Land expropriation without compensation: who will suffer most

In the lead-up to the 2019 General Election President Cyril Ramaphosa is often shown on TV uttering rather enigmatic sound bites about “land expropriation without compensation”. Occasionally he elaborates on this to say that it will be done in such a way that it will not harm the economy.

There has been debate about this for the last couple of years, with the ANC saying that it intends to alter the clause in the constitution that protects property rights, to enable the confiscation of land without compensation. And so this has become a sound bite. President Cyril Ramaphosa has also been in photo-ops, giving out title deeds to people and telling them that these are important documents, without mentioning that his party is planning change the constitution to enable them to be rendered valueless.

Racist groups like Afriforum fill in the blanks for the President’s enigmatic soundbites, by saying that the government intends to take land from white farmers. President Ramaphosa doesn’t have to say anything like or about that, because Afriforum will say it for him, and thus help to secure votes for the ANC from people who might otherwise vote for the EFF and BLF, who have promised to nationalise all land.

The Afriforum campaign has succeeded in spreading disinformation all over the world. Almost every day on the Question-and-Answer web site Quora I see questions like:

• What is your opinion on South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s push for land distribution from white farmers?
• Why is it that no one is talking about the white farmers losing their lives and land in South Africa?
• Why is President Cyril Ramaphosa proposing the expropriation of white farmers‘ lands without compensation?

I have never heard President Cyril Ramaphosa mention “white farmers” in talking about land expropriation without compensation. He doesn’t have to. AfriForum has done it for him. And AfriForum and similar groups have managed to create the kind of impression overseas that is shown in the above questions.

But to see the real threat of land expropriation without compensation, one must listen, not to President Cyril Ramaphosa, but to Gwede Mantashe, the Minister of Mineral Resources. He has been pushing for expropriation of land from black farmers, for the purpose of mining. And by using the land for mining, such expropriation, of course, will not “harm the economy”.

The first to suffer, and those likely to suffer the most, will be people like those mentioned in a report by Human Rights Watch, the Centre for Environmental Rights (CER), groundWork, and Earthjustice. See here: Mining activists in SA face death threats, intimidation and harassment – report | Saturday Star:

The 74-page report, compiled by Human Rights Watch, the Centre for Environmental Rights (CER), groundWork, and Earthjustice, describes a system designed to “deter and penalise” mining opponents.

The authors conducted interviews with more than 100 activists, community leaders, environmental groups, lawyers representing activists, police and municipal officials, describing the targeting of community rights defenders in KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, Northwest, and Eastern Cape between 2013 and 2018.

They report intimidation, violence, damage to property, the use of excessive force during peaceful protests, and arbitrary arrest for their activities in highlighting the negative impacts of mining projects on their communities.

“The attacks and harassment have created an atmosphere of fear for community members who mobilise to raise concerns about damage to their livelihoods from the serious environmental and health risks of mining and coal-fired power plants,” write the authors.

“Women often play a leading role in voicing these concerns, making them potential targets for harassment and attacks.”

But municipalities often impose barriers to protest on organisers that have no legal basis while government officials have failed to adequately investigate allegations of abuse.

These protests have been going on for some time, but I have never seen questions on Quora about them, and racist groups like AfriForum are only concerned about white farmers, not black ones.

In the media “farm murders” refers only to white farmers, mostly killed by armed robbers, not black farmers murdered by people acting on behalf of mining companies, or who think they can make more money themselves if the mining companies take over the land.

Last year we learned how the High Court rules in favour of Xolobeni community in historic mining rights case | News | National | M&G: “The Amadiba Crisis Committee launched a court battle against the department of mineral resources and Australian company Transworld Energy and Mineral Resources (TEM) over mining rights earlier this year.”

But if the constitution is changed to allow expropriation without compensation, would the High Court have any jurisdiction in such matters? Ramaphosa makes enigmatic pronouncements, AfriForum produces a convenient smakescreen, and in the murk Mantashe and the mining companies are going around dispossessing black farmers. And people on web sites like Quora are asking if “the West” will allow white farmers from South Africa in as refugees, because they assume, and have been led to believe, that white farmers have all already been kicked off the land.

 

 

The Great (and dirty) City of Tshwane

This morning as we were driving to church we saw a bakkie dumping rubbish at the side of the R104 near the entrance to Saulsville. If we hadn’t been late we might have slowed down and taken a photo of it, but it is becoming all too common.

