Article from Noseweek Magazine September 2019. By Sue Segar
President Ramaphosa’s land advisor Professor Ruth Hall has plans for a happier land future.
She grew up in the eastern cape, “frontier country”, a descendant of 1820 settlers. “It took me many years to work out that I was living in a colonial enclave and my ancestors were allocated land that had been stolen. Violent conflict and theft of cattle made way for my ancestors, so I’ve always been aware of land as a question of rights and justice”.
Professor Ruth Hall, who holds a senior position at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and who is a member of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s top-level advisory panel on land reform, was explaining why she is so passionate about land reform that she has dedicated the better part of her life to researching the issue.
Interviewed in the offices of UWC’s Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (Plaas), which she joined in 2002 as a researcher, Hall continued: “I also grew up in a politically engaged family during the 1980s, which was a volatile time, particularly in that part of the world. As a child, I spent time tagging along with my mother to meetings in so-called black-spot communities, which were under threat of forced removal in the process of the creation of Ciskei. I saw the removal of black people from what was called the white corridor, between the Transkei and Ciskei.
“I was aware of political trials, police torture, and detentions – and in all of the ferment of the 1980s, this was not just about struggles for people to get the vote. It was also about history, land and justice. I have a strong sense of place, of where I come from… and a sense that having a history with land and territory is part of what defines all of us.”
Hall, with 23 years of land research under her belt, has in recent years become a familiar voice of reason in South Africa’s fractious land debate. During the interview, she spoke about her childhood in Grahamstown as the daughter of an academic father and an activist mother who was detained
several times and about a feeling of “not really belonging”, as a young white child of the left during apartheid. She also spoke about her love for Plaas, “my intellectual home”. “I came on a one-year contract in 2002 and never left.”
When we met, Hall had just been nominated by her close colleague, Professor Ben Cousins, the highly respected founder of Plaas, to be his successor in the South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) chair that he holds in the department of Science and Technology’s National Research Foundation.
“If I get it, this could mean five years of substantial funding to enable me to get Master’s, PhD and postdoctoral students into a programme and take them through a developmental process. I am busy writing the proposal of what the next five years would be like.”
Our interview took place shortly before the much-anticipated expert panel’s report was released. The ten-member panel, tasked with advising the inter-ministerial committee on the full range of policy matters linked to land reform, was chaired by National Planning Commission member, Dr Vuyokazi Felicity Mahlati.
Besides Prof Hall, the panel includes, among others, the author of the highly regarded book The Land is Ours, advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi; emerging award-winning farmer Thato Moagi; land expert, CEO and founder of the Dr J L Dube Institute of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Thandi Ngcobo; AgriSA president Daniel Kriek; and Sernick Group chairman Nick Serfontein.
Since September last year, Prof Hall and her fellow panel members have sat regularly “in the same room at the Union Buildings” thrashing out their recommendations on a wide range of land-reform issues.
“Working on land reform has been both fascinating and frustrating…it has sometimes felt like hitting my head against a brick wall. My appointment to the panel felt as if, suddenly, a door had opened in the brick wall. I loved being part of the panel, but it was hard. We engaged robustly, but there were sticking points. I didn’t get everything I wanted into that report.”
(AgriSA’s Kriek and Sernick’s Serfontein released an alternative report laying out a view based on “proven agricultural practice”.)
Hall, who has an MPhil in Development Studies as well as a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford, believes the issue of land reform under the ANC has dwindled considerably and that people have been criminalised “just because they are struggling for land”.
“On top of that, many of the struggles for land are in the cities. Land reform should not just be a rural priority, but an urban one too.”
“One of the biggest misrepresentations in the land debate,” she said, “is that land which is transferred from white commercial farmers to black farmers will inevitably cause a loss to productivity, food security and to the economy in general. While there have been many examples of failed farm transfers, where people didn’t get farming support, this is a failure of planning and implementation. There are successes too, and 56% of beneficiaries have improved their livelihoods as a result of land reform.
