Rite and Reason: The Government should set up a "Davitt fund" to provide loans on easy terms to enable South Africans to buy out large, white-owned farms, writes Fr Donal Carr.
T he more or less complete abolition of the landlord class took place in Ireland some years before the uprising that brought about political independence for the 26 counties.
The importance of this prior social revolution, due largely to the work of Michael Davitt, was a point stressed repeatedly at two recent Davitt conferences, one at Drumcondra in Dublin and the other at his birthplace in Straide, Co Mayo.
A sharp contrast to this Irish experience is what has taken place over recent decades in several African countries.
Having worked in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, I am reasonably familiar with the situation in these countries. When Kenya became independent 40 years ago many of the big white-owned farms changed hands. Some of the farms were divided up, but many of them came into the hands of newly-wealthy Africans, politicians or their friends.
More recently there has been a lot of "ethnic cleansing" in which small farmers or squatters were pushed off the land. The result has been a build-up of huge unrest, focused mainly on ownership of land.
The land troubles in Zimbabwe over the past few years have been widely reported. It is important to note that the source of the present difficulties was a fundamental weakness in the agreement that allowed the Mugabe-led government to be installed in Zimbabwe 25 years ago.
At that time, a relatively small number of huge white-owned farms occupied practically all of the good land in the country.
The takeover by an African government did not change this situation and it was left as a source of festering resentment by poor Africans. In the past few years President Mugabe has harnessed this resentment to justify a series of flagrantly unjust land-grabs.
Far from solving the land issue, his actions are likely to exacerbate the problem.
In South Africa, there is bitter resentment among much of the black population that white farmers still own a hugely disproportionate amount of the fertile land. Government action to change this situation has been weak and fragmented - due to both shortage of money and to political sensitivities.
The issue of the ownership of land is a ticking time-bomb that may explode at any time.
There is a real danger that the hopes of the world for the new multicultural South Africa will be disappointed and that the country will be racked by a bitter land war and ethnic strife.
Ireland has the opportunity to play a key role in helping South Africa to avoid these problems.
We can learn from the work of Davitt and the Land League in which he played a central role.
More particularly, we can be inspired by the way in which a solution was found to the land struggles of Davitt's time. Various Acts of Land Settlement were passed by the British government, allowing peasants to buy out the landlords and to gain ownership of their farms.
Now that the Irish government is committed to moving rapidly towards devoting 0.7 per cent of its income to overseas aid and development, it should set up a "Davitt fund" to which it could devote quite large amounts of this earmarked money.
The purpose of the "Davitt fund" would be to provide loans on easy terms to enable Africans to buy out many of the large white-owned farms in South Africa with a view to having large co-operatives or smaller but viable individual farms.
The loans would be repaid over an extended period - on the model of the annuities in Ireland.
The repaid money would be used to prolong and extend the buy-out scheme. When the buy-out scheme had come to an end, the annuities could be devoted to various ecologically helpful projects, such as reforestation or the building of small dams.
Obviously, IrelandAid alone would not be able to provide sufficient funds to solve all the land problems of South Africa. But the Davitt fund would be a pilot scheme that would, hopefully, be followed by other European countries, by the EU as a whole, and by other wealthy countries.
In view of the ecologically fragile situation of the whole southern African region, it would be important that environmental sensitivity be made a built-in condition of any grants for the buy-out of land. At this point, there would be room for committed action by a variety of non-governmental agencies, as part of the initiative or to run alongside it.
The NGOs might focus particularly on the provision of skills-training and education programmes for the beneficiaries of the fund - with a particular emphasis on the development of ecologically sensitive styles of farming. Furthermore, there could be provision for giving a privileged role and extra subsidies to those who choose to go organic.
The setting up of a Davitt fund would be a good way to mark the centenary of the death of this great Irish patriot.
Fr Donal Dorr is a priest with St Patrick's Missionary Society. He has written extensively on international social justice and development. His latest book, Spirituality of Leadership, (Columba Press) was published last February.