Land Reform in South Africa: The Conversation That Never Took Place (original) (raw)
Related papers
Chapter in Hebinck, P. and C. Shackleton (eds.) Reforming Land and Resource Use in South Africa: Impact on Livelihoods. London: Routledge, pp. 137-162, 2011
Scientific communities worldwide grapple with finding the appropriate analytical tools with which to study the impact of land reform on rural livelihoods. In the South African context, analyses consistently focus on the tension between promoting large-scale, commercial agriculture and support for smallholder farmers (cf. Cousins and Scoones 2010; Cousins this volume; Ntsebeza and Hall 2007; van den Brink 2003). A pertinent concern here is the lack of policy options to implement broad-based land reform that would enable previously white-owned large commercial farms to be dismantled or otherwise reconfigured to fit diverse livelihood options. Flexibility is lacking as policy makers see no merit in revitalizing what some hold to be a dormant or destroyed African peasantry (Bundy 1988; Hebinck and Van Averbeke 2007). The spectre of history appears to haunt South African land reform. Modernization trajectories mirror proto-apartheid notions of the ideal farm economic unit. The inability to restructure the agrarian structure appears evident in a dualist land reform model. On the one hand, this model seeks to maintain the viability of the established large-scale commercial farming sector. New African farmers should be endowed with entrepreneurial skills that match those of the exiting white farmers. On the other hand, separate programmes are developed that aim to support African smallholder producers, who often combine farming with other livelihood pursuits. As Cousins and Scoones (2010: 36) remark, this has encouraged the ‘persistence of agrarian dualism, especially in South Africa and Namibia, and the revitalization of colonial-era modernization narratives that see “viable” small-scale farms as scaled-down versions of large-scale commercial farms’. From this perspective, agrarian reform in South Africa is narrowly directed towards a group of relatively well-to-do rural (and some urban) Africans who can become a new class of full-time commercial farmers (ibid.: 50–1). Policies and grant allocation problematically hinge on the optimization of key production factors such as marketability of land and crops, efficient allocation of labour, commercial farming skills, and access to capital outside government. Redistribution of land remains key to the de-racialization of commercial agriculture.
Land restitution and poverty alleviation in KwaZulu-Natal: the case of Hlomendlini Community
2020
Unequal land access and poverty skewed along racial lines remains one of the major legacies of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa. Massive poverty amongst the black South African population in particular is associated with their landlessness dating back to the colonial past. The democratic government rolled out a land access programme to restitute the victims of past injudicious laws. Amongst other objectives, this programme aims to improve household welfare and alleviate poverty. The nexus between land access and poverty reduction has become the dominant narrative amongst politicians, some scholars and policy-makers. This study seeks to interrogate the popular notion dominating the South African land discourse that access to land will reduce poverty amongst the poorest of the poor. To achieve its aim, the study adopted qualitative methods using a case study approach which was better suited given the complex nature of the study. Using snowball sampling to identify participants, I used semi-structured interviews, observations, secondary materials and transect walks to conduct the research. The study found that land access was biased towards old people and males in particular. The government imposed its own preferred land use plans on new landowners in order to sustain the previous large-scale commercial model, despite the limited number of hectares of land shared by a large number of beneficiaries. Post-settlement was inadequate as land claimants face numerous challenges such as delayed grant funding, a lack of institutional support, corruption, a lack of equipment and difficult co-management arrangements with white strategic partners. The study found that contestations from within and outside the community have pushed them to the brink of collapse. The major finding of the study is that since taking ownership of the land, there are no durable material and psychological benefits that have been derived by new land entrants to alleviate their poverty, largely caused by their loss of land due to dispossession. v
‘After years in the wilderness’: The discourse of land claims in the New South Africa
Journal of Peasant Studies, 2000
The paper examines land restitution in the new South Africa, and looks at the intersecting roles of land-claiming communities who were forcibly resettled from their land during the apartheid years and the NGOs and-since 1994-Government Commissioners who have helped them to reclaim the land. Ideas and practices concerning land, community and development that have emerged from the interaction between these different players have been mutually constitutive but are sometimes mutually incomprehensible. A populist rhetoric, evident both in discussions with former land owners, and in much of the writing in NGO publications such as Land Update, depicts land as something communally owned which must be communally defended. This sense of a uniformly experienced injustice and a shared resistance against outside intervention obscures the fact that claims on land derive from a series of sharply differentiated historical experiences and articulate widely divergent interests, such as those-in the case of the farm Doornkop for example-between former owners and their former tenants. The restitution of land to these former owners, while being of great importance to them as a source of identity and as a redress of past injustices, is not necessarily the key to solving "poverty, injustice and misery" as has been claimed for the process of land reform as a whole.
Land Reform and Restitution in South Africa.
