Land as Home in South Africa: The Living and the Dead in Ritual Conversations

Introduction

In Ingogo, Kwazulu-Natal (KZN) province, South Africa, both the living and the dead find themselves landless. They have made ceaseless daily efforts to remain connected, fighting against the odds stacked against them by the constant evictions, and displacements caused by land grabbing, racism, and regimes of forced or slave labor.

In a world where the living and the dead, their conversations, and the land are all deeply intertwined, the impact of land dispossession has been like a nuclear bomb. It has scattered into loose particles what for ages had been meticulously placed in vital relationships of proximity, intimacy, and mutual belonging. Maintaining our analytic resolve as social scientists in the face of a tragedy of such magnitude has also been a challenge. In this respect, it is worth highlighting the undeniable importance of the South African experience to social sciences and its roots that date back to an era marked by colonial measures—like the Glen Grey Act of 1894—the effects of which are still felt over a century later. Modern social sciences, their political challenges, and their theoretical achievements are deeply imbibed by these corrosive, destructive forces. Fractures in the world have doubled in our existence as practitioners of interpretation.

Instead of pursuing what might seem an unattainable goal—a world apprehended as a whole, unfragmented—modern social scientists have found ways to work round this predicament by developing conceptual slots into which things and facts are assembled into what are taken to be seemingly heuristically useful classifications. Any theory attempting to depict life as a whole came to be seen as either scientifically infeasible or politically undesirable. In order to avoid conceptual coalescences that threaten these classificatory devices, land has mostly been approached in terms of either its temporal capacity or its spiritual aspects. Along the same lines, other threads have been explored as significant, inescapable features of land. On one side: labor relations, migration, property, productivity, and political conflicts. On another: its ritual importance, cattle herding, lobola payments, funeral rites, ancestor cults, and so on. Despite acknowledging the limits of each chosen field of analysis, contemporary scientists have been led to believe that this approach is more faithful to reality than attempts to apprehend the world as a living whole.

The aim of this article is precisely to challenge what has become established as a pragmatic approach that, I argue, has lead us to order the world in accordance with principles that clash with our research experience among people who themselves constantly produce knowledge that challenges the fractured scientific world. For those with whom I conduct my research, there is nothing like an economic dimension of the land separate from its cultural quality. Their fight as landless people thus targets more than a territory, with delimited boundaries, intended for rural production. For them, land is home, insofar as it entails an unparalleled power to bring together the living, the dead, and those yet unborn. Hence, their claims as landless people go far beyond the bureaucratic slots established by the South African political land reform program or by any neatly segmented academic or disciplinary approach. If we are to comprehend their efforts to build a commitment to each other, despite the perennial threats, disputes, or incertitudes that they need to understand and act upon, we must ourselves commit to developing theories that work to overcome our own analytic deficiencies.

Inspired by their intellectual effort to keep together what has been threatened with annihilation, in this article I contend that the imbrication of ritual, land, and the conversation between the living and the dead as a whole is in constant formation and transformation. The lessons provided by the Khubeka family show that the past is a haunting landscape set ahead of us, one that we must face and intervene in if we are committed to belong and to relate beyond boundaries of segregation in space like apartheid, but also segregation in time like what is experienced by those whose history is doomed to disappear in the endless abyss of colonial archives. This article also seeks to challenge social scientists to commit themselves in the same way in which the people with whom they do research commit themselves to the dead and to those who have yet to be born in academia, working to build a concept of belonging that is no longer based on a chain of unattainable and unchanging events, but on a living notion of home, to which the past should be no longer a foreigner’s land but regained holy ground.

A History Called Home

Redistribution has been one of many land reform approaches adopted in South Africa to address present-day land concentration and social inequality, which is deeply connected to the earlier racist system and various policies of territorial plundering. Put simply, the land redistribution program run by South Africa’s democratic government offers grants to families who have proved that they fit into the farm dweller or labor tenant categories, referring in effect to black people who have lived and worked in rural areas legally belonging mainly to white farm owners. Different legal acts have assured farmworkers the right to stay in the area where they used to live when working for a farm owner, even if their labor is no longer hired—such as the Land Reform (Labour Tenants) Act (3 of 1996) and the Extension of Security of Tenure Act (62 of 1997). For landlords, the new regulation acknowledging dwellers’ rights to land has forced them to meet labor laws that supposedly make their business less profitable and their land ‘unsellable’ due to the on-going litigation. Little wonder, then, that the presence of these families on the farms has been almost entirely unwelcome. Their daily life is pervaded by various menaces intended to evict them, since, from the farmer’s perspective, their presence diminishes the value of the land. Playfully, people in Ingogo and the surrounding areas I have visited call the systematic method used by farmers to expel undesired people from their land as ‘constructive eviction’. ¹

Families applying for redistribution differ from restitution claimants since they lack title deeds or any other documentary evidence to prove earlier private property ownership. What they can substantiate, instead, is a livelihood deeply linked to the land—where they have been residing, where they eventually cultivate inconspicuous gardens, raise small flocks, and bury their kinfolk—and to their labor relations with the (white) owner of the overwhelming farm (Ntsebeza & Hall, 2007). In short, they are landless people fighting for a land that has never belonged to them in legal terms. Despite the violent rejection of the legitimacy of their claims by the authoritarian state over decades, they affirm that they belong to the land and the main evidence they hold up to prove this relationship is their performance of rituals on circumscribed ground within the property of a white farmer for whom they have worked.

