Lawmakers debated whether to change Section 25 of the constitution to enable authorities to seize land to address racial land inequalities left over from colonialism and white minority rule.

Redressing them has been a flagship promise of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) but little progress has been made on it nearly three decades since the end of apartheid.

“Today we stand to complete the fight against the original sin of land dispossession,” the amendment’s main champion, Justice Minister Roland Lamola, said in a speech in parliament.

He said the state was targeting land only under special conditions such as it having longtime informal occupants, being unused and held purely for speculation, or being abandoned.

But it was rejected by the ANC’s opponents on both sides of the spectrum. The main opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) and right-wing Freedom Front Plus view the plan as an assault on property rights, while the radical Marxist EFF — which also voted against — wants the state to take control of the land.

In all, 204 lawmakers backed the amendment and 145 voted against, with no abstentions.

In the early 20th century, South Africa’s British imperial rulers gave the lion’s share of farmland to whites, mostly to the Afrikaners, descendants of generations of Dutch settlers who make up most white farmers today.

They left just seven per cent for “natives,” meaning Blacks, aboriginal Khoisan and “coloureds” — Afrikaans-speaking South Africans of mixed multiracial heritage.

Then in 1950, the Afrikaner National Party passed a law limiting movements of non-whites, kicking 3.5 million Blacks off their ancestral homelands and putting them in townships.

Twenty seven years of Black majority rule has barely shifted this apartheid geography, despite Nelson Mandela’s pledge after taking power in 1994 to return 30 per cent of land in five years.

“This bill…does nothing to help landless South Africans who have been let down by the ANC’s failing land reform,” the DA’s land committee chairperson Annelie Lotriet said.

Nearly 26 million hectares — three quarters — of privately-owned land is still in the hands of whites, who make up less than a 10th of the population of 58 million, while only four per cent is owned by Blacks who are nearly 80 per cent, government data shows.

The government has tried to persuade whites to sell their land under a ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ policy, but found hardly any willing sellers. A 2016 parliamentary study found the programme had transferred just 5.46 per cent of farmland to Black individuals, trusts and state institutions in two decades.

— Tim Cocks is a Reuters correspondent for southern Africa in Johannesburg.

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The killing of Brendan Horner, a white man whose body was found tied to a pole at his farm in Free State province, sparked riots at the start of this month, and prompted President Cyril Ramaphosa to appeal to South Africans to “resist attempts … to mobilize communities along racial lines.”

The farmers outside the courthouse in the town of Senekal accused the government of failing to protect them from violent crime. Their opponents, from the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), complained about what they see as the continued domination of South Africa’s economy by whites, while many Black South Africans remain as poor as they did under apartheid.

EFF leader Julius Malema sat inside the courtroom in which the two murder suspects filed a request for bail during Friday’s hearing. The judge adjourned the case until Oct. 20.

Afterwards, Malema told a rally of thousands, “don’t be confused by the so-called farm murders,” adding that many more Black South Africans were victims of violent crime.

“Those are the ones who deserve our sympathy, not the old, white racists. We don’t want to kill (the) white man. We want equality.”

EFF supporter Khaya Langile, from Soweto, said, “I’m here because of white people … taking advantage of us.”

Tired of murders

Earlier, police separated the two groups with razor wire in one street, but despite the noisy standoff there was no violence.

“There have been indications of tensions but by and large all of them took a decision that they did not want to see violence,” State Security minister Ayanda Dlodlo said outside the court.

The farmers mostly wore khaki shirts and shorts, a few wore military outfits, and at least one was armed. A group on motorbikes sporting long beards drove through Senekal, some waving flags emblazoned with crosses.

“We are getting tired now of all the farm murders,” said Geoffrey Marais, 30, a white livestock trader from Delmas, where a woman was strangled to death two weeks ago.

“Enough is enough. They (the government) must start to prioritize these crimes.”

Murders of white farmers make up a small fraction of the total in South Africa, which has the world’s fifth highest murder rate. In the 2019-20 financial year there were 21,325 murders across the country, of which 49 were white farmers, according to police statistics.

The farmers also feel threatened by a government plan to expropriate white-owned land without compensation as part of an effort to redress economic inequalities that remain stark a quarter of a century after the end of apartheid.

Roughly 70 per cent of privately-owned farmland in South Africa is owned by whites, who make up less than nine per cent of the country’s population of 58 million.

— Tim Cocks is a Reuters southern Africa correspondent based in Johannesburg.

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