Abstract
Land Reform Revisited addresses pertinent questions surrounding the nature of land reform, the experiences of farmworkers, the challenges with, and the implications of, land reform for rural and farm dwellers’ livelihoods in South Africa. It contributes to a rapidly growing literature on land reform in the country. When, over the years, scholars address questions of the nature of land reform in South Africa, they, invariably, focus on its slow pace since the dawn of democracy in 1994. Some account for this in terms of the lack of political will on the part of the post-apartheid government (Hall 2007), while others suggest that although Section 25 of the South African Constitution (commonly referred to as the Property Clause) calls for equitable access to resources, it also simultaneously offers a significant handicap to any efforts at radical land reform (Ntsebeza 2007). Alternatively, scholars highlight how the neo-liberal orientation of post-apartheid South Africa’s land reform slowed the transformation of the country’s dualistic land structure (Alden and Anseeuw 2009).
In contrast, the chapters in this book turn our attention to land reform and state-making, and their implications on the livelihoods of those who are meant to be the beneficiaries of land reform. Mkodzongi and Brandt (in Chapter 1), for example, draw on James Scott’s (1998) concept of high modernism to stress the point that South Africa’s land and agrarian reform has been imposed from on high. Reflecting the views of policymakers, land reform, they remind us, has stressed productivity, often seen as achievable only through large scale farming operations. Consequently, the two authors point out that land reform policies take little regard of the input of beneficiaries—a point that Sarah Bruchhausen and Camalita Naicker also make in Chapter 2 of the book. Bruchhausen and Naicker points out that the post-apartheid state continues to conceive the questions of land and citizenship in relation to the former Bantustans in very narrow terms of ethnicity and race. Such a conception, the two authors argue, excludes grassroots forms of politics and political organisation similar to those among the Mpondo in the 1960s and the Marikana protestors in 2012. It also perpetuates the legacies of colonial and apartheid era ethnic spatial fixing (Moore 2005) informing patterns of access to land in places such as Marikana. There, immigrants, who are non-Tswana speakers, are excluded from access to land and services on the basis of ethnicity. In this way, the chapters link the land question to the processes of state and nation-making that incorporates traditional authorities. This, the book reminds us, is not an unproblematic venture. For example, while land reform is premised on the constitutional requirement to ensure equitable access to resources among those who belong to the South African nation, the reopening of the Restitution Claims in 2014 has, in part, promoted claims rooted in ethnicity such as the Khoisan revivalism that Chizuko Sato documents. These ethnic based claims exist in tension with attempts at constructing a national identity based on belonging to the boundaries of South Africa.
Other chapters show the limits of agrarian reform from on high for missing the voices of women, the old and those who live on the fringes of urban society. Kezia Batisai’s chapter, for example, reveals that exclusions along lines of gender and space persist when scholars, policymakers and activists privilege a narrow conception of the land question in terms of agrarian reform. Women and urbanites who require land for residential purposes, she shows, feel excluded. Similarly, Tarminder Kaur’s chapter shows how policymakers and international agency have framed the issue of sports among farmworkers in ways that do not accommodate the latter’s views. Couched in the language of ‘development’, Kaur points out, government and ‘development’ practitioners’ interventions in the lives of Western Cape farmworkers in the name of sport perpetuate a depoliticised and dehistoricised discourse that ‘obscures the structural, material and political conditions that underpin development problems (e.g., the issue of poor cash wages)’ (p. 111). Femke Brandt further articulates some of the challenges faced by farmworkers together with the unequal power relations obtained on the farms. Paying particular attention to the game farms in the Eastern Cape, Brandt demonstrates how the turn towards game farming has led to the displacement of many former farm dwellers while exposing those who continue to work with wild animals and trophy hunters to grave danger. All of this is set against the paternalistic attitude of white ranch owners which also sows mistrust amongst the mostly black workers.
The chapters in this book further address the outcomes of the various land reform initiatives. In doing so, they not only highlight some of the limits to the trajectory that land reform took but also deepen our understanding of what McCusker et al. (2016) called uneven transformation. Kamuti’s chapter, focusing on the Gongolo area of KwaZulu-Natal, shows that competing ideas of land use (game ranch versus land restitution and small-scale agriculture) as well as competing institutions have stalled efforts at achieving land restitution. Nerhene Davis points out that because South Africa’s land reform policy has often privileged large-scale production over small-scale farmers, land restitution nominally transferred land ownership to the communities, but retained pre-existing production systems on the land. This was achieved through the establishment of partnerships with former owners who came back as consultants. The result, she shows, is that land restitution did not transfer ‘real’ benefits or ‘effective control’ of the land and the production activities to the restitution communities (p. 150). Instead, it benefited capital through what Davis—borrowing from Tania Li (2005)—calls ‘detached accumulation’. In this conception, ‘agribusiness do not need to own the means of production to control the direction and frequency of benefits or profits derived from the newly acquired land…’ for this allows them ‘to deploy rigorous accumulation strategies that are completely ‘detached’ from community interests/ aspirations’ (p. 153).
However, as Fani Ncapayi’s chapter shows, in some cases, land reform has improved the livelihoods of some beneficiaries. In contrast to popular arguments that ‘group-based land-reform projects, where land is held and production is organised on a collective basis are, on the whole, unsuccessful’, Ncapayi argues that ‘under given conditions…, large groups can contribute to the improvement of not only the lives of their beneficiaries but also those of the wider societies they come from’ (p. 221). He identifies three factors that led to success amongst the land reform beneficiaries of Delindlala: ‘proper identification of beneficiaries through research, sustained support not only after land acquisition but also before, as well as the existence of determined and focused leadership…’ (pp. 240–241). For his part, Ngubane urges scholars ‘to think beyond the conventional verdicts of “failure” and “success” in land reform’ because, as he put it, ‘land reform is not only about economics or an emerging class of black farmers but also about land justice and a sense of landownership for land beneficiaries beyond materialist ideals’ (p. 247). Ngubane demonstrates that in the dismantled game farms of the KwaZulu-Natal midlands, beneficiaries utilise land for livestock grazing, and access other natural resources such as firewood and this, he argues, is a success.
By highlighting cases of success amongst beneficiaries of land reform who were involved in decision-making, some of the chapters in this book, then, do not only demonstrate the limits of a land reform from above that also privileges large scale production for the export market, but also raise a set of important points. First, they show that the beneficiaries in question were invested in land reform, poking holes into claims—often made by some scholars—that what is important to many South Africans is jobs rather than land. To the contrary, these chapters show that with proper support structures, rural based South Africans can still derive and improve their livelihoods from the land. Second, by broadening the land question beyond agrarian reform—as Kezia’s chapters does—the book, while recalling a point also made by McCusker et al. (2016), illuminates the importance of reform policies that address rural livelihoods and the livelihoods of people living in urban and peri-urban informal settlements. Finally, by critiquing South Africa’s land reform as agrarian change from above, the book calls for land policies that are attentive to the voices and needs of the beneficiaries. Save for the historiographic chapters that set the historical context for the study, the substantive chapters in this book themselves achieved this feat. They draw from rich ethnographic research that illuminated many voices, struggles, aspirations and experiences of South African men and women in informal settlements, farms and rural townships. The result is a study that not only engages some of the intellectual debates about land reform but is an important read for policymakers and development practitioners in former settler colonies like South Africa.