EFF statement on 6th April 1652, Land Day
6 April 2022
The Economic Freedom Fighters observes the 6th of April as the day the problems of South Africa began. On this day in 1652, the colonialist and land thief Jan Van Riebeek, arrived on the shores of this country on board the ships Dromedaris, Rheiger and Goedehoop.
Arriving on our shores under the pretence of establishing a refreshment station, Van Riebeek went on to lead the brutal theft of our land, on the basis of colonial and Western rationality.
Simply because Africans did not subscribe to the capitalist notion that land is an individual asset to be owned for purposes of wealth accumulation, Van Riebeek and his gang of thieves took it upon themselves to steal our land, because it was not encroached and supposedly did not contribute to their global capitalist economic system.
It has been 370-years since that fateful day, and black life in this country remains one of trauma, dispossession and landlessness. Africans remain underdeveloped, black people continue to live in squalor and we remain collective spectators in the economic affairs of our country.