The Palace and the Forest

ITwo Images, One Constitution

On 9 June 2026, the newly elected Federal Leader of the Democratic Alliance, Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, led a high-level delegation to the eMashobeni Royal Palace in Pongola, KwaZulu-Natal, for a courtesy visit to His Majesty King Misuzulu kaZwelithini. The delegation included DA National Chairperson Solly Msimanga, DA KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Leader Sithembiso Ngema, and—critically—DA Provincial Chairperson and Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure, Dean Macpherson. The visit was described by the DA as reflecting the party's “respect for the institution of traditional leadership and its enduring role in the lives and heritage of millions of South Africans” (EWN, 2026). Two cows were presented to His Majesty as a gesture of honour.

I write not to question that visit. Respect for the Zulu monarchy is appropriate. The institution of traditional leadership is protected by the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996, ss. 211–212), and the Zulu nation's contribution to South African history, culture, and governance is beyond dispute.

I write because of what the same day's image reveals when placed beside four years of state conduct at Knoflokskraal.

At Knoflokskraal—a settlement in the Elgin Valley between Grabouw and Botrivier, on land owned by the Department of Public Works and Infrastructure—San and Khoi descendants have, since 2020, been building a community rooted in Indigenous identity, cultural restoration, and the desire for land and belonging. The settlement has grown to approximately 4,000 structures and an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 residents. The state's primary vocabulary for Knoflokskraal has been: unlawful occupation, land invasion, containment, rule of law, unsustainable, criminality, parallel settlement (Macpherson, 2026a; DA Western Cape, 2026). Minister Macpherson's Department has spent R41.4 million over four years on the Knoflokskraal situation—overwhelmingly on containment, security, court orders, and surveillance (African News Agency, 2026). Not on dialogue. Not on cultural heritage assessment. Not on restorative engagement.

The question is therefore not: Why does the DA visit the Zulu King? That is not the problem. The question is: Why is one form of African traditional authority approached through dignity, ceremony, diplomacy, and respect, while another Indigenous restoration claim—San and Khoi, landless, urban, historically fragmented by colonialism and apartheid—is approached primarily through containment, legality, suspicion, and enforcement?

That is the question this piece addresses.

IIThe Man in Both Rooms

There is a detail in the Hill-Lewis delegation that cannot be treated as coincidental. Minister Dean Macpherson was physically present at eMashobeni Royal Palace, standing in the presence of traditional authority and performing respect. He is the same Minister who, on 7 April 2026, held a media briefing describing Knoflokskraal as “serious, entrenched, and unsustainable”, warning that it had “effectively become a parallel settlement operating outside lawful governance” (IOL, 2026; TimesLive, 2026). He is the Minister who outlined a four-pillar intervention plan centred on containment and enforcement. He is the Minister under whose authority R41.4 million was spent—not a single rand of it on cultural assessment, heritage documentation, or an independent restorative process.

Minister Macpherson occupies a dual position. He acts legally as a national Minister responsible for state-owned immovable assets. But he is also a DA public representative—now the DA's Provincial Chairperson in KwaZulu-Natal. The DA cannot entirely separate its public posture of respect for traditional leadership from the conduct of a DA-appointed Ministry toward Knoflokskraal. The issue is not partisan point-scoring. The issue is coherence between symbolic recognition and administrative justice.

When a Minister can travel to a royal palace to affirm the dignity of Indigenous leadership, and then return to his office to authorise containment operations against another Indigenous community, the problem is not hypocrisy in the conventional political sense. The problem is structural. It reveals what the state is willing to see and what it is willing to unsee.

IIIGovernance Legibility and the Architecture of Recognition

James C. Scott (1998), in Seeing Like a State, demonstrated that states simplify complex social realities into administratively legible categories—and in doing so, systematically misrecognise or render invisible those forms of life that do not conform to the state's classificatory apparatus. Mamdani (1996) extended this analysis to colonial Africa, showing how indirect rule created a bifurcated state: one set of institutions for “citizens” and another for “subjects,” with traditional authority instrumentalised as a technology of colonial governance.

The Zulu monarchy survived colonialism not unscathed, but institutionally visible. It retained royal houses, genealogical continuity, territorial association, and—crucially—a form of governance that the colonial and post-colonial state could read, categorise, and engage. This is not a criticism of the Zulu nation; it is an observation about the politics of institutional survival under colonial conditions.

