A protester with a medical mask against tear gas
Photo: Ekmel Ertan

I had thought that those who characterized the Tahrir square uprising in Egypt as facebook revolution were neglecting the primary dynamics of the event in favour of new media. I am in the field of new media and the conferences I have attended always looked at the subject from this angle and foregrounded the role of social media. Facebook graffiti on the streets of Cairo was noteworthy. Social media had an undeniable role in all this but I thought that the “facebook revolution” characterization was a kind of branding, a new form of orientalism.

Last week I changed my mind. I certainly cannot call what happened in Turkey as a facebook revolution but I have experienced how important and defining facebook and social media in general can be. Facebook graffiti in Cairo streets were in fact a tactic to try to draw people to social media. Tahrir square was the first social movement of this size where the effect of social media became so apparent.

In Istanbul nobody wrote facebook or twitter on walls. This was because these are ordinary and everyday communication tools for the youth on the streets. Everyone was aware. This is why social media was intensively used from the very beginning. Nobody will call what happened in Istanbul a facebook revolution because that first wave has already been overcome in Egypt. However, I feel obliged to say, is social media wasn’t there, we may well woken up to much darker mornings. The uprising would have been taken care of in a couple of days with excessive police violence, and the pain of injustice would have been planted in the bad memories of those hopeless souls who know what happened, and who are ostracized precisely because of this knowledge.

Ataturk Cultural Centre (home of the State Opera and Ballet and State Theatre covered by flags by protester groups. AKM has been closed for the last 8 years for renovation, which never properly started.
Photo: Ekmal Ertan

The events that led to the current revolt started with an opposition to the government’s decision to reconstruct in the middle of a city park a 18^th military barracks that was themselves demolished in 1940 by the recommendation of Henri Prost, the French planner who was reworking Istanbul’s master plan at the time. The proposed new military barracks was in fact a shopping center. Given the fact that Istanbul’s biggest need is public places and parks (1), the transformation into a shopping center of what is at hand as such was an unacceptable idea to Istanbulites, especially given that the park in question is in the city center where this need is direst. Further, the Taksim square bears the political memory of the republic. Besides a dominant representation of the republic, it also provides a public space of expression to those socially politically marginalized or otherized in one way or another. As such, it is the most visible and most public urban place.

The Taksim Pedestrianization Project that includes the reconstruction of the Artillery Barracks was announced by the Istanbul Municipality in 2011 (2). The Istanbul’ Chambers of Architects and of urban planners legally challenged the decision and, as the attempts to destroy the park became actual, Taksim Solidarity was formed and the latter’s volunteers started to stand watch at the park. In the meantime, despite the ongoing talks between a number of state agencies and civil society representatives, experts’ reports and court decisions to halt the construction, PM Erdogan continued to announce the construction of the barracks adamantly and incomprehensibly. On this very day he shows his incompetence in democracy by continuing to repeat the same line in a language that gets increasingly violent that terrifies the populace and attempts to literally divide it.

Protesters’ tents in Gezi Park
Photo: Ekmel Ertan

On May 27 as it became public that a wall of the park was torn down to let the construction machines in, a group of 50 voluntary activists from the solidarity came to the park and started to stand watch. The group spent the night at the park. Next morning, around 5AM construction machinery went into the park accompanied by the police. The news of this event went out that morning and rapidly spread via social media and awakened a large majority. As Süreyya Sıtkı Önder, an MP came to the site and stopped the demolition by standing in front of a construction machine, the event took on a different dimension, the news spread even more and a reaction started to form. Next morning, as the police repeated themselves and set the tents of some protesters on fire, very different groups all living in Istanbul all reacted with the same sensibility and decisiveness. Football fans organized, led by the infamous Çarşı (Bazaar) team of the club Beşiktaş. The next day Çarşı marched to Taksim; Fenerbahçe fans declared that they support Çarşı and departed for Taksim. Galatasaray fans joined in. Many sectors of the populace shared the sentiment. A crowd of a few thousands that took off from Kadıköy, crossed the Bosphorus bridge and arrived in Taksim. Un unbelievable crowd was pouing into Taksim from all over Istanbul. The violence of the police escalated. Barricades were set up on the major arteries leading to Taksim and protesters clashed with the police (3). The clashes which lasted until June 1 took the form of officers directly firing at people with tear gas canisters and the crowd pulling back to defend the barricades. Meanwhile the revolt became even more widespread in Istanbul as the police prevented people from other neighbourhoods from coming to Taksim and they supported the protest in their neighbourhood. Other cities joined in the protests. The clashes intensified as people poured in the streets and the police attacked them with tear gas (4).

Protesters in the park
Photo: Ekmel Ertan

It all started out with the uprooting of a tree and escalated with the unacceptable violence of the police but such a local incident would not have been enough to make cities such as Adana and Rize rise up. The causes were closely related to a number of facts that have been accumulating. In the last two years the number of political detainees had surpassed those of China and Iran; Turkey was also the world champion in the number of arrested journalists; Administratively, the people were not consulted in decisions that concerned them leading to a systematic digression from democratic principles; the judicial system was instrumentalized for political ends and the prime minister increasingly behaved as a tyrant, an a priori sultan who intervened in the everyday life of the citizens. Erdogan had managed to bring to an end the almost 40 years old Turkish-Kurdish conflict to an end but the oppressive and othering discourse he employed in this case constituted a stark contrast.