On the way home I did take several photos.

R104, entrance to Atteridgeville West.

All over the city there is rubbish dumped like this. Not just in Atteridgeville, but near the Botanic Gardens in the east, and in various other places, and it has been getting worse and worse. The place in Atteridgeville is noticeable because we drive past it once a fortnight, and see each time how more and more of the verges are covered with rubbish. Littering has become part of our lifestyle.

Political parties love to blame other parties for maladministration, but it was bad when the ANC confrolled the city council, and it is worse now that the DA controls the city council. It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the municipal administration will remain just as putrid as the rubbish littering the streets.

Thirty years ago I visited Singapore, which was then reputed to be the cleanest city in the world. And the reason was not far to seek — as you walked down the street, you would see lots of signs informing you that the fine for littering was $750. And that law was strictly enforced.

The City of Tshwane could deal with this in similar fashion.

Increase the fine for littering to R5000 or so, put up signs, and employ the Metro Police see that the law is enforced.

As one sports shoe manufacturer likes to tell us, Just do it.

 

The Big Six (review)

The Big Six by Arthur Ransome

When I was a child, books by Arthur Ransome were the kind of children’s books that adults thought that children ought to read, but which I found rather boring. Our school library was well stocked with them, so I read a few, but if I’d been on Good Reads back then I’d have given them two stars, three at the most.

I can remember little of what I read, and perhaps I read Coot Club, of which this is a kind of sequel, and I suppose my main memory is knowing what the Norfolk Broads were — the kind of knowledge that comes in useful when watching TV quiz shoes like Pointless, until you’ve seen them so many times that you stop trying to work out the answers, and rather try to remember which question is going to come up next and which of the very familiar contestants gets the right answer. But yes, reading about that di help to me form some kind of picture of the place, which recurs in other books, such as The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers.

I also read Missee Lee, from which I learned that typhus was a serious disease, but when I grew up I found that its cousin typhoid was more common.

Arthur Ransome’s books were great for children who liked messing about in boats, but the closest thing we got to that was paying an exorbitant fee for half an hour rowing round the island in Joburg’s Zoo Lake, or the slightly less crowded Germiston Lake.

The Big Six has boats, lots of them. But it is also a whodunit, and that adds to the interest. I don’t remember reading it as a child. I do remember reading a couple of Enid Blyton‘s Secret Seven series, where a group of children outwit the criminals that have the local police foxed.

In this one it is not difficult to guess the culprit, but the child detectives are themselves accused of the crime, and so in order to exonerate themselves they have to find the real culprits. The crime is casting off moored boats, and stealing some equipment — not major crimes worthy of Interpol, but serious enough in a small village where the children’s fathers are boatbuilders, and a bad reputation could harm their livelihood.

Though it takes a long time for the children to identify the suspects, that is not the main problem. The main problem is to collect evidence that points unambiguously to the perpetrator, because so much of the evidence they do manage to collect is open to different interpretations. So as a children’s whodunit, this one is quite sophisticated. Finding a suspect is one problem, getting enough evidence to convict is another.

In addition to being a whodunit, there is an undercurrent of environmental concern, perhaps of wider concern now than when Ransome wrote it in the 1930s. One is conscious of such concerns throughout the book, that, and the price of things. The idea of a lawyer’s fee being 66c makes the mind boggle.

I don’t think I read this one as a child, but if I had, I wonder if I would have been able to grasp that point at the age of 9 or 10. But as an adult, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

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Mystery tree feller

Every now and again we hear chopping sounds, and our dogs bark. A couple of years ago there used to be security guards across the road from us, near the railway line, and in winter they would chop up fallen branches to make a fire on cold nights.

But they haven’t been there for some time now, and the chopping sounds have come at all times of the year and all times of the day, and not just dead branches, but whole trees began to disappear. It’s one thing to chop dead branches on a cold winter night, quite another to chop living trees on a warm spring morning. So when I heard chopping this morning, I went out and took a couple of photos. Thereafter the chopping stopped.

But I wonder who is chopping down the syringa trees and why. They’ve just been blooming and looked quite nice. Is syringa wood reputed to have unusual properties, like rhino horn?

The mystery tree feller, chopping off a branch.

