A little overstated here i think, the degree of risk in RSA, especially as it pertains to Messina and like claims, but it is useful to keep in mind the possibilities ... also the waves of increasing and decreasing fear ... feels to me almost like it's time for some bad news in re suf
'The new ANC, African National Council, laws say that blacks can verbally make claim to white-owned farmland that supposedly belonged to their ancestors who had been removed by force. The white farmer then must prove he owns the land and previous owners did not drive those black ancestors away. Now who will be able to access records from the 16-1700’S?'
Exactly this happened to my wife's uncle not too many years ago, he lost an entire ranch ... 'indians' came wandering through and decided that this is where their ancestral territory was, some bureaucrat decided they were correct, and that the agrarian law applied .... he tried to fight it and the lawyer's fees broke him, so instead of losing two thirds or whatever they wanted, he lost it all .... the claim was entirely bullshit, and everybody nearby knows it, because there are still oldtimers alive who were clearing that area in the 1930s, it was heavily timbered with lots of caoba and cedro, and had had no agriculture of any kind practiced on it for hundreds of years, probably during the classic maya period and not since ... but these people had connections superior to his, and that's all there was to it, he lost a ranch and herd that he'd been building all his life ... and he was just as 'indian' by blood as they were, if not more, it wasn't a race thing, but a thing of crafty opportunists versus a plodding worker who minded his own g.d. business
The shame of this sort of thing - and there are other examples of it - is that there is good reason for such laws, people have been robbed of their land, and should rightly have a claim on it, in many cases .... but too many times, the law gets 'enforced' on the wrong people, and not at all applied where it should be |
