In Lungisile Ntsebeza’s Polokwane Briefing (“Address the land question“, August 17) he says it is by now widely acknowledged that “land reform … is a dismal failure”. The claim of “failure” is a common one, but it often obscures how — and in what setting — policies were made in the first place.
It is true, as Ntsebeza writes, that colonialism is one context in which we need to understand land reform. But we also need to see it in the context of attempts made over more than 30 years to contest colonial and neocolonial land-grabbing. Rather than land reform policy being made as a result of pacts between elites to be foisted upon an unwilling populace, these plans represented the culmination of a decades-long attempt to undo land dispossession.
People, particularly evicted titleholders, strove to reclaim their lands — a process that involved years of dialogue and contestation. It was this that gave the land reform programme a very particular shape.
“Restitution” became the dominant mode in which everyone conceptualised their desire for land — even those for whom policy makers, pigeonholing people into different categories, had designed different legislation. Thus, many of the proposed beneficiaries of land “redistribution” actually saw themselves as reclaiming land rights according to a restitutive model — in which land stood for the righting of past wrongs, the restoration of citizenship, the reclaiming of sovereignty.
I certainly concur with Ntsebeza’s statement that “claims about land are directly linked to the meaning of citizenship after 1994”, but I would argue that one cannot disentangle this symbolic meaning of land from the historic procedures that produced it.
A second essential context is that of the policies themselves. When people experienced frustration as delivery was delayed, many began to conceptualise their model of landholding in a different way. They reverted to the notion of trusteeship, which had been laid down in reserve areas in the 1930s, with land owned by a higher authority on whom one could rely for some protection. Instead of wanting to “own” property, many — particularly among those who’d never owned it in the first place — turned back to the idea of occupying land while dependent upon a paternalistic chief, whose powers would be secured by a benign state.
In an unexpected twist, some even conceptualised their rightful place as being on the white-owned farms where they lived or once lived, but under the protection of a farmer who would respect their rights to graze their cattle and bury their dead. Once again, history and past experience laid the groundwork for people’s ideas about what kind of landholding they aspired to. They turned to these earlier experiences of land occupancy because the working out of policy — with its emphasis on “property ownership” — was proving so unwieldy.
Although it is common to assert the “failure” of South Africa’s land reform policy, one must acknowledge that there are unintended consequences and unexpected productivities that result from the implementation of any set of plans. What these are can only be discovered through detailed observation. If land reform has been a “failure”, then what has it — with all its officers, buildings, paperwork, bureaucracy and attendant paraphernalia — actually done in the South African countryside?
It has raised expectations without fulfilling them, breeding cynicism. But some have taken it upon themselves to negotiate informal land deals (with people not necessarily entitled to undertake them) — and in the short term, at least, they have been able to secure some rights of ownership or usufruct. In the process they are developing a more canny sense of how it is that politicians and state officials can and should be held to account for their promises. In this sense, if not in the sense of acquiring formal property rights, they are asserting their citizenship.
Deborah James is reader in anthropology at the London School of Economics and currently visiting the University of Cape Town. She is the author of Gaining Ground? Rights and Property in South African Land Reform