More than three decades after the formal fall of colonial and apartheid regimes, land remains stubbornly white in its ownership, its meaning, and its power. The silence of constitutions, the diplomacy of commemorations, and the politeness of post-independence governments mask a violent continuity — a continuity that shouts: the land question was never answered. In South Africa and Namibia, the myth of post-colonial neutrality has become the grandest deception of our time, precisely because it hides in plain sight. It wears the robes of legality, constitutionalism, and democratic procedure — while beneath, the ghost of conquest smiles.
When Namibia and South Africa entered the post-colonial moment in 1990 and 1994 respectively, the dominant narrative spoke of reconciliation. But reconciliation between who and what? Between the dispossessed and those who kept the spoils? Between the landless and the landed? The so-called “rainbowism” of South Africa and the “One Namibia, One Nation” doctrine in Namibia were engineered not as frameworks of justice, but as devices of forgetting. They asked the black majority to suspend memory, to unsee the chain-link fences, to stop asking how 7.3% of South Africans (whites) own 72% of largely unproductive agricultural land while 81.4% of black Africans own just 4%, according to ACTSA — and how in Namibia, whites hold 27% of 39 million hectares of farmland compared to only 16% owned by black people. In both countries, reconciliation without redistribution became a betrayal dressed as peace.
The political elite — once freedom fighters — soon became managers of colonial leftovers. Namibia’s independence, brokered through United Nations Resolution 435, made no provision for immediate land restitution. South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC)-led government inherited the 1913 Land Act not as a relic, but as a living document, embedded within unequal property relations that the new Constitution would largely preserve. The so-called property clause — Section 25 — offered protection to those who had inherited their wealth from conquest, while demanding from the poor a process, a procedure, a performance. Liberation was postponed, once more.
To understand the “whitenisation” of land, we must first admit that whiteness is not simply a skin colour. It is an institutional logic — a regime of entitlement, order, and spatial supremacy. In both South Africa and Namibia, land is whitened not just by who owns it, but by how it is governed, mapped, fenced, titled, and imagined. Drive through the Stellenbosch wine route or the Khomas Hochland in Namibia, and you will see this regime in full performance: green pastures, surveillance cameras, armed gates, Afrikaans names. This is not nature — it is conquest turned into lifestyle.
Even the so-called “willing buyer, willing seller” principle — touted as a post-independence land reform policy — was not neutral. It was a euphemism for surrender. It positioned white landowners as sellers of choice, while black dispossessed communities were expected to become beggars with bureaucratic paperwork. In South Africa, this model failed spectacularly. By the end of 2019, a study of 62 farms under the State Land Lease and Disposal Policy revealed that nearly half were given to affluent individuals, while less than a fifth went to farmworkers. In Namibia, despite the much-hyped 2018 Second National Land Conference — redistribution has barely scratched the surface of German and Afrikaner commercial dominance.
What we are confronting here is not policy failure. It is policy design — crafted to protect the fruits of conquest while offering symbolic reforms to pacify demands. This pacification is made complete by the myth of post-colonial neutrality. The myth tells us that because we now vote, because we now sing our own national anthems, because we now have black presidents, the past has been settled. But in land, the past lives on — in deeds, titles, fences, and poverty. Neutrality, in this sense, becomes the most dangerous lie: it pretends to be objective while silently taking sides.
The language of neutrality itself is deeply colonial. Terms like “underutilised land,” “communal areas,” and “resettlement” carry the assumptions of colonial cartography. Communal land, where most black citizens live, is often framed as backward, unproductive, or mismanaged, while commercial farms — many of them established through dispossession — are protected as zones of national interest. This is a sleight of hand, a linguistic colonialism that continues to infect public policy. In both Namibia and South Africa, post-independence governments have inherited not only the maps but the meanings attached to those maps. The result? Redistribution is treated as a risk; preservation of white-owned land is treated as a duty.
What makes the land question especially explosive in Southern Africa is its intergenerational injustice. In both Namibia and South Africa, descendants of colonial settlers continue to benefit materially from ancestral theft, while descendants of the dispossessed inherit poverty, overcrowding, and exclusion. This is not just historical — it is structural inheritance. The white farm today is not only a symbol of stolen land, it is a machine of accumulation: it generates capital, secures loans, provides export commodities, and reproduces racialised wealth. The informal shack in the township does the opposite — it drains resources, invites debt, exposes its occupants to disease, and forecloses future opportunity. To speak of reconciliation in the midst of such opposites is to mock the idea of justice.
