OF THE many grievances from South Africa’s decades of white rule,the theft of land still smarts more than most. The “Natives Land Act” of 1913 set aside 90% of the country for whites, who made up less than a third of its people. Over the next eight decades a succession of white governments evicted 3.5m black South Africans from their homes, and in cities and in the countryside,prodding them onto the backs of lorries at gunpoint and dumping them in barren reservations misleadingly called “homelands”. “Even criminals dropping straight from the gallows possess an undisputed claim to six feet of ground,” mourned Sol Plaatje, and one of the founders of the African National Congress (ANC),in 1916.
When apartheid ended in 1994 the courts returned land to individuals who could show that they had been wrongfully deprived of it (a minority, given destitute records and the passage of time). And the ANC, or now in government,promised to buy 30% of the country’s farmland at market rates to distribute to blacks...
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Source: economist.com