I’m sure if the railways people were having a purge of exotic vegetation, they would send a whole team of people in with chain saws and do it all in one fell swoop — our very own Kilner Park chainsaw massacre.

Stumps of already-vanished trees

Are syringas exotic?

I just looked them up on Wikipedia, and just discovered that they are the same as lilacs, which I’ve read about. Perhaps they are exotic, but they replenish the oxygen just like other trees. And the mystery feller isn’t replacing them with indigenous trees.

Invertebrates in the Gulf of California

The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I began reading this book I was reminded of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. It’s the same genre — travel with a lot of philosophical musing thrown in.

Most of the book is a description of a voyage to the Gulf of California. John Steinbeck’s friend Ed Ricketts was a marine biologist, and they chartered a fishing boat to collect specimens of marine invertebrates. There is an appendix, Steinbeck’s memoir of his friend Ed Rickett’s.

I found it interesting because it’s a part of the world I knew nothing about, and after reading the book I know a little more, at least about what it was like 70-odd years ago. And in the process I learnt something about marine biology; most of what I knew about that was from bed-time stories my father read me when I was 3 or 4 years old from his biology text books. Who needs extra-terrestrial monsters when you can have a sea urchin? That caused me problems in my later reading when I came across descriptions of children as urchins — were they all spiny?

As for the philosophy, I’m not sure if I understood it all. I think Steinbeck was coming from a completely different place, with different assumptions. He seemed to be anti-teleology, and to think that there is too much teleology in the world, but he seemed to see it in a quite different context. Here’s a sample, for anyone interested:

It is amazing how the strictures of the old teleologies affect our observation, causal thinking warped by hope. It was said earlier that hope is a diagnostic human trait, and this simple cortex symptom seems to be a prime factor in our inspection of our universe. For hope implies a change from a present bad condition to a future better one. The slave hopes for freedom, the weary man for rest, the hungry for food. And the feeders of hope, economic and religious, have from these simple strivings of dissatisfaction managed to create a world picture which is very hard to escape. Man grown toward perfection, animals grow toward man, bad grows toward good, and down toward up, until our little mechanism, hope, achieved in ourselves probably to cushion the shock of thought, manages to warp our whole world. Probably when our species developed the trick of memory, and with it the counterbalancing projection called “the future,” this shock-absorber, hope, had to be included in the series, else the species would have destroyed itself in despair. For if ever any man were deeply and unconsciously sure that his future would be no better than his past, he might deeply wish to cease to life. And out of this therapeutic poultice we build out iron teleologies and twist the tide pools and the stars into the pattern. To most men the most hateful statement possible is, “A thing is because it is:” Even those who have managed to drop the leading strings of a Sunday school deity are still led by the unconscious teleology of their developed trick. And in saying that hope cushions the shock of experience, that one trait balances the directionalism of another, a teleology is implied, unless one know or fell or think that we are here, and that without this balance, hope, our species in its blind mutation might have joined many, many others in extinction.
Source: Steinbeck 2000:72f

What puzzles me is that I don’t find “It is because it is” hateful at all, but I find Steinbeck’s aversion to teleology in this context (biological evolution) puzzling, because elsewhere he appears to cite with approval his friend Ed Ricketts’s theory that rattlesnakes and kangaroo rats are symbiotic. Though rattlesnakes eat kangaroo rats, they are actually doing them a favour by removing the weaker elements of the population, thus increasing the chances of the species as a whole to survive. But if it is because it is, why should it matter, and why should we see such ecological connections.

So some of his comments were interesting, but others seemed to make little sense, to to be contradicted by something else he wrote a few pages later.

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Eclipse

This morning there was an eclipse of the moon, so we went outside early to have a look at it.

Lunar eclipse 28 Sep 2015, about 3:15 am

And again a bit later when the moon was fully in the earth’s shadow:

Lunar eclipse 28 Sep 2015, about 4:45 am

I thought I might be able to get better pictures of it with a better camera and a tripod, but it’s rather difficult.

I checked in my diary to remind myself of other eclipses I had seen.

There was one on 15 June 2011 which seemed to last a long time. There was another on 4 May 2004, where I noted that there wasn’t much to see except that the moon was a bit dimmer and redder than usual.

On 4 December 2002 there was supposed to be an eclipse of the sun, but it was overcast, so we didn’t see much of it.

