JACOB G ZUMA FOUNDATION
27 February 2023
Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development
Formerly known as Department of Rural Development and Land Reform Private Bag X250
Pretoria 0001
Attention: Minister Thokozile Didiza
[email protected] [email protected]
Dear Honourable Minister T. Didiza
LAND CLAIM COMPROMISING THE SOVEREIGN STATE OF REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA.
PART ONE- NOTIFICATION OF LAND CLAIM
a. I, Jacob Gedleyihlekisa M. Zuma, having held office as The Fourth President
of South Africa.
b. I, Jacob Gedleyihlekisa M. Zuma, in capacity as Patron of the Jacob G. Zuma
Foundation on behalf of the Black indigenous peoples hereby notify;
the Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development and its predecessor being Department of Rural Development and Land Reform the following:
c. Land Claim for the Sovereign Territory of South Africa-
The Black Population originates from the Bantu Expansion and we have had a presence in South Africa since time 500AD reaching present-day KwaZulu-Natal Province, of which since 500 AD we have inhabited the entire territory of South Africa.
PART TWO- FIRST STEP OF LAND CLAIM PROCESS
a. Our Submission of Claim is that the process starts with a claimant contacting the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform which is no known as the Department of Agricultural, Rural Development and Land Reform, with our "notice of intention" to make a claim based on dispossession by one or more means including:
i conquest;
ii cession under treaty or agreement;
iii occupation by white settlers;
v any other means resulting in dispossession such as forced removal ("land will be taken away without compensation"), occupation without title deed etcetera.
PART THREE- REASON FOR "NOTICE OF INTENT"
1. It has been pointed out to myself recently by my learned friends and Comrades, that Land has pillars, which are Dignity, Education and Economy. These lead to the Tripple challenges, namely Poverty, Inequality and Unemployment.
2. Dignity is the Recognition of our people who have occupied South Africa since 500 AD, prior to Jan van Riebeeck arrival of 5th April 1652.
3. Dignity cannot exist without the Recognition of the Land Issue.
4. Since 5th April 1652 the Black indigenous peoples have be subjected to inimical behavior which was perpetrated by the arrival of the interloper on 5th April 1652 and which has continued to this present day.
5. The Black indigenous peoples have suffered and continue to suffer harmful, antagonistic, or opposition to the redress and restoration of our Land Issue.
6. Our notification of our Land Claim- which will ultimately go towards restoring our Dignity.
PART FOUR -EDUCATION OF OUR BASIS FOR "NOTICE OF INTENT"
a. According to Historical Accounts the following is well documented of which we summarize as follows:
1. On 24 December 1651, accompanied by 90 persons, Jan van Riebeeck set off from Texel in The Netherlands for the Cape of Good Hope.
2. Van Riebeeck had signed a contract with the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to oversee the setting up of a refreshment station to supply Dutch ships on their way to the East.
3. Prior to Van Riebeeck departure in 1651, the Council of Policy, a bureaucratic governing structure for the refreshment station, had already been established.
4. Land was sighted on 5 April 1652 and the ships docked the next day. Within a week of the arrival of the three ships, work had begun on the Fort of Good Hope.
5. The arrival of Van Riebeeck marked the beginning of permanent European settlement in the region. Along with the Council of Policy, Van Riebeeck came equipped with a document called the 'Remonstrantie'.
6. The "Remonstrantie" was drawn up in the Netherlands in 1649, which was a recommendation on the suitability of the Cape for this VOC project.
7. Van Riebeeck was under strict instructions not to colonise the region but to build a fort and to erect a flagpole for signaling to ships and boats to escort them into the bay.
PART FIVE- HISTORY OF OUR "NOTICE OF INTENT".
1. Having established the first step in notification of our land claim as the first step of the requirement for making a Land Claim, we proceed with historical facts.
2. History is History and as such affords us the position to "balance the scales of justice" which has long been afforded to the whites and their descendants since 5th April 1652.