The San and Khoi peoples were subjected to a fundamentally different colonial trajectory. Their governance systems were not merely suppressed; they were systematically dismantled. Missionisation fractured spiritual authority. Land dispossession severed the relationship between people and territory. Forced labour regimes—from the wine farms of the colonial Cape to the farms of the Overberg—destroyed social cohesion. Racial reclassification under apartheid absorbed San and Khoi identity into the administrative category “Coloured,” erasing Indigeneity altogether (Adhikari, 2010; Besten, 2011; Erasmus, 2001). Language death, forced assimilation, and the deliberate refusal to recognise San and Khoi peoples as sovereign nations with living law and governance completed what Penn (2005) called the “forgotten frontier.”

The consequence is this: when the state only respects Indigenous authority once it is institutionally legible—once it has a recognised king, a royal house, a territory, and a legal personality—it effectively rewards those histories that survived colonialism in visible, formalised institutional form, and punishes those whose institutions were deliberately destroyed by the very forces the democratic state claims to have repudiated.

The DA visits what it can already see. What it cannot see, it calls illegal.

IVKnoflokskraal as Restoration, Not Invasion

The dominant state narrative frames Knoflokskraal as a land invasion—an unlawful occupation of state property that began during the COVID-19 pandemic and spiralled beyond administrative control. The DA's official statement of April 2026 described it as driven by “political groupings ahead of the local government elections in 2021” and spoke of “drug-related activity, intimidation of emergency services, deeply embedded criminal syndicates and illegal public land sales” (DA Western Cape, 2026). The language is entirely securitised. The community is collapsed into a threat.

But Knoflokskraal cannot be read only through the lens of property management. It must also be read as a restoration claim arising from a history of Indigenous dispossession, cultural interruption, and failed recognition. The community members who have spoken publicly describe Knoflokskraal not as an opportunistic land grab, but as an assertion of identity, dignity, and belonging. As one community leader stated: “For many, this land represents belonging, dignity and restoration” (TimesLive, 10 April 2026). Residents have explicitly rejected the criminality narrative: “We did not move here to be bergies” (TimesLive, 2026).

This is not to claim that no challenges exist within Knoflokskraal. Every large informal settlement faces governance, safety, and infrastructure pressures. But the state's refusal to engage with the cultural, historical, and restorative dimensions of the settlement—its insistence on framing the matter as exclusively one of property administration and law enforcement—is itself a political act. It is a decision about what counts as a legitimate claim and what does not. And that decision carries the weight of centuries.

VThe Law Already Knows

South Africa's own legislative framework acknowledges that San and Khoi recognition is a constitutional matter, not merely an administrative one. The Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Act (Act 3 of 2019), which commenced on 1 April 2021, was explicitly designed to provide for the statutory recognition of Khoi-San communities, leaders, and structures—for the first time in South African legal history. The Act established the Commission on Khoi-San Matters to receive and investigate applications for recognition. The Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs has described the recognition process as “essential in affirming the identity, rights, and role of Khoi-San communities in South Africa's traditional leadership system,” forming “part of government's broader commitment to inclusion, redress, and the restoration of dignity to historically marginalised communities” (SAnews, 2025).

The Constitution itself, in Section 25(6), provides that persons or communities whose tenure of land is legally insecure as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices are entitled to legally secure tenure or comparable redress. Section 211 recognises the institution, status, and role of traditional leadership according to customary law. Section 31 protects the right of cultural communities to enjoy their culture and to form associations. The Preamble commits the nation to “heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights.”

If the state's own laws and Constitution recognise that San and Khoi peoples have been historically denied recognition and that restoration is a national obligation, then Knoflokskraal cannot legitimately be treated solely as a DPWI asset management problem. It must be engaged as a constitutional restoration problem. To do otherwise is to use the law as a shield against the very justice the law was written to deliver.

VIRecognition From Above, Recognition From Below

The image from eMashobeni Royal Palace shows recognition from above: a powerful political party visiting an already-recognised monarch, in a setting of ceremony and mutual legitimation. The delegation performed respect. The media documented it. The political capital was banked.

Knoflokskraal represents recognition from below: displaced, fragmented, historically denied San and Khoi people trying to rebuild life, land, memory, governance, and dignity after centuries of colonial interruption. There is no palace at Knoflokskraal. There is no royal house with institutional form already legible to the state. There is a community building itself from the ground, in conditions of material hardship, under the constant threat of eviction, displacement, and—as residents have described it—cultural erasure.