On 21 Jun 2001 there was a partial eclipse of the sun, the first of the 21st century and the Third Millennium. It was also notable for being on the winter solstice. On 9 January 2001 was the first lunar eclipse of the new century and millennium. We went outside to have a look, but there was a cricket match on TV, South  Africa vs Sri Lanka (South Africa won), and between overs they showed the progress of the eclipse, so there was a better view from inside.

On 16 September 1997 was the last lunar eclipse of the 20th century, but it was cloudy, so we didn’t see it.

On 6 August 1971 I was with some friends watching a film at the Windhoek drive-in. There was a double feature, and for the first one we sat in the back of the bakkie under the open sky. The film was an Italian Western called Kill or be killed, and the eclipse was more interesting to watch than the movie. For the second one, Carry on spying, we turned the bakkie around to face the screen and watched from inside, as it was getting colder.

The first eclipse of any kind that I recall seeing was a solar eclipse which we watched from my aunt’s beachfront flat in Sea Point, Cape Town, which had an uninterrupted view over the sea, and it was a very good place from which to watch an eclipse.

The earliest mention of an eclipse was from when I was still at school. The regular geography teacher was away overseas, and the headmaster, Wally Mears, stood in for him. He wanted to inspect our books. In Robert Mercer-Tod’s book he found a picture of a half-undressed dancing girl, and held it up for us all to see, and asked Tod, “Is this an eclipse?” and then burst out laughing, and so did we all, for about five minutes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coming up for air

George Orwell Omnibus: The Complete Novels: Animal Farm, Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Coming up for Air, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Coming up for Air is a strange book. I was determined not to like it, and yet I felt compelled to finish it, though I couldn’t stand to read much more than a chapter a day; a page-turner it wasn’t. It’s about a fat middle-aged salesman called George Bowling living a dull middle-class life in a dull London suburb, who goes out to get his new set of false teeth. On the way he sees a poster about King Zog’s wedding, and that sets him off reminiscing about his childhood in a small town in Oxfordshire. One expects the memories to last for a chapter or two, but they go on and on and on, while I kept wondering when it would get to the point, if there was one.

Yet in some ways it was also strangely compelling. The description of the esperience of going back to the scenes of one’s childhood seemed uncomfortably close to my own, some of which I have described here. He finds the rivers and ponds where he used to fish in hsi childhood either drained or hopelessly polluted so no fish could live in them. And I sometimes recall that I used to go swimming in the Jukskei River upstream and downstream of Alexandra Township. Would anyone dare to do that today?

It was all the more uncomfortable because George Bowling is not a very sympathetic character (sympathetic also in the Russian sense, in that one cannot feel a great deal of sympathy for him). He is selfish and and self-centred, and yet I found myself agreeing with some of his opinions: “I don’t mind towns growing, as long as they do grow and don’t just spread like gravy over a tablecloth.”

 

 

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The City of Tshwane gets it right: a service-delivery thank you

When local government bodies get things wrong, people are quick to complain, and one of the phrases that we have seen a lot of in the media lately is “service-delivery protests”.

But sometimes they get things right, and people tend to say less about that.

When we were coming home from church this morning we noticed that municipal workers were plasnting trees in George Storar Drive. Not little saplings, but full-grown jacaranda trees, for which Pretoria has been famous. It is now late spring, and the jacarandas are blooming — here they are in Middel Street, at the eastern end of George Storar Drive.

Jacaranda time in Brooklyn

George Storar Drive had a few small trees in the centre islands, barely more than shrubs, and some flower beds, but if they take in their new home, these full-grown trees should look quite spectacular in a couple of seasons’ time, and change the whole appearance of the road.

Tshwane City Council workers planting jacaranda trees in George Storar Drive

George Storar Drive is, in a way, the entrance to the academic part of the city, as there are a lot of educational instituions along it, or that it leads to, including the University of Pretoria, and the University of South Africa as well a several high schools.

Some of the newly=planted trees — the holes have not yet been filled in.

It looks as though some trees had to be removed because a road was being widened somewhere else, so congratulations to the city authorities for thinking of another place to put them, a plac e where they will look really good.

In a couple of years we hope to see the newly transplanted trees looking like this.

