Land reform in South Africa

The newly‐elected South African government began in 1994 to make laws and implement a programme for land reform. It consisted of three dimensions: redistribution (transferring white‐owned commercial farm land to African users); restitution (settling claims for land lost under apartheid measures by restoration of holdings or compensation); and land tenure reform (to provide more secure access to land in the former bantustans). Only a few restitution claims have been so far resolved. After much rethinking a revised draft of a land tenure bill is to be presented to Parliament in late 2000, but as one stated aim is to give ‘land to tribes’, it remains to be seen whether it will bring increased democratisation, allowing for common resource management, or will entrench ‘decentralised despotism’.

This article concentrates on the most actively pursued dimension of land reform: redistribution. Under the diverse influences of rights‐based activism of earlier years and of World Bank advice about a ‘market‐led’ approach, the government has set up mechanisms to help finance and facilitate ‘community’ initiatives to acquire land, to settle on it and, if possible, to make productive use of it. What was advocated as a more rapid and less bureaucratic approach than a government agency acquiring and administering resettlement has instead spawned a sprawling edifice, some of it out‐sourced to an array of consultants, often with little experience and few credentials, and has led to a protracted process of transfer of a much smaller amount of land in five years than, say, Zimbabwe managed in the same period. The reasons for this are examined.

A policy rethink during 1999 has led to changes in emphasis which, hopefully, will speed up the redistribution of land, provide more back‐up to those resettled, and prioritise future grants for more productive agricultural use. This latter formula, however, is constricted by old‐fashioned ‘modernist’ (and often implicitly colonial) orthodoxies still current in South Africa, not least in the ANC and government. These are fixated on ‘commercialisation’ ‐ which usually translates into larger‐scale and high‐tech ‐ and the promotion of the interests of a would‐be black agrarian entrepreneurial class, rather than those of the propertyless. Some hope may derive from the inclusion of experiments in the new programme to chart an alternative to the ‘market‐led’ formula which would instead allow redistribution of land as an element within district‐level planning.