That difference matters profoundly. And it is precisely this difference that the democratic state is constitutionally obligated to address—not exploit. If recognition is only available to those who already possess it, then the state is not practising recognition at all. It is performing confirmation. And confirmation without expansion is not justice; it is the preservation of colonial outcomes in democratic clothing.

VIIThe Budget Tells the Truth

Political language can be ambiguous. Budgets cannot. R41.4 million has been spent at Knoflokskraal over four years. The expenditure categories tell us what the state believes Knoflokskraal is: a security problem, a containment challenge, a property dispute. If even a fraction of that R41.4 million had been directed toward independent cultural-heritage assessment, formal dialogue with Indigenous leadership structures, historical land-tenure investigation, or a restorative justice process, the trajectory of the past four years would have been fundamentally different.

Meanwhile, the DA's courtesy visit to King Misuzulu was accompanied by the gift of two cows—a gesture of cultural respect that requires no budgetary justification because respect for established authority is treated as self-evidently legitimate. The asymmetry is not merely rhetorical. It is fiscal. It is institutional. It is the state revealing its priorities through the only language that cannot be qualified: expenditure.

VIIIWhat Equal Seriousness Requires

Knoflokskraal is not asking for special treatment. Knoflokskraal is asking for equal seriousness.

If royal institutions can receive courtesy visits, respectful language, political diplomacy, and recognition of heritage, then San and Khoi communities at Knoflokskraal deserve: formal dialogue conducted in good faith, not only containment and surveillance; recognition of historical dispossession as context for present claims, not only assertions of present illegality; an independent restorative justice process that takes the full weight of colonial and apartheid land dispossession seriously, not only policing, eviction threats, or removal; a cultural-land assessment that acknowledges the relationship between people, identity, and place, not only property administration; and fair recognition under the constitutional, customary, Indigenous, and human rights principles that the state itself has enacted into law.

The Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Act already exists. The Commission on Khoi-San Matters already exists. Section 25(6) already exists. The constitutional obligation is not hypothetical. It is legislated, proclaimed, and waiting to be honoured.

IXA Word to the DA, and to South Africa

I address this not as a partisan adversary, but as a /Xam-ka !ei and Khoekhoe descendant, a scholar, and a citizen who believes in the constitutional promise of this country.

The DA's visit to King Misuzulu kaZwelithini must be welcomed as an affirmation that traditional leadership remains a living institution in South Africa's constitutional democracy. But when placed alongside the state's treatment of Knoflokskraal, the image reveals a serious inconsistency in political recognition. Traditional authority is publicly honoured when it is already institutionally legible, ceremonially established, and—let us be frank—electorally valuable ahead of the November 2026 local government elections. Yet San and Khoi restoration claims, emerging from landlessness, urban displacement, and historical erasure, are reduced to the language of illegality, invasion, containment, and administrative risk.

The DA cannot celebrate traditional leadership when it is symbolically powerful and electorally useful, and simultaneously treat San and Khoi restoration claims as a mere land-management problem when those claims arise on state land under its own Ministry's control. That is not governance. That is selection. And selection based on institutional legibility is the reproduction of colonial logic by another name.

To other political parties, to Parliament, to the South African Human Rights Commission, and to every institution that claims to uphold the dignity clause of our Constitution: look at these two images side by side. The palace and the forest. The ceremony and the containment order. The two cows and the R41.4 million. Then ask: is this the South Africa we promised ourselves in 1996?

XClosing

The San and Khoi peoples of southern Africa are not asking for palaces. We are asking for the same constitutional breath that the state extends to those whose institutions survived colonial violence in visible form. We are asking to be seen—not as invaders on our own land, but as peoples whose governance, whose memory, whose law, whose territory, and whose dignity were deliberately broken, and who are now, at Knoflokskraal and elsewhere, trying to reconstitute what was taken.

Lawfulness without restorative justice is another instrument of colonial continuity. The state may manage public land. But it may not manage away the historical fact of dispossession. It may not contain a people's claim to exist.

The measure of democratic respect is not how a party behaves in the palace of a recognised king. The measure is how it behaves at the edge of a forest, where the descendants of broken Indigenous nations are trying to become visible again.

//Kabbo told his story so that it would not be forgotten.
We are still telling it.