Sunday, 6 April will be the 362nd anniversary of the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck in the Cape - and of the founding of our mother city - Cape Town.
There will, of course, be no celebrations because hardly anybody wants to commemorate any aspect of our 'colonial' past. The predominant attitude is the South African version of Malcolm X's famous comment, "Our ancestors weren't pilgrims. They didn't land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock was landed on them."
For many black South Africans 6 April is viewed as the commencement of what the ANC calls "the national grievance arising from colonial relations." They regard it as the beginning of black dispossession. The ANC's 2007 Draft Policy on the Expropriation Bill commenced with the following quote: "In April 1660 after the war, he (Autshumato - or Harry the Strandloper) was brought back for peace negotiations. During those negotiations Van Riebeeck told Autshumato that not enough grazing land was available for the cattle of both the colony and the Khoi-Khoi. Autshmato then asked van Riebeeck: 'if the country is too small, who has the greater right, the true owner or the foreign intruder'".
Our subsequent history is etched deeply into the collective consciousness of many black South Africans. They recall the nine Wars of the Axe that were fought with desperate bitterness during the 19th century between the Xhosa and the British. They remember the Zulu War and the defeat of King Cetshwayo at the battle of Ulundi in 1879. And then they remember the Land Act of 1913 and 80 years of deprivation and subjugation culminating in 46 years of apartheid and National Party government.
These are intense memories smouldering in the hearts of generation after generation of black South Africans. They lie at the core of the ANC's ideology of the National Democratic Revolution. The NDR's goal is "... the resolution of the antagonistic contradictions between the oppressed majority and their oppressors; as well as the resolution of the national grievance arising from the colonial relations."
The elimination of what the ANC calls "apartheid property relations" is at the centre of the NDR's "programme for national emancipation". According to the ANC's Strategy and Tactics documents "this requires the deracialisation of ownership and control of wealth, including land; equity and affirmative action in the provision of skills and access to positions of management."