I’m pretty sure to the dispossessed, living in dire poverty, African, the profit the white farmers have drawn off their land over several generations, ought to be considered sufficient compensation.
If you’re a white holder of a large farm, how did you not see this coming?
I think you need to look at this in the context of existing law.
Leaving aside apartheid and all racial issues, and looking at it in the context of US (or other countries’) law. Suppose some family has been living in a house for the past 40 years, and some other guy establishes with valid proof that it belonged to his father and that the house was stolen by the father of the current occupiers. How does the law treat that?
IANAL, but I’m guessing that the current occupants are out of luck. Tough break for them, but that’s how it goes.
Not in my state (and any other I believe). Adverse possession kicks in after 10 years. If there was not suit filed within that ten year period, the occupiers own it outright.
In this parallel instance, a lawsuit would not have been possible.
Just for background, what was the population of South Africa before the Europeans arrived? Where did people live? I can’t believe that it’s the entire country that was “stolen” from the natives.
They didn’t take ALL the land, just the agriculturally very rich land. Which, as you can imagine was heavily used and populated at the time.
(It’s not a lot different to what happened to the first nation peoples of NAmerica. We pushed them out of the farmland we wanted. When we needed more forest, we pushed them out of there. When we had used up the game, same again. And ever onward, the same with water resources, mineral deposits all the way up to oil. )
As you can see, the displaced always end up on the useless, remote, hard scrabble, poorly watered, etc lands.
People lived everywhere. Why wouldn’t they? The more inhospitable areas had lower population densities but “the people living in this large area are nomadic and roam around large stretches of land” doesn’t equal “nobody lives here”. People live in Gobi, in the Artic Circle, Sahara, the Amazon Forest…
What does this have to do in any way with the expropriations of the non-White lands in **the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s on as Dibble has highlighted? **
Irrelevant.
Everywhere.
It wasn’t *all *stolen. Wasn’t that just absolutely fucking generous of them.
Now that’s out of the way, care to explain the scare quotes around “stolen”, if you’re Just Asking Questions “for background”, wink wink?
Gotta Admit, Balthisar, that seems off point.
Stick to the topic, all of you.
I can’t think of a better recipe for a “people’s revolution” then South Africa ignoring the growing demands of a poor, landless black/African class.
The only way forward is to create a WORKING land reform. It won’t be easy, but the alternative is a Zimbabwe-like land seizures by the poor/desparate.
Ignoring this issue (“just let the landowners keep all the land”) isn’t a viable solution.
So assuming you are living in the USA and are not native American, your land and home should be returned to its rightful native American owners?
If your *specific *home can be pointed to as having been taken from specific Native Americans, in living memory, then yes, it should be.
Otherwise, this is just an attempted gotcha that ignores all the many ways the SA situation is *not *like the American one. Including the big one - Native Americans don’t have the power to effect redress, SA non-whites actually do.
Why does living memory matter if you are trying to right a wrong?
That’s probably true. But the issue here is also a matter of principle. I recognize that, in your hypothetical scenario, the children of the original owners are not likely to get the stolen house back. But that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t.
To be honest, I feel basically the same about groups like the Australian Aborigines, the American Indians, and any number of other native peoples. In a truly just world, the local Aboriginal tribes would get Sydney Harbour and its foreshores handed back to them, and the Native American tribes from the Bay Area should have ownership of San Francisco and Silicon Valley. I understand that this isn’t going to happen, but it doesn’t mean that doing it would be wrong.
If someone stole a watch from your father 50 years ago, and then sold it to someone else, who sold it to someone else, who sold it to someone else, who sold it to someone else, who then sold it to me, the watch is still stolen. And it’s still stolen no matter how many hands it passed through, and it’s still stolen even if I bought it in good faith, and had no idea that it was stolen property. Legal statutes of limitations might mean that the theft can no longer be prosecuted, but they in my opinion don’t change the basic principle. I’m not arguing that I should go to prison for buying or possessing it, but once I know it’s stolen, and that you were the rightful heir to your father’s estate, the right thing would be to give the watch (back) to you.
