After Apartheid: Reinventing South Africa?

The Land Question: Exploring Obstacles to Land Redistribution in South Africa

The Land Question Exploring Obstacles to Land Redistribution in South Africa Lungisile Ntsebeza The gradual conversion of a large number of the indigenous people of presentday South Africa into wage laborers, particularly after the discovery of minerals in the latter part of the nineteenth century (see Bundy 1988; Mafeje 1988), has led to a peculiar situation in which the land question in South Africa has been marginalized. Yet, compared with the situation in other countries on the African continent, the extent of land plunder in South Africa was extraordinary. The Natives Land Act of 1913 was the first major legislative attempt on the part of colonialists to grab a substantial amount of the land. This act confined the indigenous people to about 7 percent of the land in areas that were designated reserves. They were thus not legally allowed to own land outside the reserves. The area of land available to indigenous peoples in the reserves was increased in terms of the Land Laws of 1936 to 13 percent of the landscape. However, this hardly made a dent in the chronic shortage of land in these reserves, a development that forced many African producers to sell their labor, with some becoming migrant workers and others fully fledged workers in the cities. From the late 1960s, however, the concerns of the liberation movement focused on urban issues to the neglect of the countryside. A key problem currently facing South Africa is black poverty, the roots of which cannot be dissociated from colonial conquest and land dispossession. It is hard to imagine how a permanent solution to black poverty and the legacy of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa can be achieved without some resolution of the land question. Indeed, land remains at the heart of the struggle not only for livelihoods, but for citizenship as well. Conse- The Land Question 295 quently, resolving the land question is crucial to what it means to be a citizen in South Africa. Against the background outlined above, this essay surveys the land question in South Africa and attempts by the African National Congress (ANC)– led government to deal with it since the advent of democracy in South Africa . I show that the land reform program in South Africa, which has very limited objectives, given the ravages of colonialism and land plunder, has not gone far toward resolving the land question. The entrenchment of the property clause in the constitution, coupled with weak civil society organizations focused on the land question, presents a major obstacle to achieving even the limited objectives of the land reform program. Recent pronouncements in the 2009 ANC election manifesto and government’s recently renewed commitment to rural development and land reform do not change the picture. This essay is not about what blacks will do or should do with their land once it has been returned to them, or they have claimed it back. These are important questions, but they should be addressed separately and not confused with the need to address historical injustices—the thrust of this essay. THE LAND QUESTION AND ITS RESOLUTION IN THE POLITICAL NEGOTIATION PROCESSES Archie Mafeje’s and Colin Bundy’s work is representive of a considerable scholarship that has addressed the issue of colonial conquest and land dispossession, and how this resulted in the proletarianization of the indigenous people of present-day South Africa. I agree with this characterization and do not repeat it here. However, notable in this narrative is that, unlike in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, for example, the liberation struggle in South Africa was not overtly fought around the land question. This was particularly the case when popular resistance against apartheid rekindled in the late 1960s and early 1970s, following the massive political clampdown against resistance in the early 1960s. Prior to this, there was limited involvement by the All African Convention (AAC) and the ANC in rural struggles against government policies that sought to limit the quantity of land and stock. Both organizations adopted clauses on the land question in their political programs—the ten-point program of the Non-European Unity Movement (which emerged from the AAC), adopted in 1943, and the Freedom Charter of the ANC, which was adopted in 1955. But the land question was peripheral to the activities of these organizations. An organization that promised 296 Lungisile Ntsebeza to put the land question high on its agenda, the Pan Africanist Organisation (PAC), which...