MICHAEL MORRIS: Land reform is an urban priority - Business Day

Michael Morris

After making an effort to dwell on the names and the lost hopes of the victims of last week’s Jeppestown fire, perhaps the next most important thing for policymakers to think about is the name of the hijacked building that is now a blackened hulk — not its formal name (if it ever had one) but the name it is known by, its truer name.

This name, Enkanini, means “stubborn” in Zulu. We learn from long-time resident Tholakele Dlamini, in a post on X by an EWN reporter, that people who stayed in the building “call it that because the municipality has tried to evict them a number of times before but they always return”.

I was instantly reminded of the story attributed to Pimville squatter leader Oriel Monongoaha, recounted in Wits scholar Alfred William Stadler’s 1978 paper, “Birds in the cornfield: Squatter Movements in Johannesburg, 1944-1947”.

Monongoaha it was who, in 1947, likened Jan Smuts’ government’s response to black people moving to the cities to a farmer whose “cornfield” has been invaded by birds. “He chases the birds from one part of the field and they alight in another part ... We shall see whether it is the farmer or the birds who gets tired first.”

What links this distant time to contemporary Jeppestown is that force at work in every society in every fraction of time, which is people doing what the needs of life compel them to do, without permission if necessary, and, more often than not, against the odds.

It is surely notable that in his inaugural lecture at Wits, Stadler defined his scholarly ambition by saying: “I want to raise questions about how people without power, wealth or even votes act politically, and try to estimate the effects they produce on political structures.”

Looking back from the late 1970s, he wrote of the birds in the cornfield that “squatter movements were (though not only) ... a protest by blacks in Johannesburg against the serious shortage of housing which developed during a period of rapid urbanisation”.

Apartheid slowed — and tried to halt — urbanisation, but even apartheid was ultimately defeated, years before the final capitulation in 1994. One symbol of this defeat was the Abolition of Influx Control Act of 1986. The far larger symbol, however, was the sum of daily choices that millions made — defiantly, not unlike Oriel Monongoaha and his untiring birds — in joining the great universal human exodus from countryside to city, from the old world to the new.

How strange, then, that for decades now land reform is deemed to be about the farming landscape, the politics of history, the sentimentalism of a pastoral “Eden”.

This, when UN-Habitat notes that “SA is one of the most urbanised countries in Africa with around 67% of its population living in urban areas, projected to increase to around 80% by 2050”.

No wonder Institute of Race Relations (IRR) polling consistently shows scant popular interest in “land reform” as a government priority (ranked at 1% in the 2023 survey, against 47% for jobs).

City officials confronted with criminal syndicates hijacking buildings deserve sympathy (though not their political principals, who have let things slide for far too long). But what “Enkanini” signifies is that the criminal syndicates understand the forces of history better than the policymakers do: greater numbers of people than we can conceive of, never mind cope with, will be living in our cities soon.

Land reform — and property rights that give today’s “outsiders” a meaningful stake — is an urgent, urban, priority.

Morris is head of media at the Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2024-09-02-michael-morris-land-reform-is-an-urban-priority/