3. The illegal occupation of all whites stems from Van Riebeck in total disregard to a formal and legally binding instructions "Remonstrantie" of 1649 not to colonize the region.
4. This illegal occupation continued unabated with whites and their descendants whether Dutch or British to the late 1800s when "Cecil John Rhodes called the Glen Grey Act the 'Bill of Africa'
because he envisaged that it would be extended to cover not just the Transkeian territories and any district in the Cape Colony occupied what he called an 'aboriginal native', but he ambitiously saw the Act being extended to other British colonies outside the South Africa.
5. The Act was drafted by Cecil John Rhodes and his secretary Milton and it was geared towards dealing with three main issues: land, labour and the franchise.
6. The ideas of the Act were rooted in two commissions previously set up by the colonial government- the Cape Commission on Native Laws (1883) and the Glen Grey Commission (1893).
7. Additionally, the Act was influenced by the views of various colonial administrators in the Transkeian Territories and the Afrikaner Bond all formed the basis of the Glen Grey Act.
8. Rhodes rejected the idea of making more land available to the Africans as a solution to what he viewed as a problem of an increasing African population.
"The main purpose of the land provision was to fix the existing population to the land. Any increase would subsequently have to go out and work."
9. The Glen Grey Act was passed in 1894, a year that saw the completion of the annexation of the Transkei and Pondoland.
For instance, Victor Sampson, a farmer and an election candidate for Thembuland sponsored by Afrikaner Bond complained about the overpopulation of Africans in areas where they stayed and that African locations took away labour from the White owned farms. He recommended the restructuring of land ownership as a way of controlling the African population.
9. The district of Glen Grey was located partly in Queenstown and partly in the Wodehouse divisions of the Cape Colony. In 1879 the land was proclaimed as a magisterial district set aside for missionary and railway use, and as farmland for whites and Africans.
White famers resented African ownership of the land and demanded that it be taken from them.
10. Growing political awareness among Africans clearly worried the colonial government. However, Whites were not satisfied and continued to push for further reduction of African qualification in the franchise.
J.H Hofmeyer leader Afrikaner Bond complained in 1891 that the "Act had not done enough to reduce the threat posed by African people to white voters."
11. The Glen Grey Act systematically limited the number of African people who could live on and own their own land. It also pushed those who were deemed unqualified to acquire land - to leave the area and look for work in farms or other forms of employment outside the Glen Grey District.
12. In Natal, the Zululand Land Delimitation Commission was appointed in August 1902 to investigate and make recommendations on demarcations of land between Whites and Africans in Zululand.
13. The commission submitted its report in October 1904 and recommended that
40% of the best and fertile land be reserved for White occupation as of January 1906.
Africans who had became labour tenants on White farms of were removed to the remaining areas that had been declared as reserves.
14. In 1903, Lord Milner appointed Sir Godfrey Lagden to chair a commission that would report on "native affairs" in the four Southern African colonies which were to be incorporated into the Union of South Africa.
15. The Commission endorsed the ideas of Theophilus Shepstone, which promoted the creation of the so called "native reserves" for easy administrative rule.
The commission argued that "Natives" had distinct rights to the reserved lands as the ancestral land held by their forefathers.
These tenure rights were presumably administered by the tribal chief on behalf of the people, and these chiefs were said to have "transferred their sovereign rights including their powers of administration over communal lands to the Crown through a process of peaceful annexation."
Thus, the Crown had a duty to administer "natives" according to traditional ways of governance which were tribally based.
16. Historian Nigel Worden points out that the "tenure proposals contained in
the Lagden Report marked a departure from Britain's mission to 'civilize' its colonial territories in favour of a decision to retribilise the African population."
17. Amongst other concerns raised by the commission was "the unrestrained
squatting of natives on private farms, whether as tenants or otherwise" which was described as "an evil and against the best interests of the country."
18. Thus "it had become necessary to safeguard the interests of the Europeans to
prevent the 'amount of land in Native occupation from being undesirably extended."
