The word “stolen” is a very unfortunate word when it is used to describe land ownership.
The leader of Cope, Mosiuoa Lekota, said during a conversation on Radio 702 that the “general assumption” that land was stolen from black people is not correct.
Lekota says that whites who own land in South Africa bought it after negotiations, and from that, the system of title deeds came into being.
He said his own people should not believe that every white man who walks in the street owns the land. The families who owned land bought it and only need to return the land to the government if the government could deliver a title deed stating that the property is rightfully theirs.
Lekota said that the system of title deeds did not exist before Europeans came to Africa. Nevertheless, it enabled security for all those who had the ability to buy land.
He also admitted that black people did not originally own the country in the south but only occupied it when they arrived from the north.
“We, the so-called Bantu-speaking South Africans, came from the north, from the Great Lakes. We ran across the land occupied by the Khoi and the San. We were not even the original residents here,” Lekota said.
He says title deeds are essential because it makes it easier to identify the actual owners of the certain land.
Read the original article in Afrikaans on Die Vryburger
South Africa Today – South Africa News