Since May 27 when the revolt began until the last few days mainstream media outlets failed to report on the event, they ignored them. This was a clear breach of people’s right to receive accurate information. As Taksim, the heart of the social memory of  Turkey was heavily bombed with tear gas, Haber Turk channel chose to broadcast a documentary on penguins and NTV went for recorded old speeches of the prime minister. In other channels continued with their usual sitcoms. The only dissenting channel Halk TV (People’s TV) tried to support the revolt and report on the events with complete live coverage.

The crowd was multiplying as people continued to arrive in Taksim. Everyone has become an insurgent. Nearly everyone was carrying some type of gas mask, a scarf, a scuba mask, vicks, lemon and carbonated water in his or her bag.

In the early hours of June 1 the police was pushed out of Taksim and with the participation of various groups, Gezi Park became the center of the resistance featuring a multi-layered social life in which cooperation and solidarity reigned. Tens of thousands of people have been in Gezi Park since June 1. The streets that were formed in the park were named after the people who died on the streets. A library was opened and a vegetable garden planted. TV and radio broadcast began. A sick bay, kitchen and clothing exchange service has been responding to the needs of the protesters. Never before such a collective life has been practiced in Turkey. Never before in the history of the Turkish republic such a heterogenous group has exhibited such a homogenous behaviour. The Turkish youth born after the 1980 and always branded as  apolitical surprised everyone by displaying an unexpected level of resistance and cooperation.

In the meantime, the prime minister went on a trip to North Africa as if nothing had happened. He faced small problems such as cancellations of appointments by democratic institutions and came back with an honorary doctorate he received in Morocco. The night he returned, thousands of “men”, called in via sms (5) by the AKP Istanbul local municipalities were taken to the airport by bus. For the first time, the subway worked until 4 AM for the same crowd to come back. The same subway had been shut down to prevent the people from coming to Taksim square on May 1. This supposedly spontaneous but highly organized gathering (“we weren’t expecting it”, “we didn’t know”) was presented as the reaction of the people to the Gezi resistance. The prime minister responded to it with an agitated and poetry-ridden speech that is full of hatred, and occasioned a rather shameful and tragic moment for the country. The crowd chanted “open the way and we’ll crash Taksim”. Predictably, the PM likened the actions of the protesters (the overturning and destruction of police and media vehicles in the square, the use of a few destroyed buses as barricades against the police, the graffiti and writing on the walls etc.) to a terrorist action and characterized the protesters as looters, a group of marginal punks. As a result of his efforts, the “çapulcu” (looter) was universalized and even a intellectual dignitary such as Noam Chomsky said “I am a çapulcu as well”.

Protest in Taksim Square
Photo: Ekmel Ertan

Towards the end of his speech, the PM said that he wishes a computer literate youth that carry one in their person. That youth was already at Gezi Park. This showed that the PM and his government did not understand at all the world of computers and information, communication technologies and their inner-ideologies. The exclusively male crowd who went to the airport to greet the PM were called there via SMS and transported by bus. SMS is a unidirectional form of communication. The message arrives at a particular address and directly targets the receiver who will read it. This is very different from being in a network. It is in fact not-being in a network. It is not voluntary. If you are not in the network, someone has to arrange a bus for you to get from one place to another!

Such a popular act could not have been imagined in the 1980s. Turkey is now enjoying a freedom, the slowly developing democracy. The continuation of this protest in Taksim square shows that we have made progress in a lot of issues. Turkey has changed a lot and Gezi is an expression of this change. On the other hand, another source of hope for the resistance is its humor and art. There has never been a resistance action that is as humorous. Resistance means struggle, this resistance is carried out by a youth who can grasp the whole picture and thus puts everything into comical use, the youth whom we have a habit of calling apolitical in this country. It is a good thing their parents kept them away from politics out of the fear of their own past experiences, a good thing that they did not receive that knowledge. Our perception of their apolitical nature stems from the fact that their language and discourses are completely different from our habitual forms (6). This movement is undoubtedly political and it proposes an entirely new political practice. This humor proposes and reproduces a perception of the graffiti written on the walls during the Gezi resistance, the jokes circulating in the social media, Çarşı fan group’s takeover of a construction machine and chasing police vehicles not as a picture of war but an element of comedy. This is a sign of a serious position taking and awareness, a sign of new political practice.

There is a visible orientation towards direct democracy in the world as indicated by the Arab Spring, Occupy movement and what is happening in Turkey. This is a direct and political movement but it cannot be understood with the traditional models. This is an act of direct democracy. It is not a coincidence that movements that bear similarities appeared one after the other in the last few years. Communication technologies and digital reality constitute the cultural and ideological background of these movements. Politics has fallen behind society in Turkey and the World. Hierarchical political models built on power balances, interest-based relationships and secrecy are incapable of understanding and responding to the events in a manner suitable with the speed of the times. Politics still responds to the people with its old reflexes because it cannot figure out the networked structure of the new world and still thinks that the most authoritative, the most knowledgeable is the one on top of the political hierarchy; it still wishes to think the governing and the governed as separate entities. It presumes that it can control social segments and groups by othering them; it does not want to be plural and equal. It cannot give up the binary conception of the world.