19. As Heinz Klug notes, in its report the commission "developed a vision of a future South African federation based on territorial segregation of black and white as a permanent mandatory feature of public life."
20. " The commission granted White people as those who had the right to 'govern the 'Natives' as nation its non-age."
the commission unanimously concluded that in the interests of the Europeans, the "country should be segregated: land owned by Africans held in trust for them or subject to customary law was to be kept strictly separate in 'white' South Africa."
Evidently, the Lagden Commission played a pivotal role in a series of processes that laid down the foundation for the 1913 Native Land Act and spatial segregation in South Africa.
21. After the establishment of the Union in 1910, the white minority government did not lose sight of the land and "native" question.
22. In November 1910 a Select Committee headed by Henry Burton, the newly
appointed Minister of Native Affairs, was appointed and tasked with investigating the native land settlement in relation to the squatting problem.
At the end of its work the committee produced a preliminary bill which included its conclusions, but these lay dormant until the Natives Land Bill was introduced in parliament.
23. One major step taken by the white minority government in addressing the issue of the "Native question" was passing of the Natives Land Act (No: 27) on 19 June 1913. This act had a profound effect on the African population across the country.
It also laid down the foundation for other legislation which further entrenched dispossession of African people and segregation later of Coloured and Indian people.
24. The Act defined a "native" as "any person, male or female, who is a member of an aboriginal race or tribe of Africa;
Evidently, this affected millions of Africans. The Act's most catastrophic provision for Africans was the prohibition from buying or hiring land in 93% of South Africa. In essence, Africans despite being more in number were confined to ownership of 7% South Africa's land.
PART SIX- SUMMARY OF OUR "NOTICE OF INTENT" -LAND CLAIM
1. We state that our Notice of intent of Land Claim for the black indigenous peoples of South Africa is to right the imbalances of societal norms which has been inflicted on such measures as:
"the Native Land Act was officially conceived as a first stage in drawing a permanent line between Africans and non-Africans."
2. Our Notice of intent of Land Claim seeks to address the critical edifice in the construction of a racially and spatially divided South Africa.
3. Our Notice of intent of Land Claim seeks to address the land dispossession and segregation in South Africa.
4. Our Notice of intent of Land Claim seeks to address the shadow of the Natives Land Act and other legislations that followed which are even still evident in the post-Apartheid South Africa.
5. Our Notice of intent of Land Claim seeks to address the significant proportion of land which remains in the ownership of white farmers.
6. Our Notice of intent of Land Claim seeks to address the failures since 1994 of the Government of South Africa which failed in all attempts to deal with a legacy of systematic dispossession of land in South Africa.
7. Our Notice of intent of Land Claim will finally address the conquest of Africans which was coined in 1903 by the Government as the "Native Question"
In a nutshell, the term was loosely defined in the 1903 Intercolonial Conference as "embracing the present and future status of all aboriginal natives of South Africa, and the relation in which they stand towards the European population."
8. Our Notice of intent of Land Claim seeks to redress the land dispossession which began with annexation and division of territory, proclamations were made and laws were enacted by both the Afrikaners and the British to dislodge African people from their land while consolidating areas of White settlement.
9. Our Notice of intent of Land Claim seeks to redress the historical injustices of the Land Act of 1913.
10. Our Notice of intent of Land Claim seeks to redress spatial segregation through land dispossession. One of the key legislations that laid down the foundation for a spatially divided South Africa was the Glen Grey Act passed in 1894.
11 Our Notice of intent of Land Claim seeks to redress the imbalances of the
Union of South Africa, which was accomplished in 1910 which black people were excluded from meaningful political participation in its formation and future.
12. Our Notice of intent of Land Claim seeks to redress the imbalances of British and Afrikaner land owners and industrialists who set in motion a process that would consolidate their wealth while excluding Black people through legislative means.
