‘After years in the wilderness’: The discourse of land claims in the New South Africa

Abstract

The paper examines land restitution in the new South Africa, and looks at the intersecting roles of land-claiming communities who were forcibly resettled from their land during the apartheid years and the NGOs and -since 1994 -Government Commissioners who have helped them to reclaim the land. Ideas and practices concerning land, community and development that have emerged from the interaction between these different players have been mutually constitutive but are sometimes mutually incomprehensible. A populist rhetoric, evident both in discussions with former land owners, and in much of the writing in NGO publications such as Land Update, depicts land as something communally owned which must be communally defended. This sense of a uniformly experienced injustice and a shared resistance against outside intervention obscures the fact that claims on land derive from a series of sharply differentiated historical experiences and articulate widely divergent interests, such as those -in the case of the farm Doornkop for example -between former owners and their former tenants. The restitution of land to these former owners, while being of great importance to them as a source of identity and as a redress of past injustices, is not necessarily the key to solving "poverty, injustice and misery" as has been claimed for the process of land reform as a whole.

Rural Livelihoods inSouthAfrica: Complexity, Vulnerability and Differentiation

“…Subaltern rural livelihoods in South Africa have long been linked through oscillatory migration to distant urban locales and intertwined with urban fortunes. These linkages have persisted in the post‐apartheid era (Hart , ; James , ). Urban sites not only provide potential employment opportunities; they also offer the promise of superior access to amenities and infrastructural services (electricity, piped water, transport links), and higher‐quality social services such as schooling or public health care.…”

Land and Justice in South Africa: Exploring the Ambiguous Role of the State in the Land Claims Process

“…For many people, the offfijicial end of apartheid would have been meaningless to those who sufffered land dispossession if there was no process of restoring land rights (James 2000;Mgxitama 2006). The process of restoring lost land rights actually began in the dying days of apartheid, when the apartheid government repealed racist laws through the Abolition of Racially Based Land Measures Act of 1991 (Gibson 2010;Hall 2010).…”

“…Given the fact that all land claims are against the state (Department of Land Afffairs 1994), I am particularly interested in the role of the state as reflected in its practice, as well as the signifijicance of this role for 'successful' land claimants. James (2000) has noted how land claims in South Africa were largely fuelled by a discourse, by claimants and those who supported them, of uniformly experienced injustice and shared resistance against outside intervention. Along with others (Kepe 2004;Fay and James 2009), James has argued that such discourses of uniformity in regard to land injustices can obscure the fact that land claims derive from a series of sharply diffferentiated historical experiences and often express widely divergent interests.…”

The Past in the Present: Struggles Over Land and Community in Relation to the Dukuduku Claim for Land Restitution, South Africa

“…African context these processes, according to James (2000), rest heavily on a communalist discourse where communal tenure is idealised and communities are imagined to be egalitarian and inclusive. This springs out of a South African history where resistance towards a suppressive regime made way for a populist rhetoric advocating for and idealising land as a communal asset.…”