Unmasking the “Whitenisation” of Land: The Myth of Post-Colonial Neutrality in South Africa and Namibia
This essay, which won the top prize in the annual Canon Collins Troubling Power Essay Competition, explores issues of social justice in Southern Africa. It examines how, decades after the formal end of colonialism and apartheid, land ownership and power remain dominantly white in both South Africa and Namibia.
The post-independence narrative of neutrality and reconciliation conceals deep continuities of colonial dispossession. The legal and constitutional frameworks may appear democratic, yet beneath them lingers the unaddressed question of who truly owns the land and whose history is being silenced.
“The silence of constitutions, the diplomacy of commemorations, and the politeness of post-independence governments mask a violent continuity — a continuity that shouts: the land question was never answered.”
Despite independence—Namibia in 1990 and South Africa in 1994—the ideal of reconciliation was built on fragile ground. It sought harmony without justice. The slogans “One Namibia, One Nation” and “rainbowism” in South Africa became instruments of forgetting rather than healing, encouraging the black majority to overlook inequality and displacement.
The enduring disparity is striking: a small minority, about 7.3 percent of white South Africans, controls around 72 percent of largely unproductive agricultural land, while the majority remains landless. This imbalance reveals how the myth of post-colonial neutrality operates as the grand illusion of our age, cloaked in the language of democracy but haunted by the ghost of conquest.
Author’s Summary
The essay exposes how post-apartheid South Africa and Namibia perpetuate colonial land injustice under democratic facades, urging a renewed reckoning with the unfulfilled promise of land reform.