13. Our Notice of intent of Land Claim seeks to give voice to those that so valiantly fought against the injustices of the passing of the Natives Land Act of 21st March 1913;
a. 21 March 1913, John L Dube, President of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), published an article "Wrong Policy" in the newspaper ILanga Lase Natal. He criticised the Native Land Bill and stated that it was intended to keep Africans down, to tell them "Get out, Fotesake (sic), to Go back to your locations, or else go back to work for your white masters."
b. Between 28 February and 26 April 1913 African leaders continued criticism of the Land Bill in columns of newspapers. However, this changed dramatically after the first reading of the bill on 25 February. Protest meetings were organised in various parts of the country. On 9 May the first major protest meeting was organised by the SANNC at the Masonic Hall in St. James, Cape Town. In attendance were John L Dube, Saul Msane, Dr CH Hagger, Miss Molteno and advocate Alfred Mangena, who spoke at the meeting. He stated that "every clause in the bill was bad". At the end of May, Dube addressed another protest meeting near the race course in Durban.
c. Also in May 1913 the SANNC sent a deputation to Jacobus WilhelmusSauer to persuade him to not proceed with the bill which would make Africans squatters and render them homeless. The deputation received no favourable response.
d. Afterwards, Walter Rubusana wrote to the Governor General Gladstone asking him to withhold his support for the bill. His response was that it was not within his constitutional functions to do so.
e. On 25 July 1913, after the Land Act was passed, the SANNC convened a conference in Johannesburg and resolved to raise funds that would be used to send a delegation to Britain which would appeal to the Imperial government against the Act. Officials in the Department of Native Affairs requested the SANNC not to proceed with their appeal, but the SANNC resisted these attempts.
Then on 14 February 1914, the SANNC met and chose five members to go to London— John L Dube, Dr Walter Rubusana, Saul Msane, Thomas
Mapikela and Solomon T Plaatje. The delegation left for London and upon arrival met missionaries and members of the Aborigines Protection Society.
g. They later met Lewis Harcourt, the Secretary for the Colonies, and issued a petition to the king. Harcourt advised them to take their case to Parliament and not to the Crown.
h. The British government did not intervene and consequently the Land Act was not reversed.
Solomon T Plaatje published Native Life in South Africa as a protest against the Land Act. The passing of the Act also ignited a protest march by Mahatma Gandhi. In addition, the African People's Organization (APO) also spoke strongly against the Land Act.
14. Our Notice of Intent of Our Land Claim is the restoration of 'Dignity" which
has parallels to today's policy of inaction to address the Land Question for -"Once and for all".
1865- Consider this parallel for when British Kaffaria (former Ciskei area) was annexed in 1865, the racial balance was tilted in favour of Africans who came to constitute 55% of the population while Whites had 25% and Coloureds had 20%.
2023- Yet some 158 years later, South Africa is firmly tilted in favour of Africans being the black indigenous peoples and yet we continue to suffer the indignities of the land Question.
This submission will be a big a big omission and betrayal of the long struggle and sacrifices that the black people made to fight for full freedom of the African People. We cannot ignore the fact that the indigenous African People have no land after so much struggles that were waged by the defenders of their country that was taken by force by the settlers. The addressing of this question will certainly bring full freedom and equality in our country. This is equality in keeping with the major conference of the African People in Mangaung in 1912, whose focus was the land question and the rights of the African People to take the land back.
This must not be viewed as a provocation, it is not, but the means to finally bring peace, equality and real freedom in our county.
We look forward to the acceptance and acknowledgement of our Notice of Intent-Land Claim submission on the Expropriation Bill, which is the "first step".
Yours faithfully
Signed
MR JACOB G. ZUMA
Patron of the Jacob G. Zuma Foundation
CC: The Board of the Jacob G. Zuma Foundation
H.E President Zuma issued a LAND CLAIM, notice to submit, to Minister of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development, Minister T Didiza.https://t.co/wn2CGZBIPM
— JGZuma Foundation (Official) (@JGZ_Foundation) March 2, 2023
