THE SOIL REMEMBERS: A PLEA FOR JUSTICE FROM ONE MARGINALISED TO ANOTHER

Lentle Moripe Activist

By Lentle Moripe
Activist

Beneath the earth’s glittering crust, below the vast vineyards and dark mine
shafts, the soil carries memories.

It remembers the hands that first nurtured it, hands hardened by love, not toil; the rhythm of the seasons maintained in harmony, not driven by harvest quotas, the communities it sustained and in return, was nourished by, in a pact as old as time itself.

South Africa’s colonialism was more than just theft, it enforced a collective amnesia, a deliberate distorting of the soul to make looting seem like divine providence.

This is a wrong that the Black people pledge to rectify, because dignity can’t be partially reclaimed.

*The Pen That Drew Scars

It started with ink dripping like blood. The 1913 Natives Land Act didn’t just map boundaries, it slashed deep wounds into our nation’s body. With a single stroke, 93% of our birthright was set aside for a few, relegating the majority to 7% of barren land (which was reluctantly increased to 13% later).

This wasn’t a policy, it was a violent philosophy.

It stated “Your history doesn’t matter.

Your sweat is insignificant.

You’re a foreigner in the land of your birth”.

In the Transvaal, our fathers, who knew every nuance of the soil and could
predict rain from the wind’s whisper, were expelled like pests.

They helplessly watched from overcrowded reserves as their cherished fields were ploughed by men taught to label theft as “progress,” dispossession a”civilisation,” and greed as “efficiency.”

As the Black people we declare this, “the land wasn’t given, it was stolen.

And we won’t stop until every scar is healed”.

*The Psychological Harvest We Refuse to Reap

The true terror of colonial rule wasn’t physical shackles, but mental ones.

Mission schools taught our children to hate their native language.

Life on reserves taught our farmers their methods were “primitive.”

A seed of doubt was sown that grew into a thick forest of self-hatred, and today, in the lively chaos of our township spazas, we witness its bitter fruit.

A local entrepreneur, her products as good as any, watches her neighbours choose foreign owned shops over hers, murmuring about “reliability” and “professionalism.”

The ghost of colonialism continues to whisper in our collective consciousness:
What is yours is inferior.

What is foreign is superior.

This mental dispossession outlasts the physical one, shifting economic control while our people are told they lack the skills to manage what is rightfully theirs.

South Africans, this lies ends now.

We didn’t lose our land because we were undeserving.

We lost it to force.

And we will reclaim it with the truth.

*Neocolonial Chains: The Plantation Never Ended

The chains have evolved, but they haven’t broken.

On Western Cape farms, children of those evicted from their land toil under the sun for wages that can’t sustain a family.

They sleep in shacks built in indifference, entrapped in debt to
the same system that disowned their grandparents.

In our mining belts, platinum and gold are torn from the earth, wealth transported in sleek containers across
seas, while our people inhale toxic air caused by the very same mines and face
bleak futures.

The mine is the new reserve, the multinational corporation, the new coloniser.

Exploitation now wears suits and carries spreadsheets, but its essence remains,
our land’s bounty is harvested for distant masters.

As the marginalised we won’t tolerate this. We’ll ensure our resources nourish our people first because a nation that can’t support her own people equally, it is not truly free.

*The Danger of Colonised Minds in Leadership

Liberation brought dawn, but some leaders still live in the shadow of midnight.

Men and women shaped by colonial worldviews mistake alliance with foreign
power for progress, recreating old hierarchies in new forms.

Laws born of struggle, like Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment, have been twisted into rituals of “fronting,” creating a small Black elite while millions wait at the gate.

Land reform crawls at the pace of grief, hampered by legal debates that treat justice as an inconvenience.

These leaders aren’t traitors, but they are prisoners of a past they never escaped.

They view power as a prize to hold, not a trust to wield.

South Africans we can’t be led by those who seek validation from our colonisers.

We need leaders who see South Africa through the African eyes, who know that freedom is not a title, but a life lived with dignity.

*The Media: Who Tells Our Story?

The storyteller shapes the nation and for too long, our story has been told by
others.

Under apartheid, state media framed resistance as “violence” and oppression as “stability.”

Today, some outlets still depict the starving child of a land occupier as a threat to order, while the wound that drives them is an afterthought.

They portray the unemployed Black man not as a casualty of systems, but as a danger continuing the colonial work of breaking the communal pillar, leaving chaos to fill the void.

As the marginalised we must pledge to fund community media, to amplify the
voices of our people.

Because a story told from within is the only story that can truly liberate us.

*Why This Land Need Not Be Poor

South Africa isn’t a poor nation.

We are a rich nation impoverished for the many so that the few can pile wealth.

Our wealth is not just in minerals and valleys but in the indomitable spirit of those who never forgot how to be free.

Poverty here is not an accident; it’s a design.

What was built to divide can be rebuilt to unite.

*Our Path Forward: A Journey to the Self

A spiritual ancestral call on every marginalised, every child of this soil, to join us in the work of decolonisation, not as a buzzword, but as a way of life:

-Decolonise Education: Let our children in Soweto learn about the advanced agricultural science of their ancestors, of the entrepreneurial spirit that built our first trade networks. Let them see themselves not as followers, but as creators and keepers of knowledge.

-Strengthen Community Economies:

Like the Amadiba people of the Eastern Cape, who stand as unyielding as the rocks they protect, declaring “This land is our mother, we decide her fate” we will build cooperatives and community trusts that place prosperity in shared hands.

-Reform Laws with Courage:

B-BBEE will become a true transfer of power, not a tick-box ritual.

Land restitution will be treated as the moral imperative it is, the return of a stolen soul, not a legal technicality.

-Reclaim Masculinity as Stewardship:

Colonialism sought to shatter our men, turning providers into prisoners,leaders into outcasts.

We will build programs that restore them as cultivators, builders, teachers, and fathers, not as useless or failures, but as caregivers of our nation.

*A Poetic Reckoning

The land is waiting.

It has absorbed our blood and tears, yet still offers her bounty.

Our task now is to return home, both spiritually and materially.

To gaze upon this vast, beautiful nation and recognise not what was taken, but what was preserved resilience like rock, culture like river, hope like rain.

To decolonise is to remember you are not a guest in your own story.

It is to touch the soil and feel not a conqueror’s deed of sale, but your grandmother’s song, your grandfather’s plough.

The road is long, it winds through parliaments and mental prisons alike.

But every step taken in truth, every law rooted in fairness, every story told from the heart.

This is how we emerge from colonial twilight into the dawn we were always destined to inherit.

The soil remembers and our forefathers do too.

“When your Leaders are compromised, don’t despair, organise yourselves as
the marginalised and do the neccessary. Always remember that Chris Hani, Steve Biko, Onkgopotse Tiro, Robert Sobukwe and many more were compromised.

The Land transaction to some is just another business deal but to us it is everything” Lentle Moripe.

I submit.