What’s Land Got to Do with It? Reading in the South African

Postcolony

• Ecocriticism:“Ecocriticism is a study of culture and cultural products (art works, writings, scientific theories, etc.) that incorporates in some way ecological understanding as it focuses on human relationship to the natural world [and is also] a response to needs, problems, or crises, depending on one’s perception of urgency.” Slight modification of definition provided by Thomas K Dean, 1994, ASLE Website

• Postcolonial Criticism:“a designation for critical discourses which thematize issues emerging from colonial relations and their aftermath, covering a long historical span (including the present)." Ella Shohat, "Notes on the 'Post-Colonial'," Social Text 31/32 (1993), 99.

At the Fishhouses Elizabeth Bishop

Frederick Douglass Robert Hayden

From CIA Fact book

SA population: 44,187,637

Ethnic groups: black African 79%, white 9.6%, colored 8.9%, Indian/Asian 2.5% (2001 census)

note: estimates for this country explicitly take into account the effects of excess mortality due to AIDS; this can result in lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality and death rates, lower population and growth rates, and changes in the distribution of population by age and sex than would otherwise be expected (July 2006 est.)

According to a late-2002 survey conducted by the liberal Institute for Democracy in South Africa, the number of black people who believe life was better under the apartheid regime is growing.

Tragically, more than 60 percent of all South Africans polled said the country was better run during white minority rule, only one in ten people believed their elected representatives were interested in their needs, and fewer than one in three felt the current government was more trustworthy than the apartheid regime.

Black people were only slightly more positive than white and mixed-race groups about the government, with 38 percent deeming it more trustworthy than before. Only 24 percent of black South Africans agreed with the proposition that the current government is less corrupt than the apartheid regime.

There has been an overall improvement in incomes

but this has been accompanied by a rise, in numbers and proportions, of the unemployed and of people living in poverty.

Between 1995 and 2004

Two and a half million more households now live in formal dwellings, 200 000 more have running water in their dwellings, 2,1-million more use electricity for cooking, and 647 000 more have flush lavatories in their dwellings.

From South African Institute of Race Relations. 25 April 2006 in M&G

The number of unemployed whites increased from 38 000 to 104 000, or by 174%, while the number of unemployed Africans increased from 1,3-million to 3,9-million, or by 200%. [Using the broader definition of unemployment, 48,3% or 7,6-million Africans who wanted to work did not have a job in 2004]

Largely because of growing unemployment, both groups have experienced overall increases in poverty.

In the middle-income category -- households earning between R38 401 and R153 600 pa-- the African share of income earned increased by 36% while the white share declined by 33%.

A similar trend is visible in the high-income category: households earning more than R153 601 a year. The African share of income increased by 175% while the white share declined by 32%.

Inequalities among Africans do, however, remain. In 1998, 51% of Africanhouseholds were in the low-income group. This figure declined by 31% to 35% in 2004. The proportion of African households in the high-income category increased by 285% over the same period.

From South African Institute of Race Relations. 25 April 2006 in M&G

Seekings, Jeremy, and Nicoli Nattrass. Class, Race, and Inequality in South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

“pre-tax profit share soared during the late 1990s, to 1960s-era levels associated with apartheid's heyday. Pretoria also cut primary corporate taxes dramatically (from 48 percent in 1994 to 30 percent in 1999) and maintained the deficit below 3 percent of GDP by restricting social spending, notwithstanding the avalanche of unemployment. As a result, according to even the government's statistics, average black African household income fell 19 percent from 1995-2000 (to $3,714 per year), while white household income rose 15 percent (to $22,600 per year). Not just relative but absolute poverty intensified, as the proportion of households earning less than $90 of real income increased from 20 percent of the population in 1995, to 28 percent in 2000. Across the racial divide, the poorest half of all South Africans earned just 9.7 percent of national income in 2000, down from 11.4 percent in 1995. The richest 20 percent earned 65 percent of all income. It is fair to assume that inequality continued to worsen after 2000.”

From Patrick Bond, in his attack on the neoliberal economic policies followed by the ANC government since 1994, but increasingly in the Presidency of Thabo Mbeki

68/148 listed

Nicky Oppenheimer, son of Harry Oppenheimer, grandson of Ernest Oppenheimer, who founded Anglo American & took over control of De Beers.

In 2006 listed by Forbes as 136th richest man in world, worth $4.6 billion.

Source of wealth – inherited, but based in the the extraction and selling of gold and diamonds.

Trivia – the man listed at # 131, worth $4.8 billion is Eric Schmidt, founder of Google.

Cyril Ramaphosa, former leader ofCOSATU, Congress of South African Trade Unions, and perhaps the mostinfluential ‘behind-the-scenes’ negotiator of the transition to Democracy - who left politics for the world of business before 1994. Now worth (himself) just less than a billion – but worth over a billion once assets of close family are added.

Slums across the world - the growth of megacities

2001 UN-Habitat estimates 924 mill slum-dwellers worldwide

2003 UN-HabitatChina 37.8% of urban population 193.8 mill

India 55.5% “ 158.4 mill

Brazil 36.6% “ 51.7 mill

2004

In Bombay total population of 19.1 million estimated that +5 mill have no access to toilets

What’s Land Got to Do with It? Reading in the South African

Postcolony

• Ecocriticism• Postcolonial critique

Robert Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery,

“At their extreme, the estimates proposed here suggest that profits derived from the triangular trade could have furnished anything between 20.9 per cent to 55 per cent of Britain’s gross fixed capital formation in 1770.”

P 542

And

“It seems probable that the triangular trade profits as a whole grew at least as fast in the late eighteenth century as did Britain’s metropolitan economy.”

p. 542

“What [this study] does show is that exchanges with slave plantations helped British capitalism make a breakthrough to industrialism and global hegemony ahead of its rivals.”

P 572

“A history so terrible and so beautiful, so base and so heroic, may seem strange and hard to comprehend, but it is irrevocably a part of your life too. What right have we to forget?"

Hilda Bernstein, Anti-apartheid campaigner: Hilda Watts, political activist,writer and artist: born London 15 April 1915; married 1941 Lionel Bernstein; died Cape Town 8 September 2006.