Umabo is one of those rituals. It is the closing ceremony of ‘traditional’ Zulu weddings, when the bride’s relatives offer gifts to their in-laws. This usually takes place on the wedding day itself, at the bridegroom’s place:

the gifts provided by the bride’s people, [which] are always given on the wedding day at the bridegroom’s place as part of the wedding ceremonies and are known as Umabo [do not have to do] with the birth of the bridegroom but with his conception, (Ngubane, 1987, p. 178)

Although widely known, the ritual under analysis here has a specificity that makes it challenging. The ceremony I attended in 2011 sealed the union between Mangaliso Khubeka, a man who is alive, and Sesi Mollo, a woman who passed away in 1999—a ‘particular’ Umabo mainly carried out by their eldest daughter (a woman called Thembeni) and Sesi’s relatives.

Mangaliso Khubeka, whose mother tongue is Zulu, was born in the mid-1940s in Ingogo. Mangaliso’s family had never owned the farm they received in a redistribution process, or indeed any other farm in South Africa’s colonial history. Or, as they say, they have never owned a ‘title deed’, although since time immemorial they do remember living in the area surrounding Amajuba Mountain, close to Newcastle.

Possessing no papers and being held in near captivity for generations by white people, who demarcated the land on which the Khubekas have been living as their private property, Mangaliso’s family comprises what today are widely called farm dwellers: people who work and live on a farm that does not belong to them, whose rights have been simultaneously recognized and under threat since 1994. ²

Mangaliso married Sesi, a Sotho speaker who he had met in a township near Johannesburg, Thokoza, where many families have been living and working since the 1960s—usually after being forcibly removed to the area following their eviction, or as temporary migrant workers like Mangaliso’s relatives.

The fact of living far from their home villages gave them the opportunity to meet each other. At the same time, though, this kind of entanglement of ‘the rural in the urban’ was also the source of many of the problems and conflicts they had to face throughout their lives, related to ‘a combination of forced removals […] Bantu education […] and of the tightening grip of influx control’ (Mamdani, 1996, p. 231). Amazulu, Basotho and many others lived in urban peripheries to work in the factories and mines, or as domestic servants. Young Mangaliso had been a soccer star whose brilliant career was overshadowed by the need to work in different factories (Rosa, 2011). Sesi used to work as a domestic servant for white families living in the whites-only neighborhoods. ³ Since townships were intended to locate workers only temporarily, traditional customs regulating weddings were strongly repressed by the realities of everyday life under apartheid in urban areas: ‘[…] if the idea of Christian and/or traditional marriages—with lobola at the heart of the marriage contract—retained its cultural purchase as a desirable way of structuring a partnership based on reciprocal familial obligation and expectation, the realities of partnership were often otherwise’ (Posel, 2006, p. 71). Mangaliso and Sesi were no exception: despite having raised five children and been civilly married, they had not sealed their union by following tradition completely.

When the racist and nationalist apartheid regime collapsed in the mid-1990s, a succession of battles broke out in the township where they lived: first, the taxi business war, and later the so-called East Rand War. According to their recollections, an escalating wave of violence among taxi owners who fought over markers and opposed Zulu neighbors surged around their house. This raised and transformed claims of autochthony and belonging on the eve of the new democratic regime. At that time, Mangaliso was no longer working in the local factories. He owned a taxi business and his main occupation had become driving people from his hometown in KZN to the township of Gauteng.

One particular day during the war, his cars were destroyed. Houses were plundered and set on fire, people were shot dead, and others were raped and violated. African National Congress (ANC) militias paved the township streets with blood and flames. The East Rand War is popularly understood as a conflict between Zulus (Inkhata Freedom Party [IFP] supporters) and Xhosas (ANC supporters):

[…] in South Africa in 1994, narratives of atrocities, told from one side to another, travelled almost instantaneously. In these conflicts, the IFP was often understood simply as “Zulu” (even though many Zulus were members of the ANC), and from the opposite point of view, it was usually possible to label any ANC group as “Xhosa” […]. (Donham, 2011, p. 91)

As a Zulu, Mangaliso was supposed to support the IFP. He was sure that his family was in danger because of his ambiguous political loyalty—a Zulu supporting the ANC—which could be compounded at any time by his unconventional marriage to a Sotho woman. On the verge of seeing his family torn apart or even killed, Mangaliso and Sesi sought refuge in his home province (KZN), where his family homestead is located, inside a white farmer’s land. The situation was so desperate that, after the assassination of a number of people close to them (including the boyfriend of their eldest daughter, Thembeni, who was shot dead, leaving behind her and their first-born daughter, Bongiwe), they decided it would be safer to send each child to live in a different place (in Gauteng and KZN) with other relatives, until the turmoil ceased.