In South Africa and Namibia, the myth of post-colonial neutrality has become the grandest deception of our time, precisely because it hides in plain sight.
But land is not only economic — it is also spiritual. For many African communities, land is ancestry, identity, cosmology. To have land taken is not only to lose property, but to suffer cosmic displacement. This is why land reform cannot be reduced to transactional logic. It is about restoring sovereignty, not only over territory, but over being. In this sense, the failure of land reform is not just a policy failure; it is a moral collapse. It is the refusal to confront the theft at the heart of the nation-building project.
Indeed, in both countries, the façade of constitutionalism has allowed governments to delay the necessary rupture. South Africa’s 2018 parliamentary debate on land expropriation without compensation was a moment pregnant with possibility. Yet, despite the overwhelming support for constitutional change, the ruling elite retreated. The 2021 failed amendment of Section 25 revealed that the commitment to justice was rhetorical, not structural, and although the 2025 Expropriation Act aimed to revive reform, critics argue it remains largely symbolic and inadequate to redress historic land injustices. In Namibia, the late President Hage Geingob’s so-called “land reform phase” has similarly evaporated into a fog of workshops, conferences, and elite dialogues, while rural communities remain trapped in precarious tenure systems with no real power to own or develop land.
A particularly dangerous discourse gaining traction is the suggestion that the land issue should be “de-racialised” or “professionalised.” These are not neutral ideas. They are political attempts to sanitise structural theft, to pretend that land injustice can be fixed without confronting whiteness and its privileges. De-racialisation in this context is not about justice — it is about erasure. It allows the beneficiaries of conquest to remain unmarked, while those who resist are framed as radical, irrational, or even dangerous. This discursive violence echoes Frantz Fanon’s critique of how liberal rhetoric often masks the ongoing structural violence of colonial systems — a veil that renders oppression more palatable under the guise of reform.
In South Africa, the commodification of land reform has also created a new class dynamic. Some black beneficiaries, often politically connected, have become gatekeepers of redistributed land, engaging in leasing schemes that mirror colonial landlordism. This has birthed what some call a black landed gentry, whose interests increasingly align with existing white capital rather than with the landless masses. In Namibia, the resettlement farms have suffered similar distortions, with multiple farms lying underutilised or in legal limbo due to lack of support and institutional mismanagement. Land reform, rather than subverting colonial patterns, is in many cases repeating them with new faces.
What is to be done?
First, we must reject the illusion that legal processes alone will resolve historical land theft. As Professor Tshepo Madlingozi warns, constitutionalism in a settler-colonial context often becomes a “cruel optimism” — a hope that obscures the need for rupture. Redistribution requires confrontation. It requires dismantling property regimes designed to protect conquest. It demands radical state intervention — not to manage injustice, but to reverse it.
Second, we must recognise that the land struggle is not only about rural farms, but about urban land, spatial apartheid, and the right to the city. In Cape Town, Windhoek, Johannesburg, and Swakopmund, prime land continues to be reserved for the wealthy, while the black working class is pushed to the margins, enduring long commutes, high rent, and substandard infrastructure. Urban land justice must become a central pillar of the broader land struggle, or else we risk reproducing colonial geography even as we claim to have decolonised politics.
Finally, the struggle for land must be decolonial in orientation and pan-African in solidarity. The conditions that shaped the “whitenisation” of land were not national — they were regional and global. The Berlin Conference (1884-1885) did not draw borders based on soil type; it drew them based on colonial appetites. Our responses must therefore defy these imposed borders. Land justice in Namibia is incomplete without land justice in South Africa, and vice versa. In fact, without a regional front against settler-colonial land patterns, neoliberalism will continue to wear African masks while serving European interests.
The time for politeness is over. The land question must return to the centre of political struggle — not as a slogan, not as a negotiation, but as an uncompromising demand. Neutrality, in this context, is not noble — it is treason.
Gerson Ingashipola Shikukumwa is a Canon Collins Scholar pursuing a master’s degree in Political Science at the University of the Free State. His academic interests lie in urban and rural development, governance, and public policy. This essay was awarded the top prize in the Canon Collins Troubling Power Essay Competition.
Article first appeared in Mail & Guardian.
Photo by Tobias Reich on Unsplash.
