Land is an emotive issue that should always be handled with care, especially in a country where dispossession is the source of all racial inequality and high levels of poverty.
While South Africa is engaged in a delicate process of ensuring that the wrongs of the past are corrected, at the same time opening up the agricultural sector to the previously disadvantaged, a different land question is threatening to explode into a crisis in KwaZulu-Natal.
At the centre of the problem is a suggestion by a parliamentary advisory panel, headed by former president Kgalema Motlanthe, that the controversial Ingonyama Trust be dissolved and that all land under it be returned to rural communities for their direct control.
The proposal, which has not even been discussed by the National Assembly - not to mention being adopted - has angered Zulu king Goodwill Zwelithini so much that he is threatening to mobilise the whole ethnic group against it.
Yesterday, the king called on millions of subjects to each contribute R5 or more towards a fund he says he'll use to fight the proposal.