After fleeing Johannesburg, Mangaliso and Sesi rented a house in another decaying industrial township, close to his home village in KZN, Madadeni. ⁴ There he worked as a taxi driver locally, while Sesi continued to clean the houses of white people to make ends meet and raise their small children. Things had calmed down by this time and they were preparing to move back to Thokoza where they had their own house. One day in 1999, Sesi went alone on a trip to Johannesburg. Mangaliso had been unable to join her due to his increasing commitments to land rights struggles. His personal trajectory—as an adult who had grown up in a township—had not hindered him from claiming rights to land on the farm where his father and forebears had been living and working for ages. Mangaliso and his fellow comrades were claiming the rural spaces inside the white farmers’ properties precisely because they had not been allowed to experience them in the past. Reclaiming the land would allow them to re-inscribe themselves in history, no longer as evicted, uprooted people. This would assure them a place in history that gave new meaning to their past and future simultaneously. Similar to what White (2010, p. 511) suggests in another context, here too ‘the space infused with that pastness [is] a space that lay ahead in time’.

The day Sesi went to Thokoza, Mangaliso had a very bad feeling that something was not right. ⁵ His intuition proved correct when his fellow taxi drivers came to tell him the fateful news that Sesi had been killed in a car accident.

After Sesi’s death, Mangaliso went through an endless period of suffering. His engagement in the LPM (Landless People’s Movement) made it more or less impossible for him to earn enough money to raise their children. The main actions of the movement were completely based on the physical presence of its activists in different events: supporting resistance to eviction inside threatening territories (farms owned by whites), engaging in public demonstrations like marches (toyi–toyi), participating in conferences on land with government officials, and NGOs, attending court sessions due to charges for their activities considered illegal (like forced burials inside farms where owners have been trying to expel workers and dwellers). Realizing how badly his absence could be felt at home, Mangaliso eventually decided to move from the rented house in the Madadeni township to his family’s rural home where he could rely on his relatives to feed his younger children. At the same time, however, in retaliation for his political activities in the social movement, the farm owner began an extermination campaign. Any contempt for the bans on raising, sowing, reaping, fetching water, and using shortcuts would lead to arbitrary sanctions and eventually to death threats against him and his elderly father.

At this point, we should recall that when Sesi died, she was no longer a member of her family or a member of her husband’s patrilineal group either. They had an unfinished Umshado (marriage) that still had to be completely performed. On these grounds, combined with cleansing ceremonies, their White Wedding ⁶ had been staged after Sesi’s death, in 1999, with the help of their granddaughter Bongiwe, who played the role of Sesi (her mother’s mother), wearing a white dress, as her 5-year-old avatar. ⁷

In 2007, exactly 1 year after we first met, Mangaliso was extremely busy and agitated, involved in different rituals being performed to find an answer to a dream that one of his neighbors had had. ⁸ In his dream, Sesi was asking for help. She still wanted to go back home.

Any death that occurs outside one’s home is a source of distress to those in charge of bringing back home the spirit of those who have died. ⁹ Contemporary literature on this subject deals with violent traffic dynamics that lead to fatal losses in South Africa, demanding from relatives and acquainted fellows of the deceased an extra effort to ritually bring him or her back home (Bähre, 2011; Lee, 2012). Other writers highlight the working conditions of nurses who, despite public health protocols, need to respect kin members who want to enter intensive care premises where their relatives have passed away with burning herbs (impepho) to fetch them and bring them home (Jiyane, 2014). In the same vein, for the Khubekas the fact that Sesi was caught by death on the road has made her trajectory back home even more challenging to all of them—including herself.

Mangaliso was sure that his late wife was lost and suffering. What he, his father, and his children were going through could not be a coincidence or an isolated case. As other authors have written, ‘[a]pocryphal stories abound – of road accidents involving the corpse in transit, and of road accidents caused by the spirits of those improperly buried – which inscribe a type of malevolent agency onto the dead body’ (Lee, 2012, p. 196). Their suffering and Sesi’s were surely deeply connected. Each displacement, each removal had torn apart the paths connecting the living to the dead. She had become lost in a depleted and unknown territory. It was his duty to rescue her and lead her home. Where was home, though?! Not the township house in Thokoza/Johannesburg, nor in Madadeni/Newcastle, but undoubtedly the homestead in Ingogo where his relatives had been buried, and which she would feel to be her home and where she could rest in peace.