Taxi drivers’ free service for the emergency cases in Taksim
Photo: Ekmel Ertan

In a world where physical as well as –and especially- electronic communication is so common, where everyone can have access to information, where everyone can build their network via intercultural, sub-cultural, interclass relationships and where these networks are interlaced no one is just governed. Everyone knows that they are a nod that connects and makes meaningful the whole of humanity. Such an integrative stance and perception carries within it the knowledge that it does not belong to Turkey, or any particular region or country. Those people who follow the Gezi Park resistance via online media share the same concerns and know that they too had experienced the same thing during the Occupy Zucotti Park. There is no longer a localized and cornered group of people facing the sovereign. In fact, the latter has to deal with a complex and infinite network and do not yet possess the reflexes to deal with it. It was thanks to this absence that Taksim was occupied and re-socialized. Because it is impossible to develop a reflex against this network, Taksim, Zuchotti and others will always remain public places. One can only understand this network by participating in it and internalizing it; this is very different from developing a reflex as one transforms and changes with the network. The power of the future will be that of the ones who accept to become nods in the network, that is those who develop the ability to govern without a government and without power.

Being linked to a network is to know that one is part of the whole. It is to be able to see the whole picture and be open to influences. This is why these movements show similar characteristics. The fact that there is a library and a vegetable garden at Gezi Park is a consequence of being wired in a network. The communication of so many people from different groups, sub-cultures, economic or social classes is only possible via network culture, communication and being in a network.

The government carries on the same illiteracy and lack of perception. Gezi Park resistance goes on. The reflexes of the network are complex. Nobody knows what is going to happen. But we know that good things are going to happen, that we are intelligent and creative enough to develop good things, and we think better together.

Edited and translated to English by Nafiz Akşehirlioglu 

–

Notes

1. The ratio of parks and green spaces in Istanbul to the surface area of the city is 1.5%. This ratio is 14% in Berlin, 38.4% in London and 14% in New York (World Cities Culture Report 2012)
2. For detailed chronological information on this topic http://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Taksim_Gezi_Park%C4%B1_protestolar%C4%B1
3. For a chronology of the events from the very beginning in English http://whatshappeningintaksim.com/homepage
4. To get an idea about the police violence http://delilimvar.tumblr.com/
5. When I say that SMS is unidirectional, I wish to emphasize that one is subjected to it. The communication in this example is one way, nobody replied to those sms, nobody engaged in a dialogue. The order of the authority had come via an SMS, they were subjected and they either consented or not. I am speaking of one-sidedness in this sense and not in a technical sense. But this situation is very different from joining twitter and acquiring information voluntarily.
6. This situation is visible in the resistance area that effectively consists of two spaces. Taksim square and Gezi Park are application grounds of thses two different practices. Whereas those who are a continuation of the leftist traditon gather in the square and make themselves visible with slogans and flags, the representatives of the new practice at Gezi open a library, plant a garden, perform theatre, recharge their phones using sunlight and paint with children.

——

About the author: 

Ekmel Ertan, Artistic Director at amberPlatform/BIS, Lecturer at Sabancı University

See: http://www.amberplatform.org/

This paper is also being published by: http://www.purplehaze.sk/vlna/

Photo’s: Ekmel Ertan

The occupations had to do with a tactical colonialisation of both hashtag space and real lived urban space. The fit to purpose and inevitable hashtags had already paved the way on Twitter: #Occupygezi and #Occupytaksim signalled the connection to the widely known occupation of the Zuccotti Park in New York that spread as model for global reappropriations: occupation of public streets as a form of reclaiming the commons. Such occupations were never really only about that particular space, but also more abstract but as real features: protests against the logic of financial capitalism and their relation to the securitization of public space.

The events at the Gezi Park might have started with protection of trees planned to be bulldozed to make space for yet another city mall, but they revealed much about the recent urban planning of Istanbul as well as global capitalism.

Istanbul had seen rather worrying street action the past months already: For instance the movement against the demolishing of the historical Emek film theatre was met by water cannons and tear gas.  In less violent news, which however have to do with public space as well, the new legislation restricts retail sales of alcohol during the night and bans selling of alcohol near mosques.

Besides urban space, natural space has been another target. The plan to build a third bridge over Bosphorus has been fiercely criticized by a range of environmental and other groups for its clear madness: in addition to the massive cutting down of trees, such building projects including the new airport set to open in 2018 are a threat to the water resources of the area.

Of course slogans and hashtags matter in how they condense and collect a range of different images, narratives, participant accounts and political sentiments. Social media acted as a way to quick and dirty collating of material, not least images like on the tumblr site:‪ http://occupygezipics.tumblr.com/. Hence the reference to “Arab Spring” was something of a rather successful slogan. After all, Turkey was supposed to be the democratic moderate Muslim country acting as a role for the uprising Arab countries.

However, the past years have seen more of international attention to the range of human rights violations against journalists and activists. The events at Gezi Park are in this sense a rather logical continuation of control of public space that in Istanbul is paradoxically mixed with a political ignorance of specialist urban planners voicing their concerns. On the one hand, lots of the massive sizes building projects are short-sighted in terms of their implications for the environment and the long term future of the city. This includes lack of planning for instance for public transport, which in a city completely congested by millions of cars is not a minor feature. On the other hand, the police measures that restrict the public space and political protest are showing how the major financial investments and projects are tightly linked with authoritarian security.

