Is Land Reform the Last Step Towards Africans’ Total Emancipation and True Empowerment?

Abstract

In a long and antagonizing fight against colonial and white domination, the land question has always featured in the background as a highly contested idea and most visible reality of conquest and disempowerment. In Southern Africa, the question has recently become the rallying point of rhetoric and action that seeks to decisively deal with injustices of past land grabs by the so-called settler races. Both as an economic tool and as an ideology, the land question is taken as a promise of the turning of the tide in favour of Africans’ economic empowerment and the most crucial point at which Africans’ dignity is fully restored. It should, therefore, follow that the land issue is tied to matters of self-determination and freedom, which were key to the struggle for independence. Although supporters of land reform do not necessarily claim that it (land reform) occurs as the last stage of a sequential progression towards total freedom and empowerment, such a position can be attributed to their understanding of the significance of the land vis-à-vis issues of ownership and disempowerment. While I do not seek to contest the legitimacy and significance of land reform, I wish to sound possible pitfalls of such reform. The caution I offer locates itself in the lived experience of self-inflicted African failures commensurate with attainment of freedom and empowerment programmes targeted to benefit the previously oppressed and disenfranchised. I then seek to draw a correlation between reasons for documented failures with dangers I imagine to stalk the rhetoric and some acts of land reform. Yet in all these considerations, the actual threat to the success of land reform is the real or imagined value and contribution that land has for emancipation and empowerment. In total, my surmise advances the view that land, like many other realities and ideas of emancipation and empowerment before it, is just but another “Not Yet Uhuru” moment.