The Call of the Dispossessed

"It's all about land,” said my friend Lourens, waving through the car window at passing farms as we drove from Cape Town to a village nearby. “Everyone wants his 40 acres.” He added, “And a mule.” (Forty acres and a mule was the compensation awarded to freed American slaves after the Civil War.) Lourens, an Afrikaner, is a lawyer who runs a legal clinic for the poor. He is also a writer, lyrically attached to South Africa and all its peoples. We were heading out of town to visit one of his destitute clients.

It’s not so easy to get 40 acres if you are black in Africa, or an aboriginal in Canada. The whites came from Europe, took the land away and are reluctant to give it back. Sometimes they took the land by force of arms. Sometimes they took it by treaty or other form of “contract” with the indigenous peoples. Sometimes they took it by claiming sovereignty and passing an expropriating law. Sometimes no one else seemed to be around, and white settlers just moved in...