The spring 2014 issue of IIT Magazine—now available here—includes a feature article on Bernadette Atuahene, whose scholarship focuses on the subject of land restitution in South Africa. The article outlines Atuahene’s travels to South Africa, which have spawned an award-winning documentary—Sifuna Okwethu (We Want What’s Ours)—and a forthcoming book titled We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program (Oxford). In both the documentary and book, Atuahene addresses the injustice of land dispossession, a holdover from the country’s apartheid regime, and seeks to combat inequality through a more just implementation of land restitution.
Read an excerpt from the article below:
In the South African township of Evaton, a Zulu woman exits the dilapidated shack where she lives with several members of her family and walks a short distance to a plot bearing a solitary, off-white tombstone, where she talks to the spirit of her father, Wine Ndolila.
“We are here about your land that was taken during apartheid,” Ntombena Ndolila says in her native language while kneeling on all fours on the ground near the memorial. “As your daughters, we have all the rights. This is our father’s land. Halala Ndolila, your land is coming back.”
The Ndolilas are so confident that their country’s government will return their ancestral land to them that they have chosen to live there as squatters, even after the apartheid government bulldozed their homes and twice evicted them from the property. The family’s tenacity seized the attention of Bernadette Atuahene, associate professor at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law, who has focused on their plight in Sifuna Okwethu, Zulu for We Want What’s Ours, an award-winning documentary she produced and directed on the subject of land restitution in South Africa. The Ndolilas provide a face for a cause Atuahene has embraced since 2002 when she did a clerkship at the South African Constitutional Court as a Fulbright Scholar.
“The dire inequality in Johannesburg was so striking to me,” says Atuahene, a Los Angeles native whose parents are from Ghana. “I’d never seen so many Lamborghinis, Lotuses, and other exotic cars next to such extreme poverty. I knew that part of what was contributing to this inequality was land theft—where the reigning white regimes replaced an inheritance of wealth with an inheritance of disadvantage…. I knew that this was my issue; it just boiled my blood and I had to do something about it.”
To continue reading, click here. See more of Professor Atuahene’s scholarship on land restitution at her Selected Works page.
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