Until now, the Natives Land Act of 1913 was considered the cutoff point. Going back further in history means all land that’s currently owned by white people (as much as 75% of the privately owned land in South Africa) could be claimed by black people whose forebears were unfairly dispossessed. I regret to say that my fellow historians and I are unlikely to provide much clarity when policymakers must come up with reliable formulas regarding land claims. The pressure is on to redress injustices of the past, rightly so. The public discussion gaining in volume, however, has tended to oversimplify the question of who is entitled to claim. And that may create legal problems in future. In practice, expropriation will not be a matter of deciding which land was seized in the past, but one of deciding which descendants of the dispossessed are entitled to it. The example of Tswana communities of South Africa prior to 1800 presents some of the difficult questions that could arise when trying to right old wrongs.
Over the past 35 years I have studied the history of the Setswana-speaking people before and after white Dutch and English speaking people dispossessed them of land in the area roughly equivalent to the present Limpopo and North West provinces.
