Thoughts around land as I am ‘LISTENING TO THE GROUND’ this morning. I am again grateful for this music as it continues to be a thinking space for me…
Besides the fact that Africa has some of the richest, most fertile land in the universe. Our urgent need for land ‘ownership’ perhaps arises on a cultural/spiritual level. The symbolism of land in our context. Land has always been the unifying force for our people, a sacred place where we do our rituals, the beginning and end of a life cycle; from the burying of the umbilical chord when a child is born to the burying of our ancestors when they pass this realm.
Also in the precolonial era, though people owned land, it was often a communal/collective practice, land was owned by communities whereby families were allocated land by traditional leaders, it was more of a birthright as opposed to the commercialized version of land ownership imposed by the colonizer.
We continue to listen to the ground…
Nduduzo Makhathini