“A brand new vision and strategy are needed for land which should not only be focused on commercial farming areas, but also on communal areas -where some 22 million people are land insecure. Here, there’s a desperate need for people to have clear rights, but also for the revival of roads, irrigation and other infrastructure, extension services, access to inputs and output markets.”
Hall said she believes 2018 will go down as the year of the revival of the land issue, thanks, in no small part, to Julius Malema’s EFF.
“Although I don’t agree with much of what they stand for, the emergence of the EFF, their coming to Parliament in 2014, their pushing of the issue of expropriation without compensation into Parliament in 2018, posed for the first time a significant political threat to the ANC from the left.
“I think the ANC, itself a broad church, found that within its own ranks this call resonated very strongly. The ANC, not only to regain ground from the EFF but also to consolidate its own base, needed to come up with a response – and effectively we are still to hear what that response is.
“There have been various processes: there was an ANC land summit last year; there was discussion about what goes into their election manifesto — but it wasn’t very precise; there was the parliamentary constitutional review process which led to a very odd report from Parliament, released in November, which effectively said that to expropriate without compensation does not require a constitutional amendment as long as it is just and equitable. But there is such public demand for a constitutional amendment that we must change the Constitution to make explicit what is already implicit in the property clause.
It’s about several things-who owns South Africa, who has a roof over their head…
“But we still don’t really have an answer from the ANC as to what they will do.”
Hall says she has “felt like a stuck record” over the course of the year, “saying, again and again, that the Constitution is not what has held us back”.
“It’s not necessary to change the Constitution. It has not impeded land reform. What has held us back is the lack of political direction, leadership and allocation of funding for land reform, coupled with huge mismanagement, poor institutional capacity and much corruption.” [See page 10 of Noseweek Magazine September 2019 for the latest shocking example of corruption, revealed by Susan Puren in the second installment of her series on the last days of ANC rule in Tshwane. – Ed.]
Most clauses of Section 25 of the Constitution – the property clause -make provision for transformation and redistribution and restitution. The provisions have not been used adequately. “By itself, changing the Constitution doesn’t resolve these problems.”
Hall has consistently argued that there is not just one land question in South Africa, but several. “Seven, to be precise.” These questions include: Land reform for whom? Land for what? Where? How are decisions to be made? How to get the land? Whether or not to compensate? And what tenure system to hold the land?
“In the early 1990s, the focus of the government’s Reconstruction and Development Programme was mainly on the poor. This shifted towards a more elite idea around a commercial farming class. What we have seen in the past ten years is massive elite capture and corruption in the process with the budgets that are available being channelled to fewer and fewer people and a lot of this is not well documented or understood.
“If this was happening in the housing system there’d be uproar…The land issue in South Africa is like a lightning rod. It’s about several things: it’s about who owns South Africa; who has a roof over their head; or who is kicked onto the street with their possessions and their kids. It’s also about memory, it’s about the 1913 Land Act and about colonialism.
“Land is also bound up with questions about why it is that we are a food secure country that produces a surplus of food and yet more than half of South Africans go hungry.
“Often the argument against doing anything too radical about land is so as not to disrupt food security – but we need to question why people are food insecure already, and how land reform can be part of the solution.
“The narratives of how we understand ourselves and engage with others are very much bound up with the land. It’s the material and symbolic combined.”
Hall agrees strongly with growing calls for an entirely new land policy and White Paper. South Africans have, for too long, been “talking past one another on the issue of land in a climate of anger and fear”. However, she believes that there is the hope of “something different” to come.
“In my view, another countryside is possible. Another land dispensation is possible where the vast majority of people have an entitlement to something, have a foot in the door, have some land, have secure housing, have an opportunity to live closer to the city centre or to have a smallholding. Redistribution is essential in a country with massive structural unemployment such as ours.
