Back to the land: an interview with Constance Mogale

LAMOSA operates in the former Transvaal. Its ambitious aim, stated on its website, is to eradicate colonial and apartheid land injustice legacies.

Mogale has been preoccupied with apartheid land politics for a good chunk of her life. “I was born in a farming family. I was born in a family which owned land. My family bought the land when there was an opportunity back in the 1960s. They were forcefully removed with titles”, she says.

However, it wasn’t until the 1980s that Mogale channelled her awareness of land iniquities into political action. “Back in the 80s is when I started knowing about these things because I was growing up in a family where there were meetings about land rights. There was this campaign of ‘Back to the Land’. The political spirit in the country was starting to come back and people were saying we need to go back to the land. I belong to those first communities who re-occupied the land”, she says.

Then, in 1991, a land conference took place in Bloemfontein. One of Mogale’s grandfathers attended. This conference spurred the formation of the Transvaal Land Restitution Committee, which, with their counterparts in the old Natal and Free State provinces, were the organisational predecessors of Lamosa.

Mogale explains that Lamosa’s genesis and mission falls squarely within the needs of politically and economically disempowered post-liberation rural communities. In fact, it was entirely dependent on the financial contributions of the 65 rural communities from Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and the North West, which form its member base, until funders eventually came on board. “It was communities sharing the same crisis who were saying we need to come together to be a force to influence negotiations”, says Mogale.

Mogale believes that land rights advocacy is of primary importance to the social health of South Africa. She says, “I think everybody should get interested because this is the future of the country. If we want to send our children to technology universities that’s fine but we need a balance. They need to know their history. Without this information about how people were dispossessed, how decisions were made, we are not going to make a breakthrough. We are going to create a society of job-seekers, a society of people who are tenants in their own country.”

Lamosa has several key campaigns running. “Our core business is land reform and most of our members are restitution communities who were forcefully removed from their ancestral land by the apartheid government”, says Mogale. Its primary campaign is to lobby government for outstanding restitution claims to be finalised, the release of land to rural communities and security of tenure.

Another interest is its Mining and Extractives campaign. “This campaign is to mobilise communities to raise their voices and be counted as one of beneficiaries in this business thing”, says Mogale. “We want to lobby for a fair and just redistribution of natural resources and also to make sure that companies comply with their social labour plans, their environmental assessments and for communities to benefit from the land. These campaigns are linked to land rights as well because when people were dispossessed of their land they were not only dispossessed of the surface rights, they were dispossessed of the mineral rights. There was no law separating surface rights and mineral rights and if people are going to claim land back they are going to claim what they have lost which is all the comprehensive rights not only surface rights.”

According to Mogale, many companies evade the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) provision for free prior and informed consent, which demands that companies prospecting in a particular area consult with the communities living there. However, because of a lack of access to knowledge in these communities, mining companies frequently get away without fulfilling this obligation.

Lamosa also has a Small Scale Farmer campaign. It promotes awareness of recently produced policy and its lax support for small scale farming operations. “We have done the research and come to the conclusion that policies in this country undermine the rights of small scale farmers. In fact, researchers are also biased, promoting commercial farmers. Subsistence farmers [are seen as] charity cases where social development can give them grants”, says Mogale.

“Mining companies know that if a province adopts the Traditional Courts Bill traditional leaders will be empowered to make decisions in the absence of the community.”

Mogale says of the recently deceased Traditional Courts Bill, “You must remember that the North West, Limpopo and Mpumalanga, are mineral rich provinces. That is why [government and big business] wanted this bill to go through. They will just consult the traditional leader, sign the consent papers and do their business. It’s not only about traditional leaders making the right decisions. It’s also about mineral wealth. So they know that if a province adopts this bill that means the traditional leaders and courts will be empowered to make decisions in the absence of the community.”

Mogale points out another advantage of people being able to produce their own food. “If you’re going to ask people to strike against a mining company for five months it is self-defeating because they will say, ‘We are getting hungry [and our] children are dropping out of school.’ So they have to turn back to those companies to make sure there is something to eat. But if they are subsistent?” she asks rhetorically.

Find out more about LAMOSA.