Indeed, besides being able to tap into the past years of legacy of Occupy-movements as well as Arab Spring, the case for OccupyIstanbul is emblematic of bigger contexts. Like seemingly every contemporary struggle, the urban battle of Gezi park and the real-world struggle with capitalist development and authoritarian policing exists at in real spaces and commons and in digital hashtag spaces with established news agencies covering the former by following the latter.

But it also should be read again as part of a longer development: the exploitation of ecological resources and the public urban commons, and the connection between short-sighted economically driven planning with totalitarian security is something we should understand is not restricted to Istanbul.

People might be now wondering how can a city that is applying for the Olympics 2020 demonstrate such reckless behaviour. Unfortunately, this is actually not that contradictory. It also shows the capacity to control the public space, protect the commercial environments and brands and take necessary measures in construction projects to pave the way for global cultural events. In London, the Olympic year of 2012 London was also the year of Occupy movement camping front of St. Paul’s Cathedral. London 2012 might not have been a violent affair but it demonstrated a link between police-governed high tech security and global brands.

Images from Reuters and via Twitter. Thanks for feedback to Paul Caplan and for the constant stream of information to Emre Kizilkaya and dozens of others via Twitter.

About the author:

Dr. Jussi Parikka is a cultural and media theorist. He works as Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art, UK. He writes on contemporary culture and media technologies and his books include Digital Contagions (2007), Insect Media (2010) and What is Media Archaeology? (2012). Parikka blogs at http://jussiparikka.net

This article was originally published at http://jussiparikka.net/2013/05/31/park-life-occupy-istanbul/

Jussi Parrika is the director of the Cultures of the Digital Economy (CoDE) institute. His lecture Practicing Media Archaeology: Creative Methodologies for Remediation and Creation focuses on some ideas and examples from media archaeological art practice.

By visiting projects by prominent artists from Zoe Beloff to Paul Demarinis, as well as some more recent names, he aims to elaborate some ideas of how such media archaeological art is able to address questions of the “material”, temporality and nature. As such, the projects are themselves excellent articulations of some of the challenges media archaeology faces in terms of developing itself as an innovative approach to digital culture – practically and theoretically.

From: http://medea.mah.se/2011/05/jussi-parikka-on-media-archaeology/

Basking in the early morning sun
Photo: Michelle du Pisani

Braklaagte, registered as farm number 168 on the Transvaal farm register (the number was changed in the second half of the twentieth century to JP-90), was 3,152 morgen and 529 square rood in size, which is equal to 2,700.5441 ha in metric measurements.

The first title deed to the farm was registered in October 1874 in the name of Diederik Jacobus Coetzee. Ownership of the farm was transferred several times to other white farmers. W.M. Beverley was the last white owner before the farm was bought by the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa.

In 1906 a dispute arose in the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa tribe of Dinokana in Moiloa’s Reserve between Abraham Pogiso Moiloa and Israel Keobusitse Moiloa. When Abraham’s father, Ikalafeng, had died in 1893 he was a minor and Israel, Ikalafeng’s younger brother, would for a number of years act as regent. When Israel had to hand over the bokgosi (chieftainship) to Abraham in 1906 differences arose between them. A section of the tribe, led by Israel, moved eastward and settled at Leeuwfontein.

Already in 1876 Leeuwfontein had been bought for the tribe by chief Sebogodi Moiloa of Dinokana at the price of 200 head of large cattle, equivalent to about £1,000, but the transfer of the farm to the tribe had not yet been effected. ‘Quite an exodus’ of the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa took place from Dinokana to Leeuwfontein and by 1907 the majority of Israel’s adherents had settled there.

After some time chief Abraham Moiloa visited Leeuwfontein in an attempt to persuade Israel’s followers to return to Dinokana to their old homes and lands. He promised to forget about the past, to forgive them and to treat them fairly. They refused to return to Dinokana without Israel and indicated that they regarded Leeuwfontein as their permanent village. Abraham then tried to solicit the help of the Native Affairs Department of the Transvaal Colony to evict Israel’s people from Leeuwfontein in terms of the Squatters Law, supposedly because they were defying any authority, but at first he was not successful. In 1908 he managed to get Israel and his brother Malebelele banished to the Heidelberg District of Transvaal, but they returned to Leeuwfontein in 1911.

Figure 2.1: Braklaagte and other surrounding farms mentioned in the book

In the few years between 1905, when the Transvaal Supreme Court made a ruling that temporarily lifted restrictions on individual black land ownership, and 1913, when the Natives Land Act once again restricted black land ownership, black people were able to purchase farms outside the reserves. After the breakaway section of the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa had acquired a part of the farm Welverdiend and a part of Leeuwfontein, they tried to purchase the farm Braklaagte to the south of Leeuwfontein. It was a couple of years before the Union of South Africa came into existence and all hope of blacks to get a say in the central government of the country would be dashed.

