Take my land... Take my soul

Sitting opposite a polite and smiling Lebogang Seale in a Johannesburg coffee shop, a quote from Alan Paton's seminal Cry, The Beloved Country comes to mind.

- Brendan Seery

• LAND CLAIM: TRACING HIS FAMILY’S DISPOSSESSION AFTER THE ARRIVAL OF WHITES IN SA

"I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find that we are turned to hating."

Having read his recently published book about how his family was thrown off the land they had occupied for generations to make way for white farmers - and how those farmers and the system of colonialism and then apartheid brutalised the clan - I find it almost unbelievable that he hasn't turned to hating.

When I ask him, he shrugs and flashes his trademark modest smile: "What would be the point? We need to live together, all of us, in this country and you do not achieve justice by visiting injustice on someone else..."

Many of Seale's family still live in the barren and difficult lands in Limpopo to which they were banished, a step or two away from abject poverty.

Every time he drives back there from his home in Johannesburg, he is reminded of what might have been, not only for him and his kin, but for millions of other black people.

He passes by lush farms, like ZZ2, which have been turned into thriving agribusinesses and account for a significant part of the country's exports of fruit and vegetables.

His book One hundred years of dispossession, my family's quest to reclaim our land - traces the family claim to the land back to before the arrival of whites in that part of the country.

In the early 20th century, a woman called Dora Graham arrived and simply annexed the land of the Seales - who are of a long, royal bloodline and this land was later passed down to others, or sold.