One of History’s Most Dangerous Myths

From the 1650s through the latter part of the 1800s, European pioneers descended upon South Africa. Initially, Dutch and later English powers sought to claim the region for themselves, and their aggression intensified upon the discovery of the area’s abundant natural resources. In their ruthless scramble, both colonial powers forcibly displaced numerous Native communities from their ancestral lands. However, despite these conflicts, the colonizers often asserted that they were settling in vacant land without any presence of local people. These claims found support in letters and travel logs written by various administrators, soldiers, and missionaries. Maps were created to reflect these assertions, and prominent English historians endorsed this narrative. Publications promoting the so-called “Empty Land Hypothesis” rested on three central arguments. First, they claimed that most of the land being settled by Europeans had no established communities or agricultural systems. Second, they argued that any African communities present in those regions had arrived concurrently with Europeans, thus lacking a genetic claim to the land. Third, they contended that since these African communities had likely taken the land from earlier, no longer existing Native populations, Europeans were justified in displacing these African settlers. The issue is that all three of these arguments were entirely false. Virtually no part of this land was vacant, and Africans had lived here for centuries. Native South Africans simply had a different concept of land ownership from the Dutch and English. Land belonged to families or groups, not individuals, and this ownership was more focused on the land’s agricultural produce rather than the land itself. Community leaders would grant seasonal land rights, allowing various nomadic groups to graze cattle or forage for vegetation. Even the groups residing in large agricultural settlements did not fully believe they owned the land as private property. However, the colonizing Europeans disregarded this ownership system, assuming that the land belonged to no one and could therefore be divided among themselves. In this context, claims that the land was “empty” were a misinformed distortion of a much more complex reality. Nevertheless, the Empty Land Hypothesis allowed English academics to rewrite history and downplay native populations. In 1894, the European parliament in Cape Town took this exploitation further by passing the Glen Dark Act. This act made it nearly impossible for native Africans to own land, undermining the system of collective tribal ownership and creating a class of landless people. To justify the theft, Europeans portrayed natives as savages lacking the capacity for reason and better off under colonial rule. This process of depriving natives of their rights to tribal lands and depicting them as savages has been employed by many colonizers. Now known as the Empty Land Myth, this is a deeply entrenched strategy in the colonial playbook, and its impact can be found throughout the histories of numerous countries, including Australia, Canada, and the US. In South Africa, the influence of this narrative can be directly traced to a cruel campaign of institutionalized racism. Exiled from their lands, the once-independent population toiled as migrant laborers and miners on European-owned property. The law barred them from working certain skilled jobs and forced Africans to reside in racially segregated areas. Over time, these racist policies escalated, enforcing segregation in urban areas, restricting voting rights, and eventually culminating in apartheid. Under this system, African people had no voting rights, and the education of native Africans was revamped to emphasize their legal and social subservience to white settlers. This state of legally enforced racism persisted into the early 1990s, and throughout this period, colonizers frequently invoked the Empty Land Hypothesis to justify the unequal distribution of land. South African resistance movements fought throughout the 20th century to attain political and economic freedom. Since the 1980s, South African scholars have used archaeological evidence to correct the historical record. Today, South African schools are finally teaching the region’s true history. However, the legacy of the Empty Land Myth still endures as one of the most damaging narratives ever told.