"When the colonialists arrived, they had the Bible and we had the land. Now, we have the Bible and they have the land." The old African saying rings, for many churches, uncomfortably true.
"The church... benefited from dispossessing black people of their land. It has to confront the issue that it owns land while its followers are landless," says Graham Philpott, director of Church Land Programme (CLP), a KwaZulu Natal-based NGO that helps churches return rural land to surrounding communities.
Philpott is adamant that churches should do all they can to return land to dispossessed communities, even if they bought it. The fact that community land went into private hands contravenes Christian ethics, he says.
But just how much of it is owned by churches? For a long time the figure was assumed to be about 7% of SA's land surface, but research conducted by CLP in 1998 established that only 185 525 ha - about 0,2% - was in the hands of churches (see table).
He says at one stage the CLP tried to estimate how much this land was worth, but soon gave up because it found it impossible to put a value on property that had in effect been turned into communal land.
But why did churches take these large tracts of land? Generally, the intention was for the properties to be turned into mission stations and become centres of development in rural areas, where local communities could get training in fields like agriculture, masonry and animal husbandry.
These attempts at rural development failed largely because the skills needed to run the programmes became scarce as early as the 1930s, leaving the land to fall into disuse, Philpott says.
There ha ve been some successes in transferring land - KwaZulu Natal-based churches have transferred about 30 000 ha of the 52 000 ha they owned back to local communities over the past decade - but overall Philpott sees these efforts as patchy.
He also worries about churches that use land to finance their activities.
Philpott questions the ethics of this practice. He says churches should rather look at their land as a means to "secure a livelihood for rural people" than as a cash cow.
But churches are starting to address the land issue in their own way.
The Methodist church has taken the view that its not enough to simply transfer ownership back to dispossessed people, and is equipping these communities with skills to use it.
The Anglicans sold land to the land affairs department and used the proceeds to set up a trust to develop the community occupying it.
The Catholic church donated some of its land to local communities. Grants that the communities received from government to purchase the land could then be used to develop it.
But the slowness in transferring ownership from the churches to the communities is not only the fault of the churches. Philpott says in one case it took 10 years to transfer donated land because government's process for dealing with transfers is so cumbersome.
Ranking the Analysts 2009
