“Movement of Jah people, send us another brother Moses, from across the sea.”When Bob Marley sang these words in his 1977 songExodus, he drew on an ancient story of deliverance of Israelites forced to move, guided by a promise of freedom from bondage and control. The song speaks of motion born from pressure and of journeys led by power, faith and survival. In SA’s rural and customary spaces today, a quieter exodus is unfolding in what appears like a voluntary exodus of scores of people to overpopulated informal settlements closer to the cities.
This exodus is not characterised by crossing seas as the Israelites did; it unfolds through contracts half-understood, payments too small to secure a future, and land slowly slipping from communal hands into speculative circuits of profit by the ‘clever blacks’ with relatively deeper pockets hailing not too far from these targeted customary spaces. Unlike God’s provision of manna to the Israelites after 40 years of wandering in the desert, victims of rural land commodification and speculative land deals are offered no sustaining miracle. Their condition is not transitional as it was for the Israelites in the desert; it threatens to become permanent land poverty, a slow starvation of place and belonging.
Land struggles in SA have never been fixed, and they have changed as power relations have changed. During the colonial period, conflicts over land were clearly defined and power rested with colonial authorities who used unjust laws, violence and racial ideology to dispossess African communities of their land. Those who lost land were largely black rural populations whose livelihoods, identities and political autonomy depended on it.
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Resistance came from kings, chiefs and traditional leaders who challenged land alienation through armed struggle, negotiation and the moral authority of custom. Dispossession was explicit, imposed from outside and enforced through open coercion. In contemporary SA, land conflict has become far more complex.
The clear divisions of the colonial era have blurred. Figures who once symbolised resistance through customary authority are now, in some cases, involved in enabling exploitative land practices.
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