On behalf of Pholoane Naone and Lesaroa Kgori a letter was directed to the Minister of Native Affairs of the Transvaal Colony in June 1908, in which they applied to purchase Braklaagte for £1,500 from its white owner. Initially the acting Secretary of Native Affairs replied that permission could not be granted, because the black buyers wanted to settle 64 persons there, which would amount to squatting. At that time the Minister had instructed native commissioners to put the Squatters Law into operation by identifying and evicting blacks in excess of the number allowed on farms outside the reserves. Eventually, however, authorisation was given for the purchase of the farm and in 1909 five men (Kgosimang, Lesaro Rakgori, Ramogapo, Pholoani Nauni and Radikoba), on behalf of their section of the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa tribe, received their title deeds on the land. Thus Braklaagte was bought in undivided shares by a group of named black farmers, on behalf of a section of the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa tribe. Because the government was unwilling to recognise the community as a separate tribe, they held the property under an undisclosed trust.

Sebetlela Ceremony
Israel Keobusitse Moiloa requested his brother Malebelele Sebogodi of the third house of kgosi Sebogodi to settle at Braklaagte and he became the headman and performed the sebetlela ceremony. Sebetlela is the ceremony performed when a traditional leader settles with his people at a new place. Four sticks are cut from a môrobê tree (Ehretia rigida subsp. Nervifolia, English popular name: puzzle bush), sharpened, treated by the traditional healer with special medicine and planted in the soil at the four corners of the land. It marks the land as belonging to that specific tribe, and the medicine should protect the people from danger.
Braklaagte was subordinate to Leeuwfontein. Just after the land had become the legal possession of the tribe, their struggle to hold on to it commenced. They took a mortgage on the purchase price of £1,500. This mortgage was repaid, amongst others, by deductions that the Zeerust native commissioner made from wages earned on the mines by Braklaagte residents. By 1913 they had fallen behind with the payments on the mortgage and they faced legal action, which could deprive them of the land. However, little by little the mortgage was repaid, and they managed to evade being put off the land for financial reasons.

The acquisition of the farms by Israel Moiloa’s section of the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa occurred at a time when, according to revisionist historical studies, a transformation in labour and agrarian relations was taking place on the Transvaal Highveld because of capitalist development in South Africa. Processes of accumulation and dispossession resulted from the rise of mining and agricultural capital. Revisionists differ on the nature of the ‘uneasy’ alliance between ‘gold’ and ‘maize’, but agree that it led to the exploitation of cheap black labour and the impoverishment of the rural peasantry, both white and black. Mine owners and white commercial farmers needed workers and pushed for legislation that would give them easier access to African labour. Legislative measures to this effect were indeed adopted: access to land was made more difficult for black peasants, taxes and fees were raised, and stricter control over ‘squatting’ was introduced. The rural black peasantry, according to Bundy and other revisionist historians, was gradually deprived of the means to pursue an independent livelihood on the land. Whereas they initially managed to maintain their autonomy up to the end of the nineteenth century, their position vis-à-vis white commercial farmers and the white-controlled state rapidly deteriorated in the early twentieth century.
After the conclusion of the second Anglo-Boer War in 1902 black chiefs, who had supported the British war effort, including Bahurutshe chiefs, hoped to receive more land. However, this did not materialise and in the period of British colonial rule over the Transvaal a contrary process was taking place. Because of increasing labour demands by capitalist mining and agriculture rural Africans were increasingly being restricted to and even dispossessed of their tribal lands and incorporated into the capitalist economic system. Relationships of exploitation in the rural areas were changing. In the interior, Morris argues, rent paying tenants and sharecroppers increasingly found themselves impelled into labour tenancy. The next phase would be the conversion of labour tenants into wage labourers on white commercial farms.

In the Transvaal, where the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa lived, colonial control over land and labour was intensified during the post-war Milner period, which made it increasingly difficult for black peasants and tenants to produce food for the markets, and therefore to resist full dependence on wage earnings. In July 1907 the local sub-commissioner in the Native Affairs Department reported ‘a marked increase in the number of natives proceeding to Johannesburg in search of work’. During that month no fewer than 490 passes were issued to blacks in the Marico District.

Commercial agriculture was bolstered, which benefited Afrikaner landowners more than anyone else. The victory of the Het Volk party in the Transvaal elections of 1907 was based on their promise to restore white hegemony in the rural areas at the expense of African producers. Legislation against squatting, formerly applied rather patchily, was bound to be enforced more strictly. The Marico Farmers’ Co-operative in fact requested the government to assist farmers to apply the Squatters Law strictly.

In terms of the African agency discourse, mentioned in the introduction as one of the main threads of the Braklaagte narrative, it is clear that the purchase of farms outside the reserve by the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa was a deliberate action. These people exercised one of the few options available to them to get access to land. Thus they were resisting the processes of dispossession and proletarianisation that at that stage threatened to pin them down in an overcrowded reserve. The purchase of such farms in effect amounted to a means for black communities to extend the reserves. Their purpose was not to commercialise their farming and the newly acquired farms were immediately communalised.

Impact of the 1913 Natives Land Act
After the establishment of the Union of South Africa the political system accelerated the decline of the rural black peasantry. In 1913 the Natives Land Act was passed in parliament. The act reserved the shrinking areas under black communal control for occupation exclusively by blacks, but at the same time prohibited blacks from acquiring land outside the reserves. Scheduled land, that is, land set aside as reserves for black ownership in the schedule to the act, extended over about 9 million hectares or 7 per cent of all the land in South Africa. In addition the act attempted to curb squatting by blacks on white farms, by allowing them to stay on the farms only if they were employed there on a permanent or temporary basis.

