- A review of Bulelwa Mabasa’s My Land Obsession
by Prof Tinyiko Maluleke
Vice-Chancellor and Principal, Tshwane University of Technology
Once upon a time not so long ago, there was a painting of a tearful toddler in tattered clothes, hanging on the wall of a matchbox house in Meadowlands Zone 4, Soweto. Inside that house, lived a five-year-old girl, together with her little sister, her parents and her grandparents. The five-year old was both fascinated and troubled by the painting that hung on the wall. Several times a day, she would scrutinise the painting. One day, she asked her father why the toddler in the painting on the wall was crying, and why her clothes were torn and tattered. With sadness in his voice, her father told her that the toddler was crying because her land was taken away from her. From then on, the 5yr old decided that when she grows up, she wants to stand “in front of a courtroom, defending the rights and interests of black landlessness [depicted] in that painting” (p.51).
The five-year old in the true story we have just invoked, was none other than lawyer and author Bulelwa Sisi Mabasa –Tshwane University of Technology’s Vice Chancellor’s Book of the Month of July 2024 - My Land Obsession.
Her book begins with the recollection of Mabasa’s August 2018 family vacation in Thailand, during which she received a telephone call that caused her life to be “catapulted from a singular, insular career trajectory to one that was to shoulder the hopes and dreams of my fellow countrymen” (p.12). It was a call from the President of South Africa, informing Mabasa of her appointment to the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture. The five-year old girl from Meadowlands Zone 4, had come full circle.
In the first part of the book, comprising twelve chapters, Mabasa immerses the reader into her ancestry and the story of her childhood in Meadowlands and later in Naledi, Soweto. Looming large in this book is matchbox house number 511K, Ipiva street, Meadowlands Zone 4, where the author spent her first seven years on earth. This was the home of her grandparents - Nkwenkwe Elliott Themba Khemese and his wife Winnie Sesi Khemese (née Masote), who originated from the villages of Zimbani in the Transkei and Marapyane in Mpumalanga, respectively. Grandpa and grandma Khemese lived with their six children Stella, Malusi, Sandile, Nonceba, Thami, and Vuyelwa. In time, the daughters-in-law and the grandchildren ‘joined the party’ and also lived in the same house. Such was life in the township.
The main bedroom belonged to grandpa and grandma. Their first son, Reuben Malusi, together with his nursing sister wife Pamela Tiny Masopeng (née Mametse), took the second bedroom. Grandma and Grandpa’s female children ( Nonceba, Stella and Vuyelwa) occupied the third bedroom. By night, the dining room, and sometimes the kitchen, would be converted into makeshift bedrooms for the grandchildren and their uncles. And the children did not think they lacked anything. Nor did they consider themselves poor. Theirs was a warm, noisy, hard-working family, full of laughter and prone to breaking out into song, at the slightest provocation. What with grandpa Khemese, being an ardent chorister and choirmaster, so much so that he formed members of his own household into a choir, a.k.a The Band of Hope!
If hard work and perseverance were the first language of the Khemese household, it seems that music was the second family language. Grandpa Khemese’s in-laws – the Masotes - were even more musically inclined. In her teens, grandma Khemese (née Masote) was once offered a scholarship to go to the UK for training as an opera singer – on account of her beautiful soprano voice. Unfortunately, grandma’s parents thought there were far more important things for a young African woman to do than going to learn to sing in Europe.
But her three sons, more than made up for it. Malusi Khemese – became a cellist, Thami Khemese became a violinist and Sandile Khemese also became a violinist. And guess who inspired them? Their uncle Michael Masote, himself a musical virtuoso of note.
However, Malusi Khemese’s attempt to turn his daughters into music instrumentalists did not succeed. Not when he himself tried – impatiently - to teach violin to the girls himself. And not even when he enrolled them for part-time violin lessons at WITS.
If their father failed in making violinists out of his daughters, he certainly succeeded in making them independent thinkers, thirsty for knowledge, conscious of their ancestry, their history as South Africans and their place in life. This was thanks to the help he received from his wife and his own parents. Determined to give his daughter the necessary edge in life, Malusi sent them to Model C schools. He instilled a voracious hunger for knowledge and a stoic spirit of resilience in his daughters.
During her visits to her maternal grandmother’s home in rural Marapyane Bulelwa Mabasa learnt to appreciate the depth of bonds between African people and their land. She also experienced this when she watched grandpa Khemese meticulously working in his Meadowlands vegetable, herbs and fruit garden and when he spoke to her about the destruction of Sophiatown, where he once lived.
In 1992, Mabasa witnessed the blossoming of her father’s dream career. He quit his day job at SA Breweries and established the Soweto String Quartet with his two brothers and their childhood friend, Makhosini Mnguni. Their music took the country and the world by storm, turning them into “ambassadors for African classical music worldwide” (p.47). This catapulted the Khemese family to the top of Maslouw’s hierarchy of needs - self-actualization. And the Khemese children – especially Bulelwa Mabasa - embraced the ‘new’ dispensation with both hands.
Having been a participant observer and direct beneficiary of the perseverance of her grandparents and her own parents, and how they freed themselves from the restrictions of Apartheid as well as the drudgery of being ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’, Bulelwa Mabasa tackled her law studies at WITS with purpose and determination. But first, she had to learn some hard and sobering lessons about university level studies in general about legal studies in particular. Failing all her three first semester modules, she learnt very quickly that law “was not the study of waffling” and that she had to “understand and apply the principles and read and absorb long and often user-unfriendly court judgments” (p.112). The completion of her law degree at WITS did nothing to extinguish her curiosity and her determination to continue probing how the benefits of land redistribution programmes could filter through to the likes of “Mawe (grandma) and Tata (grandpa)” (p.115).
