Deferred Land Reform vs. Settler Capital in Post-Apartheid South Africa

PHOTOS BY MPHO MATHEOLANE

On January 23, 2025, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa signed the Expropriation Act, 2024 that allows the state to expropriate land without financial compensation. The law has caused outrage among white South African landowners, as well as the current US administration that went as far as offering asylum to expropriated settlers. For people whose efforts are dedicated to redressing Indigenous sovereignty on stolen land, the spirit of this legislation goes in the right direction. In the following text, Zoé Samudzi provides some much needed historic and political contextualization.

“Ilizwe lifile!” is the South African phrasal refrain that scholar and writer Panashe Chigumadzi uses in her 2021 essay, “The Cry of Black Worldlessness.” It translates to “The world is dead!”. The phrase constituted at once the social death of black indigeneity, a lamentation of systematic colonial theft made legal, and a “cosmological rupture that reverberates across generations.” It’s a phrase that succinctly summarizes the entangled material and psychological devastation of the colonial state’s severing of the black native’s relation to their land, a living entity stripped from communal systems of stewardship and land tenure and subsequently enclosed—a forced entrance into the capitalist political economy. Subjected to laws forcing further displacement into reserves and racially segregated cities, the criminalization of “squatting” (unlawful residence on white-owned farms) and “vagrancy” (the crime attached to black movement without sufficient employment), and racially constrained travel that served to control and allocate black labor, scores of indigenous peoples became internally exiled. Aliens in their own land, alienated from their lands and thus their ecosystems of life and death in their inability to properly bury their kin in and on their ancestral lands.