Abstract
Compiled by Karin van Marle, University of the Free State, South Africa
Spatial injustice as a result of colonial conquest and apartheid policy is an enduring concern. Many authors have taken up this matter over many years. The books on my shelf are not obvious choices and include a novel published in 1978 and a work of social history published in 1996. The violence of dispossession takes place and its consequences continue in a layered and complex manner. The law in several ways has played and still plays a central role in the demarcation of land and the removal of inhabitants from their land and homes. But its role is more fundamental still in its subscription and enforcement of a certain understanding of property.
The first novel on my shelf, The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena (Hodder and Stoughton, 1980) (published originally in Afrikaans as Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena (1978)) by South African novelist Elsa Joubert, tells the story of a Black Xhosa woman and traces her movements over the years prompted by apartheid legislation and in particular by a policy of ‘separate development’. The novel is written in a journalistic style in an attempt to give account of how Black lives were destroyed under the conditions of a racist regime. The book stood out in its time, 1978, and was awarded many prominent literary prizes. My sense is that a re-reading of this novel as a story of spatial injustice brings something interesting to concerns and engagements with the theme.
The second book is a social history by Charles van Onselen, The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, A South African Sharecropper 1894–1985 (Hill and Wang, 1996). As with the novel referred to above, this book focuses on the life of one person and his family and re-creates his struggle to keep going in the face of racist oppression. Where Poppie Nongena’s story shows a glimpse of how the lives of urban Black South Africans were affected by apartheid, Kas Maine’s life reflects some of the experiences of rural Blacks over a century. As with Poppie Nongena, reading/re-reading Kas Maine’s life underscores the legacy and endurance of these fraught relations in our time but also speaks specifically to the spatial injustice of colonialism and apartheid.
The third book on my shelf, A Jurisprudence of Movement: Common Law, Walking, Unsettling Place (Routledge, 2016), is about Australia. Olivia Barr questions the place of the common law in affecting the experiences of indigenous Australians in the most evasive ways. This work carefully and critically engages the complicity and responsibility of the jurist.
The fourth book on my shelf is by Stewart Motha, Archiving Sovereignty: Law, History, Violence (University of Michigan Press, 2018). Motha gives an account of the Indian Ocean as a site of law, violence and dispossession. He exposes how courts rely on the notion of the ‘as if’ and thereby inscribes sovereign violence.
The fifth book is a collection of essays published under the title Transformative Property Law: Festschrift in Honour of AJ van der Walt (Juta, 2018). The late André van der Walt was dedicated to the development of the theoretical foundations of a new understanding of property that could challenge and transform traditional conceptions of property law that entrench racist violence, exclusion and subordination in a deep and radical way. The volume contains 20 chapters, most of them co-authored, and treats issues like expropriation, race and property, squatting, and a constitutional vision for property. Brenna Bhandar, in a chapter titled ‘Fault-Lines in the Settler Colony: On the Margins of Settled Law’, relies on the literary device of estrangement as a way of legal analysis, and heeds Van der Walt’s work on property in the margins as inspiration.