Land Reform in South Africa., 2019
Land Reform and Restitution in South Africa. South Africa, emerging from the yoke of colonialism and imperialism embarked on an ambitious land reform program during the 1990s. It was anticipated that land reform would take effectively and sustainable. However, evidence to date revealed that land reform has been a failure and the cause thereof can be attributed to the lack of post settlement support. The African National Congress through h the Reconstruction and Development Program proposed that the land reform program would be implemented in an effective manner. In the White Paper on South African Land Policy, it was anticipated that through land reform, land would be distributed more equitably, poverty would be eradicated and the overall quality of life of beneficiaries would improve in a sustainable way, in both the medium and the long term.
The indicatorisation of South African land restitution
2012
This paper investigates the social life of settlement statistics in South African land restitution that have recently come to be interpreted, and contested, as indicators of state performance. Based on an overview on the legal and institutional setup of the ongoing land restitution process in South Africa, the text focuses on the shifting relevance of restitution's settlement statistics, leading to their deliberate transformation into indicators of state performance. While this development has led to a remarkable success by the numbers in dramatically reducing the outstanding claims still to be settled, the paper goes on to highlight worrying inconsistencies in the actual figures, unpacks some of the local complexities that escape simple quantification and discusses unintended consequences of indicatorisation, which, taken together, rather seem to point to a failure by the numbers. While acknowledging some of the substantial criticism aired against the indicatorisation of settlement statistics, the text finally discusses these figures as boundary objects that make possible in the first place the translation of various concerns and the switching of codes between claim-specific settings and the national arena of land reform. Emphasising autopoietic self-correction within the rational-legal logic of modern statehood, the text concludes that indicatorisation, at least in the case of South African land restitution, has indeed both increased state performance and made visible and processible, for the state and the public alike, worrying deficiencies that still persist. Government and public opinion have mainly measured the achievements of restitution quantitatively in terms of the number of claims settled and people who have benefitted, and the extent of land restored to claimants.
Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, Parts A/B/C
Despite more than two decades of implementation, land reform in South Africa remains a hotly contested terrain that is beset with numerous challenges and uncertainties. One of the main goals of the programme was to transfer land from the predominantly white commercial farmers to a cohort of black small-scale commercial farmers who would productively utilize the farms using irrigation and actively contribute to the local and national agricultural value-chains (Anseeuw and Mathebula, 2008). However, since the mid-1990s when the reforms were introduced, South Africa has struggled to attain the main performance targets set for the reform program and its contribution to the livelihoods of the targeted beneficiaries remains debatable (Mngxitama, 2006; Ntsebeza, 2007; Mpehle, 2012). The land reform process in the country is constituted by three main pillars, namely, restitution, redistribution, and tenure reform. The main objective of the restitution pillar is to return land or provide compensation to black communities who were dispossessed of their land by the apartheid regime. In this regard, the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa provides that persons or communities who were dispossessed of property after 19 June 1913 as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices are entitled to restoration of that property or to equitable redress. The redistribution pillar seeks to transfer land from white commercial farmers to blacks who have no land or have inadequate access to land, thereby increasing black ownership of commercial farming land in rural areas. This is provided for in Section 25(5) of the South African Constitution, which states that "the state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to foster conditions which enable citizens to gain access to land on an equitable basis." The tenure reform pillar seeks to improve the tenure security of former commercial farming workers who have remained on the land that has been redistributed.
2020
Since the late 1980s, there have been constant policy debates on the socio-economic rationale of South Africa’s land reform programme concerning poverty reduction, employment generation and economic restructuring. Inspired by populist ideologies, these policy debates have led to the recent adoption of a radical land redistributive reform approach as South Africa’s land reform model. Therefore, this thesis is an analysis of the implications of adopting such a model. With the adoption of Levubu-Tshakhuma as a case study (a rural community in the Limpopo Province, South Africa), this thesis is also an assessment of socio-economic realities at a community level and how these realities pose challenges on such a model, one that is geared towards re-peasantisation in an otherwise socio-economically proletarianised and industrialised society. The thesis aids in explaining South Africa’s unique socio-economic context. It improves our understanding of why popular models that may have worked wonders in one environment mostly fail if imported to a different environment. In this respect, it carries significant lessons for the South African government and other stakeholders as they pursue various strategies to redress past historic socio-economic injustices. This thesis is likely to add to policy debates on land reform, poverty reduction and employment generation in southern Africa, as well as contribute to the existing literature on the subject by providing a different perspective from the popular neo-liberal and neo-populist discourses on land through drawing on local-level dynamics and households’ perceptions of land and agriculture-based livelihoods. Through key informant sources, as well as a case study, and employing qualitative methods such as semi-structured and unstructured interviews, focus groups and observations – this thesis provides a unique perspective on South Africa’s much-deliberated land reform issue. It also offers an extraordinary insight into the local socio-economic realities of land reform in South Africa. Ultimately, the thesis’s purpose is to examine whether a radical land redistributive reform is indeed an appropriate strategy for South Africa, given its unique socio-economic context.