Uncertainty had been Mangaliso and Sesi’s constant companion along their journey. Nevertheless, at that moment, in the beginning of a new century, they hoped finally to be married and to recover their rightful land in order to address matters that were crucial to them and their loved ones. Complex entanglements draw our attention to an equally intricate gender dimension throughout this succession of experiences. Deceased Sesi has left a living collective of women—mainly daughters and granddaughters—unattended and yearning for freedom and justice. They were helpless about being landless, but also because their mother, whose main role was building bridges between the past and the future, has not yet become a legitimate affinal kin welcomed by a predominantly agnatic descent group (Ngubane, 1977).

After these initial propitiatory rituals, many others took place over the following years. In all of them, supported by the logistic, financial, and performative help of friends and relatives, Mangaliso tried to make sure that his wife, who had lost her life on the road to Johannesburg, could find her way to the graveyard of his family members on his own father’s homestead, located on the white farmer’s property—in other words, helping Sesi to find her way home to her proper resting place, where she would have been already had they consummated their marriage before she passed away.

For four long years, we saw Mangaliso fighting on many fronts, both as one of the main leaders of the Landless People’s Movement and in endless conversations with his ancestors. Finally, in 2009, a small farm of 84 hectares was awarded to Mangaliso and his family. Although their desire to get back their home, the land where his father’s homestead was situated, had not been fulfilled, they were pleased that the farm received in the redistribution process lies less than 10 km from the farm where his forebears are buried. Mangaliso and another 18 members of his family have settled a claim as a Trust, meaning they have decided that they prefer a piece of land they can use as a group rather than individually accepting and splitting small financial compensations (100,000 Rands each in 2008). According to them, this solution would not help bring them together: not just the living, but the dead too, scattered across different resting sites. Since Mangaliso was the oldest of his group of siblings, it was his duty to move to the newly acquired farm, along with his nuclear family, in order to look after the land as a whole. It was also his obligation ritually to inform their ancestors about their achievement, about the farm, and the new house, but especially to make sure they would feel at home, and welcome to visit at any time. His ancestors and his wife were the first to be informed about the farmland, named after his late father Mpondokazishi. ¹⁰ Finally, everything seemed to be in order: the world of the living and the world of the so-called living dead.

Almost two years after they moved into the new farm, in June 2011, Mangaliso’s oldest daughter, Thembeni (mentioned above as Bongiwe’s mother), was finally able to organize the third big step in sealing her parents’ union. Thembeni organized the Umabo, simultaneously playing her role as a daughter (a consanguine) and as a member of the affinal group. She saved up the money to bring some of Sesi’s relatives from Johannesburg and to buy all the gifts (mats, blankets, pillows, clay pots, etc.) for older relatives from her father’s lineage group, most of whom are already dead (Ngubane, 1987). The ceremony itself was beautifully conducted by the women, who helped Thembeni lead the bridal procession from her township house in Madadeni to the farmhouse Mangaliso’s family had received in the redistribution process. On this latter occasion, Bongiwe, the avatar child, now a young woman, once again acted on behalf of her grandmother.

Thembeni’s wish was to offer an expression of gratitude from the Molo family to the Kubheka, from the Sotho to the Zulu, after more than 30 years of displacements in space and time—displacements that had left deep scars on their bodies and souls, too traumatized to cherish any hope of a better future for her own child, Bongiwe, raised without knowing her father, murdered during the East Rand battles.

Unattainable Happiness

The joy of the marriage derived from bringing so many people together, people who had not met for decades, many of them dead who had not been to the new farm, and experienced that forever-dreamt life with a home of their own. The merriment of their achievement came with a deeper sense of attachment and responsibility to a world that had once again expanded toward unreachable and unknown borders. No plenitude had been achieved, since every attempt to build a conversation among the living and the dead leads to the possibility to disentangle unfinished business related to time immemorial disruption and separation. No happiness, therefore.

The day after the Umabo, we went to the township where Thembeni lives, where her mother Sesi used to live before she died, and to where she has been ritually brought from the farm gravesite days before the Umabo. It was late at night when Mangaliso decided to visit his daughter. Bongiwe, the granddaughter, opened the door for us. When I turned round to close it, they told me to leave it open, despite the freezing wind blowing into the state-built Reconstruction and Development Program house. Thembeni and Bongiwe were sitting on grass mats inside the one-room house, which smelt of the paraffin used to light the heater. Mangaliso addressed them using a lower voice than usual. Suddenly, he went to the corner that contained the shrine, and started talking to Sesi through a branch of Umphafa (Ziziphus mucronata ¹¹ ). He greeted her, explaining that he would finally take her to the farm where he was living with his ancestors. ¹² Slowly and gently Bongiwe had dropped the ritual posture that she had been adopting while performing as her grandmother. Following Mangaliso, Thembeni, and Bongiwe, we walked out of the house without turning our backs on the shrine. Mangaliso took a plastic bag from the shrine containing the tree branch. Into the plastic bag, he whispered the steps we were taking: ‘Now we are getting into the car’. He deposited the plastic bag on Bongiwe’s lap. Thembeni said: ‘Go well’. After organizing the final step of her father and mother’s marriage, she could not hide a certain pride and relief from her eyes. Thembeni was now a fully entitled member of her patrilineage. Not just herself and her mother, but her daughter Bongiwe and her other three children. In a certain way, sealing her parent’s marriage, she had paved her and her children’s way to the future by linking them to the past—or, more precisely, by intertwining them in a complex and multidimensional (not unilineal) history called home.

