Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
were largely ignored since they controlled little land. In Mozambique, the Portuguese took
over control of the land until they absconded.
Clearly in Scandinavia and the United States the trend has been towards larger scale
commercial farms. This is starting to happen in Africa too although there is still a drive to hand
over the land to small subsistence farmers in both South Africa and Zimbabwe. In Namibia the
situation has been fairly stable since they have many farms with 99 year leases and with time
the land will revert to the local Africans. It will remain to be seen how viable they remain.
Commercial farming is also being re-established in Namibia, including game farming and the
old infrastructure is ironically often maintained by Afrikaans Boer (farmers). In Botswana and
other smaller countries that were British protectorates, the Chiefs maintained control of their
land and mines.
Clearly, the situation of who owns and controls the land in Southern Africa is a complex
issue dependent on who was there first, who controlled it during San Bushmen times or the
Bantu/Nguni era, or influx of Southern whites and colonial conflicts and the newly created
governments. This has relevance to what the likely course of Land Reform legislation will take
in Southern Africa. Just as in the case of other Bantu language areas south of the Sahara,
including East Africa, a paramount “Chief”/President and his political elite “chiefs”
traditionally controlled and now control the land and then allocate who can use it in return for
“gifts.” Thus, in many of these areas, such as Zimbabwe, the land is now controlled by the
government and then leased out. In the case of South Africa, this has not happened, but there is
considerable pressure from the younger generations of ANC on Zuma and his government to
allocate more white owned land to blacks. If the rest of Bantu language derived areas are
anything to go by, land appropriation will increase. In Zimbabwe, there is said to be no more
privately owned farm land but is now leased out back to whites. Similarly, mining rights were
traditionally controlled by the paramount Chief and his Chiefs and this will likely to be the
future course.
The Early Homo Species in the Manger of Mankind:
To my right at dinner sat Chris' wife who is now professor of anatomy at University of
Witwatersrand, my alma mater.
We talked about our old anatomy teachers including Raymond Dart who discovered the
Taung Baby, the first australopithecine primitive ape, and Philip Tobias who with the Leakeys
described another early australopithecine skeleton (Boisei, the 'Nutcracker') and Homo
habilis. What had been of interest was that one of the skulls at Sterkfontein had been
discovered in a cavern with an opening at the top and it appeared from teeth marks that a
leopard had bitten the skull.
Subsequent researchers such as Lee Berger have suggested that maybe a primitive black
eagle had also captured the ape-like animal since the eyes had been apparently pecked out and
the eye sockets removed in the manner that eagles use to get to the brain tissue in monkeys.
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