historical background
land for settler farms: these were the control mechanisms put in place by the settlers to destroy what was there in order to replace it with a new narrative based on Western hegemony. In the following section we explore the apparatus of oppression, which changed form over the years, while in substance continuing to exert a constant and ever greater effect of forceful distancing of the KhoiSan from the land as a source of livelihoods, cultural expression, and identity. The implementation of de facto terra nullius The colonization and dispossession of Indigenous territory by the waves of settlers, was founded on the “legal fiction”8 of de facto terra nullius – land belonging to no one. It is a conception of power over territory that has its roots in land ownership and private property prevalent throughout Europe, starting with the agrarian revolution and continued into the industrial age, which was then imposed by the settler colonialists onto the lands they conquered and settled. It is a phenomenon principally structured by capitalism 9 and characterised by an egocentric view of the territory (Jakob 2009, Rose 1996).
Moreton-Robinson (2003). Marx, in his analysis of Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, identifies, in this period, the formation of a group/class from whom every form of “property” was removed, including the means of production and, as a consequence, their roots in a specific piece of land thus rendering them at the mercy of wage labour which becomes their only relationship with the productive means and its living place. This profound separation between labour and property is analysed as a dual form of alienation: first from the land, when the worker is brought from the country to the city, or removed from his natural habitat, and secondly, from his own tools of work, which pass into the hands of a single entrepreneur. Monestiroli A. 1999, L’architettura della realta, Umberto Alemanni, Milan, p154. 8 9
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Fig. 10 Site visit with Chief Maleiba at the dunes in Alexandria, SAN Parks; 14 November 2019
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