Mangaliso had explained to Sesi where we were about to go. He drove all the way from the township to the farm. I was sitting next to him. Bongiwe was in the back seat, carrying/protecting the plastic bag. The trip took us more than an hour. During the drive, we talked about several different issues on which she was presumed to have been up-to-date; in other cases, Mangaliso was careful to introduce the subject to her gently. On reaching the farm, Mangaliso opened the car door for his granddaughter. He took the plastic bag from her lap with great care and went directly to his bedroom. We both followed him. He placed the bag in the corner, next to his bed, explaining his every step, making sure that Sesi could understand what was going on. From that night on they would sleep together, he later explained to me. Finally, we bowed in respect to Sesi and left the room. All of us went about our personal ablutions before going to bed.

The next morning Mangaliso woke up feeling very sick. He did not want to stay in bed, though, because he had to go to an ANC meeting in town. Less than a month before, in June, he had been elected councilor of his ward. ¹³ I offered to drive him to the meeting. After the meeting, he said to me in a terrifying tone: ‘I’m dying’. Trying to be funny and to calm him down I said: ‘We’re all dying, Mangaliso’. But, when I put my hand on his forehead, I could see he was burning up. It was late and the public health clinic was already closed. The only place we could go to was run by doctors who speak Afrikaans. Mangaliso was afraid. He knew that most of them were farmers, and that many of his social movement comrades ‘had been killed by those doctors’. His apprehension was not overblown. In the reception room, we were badly treated by the receptionist. The doctor, however, did not show any hostility toward Mangaliso’s presence in the clinic. He diagnosed pneumonia and prescribed an antibiotic. We went to the drugstore to buy it, knowing all along that for Mangaliso (a) fever is something you do not need chemicals to treat and (b) pneumonia is something that never happens all of a sudden. As he had seen so many times before, something beyond his reach was being plotted to destroy the happiness he had believed he and his family could attain.

We went home. Mangaliso did not get up from his bed for two long days. We were all in a state of anguish. I still have no idea what brought back Mangaliso’s strength and health. Nor am I sure what exactly caused him such pain, fever, and feeling of desolation. The day he woke up, he confessed to me: ‘You see. I really thought that the day after my marriage I would die and leave my wife a widow!’ As usual, I could not control myself and I replied curiously: ‘How could your dead wife become a widow?!’ He patiently explained: ‘How could she possibly be dead if just three days ago we finally got married?’ I could grasp from Mangaliso’s wise words that, although the past is inclement, if you act toward it in a diligent way, as he did alongside his relatives (especially the women of his family), you can make it smooth, that is, nonturbulent, eventually. Sesi was alive as his wife since they had properly sealed their union. Simultaneously, she was finally able to mingle with his ancestors as a dead female person from his affinal group (Ngubane, 1977).

Sesi’s journey to the due realm had ended: they now had a place of their own—and no matter what disputes happened, no matter how harsh their lives, this place would belong to them as much as they belong to the place (Borges, 2011).

The Land Question, Still

The South African political land reform program has created different slots with which to categorize a wide range of land-related experiences, seeking to remedy historical losses caused by land dispossession processes that created an unequal social landscape that threatens the project of a democratic nation.

This urgent redressing of the past has nonetheless legitimized legible hierarchies that match a certain lineal, ascendant approach to history, culminating, paradoxically, with the right to private property. In the nation’s rainbow spectrum of forms of relatedness to land, the farm dwellers and labor tenants fighting for redistribution are usually on the lowest rung of the social ladder of prestige and power in assuring their right to land.

Various authors have conducted detailed and sustained studies of the so-called restitution program aimed at those people able to prove previous land ownership (Hall, 2004; James, 2007; Walker, 2008). In observations of a series of negotiations and their transformations, the literature is unanimous in highlighting how different and distant social experiences that became intertwined over recent decades are underestimated and pasteurized in public policies. However, a few have been able to sustain criticism against the analytical perspectives and political interventions that make the state either a panacea or an iron cage, thus ignoring intense political movements like those led by rural women engaged in multifaceted contestations against capitalism, racism, and other lethal colonial legacies (Moyo, 1995).

