Abstract
Launched on the one-hundredth anniversary of the implementation of the Natives Land Act of 1913, this book integrates and advances academic knowledge of the land question in South Africa, while also offering comparative perspectives on Southern Africa, India and the Netherlands. In its conclusion, the editors propose a radical vision of land redistribution in South Africa to resolve the country’s extreme racially based inequality in land ownership, which they regard as a ‘crisis’ of ‘magnitude’ with ‘no piecemeal solutions’, requiring a ‘decisive break’ with the past.
On the basis of substantial and thorough research, the book innovatively links the urban and the rural through the common features of land struggles (for housing or cultivation) and the system of migrant labour. It combines historical sociology and economic and political analysis with an appreciation of the present, including the recent farm workers’ strikes. Given what are shown to be ‘inappropriate’ or ‘inadequate’ policies of the post-1994 government to secure transformation on the land, the editors point to the crucial role of social movements as vehicles of agency, as in the strikes. The book includes polemics, solidly based on empirical research. It is an important contribution to South African scholarship and more widely, a small contribution towards comparative study of the land question.
The 1913 Land Act ratified and froze the racially based distribution of land resulting from the wars of dispossession and based on the ideology of racial segregation, charted the way to the further unequal distribution of resources. The policy of segregation sustained cheap black migrant labour. Rural life bifurcated into rich white commercial farms, based on semi-slave black labour, and cramped and impoverished ‘reserves’ for the black majority. The imprint of the Land Act runs deep, even until today.
Following the introduction, there are 11 chapters and a conclusion. Kirk Hendricks’ chapter examines minutely and critically the post-1994 government land policy, calls on the African National Congress (ANC) to implement its promise to abandon the ‘willing-buyer-willing-seller’ principle, and theorizes the continued accumulation by dispossession. Lungisile Ntsebeza demonstrates the persistent reality of the ‘reserves’, shaped by segregation/apartheid land legislation and the failure to implement the constitutional requirement ensuring security of tenure, and also examines in detail recent legislation that strengthens the powers of unelected traditional authorities—something, he points out, presaged by Mahmood Mamdani, shortly after 1994.
Helliker shows how the power of white commercial agriculture, which has become increasingly corporatized and concentrated, remains virtually intact and still subject to buyer-driven global commodity chains. There has been only limited de-racialization since 1994. He points to some deleterious consequences of the trend towards game farms.
Hendricks is joined by Richard Pithouse in writing on urban land rights, a pre-determinant of access to housing, education, services and job opportunities, in the context of the sprawling of shack settlements in the interstices and the fringes of towns and cities around the country. They point out the contemporary demands of social movements such as Abahlali base Mjondolo for ‘land and housing’, and trace the history of social protest on such issues. They provide an extensive account of recent struggles in Cape Town, such as those of Joe Slovo residents against the N2 attempt by the Gateway housing scheme to evict them. They conclude with a description of the policy activities of the DA-created Anti-Land Invasion Unit in Cape Town, an original subject for academic investigation—made more pointed by the recent illegal activities of the unit in destroying the settlement named Marikana on the Cape Flats.
Ntsebeza writes a further chapter on the prospects for change in the countryside, linking previous rural revolts with the recent farm strikes in the Western Cape, of which he provides a detailed and virtually pioneering account. One would have liked the research to extend further—explaining, for example, why the strikes were confined to the Western Cape, if semi-slave conditions of farm workers are similar elsewhere in the country.
Bill Martin engages in a theoretical analysis of the effects of neoliberalism in the North (privatizing the welfare state) and the South (privatizing the commons—commodification). He starts by ‘framing the debate on rural development within a broader canvass of evolving capital accumulation, dispossession and capitalist development…then refers to earlier historiographical debates by questioning the linear approach of conventional wisdom’ (p. 160). He argues, against this linear approach, that proletarianization is not the only or inevitable trend, since there are also examples of re-peasantization, as well as the creation of generations of never-employed youth. On the theme of capitalism and apartheid, he maintains that the latter stabilized accumulation by separating different labour markets for different economic sectors.
Martin’s argument could be taken further: that the task for the future is to dissolve the polarity between city and countryside through decentralization and localization—much more possible in these times of revolutionized means of communication.
Writing on smalholder agriculture in areas of Southern Africa (with a focus on Malawi), Tendai Murisa argues for more investment and the dismantling of outdated tenure systems to overcome the present stagnation and increasing reliance on food imports.
Praveen Jha sketches the big picture, the economics and politics of international food production and distribution, with its increasingly monopolistic control and financialization, and its deleterious effects on the South. These include the enforced transition from domestic food production to an extroverted cash-crop orientation. He points to the post-2002 escalation of food prices and the new colonialism through land purchases in Africa.
Comparative chapters on land policy in Zimbabwe, India and the Netherlands follow. The chapter on Zimbabwe, by Sam Moyo, presents a benign view of the post-2000 fast-track land reform process, and provides certain relevant comparisons with South Africa. The chapter on land policy in India, with particular reference to the concept of the village, and a further chapter on the Netherlands examine situations which are more distant and different from the South African context. Yet, cross-fertilization of experiences and analyses, however different (or similar) the situations may seem at first glance, is generally valuable.
The editors eschew detailed proposals for remedying the situation, stating that these must become formulated in struggle. One of the issues that needs further discussion is that of nationalization/socialization of the land, so that the state can implement radical redistribution. This would seem to follow from abandoning the ‘willing buyer-willing seller’ principle, opening the way for expropriation, which they advocate. Nationalization, under the democratic control of the producers, would return the land to its pre-colonial status, as a communal asset for subsistence rather than private property for the creation of profit. Another issue on which the book touches in several chapters is the position of women in relation to land, but as a whole the book is weak on gender relations.
Finally, while the book was in process of production, the government announced that it was re-opening the land claim window, not only for further post-1913 claims, but to accommodate certain pre-1913 Khoisan claims of dispossession. It is unclear how this backdating of the claim date would assist land redistribution in favour of the poor and landless. The editors have expressed in advance their doubts on this question: ‘[w]hen coloured residents of the Western Cape assert ownership and legitimacy on the basis of notions of indigenous claims over the land, it raises a host of questions about the South African nation and about the regional and racial dividends of apartheid, which a counter culture has not fully addressed (p. 8).’