Interrogating the Grand Narratives about Zimbabwe: the case of the Shamvu District

Post-1994 land laws mimic apartheid

Nomboniso Gasa, Mail & Guardian

“Umhlaba! Izwe lethu! (Land! This land is ours!)” It is now more than 40 years since I first heard these slogans. Given the passion with which they were declared, I have tried to understand exactly what they meant.

Like many South Africans, I continue to grapple with the multiple meanings of the land question. For me, it is important to understand land dispossession as a structural process that played out over many centuries.

King’s culture call is all about land

Nomboniso Gasa, Business Day

KING Goodwill Zwelithini made a fiery speech in Kokstad recently in which he declared 2015 to be the Year of the Regiment. He urged male initiates to be "his regiment and defend African culture against critics".

His call to arms must be understood in the broader context of claims of power over land, resources and customary law.

Claimants still waiting for the promised land

Nomboniso Gasa, Mail & Guardian

The man’s movements were deliberate as he took the microphone at the recent land tenure summit in Boksburg.

“Minister, we support this summit,” he said. “We, the labour tenants on the farms, feel the pressing hard sole of the farmers on our backs. We, who are dragged on the backs of bakkies, without protection … many of us know no other home. Our parents gave their labour as we give ours. Must our children suffer the same fate? There is no political will to ensure that the laws are adhered to, there are no mechanisms to ensure labour tenants are treated as human beings.

Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab

AK Press

With chapters by Noam Chomsky, Max Rameau, Grace Lee Boggs, Silvia Federici, Ahjamu Umi, Ben Dangl, etc.

Read Table of Contents here.

Read an excerpt here.

“Part of the reason that knowledge about the current global land grab is so uncertain is the paucity of perspectives and analysis in defining the problem. This book fills the gap admirably. Think of it as a mix-tape, in which you’re led from rural, urban, indigenous, Earth First!, Global North, Global South, policy wonk, insurgent, high theory, and high praxis. Listen for the new voices and the new ideas—you’ll be humming them for years to come, and you’ll have heard them here first. —Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved

Re-opened restitution a cover for neo-traditionalist power grab

By Nomalanga Mkhize, Custom Contested

In recent weeks, South African news reports have been filled with leaders announcing claims and counter-claims to land on behalf of their “people” and royal clans under the newly amended Restitution Act of 1994.

These royal claims are said to be justified by South Africa’s history of colonial dispossession, which was the most extreme on the African continent and waged through two centuries of warfare, and 50 years of legislated discrimination.

The History of Land Dispossession and the Consequences for Land Policy Now

Reflections on South Africa’s Agrarian Questions after 20 years of Democracy

Call for Abstracts

Reflections on South Africa’s Agrarian Questions after 20 years of Democracy

Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa

INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP 14/15 AUGUST 2014

The Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town will be hosting an international workshop which will reflect on South Africa’s land and agrarian questions 20 years after the advent of democracy in South Africa. The workshop will be held in the Centre for African Studies gallery on 14 and 15 August 2014.

Is bypassing the state the best way to push for land reform?

by Aman Sethi, Kafila

Last month, I visited Harare to cover the Zimbabwe elections but found myself fascinated by the controversial fast track land reform process. This story was first published in The Hindu, but – as always – I am happy to take questions here. A thought worth considering: In the context of the discussion around the Land Bill in India, does Zimbabwe’s experience suggest that questions of land are best resolved outside of the ambit of the state?

Christopher Merrett reviews 'The Promise of Land'

The Promise of Land

by Christopher Merrett, The Witness

A STRUGGLE for land has been central to the history of South Africa, complicated by the fact that to the protagonists it represented very different world views.

The recent centenary of the Natives’ Land Act was a reminder that land was a cornerstone of white domination, a reason why Fred Hendricks argues in The Promise of Land that its reform is a “barrier to a unitary imagination of the South Africa nation”.

Instead, a revolution is required to complete the process of decolonisation and creation of a national identity. Twenty years after liberation, democracy, social justice and the symbolism of restitution should have made the country look very different, he suggests.

Complex legacy of 1913 Land Act ‘held captive’

By Nomboniso Gasa, The Daily Dispatch

26 April, 2013

THIS year marks the centenary of the 1913 Land Act. Yet, very little is in the public debate about its multiple legacies in the present.

The centenary of the Land Act occurs 18 years after the South African constitution was enacted into law. While the function of the constitution in any society is broader than redressing past injustices; there can be no question that such redress is central in laying foundations for a society based on justice, freedom and equality – in all meanings.

There is general acceptance that South Africa’s land reform and redress has been frustratingly low. This is acknowledged by the leaders of the country as it is equally experienced by the communities who live with the legacy of that dispossession. Why is this so?

Lindela Figlan Speaks with Ceasefire

Land is at the Heart of our Struggle

by Lindela 'Mashumi' Figlan, Abahlali baseMjondolo

Yes I have to be bold and proud to be a South African. But I’m not proud because our lovely country belongs to the wrong hands. Our struggle began with the question of land and land remains at the centre of our struggle today.

In the old days the people in this country were so united. Even those who were not interested in politics they ended up in politics. This unity came from the fact that they were crying for the land of their forefathers that had been confiscated by those who thought the land was supposed to be under their authority. The people's land had been stolen, fenced and sold.

Accumulation by Dispossession and Its Limits: The Southern Africa Paradigm Revisited

by Giovanni Arrighi & Nicole Aschoff & Ben Scully, 2010

The dispossession of agricultural producers from the land has long been considered a condition of successful capitalist development. The main contention of this paper is that such dispossession has in fact become the source of major developmental handicaps for at least some and possibly many countries of the global South. We develop our argument by focusing on the South(ern) African experience as a paradigmatic outlier case of accumulation by dispossession—that is, as one of its extreme instances capable of highlighting in almost ideo-typical fashion its nature and limits. After reconstructing interpretations of capitalist development in Southern Africa that in the early 1970s established the region as a paradigm of accumulation by dispossession, we discuss how useful these interpretations are for understanding the more recent developmental trajectory of South Africa. We then suggest ways in which these interpretations from the 1970s should be reformulated in light of subsequent developments. We conclude by briefly examining the theoretical and policy implications of the analysis.

Electing Land Questions: A Methodological Discussion with Reference to Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Durban Shackdweller Movement

by Raj Patel, 2007

Narratives about the land question in South Africa often have a similar structure. They will begin by observing that the distribution of land in South Africa is, by any measure, vastly unequal. There will often then be a suggestive statistic, one that notes the skew of land ownership, the 13 million people crowded onto the homelands (Lahiff 2001: 1), contrasted with 87% of being appropriated by white colonial farmers (Thwala 2003).This will often be accompanied by some gesture towards the colonial origins of thisdistribution, often pointing to 1913, the date of the South African Native Lands Act, a moment that consecrated the geography of apartheid. Some narratives will note, often critically, that in its post-apartheid hearings on the land reform process, the South African government’s key point of insistence was that the 1913 date for the beginning of consideration for restitution was non-negotiable despite the fact that a great deal of dispossession predates the Native Lands Act.

Thulani Ndlazi Introduces Mabogo More's 'Without Land There is No True Liberation'

Mabogo P. More's recent paper on Fanon and land question in South Africa is online here. It is introduced, below, by the Reverend Thulani Ndlazi from the Church Land Programme.