Applicants for redistribution or restitution must necessarily come to an agreement about their demands and how they wish to secure them by choosing only one of the possible bureaucratic paths paved by the government. In other words, they must establish a consensus among themselves, their kin and their relatives so that each individual in the collective can shape it in his or her own idiosyncratic ways. The main challenge for the group is to decide whether the trust to which they belong will accept monetary benefits, or will dispense with government financial compensation and acquire an entire piece of land as a close-knit group. Because South Africa adheres to the World Bank’s ‘willing-buyer/willing-seller’ model, rather than land expropriation, having the grant in their hands—after long periods on a waiting list—is not enough (Lahiff, 2007). A farm must also be available for purchase in order for the arrangement to be completed.

The first redistribution experiences in the late 1990s frustrated both government officials and the people involved. On one side, the amount of money granted individually or per household was meagre and, in order to purchase a commercial farm, relatives had to negotiate a difficult agreement on how best to obtain it. Rumors of corruption abound, suggesting that farmers have inflated their land prices so that some government officials could take a percentage from the total amount awarded. In other cases, considered by the government itself as ‘failures’, the benefited black families constructed so many housing settlements on the acquired farm that no profitable agricultural activity actually got done. In short, instead of enjoying the right to use their own land according to their will, the first beneficiaries were blamed for their lack of commercial production and thus for jeopardizing the country’s food sovereignty and security.

In 2001, a new program, the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development, was launched to guarantee that the redistributed land would be productive in capitalist terms. In order to push aside poor people with no agricultural skills or in basic need of shelter, and due to a presumably meagre budget for this specific policy, the government introduced a compulsory partnership arrangement in which the grant applicant was also obliged to invest a certain amount of money in purchasing and running a commercial farm. Among others, Hall (2004, p. 225) comes to a gloomy yet accurate conclusion that synthesizes one of the many paradoxes experienced daily in postapartheid South Africa:

[t]he redistribution of land has been limited and increasingly defined as commercial production of the model established in the white farming sector – even if sometimes on a smaller scale – bringing land reform just about full circle to “business as usual” in the commercial farming areas.

Discontent over land redistribution in South Africa is rife. There are those who blame it for being economically inefficient since it failed to increase the country’s agrarian production (Du Toit, 2004). Others complain that it has been unable to alleviate poverty levels in the rural countryside (Aliber & Cousins, 2013). Although from a profit-oriented market perspective, the farm activities could be seen as a failure, or even a catastrophe (Wolford, 2007), what the literature often misses are the effects it has on generating hope in the future by enabling people to reshape the past and the conviviality between the living and the dead.

In this vein, many authors have been less and less enthusiastic about what has been achieved in both theoretical and political terms during the postdemocratic struggles and disputes over land. Hart (2006, p. 989) foresaw prospects with some skepticism almost a decade ago, when the author disclosed her main concern:

[…] in practice, ‘the land question’ has increasingly become defined in terms of the ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ and radically underfunded land reform program that helped to propel the formation of the Landless People’s Movement. Narrowly focused on agriculture and ‘the rural’, the main thrust of land redistribution policies is the formation of a black commercial farming class at a moment when South African agriculture has one of the lowest levels of state protection in the world.

James is another severe critic of the South African land reform that ‘has come to foreground the private ownership of property’. Neither does the author spare those she calls ‘activists and […] members of the rank-and-file landless’ for seeing ‘land as an inalienable possession which ought not to be privately owned or sold’. According to her, both perspectives have paid no attention to the increasing gap between land redistribution as a way to appease inequality and the way in which land reform has actually been implemented. James is straightforward in her evaluation of who has been winning the battle in the South African land reform process. According to her, despite the continuous dispute between the above perspectives, ‘the welfarist vision of citizenship as fulfilling needs and providing entitlements has been quickly superseded by market-oriented notions which posit the individual citizen as responsible for her own wellbeing and sustainable reproduction’ (James, 2013, pp. 30–31).

Nevertheless, other social scientists have acknowledged that land redistribution has altered the local balance of power in various ways, despite its problematic implementation and fulfilment (Atuahene, 2011; Chitonge, 2013; Chitonge & Ntsebeza, 2012). Some of these authors emphasize that nowadays a better understanding of land and its meanings can be attained by shifting away from an exclusive focus on land as means of production and toward a broader concern with its (re)distributive and imaginative agency. Among others, Ferguson (2013, p. 172) highlights that land security, along with cash transfer policies (the well-known social grants), assure what he calls a positive dependency, where elders—mainly women—and children play a central role and land is better understood as a distributive resource rather than merely a means of production:

[w]hile cities in Southern Africa have long been defined as the place of work, rural settlements have historically served as refuges for the supposedly ‘non-productive’: the old, the sick, the disabled, young children and so on. But nowadays it is precisely the ‘non-productive’ who, as state dependents, are likely to be key sources of income.