Jacarandas are exotic to South Africa, and a few years ago there was a lot of antipathy in official circles to illegal alien vegetation, and under that policy Pretoria would have lost all its jacarandas, for which it has been famous for years. Lots of places that had alien vegetation have been cleared, but now the policy has been softened a bit. A few days ago I was listening to a radio programme about the Tsitsikama forest, and someone was saying that exotic trees, like wattles, protected the indigenous forest, because the wattles were available for firewood, whereas if they were not people would be chopping down trees in the few remaining bits of indigenous forest for that purpose.

About a month ago we noted that where former council houses were damaged in a severe hailstorm last year, the city council was helping the residents to replace the old asbestos roofs with galvanised iron ones, which, in addtion to being more resistant to hail damage, are also made of a safer material.

So congratulations to the City Council of Tshwane for good ideas for beautifying the city and improving the quality of life of its citizens in different ways. If anyone from the city counsil is reading this, they can take it as a service-delivery thank you.

Spring is early this year

In our garden the first sign of spring is the budding of new leaves on our mulberry tree. They usually make their first appearance on 20th August, but they are early this year. They first appeared about a week ago, and now they are quite big.

When we first moved to this house, nearly 30 years ago, there was no mulberry tree. There was one over the road by the railway line, and when the children kept silkworms, they used to collect the leaves to feed them, and the fruit as well. One of the seeds must have germinated, and the tree is now far larger than its parent. The fruit comes in October, but we rarely get any. The birds eat most of it while it is still green, and what drops on the ground the dogs eat avidly.

Spring is here. Our raised garden is gradually taking shape, and leaves have already appeared on the mulberry tree

Meanwhile, the other trees are still bare, except for the jacarandas, which haven’t lost their leaves yet.

Fire and water

Nature is amazing.

Last week water began running down the gutters on both sides of the road that runs past our house. It sometimes does that after heavy rain, but this is winter, and we live in a summer rainfall area with dry winters. There’s been no rain for at least two months.

Was it a broken water main? I went up the road to have a look, and there was no sign of such a thing. The water was coming across the road all along, from the empty veld by the railway line across the road from us. Why would it come when there has been to rain? What would cause the water table to rise so that that dry veld would turn into a swamp?

The entrance to the vacant land beside the railway line — water in the dry season

Then we recalled that a couple of weeks ago there had been a fire over the road. Every winter there’s a fire there, and some of the grass is burnt. But this time it was nearly all burnt. Between our house and the railway line was not a blade of grass, just black stubble. With no grass to suck up the water and transpire it into the air, the water rose to the surface, flowed under the concrete fence and out into the street where it ran down the gutters.

That’s our house with the red roof, seen from the railway embankment, with nothing in between but blackened burnt grass.

It’s hard to think that the dry grass that was there before the fire sucked up so much water. It is brown and dry and brittle. Yet somehow cattle eat such grass and thrive. It gives them both food and moisture.

Burnt, dry and dead. With grass gone, the water flows

A little way off was a clump of trees. They too are dry and leafless, winter-brown. But somehow the fire has not penetrated the trees, and there is a clump of aloes where the fire stopped.

A clump of aloes hides a ruined habitation, a relic of a troubled past

But when you go to the aloes, you see that they hide a heap of stones. And beyond it there are more heaps of stones. And then I realise that these are houses. Perhaps this is an archaeological site. Who lived here, and when?

And then I realise that this is a relic of the ethnic cleansing that took place under apartheid. Kilner Park, the suburb where we live, used to belong to the Methodist Church, as did the neighbouring suburb of Queenswood. Across the railwayline to the south-east is Weavind Park — all named after luminaries of the Methodist Church. On the hill was the Kilnerton Institution, where many black South African leaders were educated. But it was too close to white Pretoria, so the black people had to go, and all that remains are these piles of stones.

And now the suburban trains of MetroRail run past here. There is no station, nothing to stop for. They are going to Mamelodi, 15 kilometres to the east, far enough from white Pretoria for the black people to live.

The trains rush past, taking commuters to Mamelodi, farther east.

I marvel at the interaction of fire and water. The old elements of the ancient Greek philosophers, earth, air, fire and water. The fire comes, and brings the water. Modern chemists will say that these are not real elements, not the chemical elements of the universe. But they are the elements of human life, of the human world. We need them all to live. In three weeks time spring will begin. Green shoots will appear in the grass, the trees will sprout leaves. The water table will recede again until the rains come in October, and the fire of the sun will enable the grass to suck up the water from the earth, and the life of the world goes on.