South Africa: Zulu king’s lands are controversial

In South Africa, the announcement of reform on land redistribution does not please everyone.

First, there is this tension with South African white farmers who could be expropriated without compensation from the state. But that’s not all…

The traditional leaders of the different tribes also oppose this reform. For a simple reason, they could lose the many lands that belong to them. At the forefront of the protesters, the influential Zulu king who intends to mobilize his people to preserve his land.

“If they continue to provoke us, it will end in war,” Zulu king Goodwill Zwelithini warns the ANC; touching his land would provoke the anger of all his people.

In the KwaZulu-Natal region, Zulu stronghold, 30% of the land belongs to him; the result of an agreement with the apartheid government in the 1990s.

But at the time of the struggle of South African blacks to find their land, this kind of privilege seems anachronistic for some, as for the former interim president Kgalema Motlanthe who advocated the return of these properties in the fold of the State.

Not sure yet that this clause appears in the law that will be voted in a few weeks in Parliament, but the Zulu king is already ready.

Goodwill Zwelithini asked all those who really felt Zulu to give the equivalent of 30 cents to finance a possible legal battle.