FUTURE FARMING
AYABONGA CAWE: In debating the land issue, remember Phillip Kgosana
Decades before the exploits of the #FeesMustFall movement became the centre of the public conversation in SA, a young student who lived with migrant workers in Langa placed the South African situation before the eyes of the world. Last Wednesday we commemorated the role the young Philip Kgosana played, and what lessons it provides for our debate on land. In 1960, when he was a 23-year-old University of Cape Town economics student, he led a 30,000-strong crowd from the Langa Flats to the police headquarters at Caledon Square. The men and women he led, he would recount before his passing, were people with whom he lived and shared bread as he could not get a place in a university residence: "I had to find my place among the migrant labourers as a university student… I was allocated a room in Block C with one Mr Roto, who could only speak Xhosa. He was nevertheless a very kind man and shared his food with me."Kgosana would later join the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) which, wi...
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