Last week Limpopo farmer David Rakgase finally triumphed in his long legal battle to purchase state land that he had been working since the early 1990s. While he has yet to receive his title deed, this is – we trust – a great triumph for property rights.
His case reminds us how important personal stories are in crafting the narratives through which we understand our noisy and chaotic political world. A simple story such as Rakgase’s about the abuse of power can tell as much as a whole library of stats and facts.
And Expropriation without Compensation (EWC), or, as the government euphemistically calls it, ‘land reform’, is an area of politics where South Africans’ views are shaped more by narrative than perhaps anything else.
An IRR survey of South Africans’ attitudes in 2018 found that only 2% of all respondents and the same percentage of black respondents believed that ‘speeding up land reform’ should be the government’s top priority. Despite this, two of the three biggest parties in the 2019 election promoted EWC as one of their headline election promises. As the EFF’s posters proclaimed, ‘Our Land and Jobs now!’
A reason for this, perhaps, is that while in moments of rational contemplation – such as when thoughtfully answering a survey, – crime, jobs and education may rank very highly, whereas the way the land issue is raised in speeches by the racial-socialists of the EFF and ANC is deeply emotional. Those narratives create the image in one’s mind of a proud black nation (‘black nation’ being a formulation employed by President Ramaphosa) rising up against the oppression of a small white cabal and finally reclaiming its ancestral land.
Moral and factual holes
But this is a narrative with many moral and factual holes in it; under EFF policy (and probably under the ANC policy, too, if past policy thrusts, the comments of senior party members and the state’s overall approach to the Rakgase issue are any indication) no black people will actually own land. Rather, they will be tenants under a corrupt and incompetent state. Yet, for the true believer, these arguments have failed to blunt the emotional force of the pro-EWC narrative.
What the David Rakgase case has demonstrated is that we don’t have to look very far to see that a counter-narrative is possible. Rakgase’s story is a powerful alternative to the EFF/ANC’s line. A common desire to own property unites South Africans; the proof is right in front of us. We have only to work harder at projecting this alternative narrative.
Liberals and all defenders of property rights need proudly and unashamedly to tell the story of how a successful black farmer was opposed at almost every step in his attempt to realise his hopes and ambitions, and to leave a legacy for his children, because the state decided that he wasn’t entitled to the property rights successful farmers take for granted. This narrative tells us how a corrupt and malicious state went to great lengths to block his rights to property.
David Rakgase’s story is a story that millions of South Africans, especially poor black South Africans, know all too well. Without title deeds to land or property, people are vulnerable to expropriation or theft by corrupt government officials, warlords and gangsters, and struggle to gain a foothold in the formal economy.
Repetition
It is easy for commentators and activists to fall into the trap of thinking that a story doesn’t bear telling because it’s been told already so many times, and is not particularly fresh. But here we can learn from political parties; repetition is the surest way to establish a narrative.
The ANC almost always gives the same speeches, puts up almost the same posters and delivers almost the same message in every election. It works – even if it pushes against some of the things ordinary South Africans are deeply committed to. The racial-socialist land narrative was not established in a single article or in a single speech, but was built by telling the same story again and again for decades until it simply became ‘common knowledge’: a narrative so entrenched that a host of journalists and analysts struggle to see past it.
That’s how the battle of ideas is won, not in a grand strategic move, but rather in the tough slog of facts, reason and telling a simple story, again and again, until the message is always in the back of every mind, and your opponents have no choice but to fight you on your own turf.
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