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Cause, on 04 July 2014 - 12:05 PM, said:
I thought I would post this article, written by a black man in my country about a proposed Land redistribution scheme in my country (All farms will have their ownership split in two and half the farms value will be divided amongst the workers who work on it). The scheme is unconstitutional and will probably never become a reality but his thoughts on the matter are nevertheless I think quite interesting. Especially as I think he and I agree and both point out how in the long run this short-sighted schemes hurt the very people they are supposedly meant to help.
http://www.sabreakin...t-land-thieves/
Anyway things to consider:
-Even if we accept the premiss that white farmers stole the land they work on, does stealing it back right a social injustice or create a new one.
-Who would decide how to manage the farm, the white farmer who owns 50% and has experience or the black-co-operative or would tens to thousands of people have to make the decision as a committee?
-Farmers have over decades or even centuries been cultivating, improving and investing resources into there farms, does this count for anything?
Just because your a farm worker today does not mean you have any connection to the land you work, What about people who were once indigenous to the area but are now maids, miners or even Doctors? Are we righting an injustice or just trying to take wealth from white people and give it to black people?
-Who owns the land? the black people the whites stole it from? The black people other black people stole it from before the white people stole it from them?
http://www.sabreakin...t-land-thieves/
Anyway things to consider:
-Even if we accept the premiss that white farmers stole the land they work on, does stealing it back right a social injustice or create a new one.
-Who would decide how to manage the farm, the white farmer who owns 50% and has experience or the black-co-operative or would tens to thousands of people have to make the decision as a committee?
-Farmers have over decades or even centuries been cultivating, improving and investing resources into there farms, does this count for anything?
Just because your a farm worker today does not mean you have any connection to the land you work, What about people who were once indigenous to the area but are now maids, miners or even Doctors? Are we righting an injustice or just trying to take wealth from white people and give it to black people?
-Who owns the land? the black people the whites stole it from? The black people other black people stole it from before the white people stole it from them?
1) The white farmers on the land didn't steal the land they work on now. However, the colonialists from Europe not only stole land, they murdered the people there, disrupted ways of life developed over generations, re-terraformed the land to better suit their own goals and instituted oppressive governments and policies that directly and indirectly hurt and restrained native Africans from competing with the invaders. It's really a difficult thing to look at, especially with the indirect hurt and restraint from policies in government and bank lending, but the predecessors in South African and many other places to the people there now have created this and never repented, restored what they took or even apologized.
2) I think the forcible repatriation and division of the land is not a good idea. There's the management problems and more - the new black farmers do not have the skills or the experience in negotiating the physical difficulties of farming, the budgetary/financial aspects and the relationships with suppliers that the established white farmers have built up over decades or centuries. To take the land from those people who are building wealth with it and turn it over to a near-totally fresh group of people is almost certain to produce decades of turmoil, misuse and loss in the economic and societal sense.
3) I also believe that the better course would be to provide free admission to agricultural school (where people go to learn how to farm in the "big" sense, rather than just working on the farm) to blacks and then provide state sponsorship in their post-graduation acquisition of land to farm upon. That could be done by offering buyouts (which is a tough concept to sell to the already poor black South Africans with legitimate grievances) to a segment of white farmers (not all). In a largely corruption free administered program like this (hard to do, I know), this would give black farmers a tremendous chance at fast success with land that isn't wrested back from whites. Not all would succeed, but it'd not cause the violence and hardships that the proposed scheme above would.
In conclusion, I think that the article by Daganda has a few crucial mistakes - assuming that the economic successes in China and elsewhere are wholly real is one of them - and that the general thrust of giving black South Africans more after decades and centuries of whites being given more is a good idea. White privilege is a very real thing globally. However, these are problems that have no easy or fast solutions and those are the ones politicians love the most, to the point of implementing easy/fast solutions that cause even more pain down the line and to other people.
For the Americans being driven by the Bush administration/neocons, invading Iraq in 2003 was an easy and fast solution to a perceived set of problems involving WMDs, tyrant regime, Islamofascist terrorism and more. The subsequent 11 years have proven nearly every bit of their assumptions and offered solutions completely, disastrously and bloodily wrong.
The same happens with governments trying to fix racism against blacks - although usually with less overt bloodshed. The programs designed to address the wrongs visited upon blacks are short-sighted, poorly administrated and often flat out wrong in their treatment of others as well.