The Natives Land Act was not the result of a desire to create the territorial basis of a just, if segregated, society. It was rather the response to the needs of white farmers, then the dominant interest group in South African politics, who required continued access to a supply of low-wage labour. It was intended to minimise competition for land by prohibiting blacks from acquiring land outside the reserves. In effect the 1913 act forced the majority of rural blacks, even formerly self-sustaining peasants, to work for someone else in order to be able to make a living. This was the case because the reserves were simply too small to provide a livelihood in agriculture for all their inhabitants. Therefore, the Natives Land Act is regarded as the death knell to the prosperity and possibilities of the peasantry. White commercial farmers only started acting in unity through farming associations towards the end of the 1920s. It took many years before the controls over sharecropping and squatting transformed labour relations into a pattern of labour tenancy. However, in the long run the population of the reserves became captive labour for the mines and the tenants became trapped labour for commercial farmers.

Figure 2.2: Scheduled lands in terms of the Natives Land Act, 1913. Moiloa’s Reserve was part of the scheduled lands, but Braklaagte was not.

Attempts to get the Braklaagte Title Deed transferred to the Minister
Although Braklaagte’s community was in a better position than most of the other rural communities, the ownership of Braklaagte was immediately at stake again when the 1913 Natives Land Act was passed. Private land ownership by blacks on land outside the areas reserved for them was restricted by the new legislation. The Bahurutshe of Braklaagte were in real danger of losing their claim to the land the moment the last of the five deed holders would die. To protect their tenure the black inhabitants of Braklaagte requested the local native commissioner in 1921 to transfer their title deeds to the Minister of Native Affairs, who would hold the deeds in trust for them as the rightful residents. At three different occasions F.S. Malan (Acting Minister of Native Affairs, 1915-1921), J.B.M. Hertzog (Prime Minister, 1924-1939 and also Minister of Native Affairs, 1924-1929) and E.G. Jansen (Minister of Native Affairs, 1929-1933) signed letters in which permission was granted for the transfer.
At that point in time the old feud between the Bahurutshe of Dinokana and the Bahurutshe of Braklaagte flared up again. During the 1920s and early 1930s the successive kgosi (chiefs) of Dinokana, Alfred Moiloa and Abraham Moiloa, were involved in disputes with the kgosana (headmen) of Braklaagte, Malabelele Sebogodi (Moiloa) and George Moiloa. Because the Department of Native Affairs did not want to make a precedent by recognising the section of the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa which was settled at Leeuwfontein and Braklaagte as a separate tribe, they seemed in no particular hurry to comply with the request for the transfer of Braklaagte’s title deed to the minister. There had been an earlier Supreme Court ruling that a section of a tribe could not purchase land independently from the tribe of which it formed part. Consequently the transfer was delayed for more than a decade.

At this point the system of land tenure at Braklaagte was already moving away from true communal ownership under customary law to what Budlender and Latsky refer to as a system of ‘nationalised ownership’ held by the state. A few remarks need to be made here about the role of communal tenure and the situation of the black peasantry in the first half of the twentieth century.
Communal tenure, although it was originally based on African customary law, was modified by successive South African governments in the course of the twentieth century. Alternative forms of tenure were effectively denied to black people by law. In the literature communal tenure has been described as
… an essential component of the migrant labour system, facilitating the concentration of the maximum possible number of Africans in the reserves/homelands, preventing the emergence of a stratum of rich peasants or capitalist farmers and providing the basis for a high degree of social control through compliant tribal leaders who controlled access to land.

Formal title (in the form of deeds) of most communal land, including Braklaagte, was held by a state official on behalf of the state in trust for specific tribal communities and allocated by traditional leaders to people living under their jurisdiction on a usufructuary basis. Communal tenure was a hybrid form, which combined elements of individual and collective property rights. An individual’s right to use the land flowed from membership of a tribal community rather than from private ownership. However, communal tenure did not imply communal ownership of all resources and communal agricultural production. Allocated residential and arable plots were reserved for the exclusive use of the occupying household, and unallocated lands were available as a commonage, providing pasture for livestock. Those who were allocated land by the chief or headman obtained a right to the use and benefits of that land, but had no right to sell it. In effect communal tenure in twentieth-century South Africa meant ‘a degree of community control over who is allowed into the group, thereby qualifying for an allocation of land for residence and cropping, as well as rights of access to and use of the shared common pool resources used by the group (i.e. the commons)’.

Many South African social historians have argued that the native reserves were deliberately underdeveloped in order to force Africans to sell their labour to the farms, mines and factories of an industrialising South Africa. Colin Bundy contended that the African peasantry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries responded by increasing their production for the market. Then a rapid decline of the peasantry set in and by the 1930s an independent peasantry no longer existed. In his analysis of agricultural production Simkins came to the conclusion that the disintegration of the peasantry occurred a bit later, in the 1950s. Drummond states that available evidence from Dinokana would tend to support Simkins’s view. Agriculture in Dinokana seems to have remained stable and productive till at least the Second World War period and even into the 1950s. A range of agricultural products was produced at Dinokana and in the 1930s the community, regarded as a ‘model native area’, received a large grant from the Minister of Native Affairs for agricultural improvements. When the government completed an irrigation system during the drought of the early 1930s a local councillor expressed optimism that increased production would ensure a ‘great future’ for Dinokana.
One of the residents of Lehurutshe recalled:
Even when I was attending school before 1937 I was gardening all the time. Only a few were running gardens under irrigation. Most people were farming on dry land – kaffir corn and mealies. At that time we ploughed and irrigated wheat to a large extent. People were financially strong. I once harvested ninety bags of wheat, which I sold in Zeerust for Two Pounds Ten Shillings a bag. I sold vegetables locally as well.

