One day in 2002 a friend — now serving as a restitution officer for the South African government — took me on a tour around a densely crowded rural settlement near Nelspruit in Mpumalanga. As we drove past mile after mile of roughly constructed tin shacks and mud shelters, he pointed to different clusters of dwellings and described to me the places their inhabitants had projected for themselves on a newly imagined map of the area: ‘Those people have put in a bid to reclaim the fruit farms belonging to Hall and Sons” and ‘those are the followers of Chief so-and-so. They are claiming all the land from the Vaal River to the Mozambique border.” There was a poignant disparity between these grand-scale territorial ambitions and the claimants’ shabby and cramped dwellings.
My friend’s descriptions, like many other conversations I have had while undertaking the field research for this book, pointed to the extraordinarily ambitious nature of South Africans’ aspirations after 1994; in particular those regarding land. Their wish to claim, own and/or occupy land was fuelled by the state’s land reform programme, but also drew impetus from experiences of the anti-apartheid struggle and from memories of a deeper past. These aspirations were virtually unrestricted in scope. Loosely combining the restitutive with the redistributive aspects of the state’s land reform policy, what was at stake in the public imagination was nothing less than the complete redrawing of the map of South Africa. Some people, having once owned farms but had them confiscated, now imagined their lands reinstated.
Others had once lived on white-owned farms as tenants with no rights of tenure and now imagined themselves moving back to supplant the farmers who had long ago evicted them. Yet others were continuing to reside, with scant or non-existent rights, on white farms: they now imagined themselves free to herd their cattle across the land, unrestricted by fences and formal boundaries. Even more ambitious, members of new regional elites with links to hereditary chiefs, imagined themselves reclaiming not single farms but entire lost empires. Some spoke with enthusiasm of the abundant herds they planned to keep and the maize fields and orchards they would cultivate on what appeared to be barren ground. Others evocatively described the factories, towns, shopping centres and casinos they envisaged as springing up on dry and rocky hillsides.
Land reform, perhaps more than other policies in the new South Africa, has provided fertile grounds for the forming of such expectations. Failing to nourish these adequately has made the subsequent disappointment inevitable.
Land reform has been a social experiment ambitious in its breadth of scope, but ultimately unrealistic given the limited material and human resources on which it has had to rely.
In situations of social transition like South Africa — as with other post-Cold War settings such as Eastern Europe — transformation is occurring at breakneck speed and people try to position themselves within this situation of flux and change. A remapping of personal trajectories seems particularly likely in contexts where officialdom itself is engaged in extensive and ambitious planning for what lies ahead.
But the uncertainty of the enterprise may cause some people to cling tenaciously to the past. An eagerly anticipated future is built on unrealised ambitions in the present and fuelled by longer memories of injustice, which demand redress. If the future fails to materialise as expected, the past provides a fall-back position.
In South Africa, as in postsocialist Europe, Utopian-style expectations of a future freed from oppression have given way to dissatisfaction with the new dispensation, sometimes based on surprisingly positive memories about the old one.
Of the millennial aspirations to redraw the map of the South African countryside, not many have yet been achieved. And those among the aspirant owners who have realised, or who come close to realising their ambitions through the state programme — that is, to becoming ‘beneficiaries” of land reform — have nonetheless been dogged by uncertainty. They have found themselves balancing the promises of modernity against the security of the well trodden path. Social forms of the old order seem to be so tenacious because the elaborate designs to supplant them are taking so long to become real.
The aspirant black South African landowner of the early 21st century is like an explorer setting forth in a rickety ship, relying on the stars for guidance because more complex technological navigational systems are still being perfected. Set against the promise of new lands to be gained is the fear that old lands — and a way of life associated with them — are in danger of being lost.