Early in 2002, on the very day when her youngest sister Nomfi was starting school, Bulelwa reported for duty as a candidate attorney at Werkmans - one of the five big law firms in South Africa. Two years later Mabasa was “retained as one of the eight candidate attorneys who would qualify as junior associates and later be admitted to the High Court” (p.133). She was immediately paired with a partner - Neil Kirby - whose interest and practice was healthcare law practice - an area of great interest to Mabasa, daughter of a public health care professional and granddaughter of a self-taught believer in natural remedies. All this at a time when the law had to catch up with and assist a country to craft appropriate legislation to deal with the new reality of HIV/AIDS epidemic.
While Mabasa’s career was taking off, her grandmother discerned that something was not right in the life of her granddaughter. So; grandma convened a prayer session with her granddaughter at which she implored God to give Bulelwa a suitable husband. So, God sent Arthur Mabasa along. In God’s appointed time, four little angels joined Arthur and Bulelwa – Kurhula, Ntsumi, Akani and Rixaka.
Mabasa’s legal interests included state procurement law, administrative law, public health law as well as constitutional law. But land reform, land restitution and land tenure were her passion. She handled such cases as the (Sphezi) Nkosi land claim (p.148ff) and the Manzimhlophe Community land claim (p.151ff) and other community land claims which tended to be wrongfully considered antithetical to economic development (p. 173-175).
In 2014, when South African democracy was 20yrs old, Mabasa took the initiative to establish the rather neglected legal specialization focused on land reform, at Werkmans. She went on to cement her own niche as a formidable land reform legal practitioner. Her broader aim was to do more than mere land reform litigation - one matter at a time. She wanted “to inform, invoke debate and contribute to why land reform remained a constitutional promise that the stability and future of the country was hinged on” (p.178).
Mabasa’s grasp of land reform, encompasses the spiritual and cultural dimensions of land, and therefore the need to protect land (p.182) from desecration by mining houses and other corporates with neither understanding nor respect for land. She saw land as more than mere commercial property for the living. She saw land as the habitat of the spirits, the arena of “shared identity, collective cultural expression and generational heritage” (p.190).
In the process, Mabasa had to interrogate such key pieces of legislation as the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act 10 of 2004, the Regulation of Agricultural Land Holdings Bill, the Restitution of Land Rights Amendment Bill, the Restitution Act, the Expropriation Act, as well as the Constitution itself, amongst others.
In the process of assisting communities who were making land claims, Mabasa had to unlearn some aspects of her western training as a lawyer to become, an ‘organic lawyer’. This meant that she had to leave her office, to meet for hours days and weeks with her clients under the trees in far-flung villages, in townhalls, at graveyards, on sacred hills and by the banks of ancestral rivers (p.194).
This book starts in the serene resort town of Karon on the west coast of the island of Phuket, where Mabasa received the news of her appointment to the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture. But it ends with an encounter of ancestral proportions. Days before submitting the manuscript of this book to the publisher, a friend of her late grandfather, introduced Bulelwa Mabasa to 94-year-old Desiree Mamazana Finca, the first Black female attorney in South Africa, admitted in 1967. It turns out that the Fincas adopted and brought up Mabasa’s orphaned grandfather in Zimbani, Transkei, so that Desiree Finca considered grandpa Khemese, her brother. Two black women lawyers, related to one another, with more than half a century in age difference, approached each other and embraced for a hundred years.
But ke, what kind of book is this? Sometimes the line between a memoire (a collection of memories) and an autobiography (the story of a person’s life as told by themselves) is very thin, and it is the case in this book. This book is a cross between the two genres – genres which are close cousins. In this sense, the book is somewhat misnamed and miscategorised. In my view the book is more of an autobiography than it is a memoire. But what do I know!
The purely legal chapters are few and far between. Yes the book does dwell on the author’s land obsession as per the title. Yes, the book discusses the author’s obsession with the efficacy of the laws that attend to land restitution and reform. And yes, the book touches on the politics and spirituality of land. But I would suggest that, its actual engagement with these themes and topics, feels hurried and mainly anecdotal. Without taking away from the author’s tremendous and admirable work as a land restitution lawyer, an advocate for land justice, and a public campaigner and activist for land reform, my sense is that this books reveals a broader set of interests, than just the land obsession.
But who cares! My Land Obsession is an extremely readable and gripping biography of the author – from her own birth to the births of each of her four younger sisters; from her days at Kwa-Phalo Primary School in Meadowlands, to her TV stardom as an actor in the SABC iKhaya Labantwana, to Topaz Secondary School in Lenasia and to Waverly Girls High School in Highlands North, to her completion of her law degree at WITS; to her marriage, and to the births of each of her three biological children; and to the devastating deaths of her grandparents and her own parents.
One will have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by this book.
We thank Mabasa for this riveting book. We are thankful that our lives overlap with that of someone as brilliant as she. But did she have to be born in Meadowlands, where I was also born and bred? Did she have to grow up in Meadowlands Zone 4 – where there were bully ‘Zulu boys’ who targeted Vatsonga boys walking through Zone 4 to go to the Xitsonga medium school – at Mawila - in Meadowlands Zone 5? I meditated on these questions as I consumed Mabasa’s evocative ‘paintings’ of the sights, sounds, and smells of the Meadowlands township in which I also grew up. _Siyabulela MaDlamini, siyabulela Jama ka Sjadu, sithi: amaqobokazan’anga lal’endleni, kunyembelekile!
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