Unpacking South Africa's fraught and complex land debate

"Are white farmers being targeted and murdered?

"Claims that white farmers are being disproportionately targeted and killed, or that a "white genocide" is taking place in South Africa have been repeatedly refuted. 

"Agri SA, an agricultural industry association based in Pretoria, reported in June that 47 farmers were killed between 2017 and 2018 - the lowest in 20 years. Omri van Zyl, Agri SA's executive director, told Al Jazeera that despite the numbers, the organisation still feels that there are a "disproportionate number of farm murders".

"Between 2016 and 2017, there were 19,016 murders in South Africa, translating into a murder rate of 34.1 per 100,000 people. Police statistics indicate that during the same period, there were 74 farm murders.

"These include farmers and workers of all race groups.

"Afriforum, a right-wing lobby group that has both welcomed and taken credit for informing Trump's tweet, claims that the murders of farmers translate into a murder rate of 156 per 100,000 people, or 4.5 times higher chance of getting murdered than the average South African.

"Fact-checking website Africheck has repeatedly refuted Afriforum's statistics, arguing that given that it is not clear how many people live and work on farms, the group's numbers are fundamentally flawed.

"There remains no evidence to suggest that farmers as a group suffer more attacks than any other demographic in the country.

"...Do black South Africans want white-owned farms?

"The ANC's call for amending the Constitution has also ushered in hysteria, rampant misinformation and fake news, culminating in Trump's tweet last week.

"Experts say that while the narrative has centred around the fate of white farmers and the seizure of commercial farms, mostly due to the lobbying of Afriforum, the reality is that most black South Africans are not interested in rural land.

"Unfortunately, the conversation is being framed around white farmers … but white farmers will be largely unaffected, because the demand for land is in the urban areas," Ngcukaitobi says.

"Van Zyl, from Agri SA, confirmed that the demand for urban land was on the rise. He added that while farms were not being seized as reported, land occupations closer to urban areas were taking place.



"More than 60 percent of South Africans now live in urban areas and the struggle over land is no longer a question of resolving historical dispossession but a matter of inclusion in the country's economy.

"The political heart of the matter is located in the urban areas … in particular, the big metros," Hall says.

"Remember, apartheid kept black people out of the cities."

"With urban housing either too expensive or low-cost housing inaccessible from the city, millions of black South Africans have, since the end of apartheid, resorted to occupying vacant plots of land, often belonging to the city or local government.

"People don't look at land as purely a hard asset. People look at land as a mechanism to be closer to where they work," Ngcukaitobi says.

"This is where the future of contestation over land is headed," Ngcukaitobi adds.

"At least 11 percent of all households in the country's urban areas are located in informal settlements. In Gauteng province, considered South Africa's economic hub, 19 percent of households are in informal settlements - often without proper water, sanitation or legal electricity connections. It is this demographic who consistently face eviction and displacement.

""Our cities are poverty traps 24 years after apartheid," says Steven Friedman, director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Johannesburg.

"Friedman says that if one looks at other places around the world where progress has been made in the fight against poverty, one of the common dominators is the proximity of poor people to economic hubs. "Until we change that [here], the poor will simply continue selling things to other poor people," Friedman adds.

"Hall says that ordinary black people want action over land because they are well aware that it is they who are most likely to suffer displacement or dispossession.

"We see it in the urban areas: people from informal settlements are evicted by the state. On commercial farms, large numbers of black people are evicted by white farmers," Hall says.

"She cites cases where commercial farmers evict black workers and their families who have lived on these farms for generations due to financial pressure amid worsening economic conditions, as well as political reasons due to the perceived fear of robberies and violence.

"The rate at which black people are kicked out of commercial farms is faster than that rate at which they accessing land," says Hall. 

"Then in the communal areas, the traditional authorities are evicting people after they get into deals with mining companies … across these three spaces, the cities, the farms, communal areas, we see a process of black people being pushed off land and left in much more vulnerable and insecure positions."

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