What is the great injustice in that?LeafByNiggle:
I assume the 80% you use is Black Africans. If so your analysis is wrong. The land may have been owned by certain tribes. But not every Black South African is a member of those tribes.
It is not inherently unjust to consider race in restoring rights that were taken unjustly based on race.
The “right” is to own land, and it was restored.
But what was “…the community…” at the time of colonization? The land was then as underpopulated as the Great Plains in the U.S. were when Columbus landed. And the “Community” then were scattered bands of bushmen, not the people who are going to get the land now.
Land reform is not an easy problem to solve. It took 300 years to create the unjust situation. It has only been addressed now for about 25 years.LeafByNiggle:
The “right” is to own land, and it was restored.
That’s different than giving people land they never ever owned, in any previous generation. They were immigrants who came to SA.
Incidentally, I’m for effective land reform. But that is not what we are seeing in SA.
Because of apartheid laws that confined blacks to 13% of the land, now we will never know how many of them would have owned the rest of the land. We will also never know how many whites would have ended up owning land without the benefit of those very same laws which reserved those land purchases for them exclusively. However your description of colonization is incorrect. Land was not acquired simply by moving into unused land. The colonists encountered resistance from established communities and took the land by force of arms. Look up the Xhosa Wars.LeafByNiggle:
But what was “…the community…” at the time of colonization? The land was then as underpopulated as the Great Plains in the U.S. were when Columbus landed. And the “Community” then were scattered bands of bushmen, not the people who are going to get the land now.
The children are losing the inheritance because of the sins of the father. This is similar to the losses that we endure because of the Ancestral Sin. I would be wary of suggesting that it is unjust.
What was the Native American population, when Columbus arrived?
So, the land was quite clearly occupied. The fact that blacks fought among themselves is no justification for Europeans to take all the land for themselves.
It is if the children are still benefiting today from those very same sins. And what they “pay” is nothing more than the return of what their fathers unjustly acquired. There is no “punishment” beyond that.
Before either the Xhosa, the Boers or the Brits arrived, it was populated by bushmen who one might argue weren’t really quite 'black" in the same sense as the Zulu or Xhosa and might have been Asian/Australoid. They preexisted what we think of as “black Africans” in AFrica, and their language is related to no other. They’re probably the first people ever to live in Africa.
Who said it did. You’re arguing that apartheid justifies expropriating land from white people and supporting it by saying it was “taken” from e.g. the Xhosa by whites. I’m just saying in large part it wasn’t. Most of the land in S.A. was taken by blacks and whites from the bushmen, who are an older people than either. Probably before the Boers and Zulu the bushmen were in possession for 20,000 years. The Xhosa came later than the Boers and Zulu, who expanded into the area more or less simultaneously.
If the bushmen even become a repressed majority and rise up and take political control of their homelands, then we can discuss the morality of their land reform proposals. Right now we have a currently dispossessed majority population which is in the process of trying to correct the injustice of their situation. It would be the same as if China took control of the American continent by force and used as their excuse, “Well, the Americans took it from the natives a long time ago.” and then they somehow made all current Americans move to Montana and reserved the rest of the land only for Chinese people. Then some time in the future, somehow, the Americans who were relegated to live only in Montana rose up and got political control from the Chinese, and passed laws saying that land could be expropriated from the Chinese who had taken over and given to the descendants of those Americans who were confined to Montana. At that point could anyone protest that those Americans have no moral right to take back the land that the Chinese invaders took?LeafByNiggle:
Who said it did. You’re arguing that apartheid justifies expropriating land from white people and supporting it by saying it was “taken” from e.g. the Xhosa by whites. I’m just saying in large part it wasn’t. Most of the land in S.A. was taken by blacks and whites from the bushmen, who are an older people than either. Probably before the Boers and Zulu the bushmen were in possession for 20,000 years. The Xhosa came later than the Boers and Zulu, who expanded into the area more or less simultaneously.