So you really want to talk about land expropriation?

Saul Mkhize would be turning 89 next week had he not been mown down by a policeman’s bullet four decades ago.

A leader of the Driefontein community, near Wakkerstroom, which was a so-called “black spot” and therefore earmarked for forced removal by the government because it was deemed to be too close to a white area, Mkhize was shot and killed in April 1983 by a white policeman he was, ironically, trying to save from an enraged crowd. 

Mkhize was addressing a protest march against the pending removal of the village when the policeman and his colleague tried to disperse the gathering, which they said was illegal. The young policeman, Const Johannes Nienaber, was charged but later acquitted. Mkhize’s murder became a cause célèbre, and the funeral was attended by foreign diplomats and dignitaries such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It highlighted once again the cruelty and brutality of uprooting settled communities merely to satisfy the exigencies of the apartheid policy, and the lengths the government was prepared to go to enforce it. 

At a vigil for Mkhize at St Mary’s Cathedral in Johannesburg, John Kane-Berman, from the Institute of Race Relations, gave a stirring speech that is worth repeating at some length not only for its searing tone, but for its unmatched castigation and denunciation of the needless destruction of communities in the name of an ideology.

“We’ve come here,” he said, “to honour a man who sought no martyrdom or glory but only to serve his people and fight for what belonged to them. Saul Mkhize tried to live for his community. Instead, he died for it — his life simply snuffed out by a white policeman half his age, a man whom he was trying to protect from angry people ...  

“One had only to visit Saul Mkhize’s home on a hillside and look at the rest of Driefontein stretching away in tranquillity below to realise the abominable wickedness of a policy seeking to destroy what these South Africans and their fathers and grandfathers before them have painstakingly created. They had no greater ambition than to be left in peace, earning enough to feed and clothe their children and send them to school, abiding by the law, posing no threat to anyone else and representing no burden to the state.

“In a land riven by fear and hate and turmoil, they are a force for stability — the kind of people on whom the future of this country should be built.

“Instead, in the name of selfishness so grotesque as to be almost beyond understanding, they face eviction from their homes and removal to one or other of the human refuse bins that dot the face of this country. They are not alone in this threat, for hundreds upon hundreds of other similar farms, and hundreds upon hundreds of similar people, are in the same predicament.

“Never having been in such a plight myself, I find it difficult to do anything more than guess at the deep anxiety and even terror that must grip the hearts of people who are to be violently torn away from a place that belongs to them and deposited they know not where. The mastery that they have over their environment, they have gained through experience. Depositing them in a new and alien environment, without even the land to carry on the activity they know best, which is farming, does not fall far short of simply destroying them.”  

Driefontein — and Daggakraal, near Volksrust — occupy a unique place in the annals of black resistance and land dispossession. Shortly after the founding of the Union of South Africa, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, president of the ANC, established the South African Native Farmers’ Association which, in anticipation of the passage of the 1913 Natives Land Act — which was to restrict black people to only 13% of arable land — encouraged black people to buy plots of land in the Driefontein and Daggakraal areas. Seme himself owned two farms in Daggakraal. 

The aim of course was not only to take people’s land from them but to deprive them of their South African citizenship

Initially the community of Driefontein made a decent living farming and planting trees and selling timber to local white merchants — until the merchants stopped buying the wood to encourage blacks to work on nearby farms and sawmills. Then in the 1970s the government announced that the people of Driefontein were to be relocated. In accordance with apartheid laws, those classified as Zulus were to be moved to Babanango, in KwaZulu, almost 300km away; and the Swazis to Lochiel, in the fledgling KaNgwane homeland. 

It was during the struggle to resist such an insane and inhumane decision that Mkhize was killed. His committee had made numerous representations to government without success. In reply to one such plea, JJG Wentzel, deputy minister of land affairs, effectively told them to chill and enjoy the ride.

“Every one of us,” he said, “has to make sacrifices in some way or other to further peace and prosperity in this beautiful country of ours. Although the government appreciates and respects your feelings, the relocation and resettlement of your people will have to be carried out in the interest of all concerned.” 

Driefontein ultimately won its battle. Mkhize wasn’t around to enjoy the fruits of his efforts. He had paid with his life. Driefontein has since been renamed Saul Mkhizeville in his honour.

But of course, Driefontein was not an isolated case. It was a mirror of what was happening across the country — people being mercilessly uprooted and shunted in a maniacal pursuance of the Nats’ pipe dream called separate development. According to the Surplus People’s Project, from 1960 until the 1980s more than 3.5-million black people were forcibly moved by the government in probably one of the largest removals of people in modern history.    

The aim of course was not only to take people’s land from them but to deprive them of their South African citizenship.

So you want to talk about land expropriation? Or people being executed? Tell that to Saul Mkhize and many others who lost their lives fighting for their lands. 

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