Andrew Kenny of the Citizen wrote the following:There has been a confused uproar over the claim by Pieter Mulder, Deputy Minister of Agriculture, that Bantu people occupied only 60% of the present South Africa when the whites arrived.
The first modern human inhabitants of South Africa arrived over 100 000 years ago. They were the Bushmen (now insultingly called “San”) and similar people.
About 2 000 years ago the Bantu entered from the north. “Bantu”, which means “human”, describes the people who evolved in West Africa and then radiated east and south into the rest of Africa. By genetic diversity, the Bantu are probably the most important of all human groupings.
The Bantu moved south and east in South Africa, displacing the Bushmen. They stopped at about the Fish River in the present Eastern Cape. This was because they had summer rainfall crops, which could not grow in the winter rainfall of the Western Cape.
When Jan van Riebeeck arrived in Table Bay in 1652 there were Bushmen, but no Bantu, in Western Cape. His European settlers also displaced the Bushmen, perhaps more brutally than the Bantu had done in the north. The Bantu, who were not desert people, probably did not live in the arid expanses of Northern Cape.
Mulder’s history is basically correct. So what?
Why does the right to own land depend on which race were the original inhabitants? If we followed this principle in South Africa, only Bushmen would be entitled to own land.
In England the original inhabitants were the ancient Britons. The Romans came in the 1st Century, the Angles and Saxons in the 5th and the Vikings in the 9th.
Does this mean that no Englishman with Roman, Anglo-Saxon or Viking blood in his veins is entitled to own property in England?
Obviously not. And, equally obviously, anybody living in South Africa today has the same right to own land as anybody else, regardless of history.
Most people on Earth, black or white, want a house in a city or a suburb, and not a large farm in the country. A 100km/sq farm in the Kalahari Desert is worth far less than a 100m/sq flat in Clifton or Sandton.
The idea of basing land justice on land area is absurd.
But the fact that so many of Mulder’s critics vilify him without refuting the facts of his arguments shows how dishonest we South Africans are about our history.
