The Call of the Dispossessed

Can land claims in Canada and South Africa be legitimately compared?

Literary Review of Canada, June 2007

"It's all about land," said my friend Lourens, waving through the car window at passing farms as we drove from Cape Town to a village nearby. "Everyone wants his forty acres. And a mule," he added. (Forty acres and a mule was the compensation awarded to freed American slaves after the Civil War.) Lourens, an Afrikaner, is a lawyer who runs a legal clinic for the poor. He is also a writer, lyrically attached to South Africa and all its peoples. We were heading out-of-town to visit one of his destitute clients.

It's not so easy to get forty acres if you are black in Africa, or an aboriginal in Canada. The whites came from Europe, took the land away, and are reluctant to give it back. Sometimes they took the land by force of arms. Sometimes they took it by treaty or other form of “contract” with the indigenous peoples. Sometimes they took it by claiming sovereignty and passing an expropriating law. Sometimes no one else seemed to be around, and white settlers just moved in. In sub-Sahara Africa, whites took land from the Khoikhoi, the San, the Xhosa and Zulu, the Venda and Sotho, and other indigenous peoples. In South Africa, the dominant country of the region, some of the taking happened recently, during the time of apartheid. In Canada, whites took land from the Innu, Mi’kmaq, Iroquois, Lubicon, Nisga’a, Wet’suwet’en, and other bands and nations.

Those who were dispossessed now say, "The land was taken unjustly and you must give it back." They want their forty acres. Or they want money as compensation. Sometimes they want something else as well – an apology, perhaps, or an expression of respect from those who oppressed them. The more recent their historical grievance, the more powerful their claim, politically and morally. If the land was taken by force, with not even a semblance of agreement, the claim is stronger yet. So, the voice of black and coloured South Africans forcibly removed by law to so-called “bantustans” in the 1960’s and 1970’s is a loud voice. By contrast, the voice of Canadian aboriginals complaining about treaties signed by their ancestors in the 19th century is, perforce, muted.

Land claims may be driven by contemporary demographic injustice. If, as in sub-Sahara Africa, those who took the land are a small minority of the population, and those who claim it are the vast majority, the demand for redistribution is hard to resist. If, as in Canada, the equation is reversed, the matter seems less pressing. If powerful and recent historical grievance are combined with obvious demographic injustice, as in sub-Sahara Africa, there is danger of economic catastrophe, perhaps even revolution and bloodshed.

Whites owned 80 per cent of South African farmland when apartheid came to an end in 1994. The government now says that 30 per cent of this land must be transferred to black communities by 2014, preferably on a willing-seller willing-buyer basis, but, if not, by expropriation with market-related compensation. But the pace of redistribution is slow. Only four per cent of white-owned land in South Africa has been transferred. The first expropriation, of a large church-owned farm in the Northern Cape, did not take place until early 2007.

Accounts are being settled in other parts of sub-Sahara Africa as well. Zimbabwe's President Mugabe has seized the land of white farmers; before he did so, these farmers, less than one percent of Zimbabwe’s population, owned over 70 per cent of the country's arable land. In Namibia, four thousand commercial farmers, mostly white, still own almost three-quarters of the arable land. Reminiscent of Zimbabwe, some blacks who fought in the Namibian war of liberation are demanding that this land be given to them, although the government seems committed to a long-term land redistribution strategy based on willing-seller, willing-buyer.

In Canada, the historical grievances are more remote; the injustices, less; those claiming injustice, a tiny fraction of the population. The issue of land claims has little immediacy. It is not at the heart of the political agenda, the core of the political debate, the way it is in South Africa (or in Zimbabwe or Namibia). In Canada, land claims are dealt with in a stately and leisurely manner, in the courts and by government bureaucrats. The general public pays little attention; other things are on the mind of the Canadian people.

Joan Fairweather’s A Common Hunger: Land Rights in Canada and South Africa struggles with these complex and emotional matters. Fairweather is a South African white who emigrated to Canada during the apartheid years, evidently bringing with her the regret and sadness carried by so many white South Africans who left their country during that time. Fairweather became interested in Canada’s treatment of its indigenous people, and in 1993 wrote an M.A. thesis for the University of Ottawa entitled Is This Apartheid? Aboriginal Reserves and Self-Government in Canada, 1960-82. She then returned to South Africa for a time, working as an archivist at the University of the Western Cape (a college created in 1959 by the apartheid government for people officially classified as "Coloured," and today regarded as politically and culturally advanced and fashionable).

There are three parts to A Common Hunger. The first, entitled "Dispossession", tells about the taking of land from the indigenous peoples of Canada and South Africa. The second, called "Reclaiming the Land", is an account of attempts by native peoples in the two countries to get land back, using judicial and political processes. The third, "Dealing with Legacies", discusses reconciliation and the restoration of dignity. Fairweather writes, “The journey South Africans have undertaken as a new democracy is about redressing the harms that were caused by land dispossession and to restore dignity [sic] to those whose humanity has not been fully recognized.” (155) She continues, “Land alienation and loss of human dignity lies at the root of many of the problems that plague indigenous communities… The task that confronts Canadians and South Africans today is to reverse the trends of history which have produced societies that are deeply divided along cultural, ethnic and economic lines and to build new societies that are inclusive and respectful of each other’s needs.”