Taking into account that land dispossession in South Africa has been inflicted upon both the living and the dead—who had to be ritually relocated each time the living were forcibly removed over the decades—our main subject has been the new perspectives that redistributed land has brought to a family that, for many reasons, but mainly because of land insecurity, has been unable to perform rituals fundamental to its sociality, such as funerals and marriage ceremonies.

Land redistribution in South Africa has brought together township and farm dwellers, living or not, who had been forcibly scattered over decades. Township and farm dwellers have struggled to come to terms with economic scarcity, political violence, and their effects on the very practicability of, among other things, getting married, raising children, growing old, and ensuring their futures as ancestors. In this context, landownership goes far beyond strictly economic or utilitarian dimensions. It enables rituals that go against a master narrative of social oppression, re-establishing a deep sense of hope that challenges current forms of life.

In countries like South Africa, a land reform program addressing issues of inequality in a capitalist landscape is challenging in complex ways. What is at stake here is not just land as a surface, or a container of natural resources aimed at agrarian production. Land has also been considered a fundamental ‘technology’ that enables people to shift and reinvent past and future history through an insurgent set of democratic practices and theories (James, 2013). Land has been the resting place of deceased kin members, as well as where cattle and other herds are bred to expand social relations through kinship ties between the living and the dead (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1990). The redistribution process under analysis here has brought together those who were moved to township areas and those who stayed in the countryside, those who have been working and living as farm dwellers, and those forcibly removed to urban townships. Retrospectively they realize that both ritual and political paths are labyrinthine and the pace to any achievement might therefore be slower than they wished—never mind the World Bank and its developmental policies.

Conversations Between Living and Dead People

What was a perfect circle—especially in anthropological heaven—upon closer inspection looks more like the broken arches of a fading nostalgia. Ethnographic accounts of funerals, ancestorship, wedding ceremonies, negotiations around lobola, and so forth, in contested and disputed contexts where land either no longer exists or can no longer be used in what was once thought of as a ‘traditional’ way, impels us to refine our analytic categories and conceptual frameworks. A few authors, like Sheik (2014, p. 77), for instance, have shown how colonial selectiveness at the end of the nineteenth century functioned to make African customary practices intelligible, tailoring them to suit the provision of male migrant labor, and the assignment of women and children to agricultural work, ‘placing women in Zulu society at the heart of administrative attempts at raising revenue and expropriating African land for settler use’. Recent research has led us to shift our theoretical perspectives, therefore, establishing a new stance in relation to the legacies of our disciplines. As academics, we need to be more attentive to the fact that those with whom we conduct our research excel in refusing to tear apart the ‘many’ worlds in which they live, constantly re-establishing a single, though complex, world.

Social sciences renew themselves by learning from the way in which our hosts in the field try to solve the puzzles of their lives, through the way they formulate hypotheses, test methods and approaches, and last but not least, generate new theories. Our hosts’ theoretical formulations challenge established academic theories through a unique dialogue that simultaneously acknowledges the importance of former ethnographic works while expanding and renovating our knowledge in anthropology. Our interlocutors in this research experience a profound existential fusion of cosmological and sociological locations, which are disappointingly conceptualized as autonomous and sometimes ambivalent dimensions of their lives.

A long history of removals and displacements was shaped into a return home in the aftermath of apartheid. In the specific case with which we are dealing here, a backlash prompted by the East Rand conflicts had enabled urban South Africans to fight for their rights as farm dwellers, reconstituting themselves on the basis of their living relation to the land and its history as their home. In the postapartheid political production of their claims for redistribution, mundane social suffering and ancestral affliction have become interwoven as fundamental driving forces in constituting a transformed notion of belonging and being in the world. An ethnographic account of what the Khubekas have experienced should not belittle their effort to challenge the racist, schizophrenic trap in which they have become imprisoned. They have refused any mandatory pragmatism in either the mundane, political domain or the cultural, traditional realm.

In order to address and redress those who have been uprooted, forcibly displaced, violently removed, and become lost, wandering in despair, land is a sine qua non. When I read this article to Mangaliso, he said that they would had performed the Umabo sooner or later, irrespective of any land reform. Nevertheless, it did make a difference to conduct the Umabo on that particular land. Otherwise, had they performed it as they had so many times before, in ceaseless rituals aimed at informing their ancestors of their latest whereabouts, both the living and the dead would have remained occulted.

The market-based land reform has brought together both its racist detractors and its liberal supporters, insofar as neither of these sides recognizes that land is home because it enables the dwelling of history in a transformative, accidental, granular, and multilayered form. In short, land reform has unearthed something that has been denied ever since: a hidden history of those whose complex lives are ignored as mere phantasmagorical allegories of a lost paradise, whose ‘coevalness’ has been acknowledged only insofar as their relations to other temporalities, landscapes, or even worlds were meticulously concealed.