“Land reform has become distorted with the idea that people have to prove they can be a commercial farmer. We have created unfair, unrealistic and inequitable targets that exclude the majority. In my view, the alternative is to have a much more varied land dispensation; not just big farms. To have small, medium, big farms, to chop up farms, to make available smallholdings, to share infrastructure. To have small farmers close to small towns feeding the small towns.
“I think it’s a travesty that most poor people who rely on social grants use their grant money to buy food from big supermarkets; that food has been manufactured by big factories far away and grown by big industrial farms far away. Why are we not growing local economies to feed local people? Our social grants actually
serve as a subsidy to big business. It’s routed via poor people but it all gets repatriated into big corporates in Johannesburg.
“We should be building more locally embedded economies, providing people with secure rights. For me, land reform is not just about undoing the injustices of the past. It is about that, but it’s also about creating a more just future and that’s not just about race, but also class, gender, and it’s about giving everybody a foot in the door.”
During the interview, Hall described some of her experiences while doing fieldwork among landless people. She also spoke about the voices the country should be listening to in the land debate.
“I’ve been so deeply touched and aghast at situations where the forces impinging on people are so overwhelming. There’s a young man who lives outside Grahamstown. His family were farmworkers who were buried on the farm, generation after generation. They were evicted and left with nowhere to go. The government gave them these “emergency housing”, corrugated-iron shacks to live in and
that was registered as a land reform project. They were living in this appalling situation with no means of surviving other than social grants or hitching to town to try and get casual jobs. These shacks were registered on a government Excel spreadsheet in a database… as ‘development’ because money was spent by the government. It’s barely human what people are going through.
“There’s no monitoring of land reform, no indicators as to what constitutes success or that informs us how many people have security, improved incomes or access to food.
“The voices we need to listen to more on the land issue are those of the people directly affected, like the people of Xolobeni in the Eastern Cape who have been very articulate about how they want to manage their land and not to lose it to a mining company. [See our reporting on Xolobeni over the past decade in noses94,116,188,199,201,205,214,229, 231&237. – Ed.]
“I listen to people like advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, who has a historically grounded appreciation of the land issue. I listen to Constance Mogale, coordinator of the Alliance for Rural Democracy, a national network of people living in communal areas-who are fighting the Traditional and Khoi San Leadership Bill.
Hall believes that President Cyril Ramaphosa has decided that dealing with the land issue is a priority. He has publicly committed to engaging with farmworkers’ rights and he’s clear on clamping down on corruption in the land reform process. Yet the ANC is torn over the issue of chiefs and communal areas, while the judiciary argues the rights to land in communal areas vest with the people, not the chiefs.
“I feel we have this duality, with Parliament continually proposing legislation that’s at odds with constitutional principles and the judiciary keeps slapping it down. I hope we’re moving into a new era on that issue.”
Hall hopes that, after 2018 where the land issue and expropriation without compensation became so central, the issues don’t dwindle and get fragmented.
“A priority now is that the president, and new minister Thoko Didiza, who has a mandate not only for land reform but for agriculture and rural development, both provide big vision and big leadership and say we are going to address all these issues in one place and develop a new White Paper on land reform.
“That White Paper should transcend the urban and the rural. It should address redistribution; land claims and restitution; farmworkers; chiefs; urban housing; and urban agriculture. It should be about undoing spatial apartheid, and for me that is what land reform is… whether it’s in the countryside, undoing the stark divides between big commercial farms and communal areas, or in the cities, undoing the divides between CBDs, suburbs, townships, and informal settlements. Land reform is about reimagining our space and redistributing access to space… and then shoring uprights that have been ignored or undermined in the past.
“If I were to predict what happens to land reform in 2019, I’d say Parliament will push through the Expropriation bill, and that the Ad Hoc Committee on Section 25, tasked with amending the property clause, will be a big site of struggle, where the divisions between the ANC and the EFF – which were papered over in 2018 – will be exposed. It’s quite possible that while the two parties voted together last year to instigate this process of a constitutional amendment, they may not agree on the wording of such an amendment and we might end up in a stalemate.