I’ve agreed with most of your arguments in this thread, but you sort of lose me here. If the principle is right—and I believe that it is—then it should be the same no matter how long ago the dispossession took place.
I understand that issues of principle and issues of practicality work differently. I take your point that the pragmatic issues related to time and political power mean that redress is much more likely in South Africa, but it doesn’t mean that the claims of other groups are invalid. The fact that Native Americans don’t have the power to reclaim their land doesn’t mean that they lack moral standing.
Both for the practicality of proof and the existence of the much-vaunted “real” victims.
I wasn’t talking about moral standing. In the specific North American case “Rightful owners” is a bit tricky for much of the territory, given the breakdown European disease wrought before physical Europeans actually rocked up. Which natives get which territory?
Now, honouring all the actual treaties etc is something I’d get behind all the way. But the South African land claims thing isn’t about some abstract idea of taking back all land from Europeans as a matter of principle. At least not for non-crazy people (here, I’m not calling you crazy). It’s about more specific claims than that, claims that post-date original European settlement. I’m not using “stolen land” as a metaphor for colonialsim.
The fundamental mistake in this talk of returning the land to the original inhabitants is that it relies on a simplistic, idealized view of the situation.
In America white people tend to talk of Native Americans as though they are all the same - a generic racial group, imagined to have been living in a peaceful, utopian way before whites arrived. ‘Noble savages’ in other words. This is still the view that predominates in present-day America.
Native Americans were not all the same. There were and are many tribes, nations, languages, and racial sub-groups. They were often at war with each other, killed and committed wrongs against each other, and the land changed hands many times.
Suppose you want to return a piece of land to the ‘original inhabitants’. You’ll find that at some point tribe A occupied that land, then it was conquered by tribe B, who were ousted by tribe C, who formed an alliance with tribe D… so who do you return the land to? Who were the ‘original inhabitants’? Some vague generic idea of ‘those people’, seen as all the same, and either as subhuman or as noble savages - or real groups of real people who were very different and occupied different parts of the land at different times?
How far back do you go? In almost every region of the world, if you go back far enough, you’ll find that somebody killed somebody else and took over the land by force, somebody enslaved somebody else, and those people had in turn earlier taken over the land from somebody else, back and back.
You have to draw a line somewhere and use common sense. Mr D. is right about living memory, because that’s as far back as it is reasonable to go - when there are still living people who were personally affected by a wrong, and still living people who committed that wrong. Historical wrongs further back than that can’t be righted, but we can still do something about wrongs in the recent past against living people.
…to add nuance here: historical wrongs going further back than that can be righted, especially if bound by treaty. In New Zealand our founding document is the Treaty of Waitangi. At the heart of the treaty is the concept of partnership, autonomy, reciprocity and redress.
We are officially a bicultural nation, and historical grievances go through the process. The nature of the settlements vary from Iwi to Iwi and range from return of land to monetary settlements.
None of this changes my argument in the slightest.
I’m well aware of the diversity of the Native American peoples. I teach United States history and California History at a university in California. I can name many of the key tribal territories that existed in California (and other parts of the United States) at contact, and could, if I were so inclined, discuss some of the key differences between groups like the Luiseño, the Chumash, the Miwok, the Pomo, the Modoc, etc., etc. There was also incredible diversity in places like Australia, with a wide range of climates and geographies and cultures and practices and languages. I have anything BUT a simplistic and idealized understanding of this history.
But European arrivals and conquest fundamentally changed, in some very important ways, the nature of cultural contact in the New World. There was certainly conflict before, but the nature and scale and purpose of it changed dramatically afterwards. As I said, I recognize that none of this is actually going to lead to a return of the lands to their native owners. I’m a realist on that point. But don’t assume, just because I disagree with you, that I don’t understand the situation. I’ll bet, given my job, that I have a far better understanding than you of the pre- and post-contact situation here in the United States.