Where to draw the line: Mapping of land rights in a South African commons

Abstract

In South Africa, formal titles to land have generally been restricted to ‘commercial’ farms under white ownership. However, in Namaqualand in the Northern Cape Province, mapping of individual dryland plots became part of the land reform process. In this study, we take a critical look at this mapping exercise in the communal area of Concordia. While securing the rights of individual dryland plot holders, the mapping also resulted in unintended impacts. Separate plots were joined together, enclosing the communal corridors in between, and new individual plots were created, reducing the communal grazing area. Furthermore, the mapping and surveying process has triggered an upsurge in the fencing of dryland plots. The case demonstrates that formalisation may cause changes in rights in general, and may promote privatisation of communal rights more specifically. This experience from Namaqualand can be seen as a test case for possible effects of planned surveying and registration of individual plots in other South African communal areas.

Introduction

The surveying and registration of rural land rights in South Africa is inextricably linked to the country's colonial history. This history involved large-scale accumulation of farmland for the white minority and relocation of the indigenous people to ‘homelands’ or ‘reserves’ (today called ‘communal areas’). South African agricultural history also reflects the inherently political nature of the act of mapping. Formal titles and associated rights were generally restricted to the 87 percent of agricultural land owned by the white minority. Beyond outer boundaries and temporary rights of occupancy, property rights in communal areas still remain largely unsurveyed.

Following liberation in 1994 and the ratification of the new South African constitution, legislation was passed in 1998 (The Transformation of Certain Rural Areas Act 94 – TRANCRAA) with the stated intention of returning the former ‘Coloured Reserves’ in the Western and Northern Cape Provinces to their original owners and current users. Surveying and mapping of land became a part of this process.

This article examines the impacts of a survey of individual dryland plots (saaipersele) carried out within the communal area of Concordia in Namaqualand in the Northern Cape Province (Fig. 1). These plots, ranging in size from 0.2 to 533 hectares (with a mean of around 130 hectares), contain arable land (saailande) and pastures. The survey was proposed by the non-governmental organisation Surplus People Project (SPP) working on land issues in the Western and Northern Cape Provinces.¹ According to staff in SPP's Namaqualand programme, the organisation initiated the survey primarily in order to secure land rights for communal farmers, to prevent and solve land use conflicts, and to facilitate future management of the dryland plots by updating the registers.

The aim of securing the rights of marginalised people through mapping and registration of land rights resembles what has become known as ‘countermapping’² in geography, anthropology and development studies (Chou, 2006, Cooke, 2003, Hodgson and Schroeder, 2002, Peluso, 1995, Rocheleau, 2005, Walker and Peters, 2001). Such mapping aims at ‘countering dominant representations of property regimes and land use practices’ (Hodgson & Schroeder, 2002: 80). If this survey had been carried out before 1994 with the aim of pre-empting eviction efforts, it would clearly have fallen within the category of countermapping. Even today, although South Africa has moved beyond Apartheid and the threat of indiscriminate evictions largely has disappeared, the Minister of Land Affairs still formally holds communal land areas in trust. The state and its institutions thus continue to represent a source of uncertainty and a potential obstacle to increased local autonomy in land matters. The land survey in Concordia can thus also be seen as a project designed to alleviate local apprehension about future control and management of the communal area. Formalisation of land rights is often also assumed to generate economic benefits related to increased investment incentives and improved access to credit (Platteau, 1996, de Soto, 2000) as well as promoting communication, networking, and accountability (de Soto, 2000).

In recent years, a number of publications have looked into social aspects of land reform in Namaqualand's communal areas, including human rights aspects (Wisborg, 2006), consultation and participation in the design and implementation of TRANCRAA (Wisborg & Rohde, 2005), imposition of carrying capacities and commercial management principles in communal areas (Benjaminsen, Rohde, Sjaastad, Wisborg, & Lebert, 2006), the appropriation of new commonage by elite groups within local communities (Lebert & Rohde, 2007), conflicts between nature conservation and land redistribution (Benjaminsen, Kepe, & Bråthen, 2008), and the overall land reform process (May & Lahiff, 2007). None of these publications, however, makes more than a passing mention of the mapping of rights to cropland within communal areas. The purpose of this article is to take a critical look at what was largely perceived as a technical exercise, with relatively straight-forward objectives, and tentatively to assess its success in terms of both intended and unintended consequences.

Studying the effects of countermapping on local peoples' rights to forests in Kalimantan in Indonesia, Peluso (1995) found that such mapping exercises may redefine and reinvent customary rights and create new ‘traditions.’ Hodgson and Schroeder (2002) studied four countermapping projects among the Maasai in Tanzania and identified increased privatisation and territorialization as unintended effects. Our analysis mirrors these findings – short-term gains in terms of tenure security and conflict resolution are jeopardised by what appears to be a shift in perceptions and fencing activities that ultimately will cause increasing privatisation and exclusion. This study also aims to arrive at lessons of relevance to formalisation initiatives. In particular, we focus on how the mapping and surveying process itself may change the very rights that the process was set out to merely register.

The information on which this article is based is in part acquired through a systematic questionnaire survey of 79 households that possess rights to saaipersele within the Concordia commonage.³ Questions focused on rights of use and access before and after the property survey. Talks were also held with professional herders, local politicians, bureaucrats, community elders, the reform facilitators in the SPP, surveyors, and the designer of the survey within the Department of Land Affairs (DLA). Most of the interviews were held in Afrikaans using an interpreter from Concordia, but some of the interviews with farmers and all the conversations with officials were in English. In addition, using survey maps,⁴ aerial photos, GPS technology, and old written descriptions of property boundaries, in collaboration with the property holders themselves, differences between land areas before and after the property survey were established for 11 randomly selected property units within the commonage. Some additional material from similar land surveys in the Leliefontein and Steinkopf communal areas has been included for purposes of corroboration and elaboration of the results from Concordia. Finally, historical documents on Concordia were studied in the Cape Archives in Cape Town and in the municipal office in Concordia.