Some things are inherently stupid. It's stupid to burn Bibles in front of most evangelical Christians or to pour scorn on the Quran within earshot of most Muslims or to wear miniskirts in the Noord Street Taxi Rank in Johannesburg. It does not matter that our constitution gives us the right to do those things; it's just inherently stupid.
So we have the case of Pieter Mulder, leader of the Freedom Front Plus, who in his recent response to President Jacob Zuma's State of the Nation address suggested that Africans did not have a legal and historic claim to up to 40 percent of South Africa's land because they migrated from northern Africa.
Mulder makes an eminently logical argument, but voicing it is inherently stupid.
It is stupid because it fails to recognise the emotion around the historic fact that on 19 June 1913, the Natives Land Act decreed that going forward, only 7 percent of the land in the Union of South Africa could be held by "natives".
Had Meneer Mulder paid more attention to his primary school maths teacher, he would understand the difference between the 60 percent "natives" were entitled to (by his reasoning) and the 7 percent they ended up with.
So for the sake of this current dialogue, let's assume as a starting point that the native majority of this country in 1913 had their land stolen from them.
That's not open for debate.
The more important question, to my mind, is what should we be doing about that theft today?
The essence of the question is that theft by force has been a characteristic of the human species long before recorded history.
We know this because humans fabricated weapons for use against other humans long before we learned to read and write. So, how far back should we go to determine whose ancestors were where at what time?
Here's one starting point: prior to the breakup of the continents some 200 million years ago, India, South Africa, and Australia were joined together as part of the supercontinent Pangæa.
We know this because fossils of Lystrosaurus have been found in these three places. This would give the aboriginal inhabitants of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands as well as those of Tasmania as much claim to the land around Durban as it would to followers of Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu.
Here's another example: there is a strong body of evidence to suggest that my own ancestors, Dravidians, had their roots in the Indus Valley civilisation between 3300 BC to 2000 BC or thereabouts. This encompassed an area including all of modern day Pakistan, north-western India (including Kashmir), south-eastern Afghanistan, and eastern Iran.
Dravidians were driven south into the Indian subcontinent around 1700-1300 BC by the Indo-Aryan invasion leading to today's divide between the Aryan Sanskrit-based languages of the north (Hindi, Gujerati) and the Dravidian-based languages of the south (Tamil, Telegu).
This makes any claims of sovereignty by the modern-day people of Kashmir as valid as claims to that territory by Tamil and Telegu speakers of Chatsworth and Phoenix.
I believe the solution lies in drawing a distinction between ownership of the land on the one hand and exploitation of the land for the benefit of all people on the other.
We already have this separation in place for specific things. Example: land ownership and mineral rights do not go hand in hand. Neither do ownership and riparian rights.
So if massive quantities of land are being farmed and providing food security for the country, surely that is an example of exploitation of the land for the benefit of all people?
Equitable allocation of profit from such farms can be done through the taxman, as is the case with mining royalties. Those profits can then be ploughed back into social upliftment.
If exploitable farmland is lying unused, the owners should lose the right to retain it in exactly the same way as mining houses would lose their mining rights if they did not use them. The land should be sold to those who are prepared to work it. If that means they get bank loans or tax breaks to fund the acquisition, so be it.
But the race of the farmer should not come into this picture. The people of Zimbabwe would have been far better off had the Mugabe government properly taxed highly profitable productive farms rather than allowing land grabs which destroyed both profitability and productivity.
So I don't care who owns our farms. As long as they feed the nation and pay their taxes, let them be.
Our elected government can use those revenues to fix education, health, and security.
It does not take the wisdom of Solomon to know that cutting the land apart benefits no one.