One immediate strategy would be to assume that a single defeat means the end of the battle. My hosts in KZN know very well that it is both impossible and a waste of energy to try to establish causal chains, since an infinitude of involved aspects are doomed to be missing from our accounts. Instead of approaching the past as a source of explanation, which would lead them into a hopeless cul-de-sac, they are committed to dealing ritually with effects the cause of which may never be known. Mangaliso has been deeply involved in the Landless People’s Movement. During the very first years of his militancy, he hardly ever saw his children, who stayed in his father’s house on the white farmers’ property. He is fully aware that Sesi has played a major role in raising his children. I recall more than once hearing him say, while far from home, that he was concerned their children might be starving, referring to the fact that they were no longer able to have a tiny garden or goats grazing around their houses. In other words, his fight to obtain a farm alongside his comrades from the movement was a journey through which his father’s presence and intervention at home was essential. Likewise, when he was travelling around the country to build the movement, certainly many other people from the realms of the ancestor helped his father—Sesi, among others. All of them, living and dead, have resisted the relentless waves of eviction from their lands. The land has been them, comprising the source of their power. No wonder that those who have been successfully evicted by farmers face insurmountable challenges that remove from them any possibility of being considered in a redistribution policy. As we have seen, in every eviction, the hauling of the dead to each new location, though mandatory, is a capricious, unpredictable process. On the journey things can go wrong: the dead may become lost, leaving the living alone without their wise replies to fundamental questions. After theses evictions, when access to the land is no longer available, rituals propitiating conversations between the living and the dead become as inexorable as they are laborious to perform. If these conversations come to a halt, a deep sense of alienation emerges from the roaring silence. No dispossession is as devastating as this.

Conclusions

What Mangaliso realizes and puts into practice inspires me to pursue an ethnographic theory based on a complex, multilayered, and multidimensional reality that is never accomplished in its totality, since new adhering elements never cease to emerge and connect with an existing body of knowledge they possess about their lives. If their ontologies are intimately related to an epistemology of partial connections, I have no illusions of either providing a comprehensive map of each event I here retold, nor of exhausting their potential meanings (Mafeje, 2000). My main objective is to share some of the aspects I have identified in their ordinary life, punctuated by conflict, dispute, and displacement, as emblems of lives devoted to understanding, challenging, and solving some of the excruciating problems of the living and the dead. My approach, therefore, looks to evoke aspects of their intellectual commitment to an incessant struggle to build a hopeful future.

In contexts of land dispossession, racism, and enslavement, what has happened to the Khubekas represents a source of visions for a more hopeful future, as well as a secure standpoint from which to readdress the past and reshape master narratives of political oppression and social oblivion. This broader horizon in mind, we should aim to investigate the relationship between land security and rituals that, when enacted, produce new arrangements and forms of cooperation and reciprocal obligations, bringing together social beings whose conviviality has been denied or strongly threatened due to the lack of land.

The return of land to the people, especially those who never officially ‘owned’ land, may seem unintelligible to persons who live in the world of private property (which defines individuals) and contract law (which governs the relationship between individuals). A land reform addressing farm dwellers and labor tenants has to do more than ‘recognize’ the importance of land in productive terms, as a mean to reduce or levelling inequality, as dreamt by those who wish farm dwellers to become major producers (Rusenga, 2019). Redistribution has made concrete and tangible the theft suffered by thousands of people left landless. Racial segregation has separated people from their ancestral grounds, preventing them from benefiting from all the powers linked to the land. Sesi’s wandering in search of a home epitomizes a malaise afflicting both the living and the dead in South Africa, a malaise related to modern segregated territoriality.

Rituals have never stopped being cherished by those who do not conform to time as irreversible or to space as fence in no-trespassing private property zones. Nevertheless, social scientists have inadvertently been engaged in making capitalist chasms even deeper when they downplay the power of rituals and underestimate their role in broadening our ability to solve puzzles and speak against oppression. Taking the concomitant efforts to get land back seriously, fighting the contumacy of racism and apartheid, and working to appease those who are restless—either living comrades or dead ancestors—is what enables social scientists to transform their knowledge-making practice. The relevance of what we do depends on where we are grounded. Acknowledging these ways of living and dying in the world produces more than meaningful identity politics: it challenges capitalism and its fury of boiling life down to mere labor force. Mafeje (1981) has stressed the idiographic feature of social sciences, a dimension that is quite often forgotten or neglected by some avant-garde intellectuals claiming to know better and whose conceptual and political frameworks demarcate what is worthy of knowing and what ought to be overcome. What is culturally specific and apparently parochial and impossible to universalize for all humanity, calls not for a cut off or an exclusion of the presumed important picture, but rather for a movement to broaden it in order to reconceptualize what is understood by humanity.