{"id":198015,"date":"2019-04-03T14:36:28","date_gmt":"2019-04-03T12:36:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wereldwyd.co.za\/afriforum-responds-to-new-york-times-article-containing-south-african-land-debate-inaccuracies\/"},"modified":"2019-04-03T14:36:28","modified_gmt":"2019-04-03T12:36:28","slug":"afriforum-responds-to-new-york-times-article-containing-south-african-land-debate-inaccuracies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wereldwyd.co.za\/en\/afriforum-responds-to-new-york-times-article-containing-south-african-land-debate-inaccuracies\/","title":{"rendered":"AfriForum responds to New York Times article containing South African land debate inaccuracies"},"content":{"rendered":"

AfriForum would like to respond to a recent\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0article (\u201cIn South Africa\u2019s Fabled Wine Country, White and Black Battle Over Land\u201d, 9 March 2019) in which the civil rights organisation is mentioned. The organisation would also like to point out some of the glaring falsehoods that the article injects into an already volatile land debate.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0article, as well as another\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0article that it links to, contain falsehoods and rely greatly on a false narrative that is attributed to AfriForum. AfriForum is the largest civil rights group in Africa, with more than 218 000 members who contribute monthly to its efforts. Despite various campaigns by AfriForum to also protect the rights of black communities and individuals in South Africa and despite the organisation\u2019s repeated condemnation of white racism and racist groups, the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0persists in describing AfriForum as a \u2018far-right\u2019 group,\u201d says Ernst Roets, Deputy CEO of AfriForum.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Obtaining a clear picture of land ownership in South Africa is not straightforward. The\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0article cites a statistic that \u201cnearly 70% of farms held by individual owners in South Africa are controlled by whites\u201d. Roets says that this statistic is misleading and creates a false perception. Although a land audit conducted in 2014 by South Africa\u2019s Department of Rural Development and Land Reform shows that 79% of the country\u2019s land may still be in private hands, it does not reveal the races of the owners of this land.<\/p>\n

According to a 2017 land audit by AgriSA, black South Africans own more than or almost half of all agricultural land in three of South Africa\u2019s most fertile provinces: the Eastern Cape, Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal. Furthermore, landowners who are not white control more than 46% of South Africa\u2019s agricultural potential. In KwaZulu-Natal alone, 45,4% of agricultural land (surface area) is owned by black people. This represents 73,5% of the agricultural potential of the province.<\/p>\n

The full AgriSA report can be viewed here:
\nhttps:\/\/www.politicsweb.co.za\/documents\/land-in-black-hands-the-definitive-report\u2013agri-sa<\/a><\/p>\n

A special report by the Centre for Development and Enterprise states that since 1994 a total of 17\u00a0439\u00a0million hectares have been transferred from white ownership, which is equal to 21% of the 82\u00a0759 million hectares of farmland in freehold in South Africa. It is quite disheartening that the motion to review Section 25 of the Constitution disregarded the facts about the real progress that has already been made with land redistribution and restitution, and ignored some of the financial realities of farming.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, 24,03% of land in South Africa is state-owned, according to AfriForum\u2019s research report. AfriForum\u2019s full Land Ownership Report can be viewed here:
\nhttps:\/\/www.afriforum.co.za\/wp-content\/uploads\/AfriForum-Land-and-land-reform.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

The article relies heavily on emotional language throughout. It reads more like a subjective narrative than an accurate account of the facts:<\/p>\n

\u201cThey still lived in flimsy shacks in cramped quarters, while Mr. Smit and his friends hold vast tracts of land brutally snatched from African inhabitants generations ago and deliberately kept in white hands for decades to come.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

According to Ernst van Zyl, a Campaign Officer at AfriForum, this statement is historically inaccurate and displays a concerning lack of knowledge about South Africa\u2019s complicated past, demographic dispersion, as well as the history of the wine region in question.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Dutch arrived in the Western Cape\u2019s wine region in the 1650s and first came into contact with the Xhosa people at the Fish River (over 900 km from Cape Town) around the 1770s. The narrative that black South Africans already inhabited the wine region in question in the 1650s is evidently false and further escalates an already controversial and contested issue. One needs to look no further than a map of the demographic dispersion of black South Africans to see that this wine region is located deep within a region that historically has never been inhabited by black tribes. The article acknowledges the fact that new black residents migrate to the Stellenbosch region daily, however, which gives credence to the historical absence of black inhabitants in this area.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is regularly argued by many South African politicians that \u201cwhites stole the land\u201d. According to AfriForum, this is the single biggest historical fallacy of our time in the South African context. There are three ways in which white people acquired land in the country, namely:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Settlement on empty land;<\/li>\n
  2. Purchase of land through treaties, cooperation and agreements; and<\/li>\n
  3. The most controversial, but least significant, by conquest.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0article frames the land issue in South Africa as solely stemming from the latter. This significant oversimplification of South Africa\u2019s history is extremely damaging to race relations in the country and only leads to animosity and vilification.<\/p>\n

    The article demonstrates that South Africa\u2019s politics and history are more complicated than the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0can comprehend. Therefore, rather than pushing a false narrative \u2013 facilitating racial division and vilification of white farmers \u2013 and fanning the flames of racial tensions in South Africa, AfriForum urges the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0and similar publications to obtain both sides of the story before injecting their takes into already tense South African political debates. AfriForum is more than willing to provide foreign publications with our carefully-researched statistics and historical facts.<\/p>\n

    \u201cLet us work together to fight false, uninformed and antagonising narratives, rather than perpetuate them. Some clicks on an inaccurate article are surely not worth the real-world damage it can cause to race relations in South Africa?\u201d Van Zyl concludes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    View the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0article here:
    \n    https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/03\/09\/world\/africa\/stellenbosch-south-africa.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    AfriForum would like to respond to a recent\u00a0New York Times\u00a0article (\u201cIn South Africa\u2019s Fabled Wine Country, White and Black Battle…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":213,"featured_media":184377,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","_kadence_starter_templates_imported_post":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[800,810],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-news-flash"],"taxonomy_info":{"category":[{"value":800,"label":"News"},{"value":810,"label":"News flash"}]},"featured_image_src_large":["https:\/\/wereldwyd.co.za\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/grond.jpg",731,487,false],"author_info":{"display_name":"AfriForum W\u00eareldwyd","author_link":"https:\/\/wereldwyd.co.za\/en\/author\/sue-ann\/"},"comment_info":0,"category_info":[{"term_id":800,"name":"News","slug":"news","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":800,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":494,"filter":"raw","term_order":"0","cat_ID":800,"category_count":494,"category_description":"","cat_name":"News","category_nicename":"news","category_parent":0},{"term_id":810,"name":"News flash","slug":"news-flash","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":810,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":800,"count":343,"filter":"raw","term_order":"0","cat_ID":810,"category_count":343,"category_description":"","cat_name":"News flash","category_nicename":"news-flash","category_parent":800}],"tag_info":false,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/wereldwyd.co.za\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/grond.jpg","fimg_url":"https:\/\/wereldwyd.co.za\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/grond.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wereldwyd.co.za\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wereldwyd.co.za\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wereldwyd.co.za\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wereldwyd.co.za\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wereldwyd.co.za\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wereldwyd.co.za\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198015\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wereldwyd.co.za\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wereldwyd.co.za\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wereldwyd.co.za\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wereldwyd.co.za\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}