In the case of Braklaagte it is not as easy to set a date for the decline of the peasantry, due to the lack of production data for the early twentieth century. Braklaagte was not as suitable for crop cultivation as Dinokana, because it did not have the same abundant water supply. Livestock farming was the main agricultural activity.
George Mosekaphofu Moiloa succeeded Malebelele Sebogodi after his death in 1925 as the headman at Braklaagte. He was the son of Israel Keobusitse Moiloa’s second wife, Mmamosweu. Because of family differences Israel had moved to Braklaagte, died there in 1923 and was buried in Malebelele’s cattle kraal. Mmamosweu and George Mosekaphofu stayed on at Braklaagte after his death. Malebelele’s rightful heir in terms of customary law, Lekoloane John Sebogodi, was only eleven years old when his father died. An ethnologist, Isaac Motile Selebego, gave evidence to the Mabiletsa Commission in the 1990s that Lekoloane had been banished to Barberton, but he did not state by whom and why he had been sent away. In terms of the later rivalry for the headmanship between the Sebogodis and the Moiloas it is important to note that George did not become headman in the customary way through a decision by the serobe (royal family council) and was never inaugurated in that position by the kgosi-tona (supreme chief). In reality he was acting on behalf of Lekoloane. However, he tried to strengthen his own hold on the position. He had the backing of the government, because the native commissioner recognised him as headman.
Although the government refused to grant George’s request that the Braklaagte community should be recognised as a separate tribe, they did in fact function independently from the chief at Dinokana. When in 1926 they purchased the rest of Welverdiend, the headman of Braklaagte was given autonomy to facilitate the administration involved in the registration of the farm. To repay the debt incurred by the purchase of the farm a special rate of £2 per annum was later levied on each member of the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa at Braklaagte.

In May 1929, at a tribal meeting in Zeerust, the chief, councillors and members of the tribe of the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa resolved with a majority of votes to once again request the transfer of Braklaagte to the minister. A list of 255 names of male members of the tribe who had contributed to the purchase-price of Braklaagte, and of their descendants, was attached to the resolution. From the number of names on this list it is clear that the number of inhabitants of Braklaagte had increased considerably in the 21 years since the purchase of the farm in 1908. If each of the 255 men had on average three dependents, there were at that stage more than 1,000 people on Braklaagte and Welverdiend.
As a result of continued conflict between chief Abraham Moiloa of Dinokana and headman George Moiloa of Braklaagte the magistrate of Zeerust approached the Ministry of Native Affairs towards the end of 1933 and suggested that a headman should be elected by the inhabitants of Braklaagte. This headman should be appointed under the jurisdiction of the chief of Dinokana, with the qualification that the chief could not interfere in issues related to farmlands, dwelling-places, grazing rights and water. The headman would have the final say over these matters, with the right of appeal to the magistrate. Apparently the magistrate hoped that the democratic election of a headman would resolve the divisions in the ranks of the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa.

On 23 February 1934 the election was held between two candidates, which were George Moiloa, the serving headman, and Johannes Moiloa, whose candidature was supported by chief Abraham Moiloa, his brother-in-law. George won the election by 134 votes to 116. Those who had voted for Johannes declared themselves willing to accept George’s appointment, provided that he fulfilled his responsibilities without usurping the powers of the chief again. George’s appointment as headman of Braklaagte, with civil and criminal jurisdiction, was approved by the Governor-General a full seven years later, in terms of the Native Administration Act (act no. 38 of 1927).
As far as the authorities were concerned the dispute among the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa had been settled with George’s election in 1934 and the transfer of the land could now proceed. The legal process for the transfer was set in motion and on 25 September 1935 the farm Braklaagte was transferred to the Minister of Native Affairs, who would hold it in trust for the particular section of the Bahurutshe tribe. The descendants of the members of the tribe who had contributed to the initial purchase-price of the farm would, in terms of the registered deed of transfer, have the only and exclusive right to the occupation and use of the land.

Figure 2.3:  Extract from deed of transfer, 1935

It seemed as if this section of the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa was now assured of their land, even though in terms of the discriminatory legislation of the Union of South Africa it could not remain their private property any longer.

Concluding remarks

The historical events narrated in this chapter can be linked to two of the central issues identified in the introduction as the focus of this book, that is, (1) the manipulation of ethnicity by the government to implement segregation and consolidate their control over black communities, and (2) the agency of the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa at Braklaagte in maintaining as much independence as possible under a system of racial discrimination.
The way in which the South African government handled the internal strife between the two sections of the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa at Dinokana and Braklaagte and the election of a new headman for Braklaagte sheds light on the manipulation of ethnicity and traditional leadership to support the implementation of segregationist policies. It demonstrated the other side of the coin of divide and rule strategies.

