Former colonies calling for reparations

When the first European settlers landed on the tip of Africa in 1652, they saw a vast, unclaimed land. Never mind the Khoisan, Hottentots, or Xhosas. In European eyes, they didn't own the land in any "proper" sense.

Nearly 350 years after those first settlers, and 125 years after European nations carved up the continent at the Berlin Conference, much of Southern Africa's most fertile land remains in the hands of the descendents of those early white colonists.

African delegates to the World Conference Against Racism this week in Durban, South Africa, are calling on the US and European nations to apologize, and make restitution for colonial land grabs and the slave trade.

African delegates from developing nations want a clear acknowledgment that colonialism left a legacy of racism that is responsible for many of their problems, including landlessness. They also want promises for help in solving these problems, whether that help comes in the form of reparations or aid.

But the conference is foundering in the wake of the pullout Monday by the US and Israel in a dispute over defining Zionism as racism - which pro-Palestinian parties also cast as an issue of colonial domination. The US has also objected to the inclusion of slavery reparations on the agenda.

Here in Southern Africa, and in Zimbabwe in particular, the inequalities in the ownership of land are considered the root of current political upheaval.

This week Patrick Chinamasa, the Zimbabwean justice minister, made the most direct demand for reparations as a means of aiding with land reform. He said the objective for which 60,000 Zimbabweans had died during the country's independence war will not have been achieved until the land is equitably distributed.

In Zimbabwe, 70 percent of the land is owned by whites. Since early last year, white-owned farms in Zimbabwe have been invaded by armies of self-styled war veterans backed by Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. Even as UN delegates meet in Durban, the situation there has deteriorated. In recent days, thousands of acres of white-owned farmland have been set ablaze and more than 5,000 farm workers and their families have been driven from their homes.

"Landlessness is not an accident," says Andile Mngxitama, land-rights coordinator for the South African National Land Committee. "It is the result of a comprehensive racist system. It was calculated to create an unsustainable level of comfort and wealth for a certain population."

In South Africa, landless blacks have increasingly resorted to illegal land occupations. About 70 percent of black South Africans live in rural areas, but blacks still own only 13 percent the country's land. In neighboring Namibia, where blacks were not allowed to own property until after the country received independence from South Africa in 1990, black farmers are threatening Zimbabwe-style land seizures if commercial farming land - 70 percent of which is held by whites - is not redistributed more quickly.

On the other side of the world, in Latin America, most land continues to be held in large estates that are remnants of early colonialism. Landless peasants in Brazil, where less than 2 percent of people own two-thirds of the arable land, have launched a highly coordinated land-seizure campaign that has become one of the main features in the country's political environment.

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