In "Dispossession", Fairweather describes the arrival of Vasco da Gama at the Cape in 1497; the brutal establishment of a provisioning station by the Dutch East India Company; the seizure of Khoikoi land; the relentless move by whites inland, displacing the San, Xhosa and Zulu; the pattern of conquest, subordination and military force; the culmination of all this in laws passed by a “sovereign” white government that prevented non-whites from owning land or even living in vast areas of South Africa. Interspersed with this account of Africa, she tells the quite different and far more peaceable Canadian story; James Cook arriving on the west coast of North America in 1778; the negotiation by the British, beginning in the first part of the 19th century, of treaties with indigenous peoples for the alienation of their land and the setting aside of reserves; the subsequent and continuing legal and political struggle to interpret and enforce these treaties; and modern attempts to integrate indigenous peoples into a broader Canadian society, often with sorry results.

In Part Two, "Reclaiming the Land", Fairweather discusses litigation, negotiation for restitution, and claims to self-government, all as methods of seeking aboriginal title and rights. She describes litigation initiated in Canada by the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en, culminating in the 1997 Supreme Court of Canada case of Delgamuukw v. British Columbia. She reviews the South African case of Alexkor v. Richtersveld Community, eventually heard in 2003 by South Africa’s Constitutional Court. She observes that “neither case has produced the kind of sea change in jurisprudence that might have been expected …” Nor is Fairweather optimistic about restitution through negotiation, noting that aboriginal peoples face powerful vested interests opposed to their claims. As to self-government, a deep irony emerges from her comparison of Canada and South Africa. In Canada, the creation in 1999 of Nunavut, a territory for the Inuit people, was hugely celebrated. In South Africa, “self-government” in the bantustans was a key feature of apartheid, and its reversal by a free and democratic country was likewise hugely celebrated. Fairweather indirectly acknowledges this irony, writing that “the notion of self-governing communities based on the protection of group rights… raises the spectre of South Africa’s homeland policy in the minds of many Canadians.”

Part Three, "Dealing with Legacies", recounts the dire conditions afflicting much of South Africa – gross disparities between rich and poor, millions living in squatter camps that surround the big cities, HIV/AIDS, and high rates of unemployment. Turning to Canada, Fairweather mentions disparities between Canadian aboriginal and non-aboriginal communities in health, housing, education, employment and social welfare; she writes, “In every case, these disparities can be linked directly or indirectly to land loss and to the absence of cultural and political determination.” Fairweather compares, as a means to reconciliation, Canada’s Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, acknowledging that the Canadian commission was “almost routine” next to the TRC.

A Common Hunger is obviously a book of personal experience, commitment and passion, and that gives it power. But, I am sorry to say, I think the work is seriously flawed. There is too much potted history, drawn from secondary sources, providing little illumination of the central ideas; much better historical accounts can be found elsewhere (on South Africa’s history, for example, in The Mind of South Africa by Allister Sparks). The discussion’s thrust is frequently unclear, and the analysis confused and fragmented. (What is the point of explaining all about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission?) A particular problem is Fairweather’s very uncertain touch when discussing law and the legal system, both in general and in particular. Does she really believe that “clearly, there is a conflict of interest when the province’s responsibilities are decided by the province’s own courts”? This comment suggests a complete lack of understanding of the role and position of the Canadian judiciary.

But the big problem is that the comparison between the struggle for land rights in Canada and South Africa is inappropriate and forced. Fairweather seems to recognize this, at least in part, on the very first page of her book: “Unlike Canada where the aboriginal population is a tiny minority, the vast majority of South Africa’s population is African.” As I mentioned earlier, there is vast demographic injustice in South Africa, but little or none in Canada; it is a question of numbers, and numbers make all the difference. Further, as I say, in South Africa many of the grievances concerning land dispossession are recent and about the use of force, and are thus very powerful politically and morally. In Cape Town today, middle-aged black and coloured South Africans still speak with bitterness about being forced when children to move with their families from comfortable homes in the city centre to squalid townships on the outskirts. In Canada, the complaint is about the interpretation of treaties signed by aboriginal ancestors in the 19th century.

Most Canadians consider their country a just society, acknowledging that justice is an ideal that can never be completely attained. Most of the world applauds the extraordinary achievement of South Africa in moving from an undemocratic, violent and racist society, to a peaceful and free democracy. But the two countries and their concerns are very different, and cannot readily be compared. “For all the talk about a ‘rainbow nation,’” writes Fairweather about South Africa, “the divide between rich and poor is still glaringly defined in terms of the indigenous and European populations.” She is right.

In Cape Town, thirteen years after the election that made Nelson Mandela president of a free country, black Africans still come in by bus to the centre of the city, from Khayalitsha and other impoverished black townships where hundreds of thousands live, to clean the houses and cut the lawns of descendants of European settlers. In the newspapers there is talk of a resurgence of Afrikaner nationalism. At dinner parties in the wealthy, white, southern suburbs, they ask nervously: What will happen to us when Mandela, the great symbol of reconciliation, dies?