Funny. When Tom Bradley was LA Mayor, his worst graft was at LAX. I mentioned last week that white South Africans had better start selling out. The shoes are dropping.
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November 2, 2003
The Diamond Mine May Not Be Forever, but It's a Start
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
KUBOES, South Africa — As a young man, Willem Hans spent years clocking in miners as they arrived to dig and sift for diamonds at the Alexkor mine, a state-owned colossus on a plot of Atlantic coastline 10 times the size of Manhattan.
He shared a room during the workweek in a dirty hostel, returned on weekends to his family in a highland shack, and considered himself lucky to make the starting salary, in 1969, of $26 a month. In white-ruled South Africa, many blacks fared worse.
So consider how lucky he must feel today, now that a landmark court ruling puts him within shouting distance of becoming part owner of the mine, which is on the most western part of the nation's coast, near the Namibian border.
Along with 2,000 other descendants of the nomadic Nama tribe, as well as mixed-race descendants of European settlers known as the Basters, Mr. Hans laid claim to the mine's land and the minerals in it, charging that the former apartheid government drove his ancestors off it three-quarters of a century ago.
The legal battle took five years, and in October South Africa's highest court agreed, giving the community the chance to recover the land or to obtain compensation.
"I am happy, I am happy, I am happy," exulted Mr. Hans, 51, in his Kuboes home, a sparsely furnished brick house crowded with six children. "Before, the white people had the benefit, and the brown man was in the background. Now we don't have to stand begging."
The ruling is part of a far broader effort by the South African government to reverse the gross disparities of land ownership under the old apartheid system that relegated blacks to so-called colored reserves and homelands and barred them from owning property.
Nine years after the nation held its first democratic elections, blacks and mixed-race people still control just 15 percent of the land, though they are 88 percent of the population.
Now pressure is mounting on the government to move faster with the land programs so that inequities do not explode into unrest.
But South African officials say they are determined to avoid the fate of Zimbabwe, where state-approved land seizures have ruined commercial agriculture.
Instead, they are relying on a plodding process dependent on administrative decisions, court rulings, a limited state budget and, at times, the willingness of white landowners to sell. Of 79,000 land restitution claims filed by the 1998 deadline, just over half have been resolved.
Few are as grand as the claim of the Namas and the Basters, who seek not only recovery of 210,000 acres of state-owned land, but also compensation for the diamonds removed from that ground over 75 years.
The potential cost to the state is so great that the government intervened as the villagers' legal adversary, arguing that British colonizers, not apartheid rulers, took the land.
Henk Smith, the villagers' lawyer at the nonprofit Legal Resources Center, says the government's loss could be South Africa's gain if the villagers, most of whom are shepherds and laborers who never studied past the seventh grade, team up with the right managers and investors to become stewards of a diamond mine. "The returns for the South African people and the South African reconciliation process could be enormous," he said.
A rags-to-riches ending is by no means assured. The case, which was novel for recognizing unwritten property rights, now moves to a land-claims court for a decision on how the villagers should be compensated.
It is not yet clear whether the diamond field has been mined out, or whether large reserves remain. Of late much of the mine's income has come from culling diamonds not from the ground claimed by the Namas and Basters, but from the Atlantic seabed just offshore.
On hearing of the court's decision, residents of the Baster village of Ecksteenfontein, about 40 miles on a rutted dirt road from Kuboes, rushed outside their homes, shouting, laughing and crying.
A week later, some were still giddy. "Are they the people with the bags of money?" yelled one woman as two foreigners passed by her backyard, where she was hanging laundry to dry.
Underneath the elation is an ironclad consensus that the community must focus on its long-term future, said Floors Strauss, secretary of the group's property association. "People are not driving new Mercedes," he said. "We know the diamonds there won't last forever."
Officials of the mining company, Alexkor, suggest that portrayals of the community as heirs-in-waiting are premature. A company statement said most claimants opted for financial compensation rather than land and that no one, apparently, had won compensation for lost income. White employees say that whatever happens, the mine will still need their skills.
Mr. Hans, the former time-clock keeper in Kuboes, agrees with that. "The white man has the skills," he said. "I don't have the skills."
But he and other villagers scoff at the notion that they would settle for less than control of the mine, especially in light of one estimate that valued the company at $56 million. After six years of losses, the mine posted nearly $10 million in profits over the last two years.
"We want a sustainable future," said Mr. Strauss, the leader of the community's association.
He and his neighbors say the court victory offers the first real hope for development for a community that until the last decade lived without electricity or plumbing and that still lacks drinkable water.
Britain annexed the territory in 1847, and after diamonds were discovered in 1925, the white minority South African government declared the diamond field to be state property. Step by step, it corralled the Namas and Basters into a "colored reserve."
For Magdalena Joseph, a 39-year-old single mother of three, the idea of part ownership in a diamond mine is almost too much to contemplate. She spends her days slinging bricks, helping build guest houses for tourists. When that government job ends in four months, so will her income.
"I've got nothing," she said in her one-room shack of tin and cardboard, before squatting on the dirt floor to fry dough over a tiny fire of sticks.
"I would welcome flowing water in my home and some furniture and a room for each child," Ms. Joseph said. "Then I would feel like a person with rights."
nytimes.com |