The fact that the government constantly refused to grant full autonomy to the people of Braklaagte as a separate tribe with their own chief, but at the same time granted jurisdiction over some domestic affairs to the headman at Braklaagte, was in line with the policies of the Department of Native Affairs. The Department did not wish to provide power bases for rural black communities outside the reserves. They regarded the chief at Dinokana as their agent who would ensure compliance of his subordinates with the implementation of government policies. The taxes imposed on the reserves made it virtually impossible for a chief to escape this role in the government system. The chief at Dinokana would be keen to maintain his jurisdiction over communities outside the reserve, such as the one at Braklaagte, because it enhanced his status among his own people and, if he performed his duties in a satisfactory way, would lead to a favourable assessment by the native commissioner. For the government it was all a matter of maintaining strict control over black communities, both inside and outside the reserves. The tension between Dinokana and Braklaagte could be, and was from time to time, utilised by the authorities to strengthen their control with regard to the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa.
The available sources do not indicate that the government unduly interfered with the election of a headman for Braklaagte in 1934. This was probably because there was no evidence in the possession of the local native commissioner that either of the candidates would resist compliance with government policies. Therefore the government probably had no special preference for either of the contenders.
The agency of the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa at Braklaagte in working out their own destiny was clearly demonstrated by their purchase of the farm and the way in which they fought to retain their possession of the land. The initial purchase of Braklaagte was an act of defiance, not only against the segregationist policies of the Transvaal government and the capitalist-induced process of proletarianisation that threatened to force them into wage labour, but also, as a breakaway group, against being directly controlled by the ‘mother community’ at Dinokana. These people used the opportunity, created by a 1905 court ruling, to purchase their own land from a white farm owner, thus repossessing a small part of the former Bahurutshe heartland.
They had to actively fight the squatters laws and later also the 1913 Natives Land Act to hold on to the farm, even if it meant ceding their title to the Minister of Native Affairs. Despite the financial pressure on them created by the tax system they managed to slowly repay the mortgage. Ironically they managed to do this, at least in part, by selling the labour of the able-bodied men among them to the distant gold mines and regularly having a portion of their wages deducted by the local native commissioner. By the sweat of their brow they earned a right to the land.

–

Whose Land is it Anyway? (1908-1935) - Chapter 2 from:  The Last Frontier War – Braklaagte and the Struggle for Land before during and after Apartheid – Kobus du Pisani.

Savusa Series co-published by:
Rozenberg Publishers – 2009 – ISBN 978 90 3610 090 8
Unisa Press – 2009 – ISBN 978 1 86888 562 6

The book tells the story of how a black community in rural South Africa, the Bahurutshe ba ga Moiloa, managed to hold on the farm which they purchased in 1908 and resist attempts by the successive white-controlled goverments to forcefully remove them from their land.
Braklaagte, the farm in the Northwestern corner of the country near the Botswana border, was in terms of the Land Act a “black spot” in “white” South Africa.
When the Apartheid regime failed to effect the forced removal of the community under resolute leadership of their traditional leader, John Lekoloane Sebogodi, they were first expropriated and later forcefully incorporated into the Bophuthatswana homeland. Thus losing their South African citizenship. The Braklaagte community lived through serious violence before being reincorporated into reunified South Africa in 1994.
The purpose of the book is not to tell the Braklaagte story for its own sake, but to interpret the narrative in the context of the discourses of South African historiography. This is achieved by focussing on three issues:
- The role of ethnicity and traditional leadership in Apartheid South Africa
- The relationship between insecurity of tenure and rural poverty
- The Braklaagte experience as proof of African agency in the face of oppression.
–
Kobus Du Pisani is Professor of History in the School of Social and Goverment Studies at the Potchefstroom Campus of the North-West University. His research interests include Afrikaner masculinities, the environmental history of arid regions in South Africa, and cultural heritage management.

De serie De toekomst van de relatie Suriname – Nederland (in boekvorm verschenen in 2004) analyseert de bijzondere bilaterale hulprelatie sinds 1975, de successen en mislukkingen, en brengt een scala van inzichten bijeen over de toekomst van de relatie tussen beide landen. De serie onder redactie van Pitou van Dijck, econoom aan het Centrum voor Studie en Documentatie van Latijns Amerika (CEDLA) te Amsterdam, en gastdocent aan de Anton de Kom Universiteit in Paramaribo, bevat zeven bijdragen van auteurs uit Nederland, Suriname en de Verenigde Staten: Frits van Beek, Rob D. van den Berg, Pitou van Dijck, Dirk Kruijt, Hans R. Lim A Po en Gert Oostindie.
Rozenberg Quarterly zal in de komende weken alle zeven artikelen publiceren.

Online:
Pitou van Dijck - Ervaring en toekomstperspectief – een samenvatting
Gert Oostindie – De teloorgang van een bijzondere relatie
Pitou van Dijck - Hulp, beleid en economische groei

Binnenkort online:
Dirk Kruijt – De hulprelatie sinds 1975
Rob D. van den Berg – De verdragsrelatie in een breder perspectief
Hans R. Lim a Po – Opgezegde verantwoordelijkheid en mislukte hoop
Frits van Beek – Een multilateraal en macro-economisch perspectief