“What I very much hope is that work starts on a new overarching policy and White Paper; that we move on creating a framework for urban land reform; that government’s moves on communal land are put on ice and are rethought in the light of widespread opposition to what are considered to be the ‘Bantustan Bills’; and that there is a renewed engagement between government and farmworkers around what they want from land reform.”
I Not long after our interview, this reporter bumped into Prof Ruth Hall at the press briefing where the panel’s report was released. Within minutes of the release, both “Black Twitter” and “White Twitter” had gone berserk. On one side were those in a panic about infringements of property rights, on the other, those who feel that not enough concessions have been made. South Africans, it seemed, were as polarised as ever on the land issue.
Professor Ruth Hall
Ruth Hall was born in 1973 and grew up in Grahamstown, now Makhanda, where she went to both government and private schools.
Her father, Dr Ron Hall who, aged 80, still lives in the family home in Grahamstown, taught English literature at Rhodes University. Her mother, Priscilla, who as an activist was arrested on many occasions and detained under the state of emergency in 1985, died two years ago.
Throughout Ruth’s childhood, her mother worked, among others with the South African Council of Churches and the International Defence and Aid Fund created by Canon John Collins during the Treason Trial to pay the legal expenses and look after the families of people on trial for protesting against apartheid, as well as the Black Sash and the Surplus People Project, set up in the 1980s to support communities resisting or affected by forced removals.
When she died, tributes poured in Grahamstown lawyer Ntsiki Sandi, who co-founded the Grahamstown Civics Association in the 1980s and has known the Hall family since he was a boy, described Hall’s parents as “two people who honestly practised non-racialism as a way of life”.
“They taught their children that they were Africans, not Europeans wandering on the continent of Africa. As black youth from the townships, we were in and out of their home and Hall’s children literally grew up before our eyes.”
Recalling her childhood, Ruth said: “I never found a place of belonging at schools. Growing up in Grahamstown meant trying to reconcile the world that little white children were meant to inhabit and the world my family pushed me to see.”
She remembers that friends were banned from visiting her home “because we were considered to be communists”.
In 1986, her mother was detained and kept in solitary confinement for about three months. Ruth’s father was on sabbatical in the UK at the time so she and her sister were looked after by friends of the family.
At the age of 16, Ruth “got the hell out of Grahamstown” when she was awarded a scholarship to a United World College, a group of alternative international schools promoting “international understanding”.
“I had wanted to go to Waterford Kamhlaba in Swaziland but missed the timing. I realised it was part of a global network of schools, so I applied for a scholarship to attend one of the others – and got it. I left South Africa in standard nine and spent the final two years of my schooling in Italy at the United World College of the Adriatic on the border of Yugoslavia.
“It was great. I did philosophy instead of home economics. It was an incredible privilege to attend an international school of 200 kids from over 80 countries. I was there during the dying days of the Cold War and at the start of political transition in South Africa. In my first year, the Berlin Wall fell, the ANC was unbanned, Mandela was released and the whole of Yugoslavia broke apart – we were living just 3km from the border. All the kids from the USSR were sending food parcels back’ home and suddenly Eastern Europe opened up and we were a microcosm of the world-changing.”
She got an international baccalaureate from the school and returned to UCT where she attained a BSocSc degree in Political Studies, followed by Honours in Political Studies.
From there, Hall obtained an MPhil in Development Studies (1998) and DPhil in Politics (2011) both from the University of Oxford. She focused on her doctoral work on the “interests, actors and discourses that influenced the development of South Africa’s land reform policy.”
She joined Plaas at the University of the Western Cape, dubbed by former rector Prof Jakes Gerwel as “the intellectual home of the left” in 2002, specialising her research in the politics and the political economy of agrarian reform, land redistribution, and poverty.
Hall has co-edited ten books on land in South Africa and Africa.
A mother of two young daughters, she loves having family time and travelling.
Related Content
