The Land Question In South Africa

Publisher description

Why has land reform been such a failure in South Africa? Will expropriation without compensation solve the problem? What can be done to get the land programme back on track? In Land Matters, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi tackles the past, present and future of the land question in South Africa. Going back in history, he shows how Africans’ communal systems of landownership were used by colonial rulers to deny that Africans owned the land at all. He explores the effects of the Land Acts, Bantustans and forced removals. And he evaluates the ANC’s policies on land throughout the struggle years, during the negotiations of the 1990s, and in government. Land Matters unpacks the government’s achievements and failures in land redistribution, restitution and tenure reform, and makes suggestions for what needs to be done in future. The book also explores the power of chiefs, the tension between communal landownership and the desire for private title, the failure of the willing-seller, willing-buyer approach, women and land reform, the role of banks, and the debates around amending the Constitution. Steering clear of the simplistic and polarising terms of the land debate, Ngcukaitobi argues for a return to the nuanced constitutional requirements of justice and equity in South Africa’s land policy. Thoughtful and provocative, Land Matters sheds light on one of the most topical, complex and urgent issues in South Africa today.

Frantz Fanon has influenced generations of activists and scholars. His life's work continues to be debated and discussed around the world. This book is an event: an international, interdisciplinary collection of debates and interventions by leading scholars and intellectuals from Africa, Europe and the United States.

This book analyzes the new political economy of land reform in South Africa. It takes a holistic approach to understand South Africa’s land reform, assesses the current policy gaps, and suggests ways of filling them. Due to its cross-disciplinary approach, the book will appeal to a broad audience, and will benefit readers from the fields of policy reform, administration, law, political science, political economics, agricultural economics, global politics, resource studies and development studies.

This thoughtful book explores the history and ongoing dilemmas of land use and land reform in South Africa. Including both theoretical and applied examples of the evolution of South Africa’s current geography of land use, the authors provide a succinct overview of land reform and evaluate the range of policies conceived over time to redress the country’s stark racial land imbalance. Drawing on compelling case studies from across South Africa, they illustrate not only the progress of land reform, but also how reforms fit within the larger historical context of racialized land use. This is the first book of its kind to fully apply geographical theory to the case of South African land reform. Rather than rely on one-dimensional technicist explanations to discuss the shortcomings of the country’s land reform program, this rich study places it in the context of bitter battles between groups seeking to exploit land policies for their own benefit.

Land Reform Revisited engages with contemporary debates on land reform and agrarian transformation in South Africa. The volume offers insights into post-apartheid transformation dynamics through the lens of agency and state making. The chapters written by emerging scholars are based on extensive qualitative research and their analysis highlights the ways in which people negotiate and contest land reform realities and politics. By focusing on the diverse meanings of land and competing interpretations of what constitutes success and failure in land reform Brandt and Mkodzongi insist on looking beyond the productivity discourses guiding research and policy making in the field towards an informed view from below. Contributors are: Kezia Batisai, Femke Brandt, Sarah Bruchhausen, Nerhene Davis, Elene Cloete, Tariro Kamuti, Tarminder Kaur, Grasian Mkodzongi, Camalita Naicker, Fani Ncapayi, Mnqobi Ngubane, and Chizuko Sato.

This book argues that the promulgation of the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework and Communal Land Rights Acts runs the risk of compromising South Africa's democracy. The acts establish traditional councils with land administration powers. These structures are dominated by unelected members.

This book focuses on the work of one of the leading African scholars on the land question and agrarian transformation in AfricaSam Moyo. It offers a critical discussion, in conversation with Sam Moyo, of the land question and the response of African states. Since independence, African states have been trying to address the colonial legacy on land policy and governance. After six decades of formulating and implementing land reforms, most countries have not succeeded in decolonising approaches to land policy and the administrative framework. The book brings together the broader debates on the implications of decolonisation of Africas land policy. Through case studies from several African countries, the book offers an empirical analysis on land reforms and the emerging land relations, and how these affect land allocation and use, including agricultural production. Most of the chapters discuss how the unresolved land question in post-colonial Africa impacts on agricultural production and rural development broadly. The failure to decolonise colonial land policy and the imported tenure systems has left post-colonial African states dancing to two tunes, resulting in schizophrenic land and agrarian policies. The book demonstrates that the failure by African states to reconcile imported and indigenous land tenure systems and practices is evident in the deliberate denigration of customary tenure. It is also evident in the rising land inequality and the neglect of the agricultural sector, the small-scale and subsistence sub-sectors in particular.

This book debates the emergent proprieties of rural and peri-urban South Africa since land and agrarian reforms were initiated after the transition to democracy in 1994. It explores how these reforms have broadened options for the use of land and natural resources. Reform-minded policies in South Africa have assumed that if access to land and other natural resources is less problematic, the use of these resources would be intensified which in turn would alter the structure and dynamic of rural and urban poverty. Reforming Land and Resource Use in South Africa examines in detail, and from several disciplinary perspectives, whether and how this has occurred, and if not, why not. A key argument that this collection pursues is whether land reform has resulted in transformed use of natural (i.e. land, crops, cattle, rangeland, wild products etc.) and other strategic resources (labour, knowledge, institutions, networks etc.), and the value communities and household place on them. The contributions explore a combination of new or alternative meanings of land, including a look beyond crops and cattle per se to include the collection and selling of wild products, as well as a discussion of how land for agriculture has become redefined by land reform beneficiaries as urban land, for settlement and urban employment opportunities, in addition to urban-based agricultural activities. Unlike most analyses and commentaries on land reform, this book pursues an analysis of land reform dynamics at various levels of aggregation. National and regional level analyses of poverty and the ramifications of the property clause are combined with analyses at disaggregate levels such as the land reform project or village. The book will be of interest to both researchers and policy makers with an interest in rural development and social change.

A collection of papers from a workshop on the land question hosted by Idasa in the Western Cape in 1990.