Shameful legacy: Land dispossession, the destruction of indigenous food systems, the criminalisation of informal trade and the concentration of
food production and distribution were deliberate, legal acts, the effects of which endure today. Photo: Madelene Cronje
The demographic character of South Africa’s food and hunger crisis is often framed as a contemporary, post-1994 failure, resulting from unemployment, inequality or weak governance.
But in reality, the racial, geographic and class-based nature of present-day hunger draws its roots from a well-designed, carefully legislated and openly defended colonial system.
To understand why millions are hungry in a country with a globally enviable climate and land that produces an abundance of food, we need to revisit the archive and bear witness to what the colonial and apartheid state said about food when it constructed South Africa’s political economy.
The archival record is candid.
By the late 19th century, African farmers across the Cape and KwaZulu, in particular, were producing surplus grain and livestock. Far from celebrating this, colonial authorities saw it as a threat.
The 1881 Blue Book of the Cape government documented surplus production by African populations, noting their use of technologies, commercial surpluses and labour stability. The Blue Book explicitly warned that the production of food by African people in excess of their own requirements was undesirable, “as it diminishes their incentive to labour”.
This position reflects the core logic of colonial governance in relation to the political nature of food. Food production and independence by African people undermined the colony’s labour needs. Hunger, by contrast, was a necessary element of the colonial labour system.
That logic was formalised in law. Introducing the Glen Grey Act to the Cape parliament in 1894, prime minister Cecil John Rhodes stated that “the object of the Glen Grey Act is to bring the native into the labour market”. In doing so, the Act restricted African landholding, disrupted communal farming systems and introduced taxes payable only in cash.
Together, the measures undermined food self-provisioning and compelled wage labour.
The resulting food insecurity was thus not a side effect of the policy. Rather, it was the mechanism that informed the policy logic.
By the early 20th century, this thinking had hardened into official doctrine.
In 1903, the British high commissioner for South Africa established the South African Native Affairs Commission to examine and make recommendations on the “native question”. The commission’s report, published in February 1905, advocated, among other things, residential, territorial and political separation along racial grounds. The report also emphasised strict restrictions on land ownership for African people and favoured industrial and manual education, as opposed to literary education, for “natives”.
Christianity and Christian doctrine were identified as necessary components of the project. It is estimated that about 37% of the South African population identified as Christian in 1900, with black Africans accounting for about 20%. In 2025, estimates range from 80% to 85% of the population identifying as Christian.
The commission’s report, which went on to shape decades of legislation, took a clear position: Africans “should be kept in a position where they can be compelled to labour” and “should not be allowed to become too independent”. It further argued that it would be “a grave mistake to regard the reserves as areas intended for full economic support”.
On food specifically, the commission cautioned that Africans “should not be encouraged to believe that they can support themselves entirely from the land”.
The self-sufficiency of African people, within the colonial logic, was a political risk.
Around the time of the report’s publication, Native Affairs Department circulars clarified that reserves, later known as Bantustans or homelands, were designed to provide Africans with “no more than bare subsistence”.
Overcrowding, soil degradation and food shortages were thus built into the model.
When parliament passed the Natives Land Act in 1913, the position on African independence was restated. The Act confined the African majority to only 7% of the country’s land, much of it agriculturally degraded. As expected, food production declined, poverty deepened and dependence on wage labour increased.
When the Native Trust and Land Act of 1936 expanded reserve land to 13%, the state introduced so-called betterment planning, a regime that profoundly disrupted food security in African areas. The Act empowered the South African Native Trust to reorganise rural land into rigid residential, arable and grazing zones; enforce compulsory stock limitations and regulate cultivation practices without community consent.
Betterment planning further dismantled the social organisation of African communities, which was closely linked to the maintenance of egalitarian, organic and interdependent relationships with the land. Among Nguni communities, for example, the abundant physical environment had nurtured a culture of integrated, communal farming systems in which each homestead was materially self-sufficient and depended on the products of its labour for food, basic materials and the instruments of production.
In contrast, betterment policies legally constrained African food production and entrenched food insecurity as a permanent feature of rural life.
Livestock and grazing controls reduced access to meat, milk, manure and draught power.
Many households were forcibly relocated away from fields and water sources due to zoning regulations, lowering yields and increasing labour burdens.
Control extended beyond production to distribution. Municipal councils in cities such as Johannesburg and Durban passed by-laws targeting African food traders. Early 20th-century council records argued that “the unrestricted sale of foodstuffs by natives in urban areas is undesirable”.
The concern centred on competition. Officials warned that African trade “undermines European traders and encourages independence”.
More than a century later, informal food traders remain criminalised in many cities under strikingly similar rationales.
White commercial agriculture, by contrast, received secure land tenure, water rights, subsidies, extension services and guaranteed markets.
The Tomlinson Commission, appointed in the 1950s to assess the viability of the homelands, acknowledged in its 1955 report that “the Bantu areas cannot produce sufficient food to maintain their population”.
The commission recognised that even with agricultural investment, the homelands would remain economically unviable.
In these conditions, hunger was not evidence of failure. It was proof that the system was functioning as designed.
Taken together, the statements expose an uncomfortable truth: South Africa’s food crisis is not merely inherited inequality. Rather, it is inherited policy design.
Land dispossession, the destruction of indigenous food systems, the criminalisation of informal trade and the concentration of food production and distribution were deliberate, legal acts.
Political liberation did not automatically dismantle this architecture.
The logic is clear: if hunger was designed, it cannot be solved by charity alone. This means prioritising land reform centred on production and local food systems, protecting informal traders, supporting small-scale and communal farming, restoring indigenous knowledge and confronting corporate concentration across food value chains.
The South African Human Rights Commission, in fulfilment of its mandate to protect, promote and monitor the observance of human rights, will conduct an inquiry into South Africa’s food systems from 12 to 20 March 2026. The inquiry will interrogate, among others, the historical roots of hunger and food deprivation and assess the extent to which the post-1994 system is equipped to dismantle historic food injustices.
The commission is receiving submissions from interested parties with information that may assist in this investigation.
The call for submissions is open until 27 February 2026.
Philile Ntuli is a commissioner of the South African Human Rights Commission. Her focal areas include land rights, the right to food and the national preventive mechanism. She is also a recipient of the M&G Power of Women 2025 award.
This is the second of a five-part series.