RICHARD PITHOUSE: Urban land reform is an urgent priority

In 2005 the wheel of human history turned and for the first time the majority of us lived in cities. At the time the UN estimated that about 1-billion people, a quarter of the world’s urban population, lived in shacks. There may be 2-billion people living in shacks by 2040 or 2050.

In a column in Business Day Michael Morris argued, eloquently, for the urgency of urban land reform (“Land reform is an urban priority”, September 2). He noted that the building consumed by fire in Jeppestown in late August was known by its residents as Enkanini, meaning a place of stubborn, forceful determination, because people repeatedly returned to it after evictions.

Enkanini is also a common name for shack settlements, which are often built and sustained with a similar persistence. Evictions are frequently violent and, in parts of the country, carried out in violation of the law and even orders of the court. There are settlements that have suffered 20 or even 30 evictions before the state concedes to the stubborn determination to access and hold urban land. 

Morris places the tenacity driving the struggle for urban land in a wider historical frame and looks back to Oriel Monongoaha, who led land occupations in Pimville, Soweto. In 1947 Monongoaha described attempts by the state to evict occupiers as being like a farmer whose maize field has been invaded by birds. “He chases the birds from one part of the field and they alight in another part... We shall see whether it is the farmer or the birds who gets tired first.” 

There’s no doubt that for many years to come our cities will be shaped by resolve from below as much as by urban planning on the part of the state and capital. Yet despite this the land question is, as Morris notes, often understood as largely being a matter of who owns rural land, and especially agricultural land.

The rural land question is, of course, urgent and exceeds its frequent reduction to the racial character of land ownership. Engaging it seriously requires that, along with the burning issue of race, we also reflect carefully about matters such as who benefits from land reform, how land is used and managed, the many issues pertaining to labour on farms — something that often remains intensely racialised — as well as the modes of governance enabled by active state support for the growing power of traditional authority. 

In rural areas mining, frequently driven by an alliance between multinational corporations, traditional authority and local political elites, has often been a flashpoint. An alarming number of grassroots activists opposing the surrender of land to mining companies have been assassinated.

But it is in the cities where millions of people live on occupied land, and where state violence is regularly mobilised with the aim of preventing new occupations, that the land question is most intensely contested. The battle for urban land is the most sustained point of conflict between ordinary people and the state. 

In the cities the land question is not a matter of restitution in the sense of returning particular land to particular communities dispossessed during or before apartheid. It is not a matter of restoration, of making whole what was crushed and shattered on the anvil of white supremacy. In the cities the land question is about access to livelihoods, education and the promise of urban life. It is not uncommon for people struggling for a place in the cities to come from rural homes in beautiful settings, homes where beauty and a deep sense of familial belonging is not matched with opportunity. 

With systemic impoverishment and unemployment millions of people cannot afford to access urban housing through the formal market. The state never built enough houses to meet the growing need for urban homes, and the rate at which it builds houses has been in steep decline for years. For young people growing up in rural villages or towns with almost no chance of finding work at home, an urban shack provides at least some hope for finding work, even if precarious, and getting children into a decent school. 

The crisis of impoverishment and unemployment is also severe in the cities, and for many young people unable to access housing through the state and the formal market, erecting or renting a shack is the only way to form an independent household and attain a degree of autonomy.

People also form or join shack settlements for other reasons. It is not uncommon for people who have been retrenched or for women subject to abuse to see a shack as their only viable option, or as a better option than living in house they can no longer afford or in which they are not safe. 

For the first 15 years or so after apartheid the state was animated by the standard modernist fantasy of subordinating urban planning to itself and the market, and to eradicating grassroots urban planning and construction. Politicians confidently announced that shacks would be “eradicated” by 2010, and then by 2014. This was fantasy, but a powerful fantasy genuinely believed by many people in positions of power. 

The state did build many houses, though always inadequate in size and quality and mostly far from the cities. At times people had to be forced to accept forced removal to what came to be termed “human dumping grounds” at gunpoint. Migrants were always excluded from access to state housing, and renters were frequently left homeless when shack settlements were destroyed and some residents moved to state housing projects.

State housing became a key form of accumulation for politically connected elites, people such as Shauwn Mkhize. Corruption was rampant, and both the building and allocation of houses providing opportunities for extracting rents. Jacob Zuma’s accessions to the presidency was driven in part by people with political connections who were locked out of the existing opportunities for accumulation. It was not invested in modernist fantasies.

Public budgets remained an important source of access to quick wealth but there was also a clear shift towards more local party actors extracting resources from impoverished people by selling land and renting land and shacks. The fantasy of eradicating shacks often gave way to the desire to control shack settlements, something that marked the beginning of regular assassinations of grassroots activists opposing the extraction of rent and the selling of land. 

There are still attempts to eradicate shack settlements, usually when they are close to places where rich people live, such as the gated communities on the lush coast to the north of Durban. There are also attempts, often violent, by local political elites to appropriate land and extract rent, usually in places where there are no rich neighbours. 

In recent weeks, as anxieties about criminality have escalated, there has been more discussion of extortion and kidnapping in the media and by politicians, promises of crackdowns on crime have often included “land invasions” in the list of crimes to be met with state violence.

This can only worsen the pervasive violence in our society, and worsen the suffering of people doing what they can to make their lives. Our cities should be preparing to receive and support people who are looking to make urban lives and not to repel them. 

• Pithouse is a distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies in Dublin and New York, an international research scholar in the philosophy department at the University of Connecticut, and an extraordinary professor at the University of the Western Cape.