Blacks Return to Reclaim Lost Lands

DOORNKOP, South Africa -- It was a bitter winter morning in 1974 when heavily-armed white police suddenly stormed into this quiet rural community with dogs, trucks and bulldozers to forcibly move thousands of terrified blacks to distant dumping grounds in so-called black homelands.


"I was asleep," recalled Aaron Thamaga, who was then 12. "But then there was a light in the house. The roof of my father's house was grass. And they were burning the roof. Then they knocked all the walls down."


The brutal attempt to erase what was called a "black spot" from a white area drew little notice two decades ago. Doornkop was only one of hundreds of non-white communities cruelly demolished under apartheid's "forced removals" policy. Its residents were among about 3.5 million people uprooted at gunpoint by the white minority regime.


But under South Africa's new land restoration law, the most significant legislation to redress the wrongs of apartheid since the country's historic all-race election in April, the dispossessed can now begin to reclaim and resettle their land. And last week, the denizens of Doornkop finally went home, the first community to do so since the far-reaching law was enacted two weeks ago.


"My ancestors are buried here," Thamaga said emotionally, pointing to a dilapidated, weed-choked cemetery filled with broken headstones and rusting tin crosses. "I think they are happy today to see my face. I'm so happy. This is my land."


Members of 45 families -- about 200 people in all -- were trucked back to reclaim the 2,000 acres in the rolling green hills of the Eastern Transvaal that was settled by their forebears nearly a century ago.


The joyous singing, ululating and solemn prayers of homecoming soon echoed across the desolate fields, empty but for broken bricks and a cluster of bullet-riddled walls under nearby trees. That's all that remains of a poor but vibrant farming community that once boasted livestock, orchards, shops and schools.


"It was a very peaceful place," Deborah Kgoroba, 54, recalled. "We were almost all churchgoers. We were almost all family too, because so many people married. And we plowed our gardens and vegetables. There was no hunger at all. And they moved us to places all covered with stones, and trees with thorns, and snakes all around."


She and her parents were trucked to an impoverished township in Lebowa, about 130 kilometers away, while all their belongings disappeared somewhere else.


"We lost everything," she said.


No one today publicly justifies those policies. How to right the wrong, however, is another question. The restoration of land to the dispossessed is one of the thorniest problems facing South African President Nelson Mandela's government since it took over from the white-minority regime of President F.W de Klerk.


Some cases date to 1913, for example, when the Natives Land Act banned blacks from owning land outside tiny reserves, later called homelands, in the country's poorest and least arable areas. That was more than three decades before apartheid was created.


Later laws, particularly the Group Areas Act of 1950, added harsh new restrictions by decreeing where members of each race could live, work or go to school.


Much of the land seized under the segregationist laws was sold at rock-bottom prices to white farmers, who then often hired black laborers in a feudal-style system of farm tenancy. The land and group areas acts were repealed in 1991, but their pernicious effects are entrenched.


Whites, who make up 13 percent of the population, own an estimated 80 percent of the land. Nearly half of the black population still ekes out an existence in the overcrowded, overgrazed and underdeveloped homelands where so many were sent. Under the new law, people can file claims to property they say was taken illegally.


A commission will be created to verify claims and mediate disputes. Claims that cannot be settled will go before a Land Claims Court, which can rule to restore ownership, award compensation or reject the claim. The court will sit for three years.


Mandela has pledged to redistribute 30 percent of the agricultural land to blacks within five years, largely by giving away government-owned property and by buying acreage back from whites. He has taken special pains to reassure nervous white farmers that their land will not be expropriated.


"This can be done without depriving people of their property or farms," Mandela insisted when he signed the land restoration law. "There is no need for the widespread concern in the farming community."