The anguish of dispossession in South Africa is neither the untold truths nor the many spoken truths of how a family, in the place of their birth, ended up stealing a grave. The anguish comes from the eyes of the ones who had to steal the grave and bury their own in a hurry. As if that is not enough, the moment of dispossession is thought of today as part of a vile past that is no longer relevant to us.

The history of dispossession in South Africa should instead be seen as part of our historical present. Our history is forever present in our social order. To locate it, we need to look deeply into South Africa's vast hectares of land. What we might excavate will be ugly, but it will also reveal the deeper meaning of dispossession – that once people are removed from the land, not only do they become slaves, they also become ‘criminals’ whose entire existence is a journey to nowhere.

This is a condition of ontological nowhereness as exemplified in Solomon Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa, where he documents how the 1913 Land Act made criminals of all those Black people (labour tenants) who refused to abide by the law which stipulated that they would become servants of the farmer and work the land along with their cattle.