and implemented? Was there too much focus on entire communities cooperating in large groups, rather than in self-constituted small groups? Was there adequate state support? The all-women groups in Kerala, for example, followed some key design principles, such as small group size, voluntary group formation, participatory decision-making, and equitable cost and benefit sharing. There was also local government support, training and access to subsidised credit. We concluded on the need to explore if lessons could be drawn from the Indian experience and contextually adapted.
On this trip, I could not meet most of those I had met in 1997, but I was fortunate to see Mamphela again. She is still as youthful looking, vibrant, and deeply concerned about the political and economic problems South Africa is facing, spelt out in her speeches and books, including Socio-Economic Equity and Democratic Freedom in South Africa (2013). She is also working with civil society on political resistance and alternative pathways to democratic change in present day South Africa.
My short visit in 2023, like the long one in 1997, was memorable, and I left with renewed ties to civil society and the hope of returning soon. Equally, I hope the remaining cheetahs in Kuno – these delicate creatures who have come a long way to make India their home – will thrive and survive into old age.
Bina Agarwal is professor of Development Economics and Environment, GDI, University of Manchester, UK, and former Director, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi.