Land claimant fights for justice with dignity and determination

Sitting opposite a polite and smiling Lebogang Seale in a Johannesburg coffee shop, a quote from Alan Paton’s seminal Cry, The Beloved Country comes to mind.

“I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find that we are turned to hating.”

Having read his recently published book about how his family was thrown off the land they had occupied for generations to make way for white farmers – and how those farmers and the system of colonialism and then apartheid brutalised the clan – I find it almost unbelievable that he hasn’t turned to hating.

ALSO READ: A land claim success story – Limpopo community’s journey of resilience

Seale fights to get land back

When I ask him, he shrugs and flashes his trademark modest smile: “What would be the point?

“We need to live together, all of us, in this country and you do not achieve justice by visiting injustice on someone else…”

Many of Seale’s family still live in the barren and difficult lands in Limpopo to which they were banished, a step or two away from abject poverty.

Every time he drives back there from his home in Johannesburg, he is reminded of what might have been, not only for him and his kin, but for millions of other black people. He passes by lush farms, like ZZ2, which have been turned into thriving agribusinesses and account for a significant part of the country’s exports of fruit and vegetables.

His book – One hundred years of dispossession, my family’s quest to reclaim our land – traces the family claim to the land back to before the arrival of whites in that part of the country.

In the early 20th century, a woman called Dora Graham arrived and simply annexed the land of the Seales – who are of a long, royal bloodline – and this land was later passed down to others, or sold.

The family, and others were moved from their villages and resettled on other parts of what now became a massive farm.

They were “allowed” to grow their own crops on small pieces of land allocated to them… and in return became, effectively, indentured labourers for the farm owners.

ALSO READ: Derelict Zimbabwe farm is a stark warning

Out of the frying pan and into the fire

After decades of abuse – including the payment of pitiful “wages” for long hours of work, beatings and even murders – many families quit the farms for the uncertain life of a village in an apartheid Bantustan.

“We were treated as outsiders, almost as criminals by the others,” he says, recalling that even the church-going so-called Christians would mete out physical and mental cruelty to the newcomers.

As the first person in his family to get a full education, he says: “I was their hope for the future. Perhaps that it’s why I felt it was my duty to fight to get the land back.”

That fight, which began in the mid-1990s, after the new ANC government promised land reform and restitution and while Seale was working as a journalist at The Star newspaper was, effectively, the second battering assault on the family.

“It was a betrayal,” he says and even he can’t keep that look of sorrow from passing across his normally sanguine face.

“This was a government which promised to right the wrongs of the past, undo what had been done to black people by colonialism and apartheid.”

Those high hopes – as Seale and a committee of elders and community representatives put in their details claims to the land well before the cut off date in 1998 – have been dashed.

“It is now 26 years later and we still do not have the land. Nor have we been compensated,” he says, with an edge of despair in his voice.

“Those people who have passed on the stories of our past, those who experienced these things, they are slowly dying… dying without seeing their hopes and dreams realised.”

He acknowledges that even he might not see the day that justice is done.

Seale does not give up

He has fought against attempts to divide the community, repeated incompetence and possible corruption from those in the various government departments and land claims offices that have been dealing with the issue since 1998.

“The younger people – and even some of the older ones – don’t see why we are stilling fighting.”

Even his teenage daughter at one stage thought he was pursuing a quixotic question, tilting at the windmills of government bureaucracy and malfeasance.

“She has read the book now and understands a little better about why I am driven to do this.

“It is terrible to realise that the people who said they were going to liberate this country and to bring justice to the people who have suffered, seem concerned only with creating their own lavish lifestyles.”

Apart from his day job at the University of Johannesburg’s communications department, he is working on other projects, including a PhD dissecting how the ownership of South African newspapers has influenced their coverage of the news – and, in turn, possibly the course of events in this country.

As with his meticulous research for the land claim – which entailed interviewing the elders, delving into myriad books and historic documents as well as speaking to white farmers and their families – Seale’s PhD is going to require the same sort of diligent digging.

That’s not difficult for someone like him – once a journalist, always a journalist.

ALSO READ: Too late to save ‘citrus jewel’ Zebediela estate

Obligation to tell stories

He says he feels an obligation, as a journalist-historian, to tell these stories – the ones deemed not important enough, or the ones which might be too sensitive for some powerful people – to “add the knowledge about our country”.

“Future generations must know what happened and why.”

A people unaware of their past always risks their future.

“I have been fortunate. I have had a good, fulfilled life. I am not doing this for me. I don’t even really know whether I want the land back – I just want someone to acknowledge that this wasn’t right.”

He may be polite and unassuming, but sitting there across from him, I get the sense he will not let this go.

If the powers-that-be think they can ignore him and the others and that he will go away, they are underestimating the man.