Hon Deputy Speaker, hon Ministers, and Deputy Ministers, hon members, good afternoon. Perhaps today I should begin with a quote from Jomo Kenyatta. I quote:
When the Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.
I pray today that it were that simple, that we could simply close our eyes, render a prayer and, when we opened our eyes, we would have the land of our forefathers back and they would have their Bible back. [Applause.] But the situation we find ourselves in is more complicated than that.
It is complicated by submissions which we've had to endure as the ad hoc committee on the legacy of the Natives Land Act of 1913 from the Afrikanerbond who claimed that, and I quote, "when they arrived in the 1600s, there were no black people here."
There is absolutely no truth to their submission, as we all know that Africans have been in this part of the country far earlier than the arrival of Europeans. The loss of the land rights by black people in rural areas in South Africa started in the 17th century and ran up to the 19th century through a process of colonisation and apartheid.
The assertion made by the Afrikanerbond is that the vast amount of land they have today was not occupied. The truth of the matter is that there were many wars of land dispossession which resulted in millions of black South Africans being butchered. For example, the war in Grahamstown of 1818 led by the mass murderer, Col John Graham, forced the Xhosas off their land which is now amongst the colonisers.
But as usual, the explanation for the wars of dispossession, as attested by the Afrikanerbond, was Mfecane. This is the universally accepted idea that the series of upheavals which took place in the 1820s and 1830s were caused primarily by the explosive expansion of the Zulu Kingdom under Shaka. Prof Julian Cobbing in his article, The Mfecane as Alibi, dismissed this notion saying, and I quote:
Dispossession was a result of the expansion of European colonial settlement.
More particularly, and I quote: They had been caused by the slave-raiding and slave-trading from the Cape colony in the south and from the Portuguese trading post at Delagoa Bay in the east.
Dispossession of land was thus cruel and brutal as it forced many Africans such as the Khoi, the Griquas, the Xhosas, and the Thembus off their land, and the list goes on.
One of the most brutal measures was the Natives Land Act of 1913, which was promulgated on 19 June 1913. The most important provision of this Act was that it restricted black people from buying, leasing and selling land, except in the scheduled areas which were referred to as reserves. As a result of the 1913 Natives Land Act and subsequent laws, millions of people were uprooted from their ancestral lands, often with deliberate cruelty and without compensation.
Land questions have played a key role in the history of South Africa, and their successful resolution is critically important for stability, democracy and development.
The hon Groenewald shares the same sentiments as those of the Afrikanerbond, who submitted that: "Application of race and ethnicity in land allocation is outdated".
I want to say to you that as long as whites, who form the minority in South Africa, own the majority of the land, the ANC will never change its policy on land reform, which consists of two elements. [Applause.]
Firstly, restitution for those who were dispossessed through forced removals and, secondly, redistribution of land to deal with the land hunger and the unequal distribution of land.
Hon Steyn speaks about the willing-buyer, willing-seller policy and I want to attest to the fact that ... [Interjections.]
That's the king's salutation, by the way; I'm just a chief. I just want to point that out and correct you. [Applause.]