Gaining Ground: Rights and Property in South African Land Reform

GAINING GROUND? ‘RIGHTS’ AND ‘PROPERTY’ IN SOUTH AFRICAN LAND REFORM

Mugabe’s policy of land seizures in Zimbabwe raised concerns in South Africa. Would the same thing happen there, given that some politicians signalled support for these actions? The South African press reported attacks on white farmers in remote areas; they in turn formed vigilante groups which directed violence against African farm-dwellers. Land reform first captured, but then served to disappoint, popular expectations aroused by South Africa’s first democratic election. The ANC knows that its supporters expect large white farms to be divided up among poor blacks, but also that incautious initiatives could destabilise the economy and exacerbate racial tensions. Set amidst these conflicts, Gaining Ground? shows how land reform policy and practice in post-apartheid South Africa have been produced and contested. Set in the province of Mpumalanga, the book gives an ethnographic account of local initiatives and conflicts, showing how the poorest sectors of the landless have defied the South African state’s attempts to privatise land holdings and create a new class of African farmers. They insist that the ‘rights-based’ rather than the ‘market-driven’ version of land reform should prevail and that land restitution was intended to benefit all Africans. But their attempts to gain land access often backfire. Despite state assurances that land reform would benefit all, illegal land selling and ‘brokering’ are pervasive, representing one of the only feasible routes to land access by the poor. Land is not only understood literally, but has become a fulcrum for social and moral disputes: over inalienable rights versus private property, public responsibility versus private enterprise, welfarism versus self-reliance, patrimonial leadership versus egalitarian democracy. Gaining Ground? shows how human rights lawyers, NGOs and the state in interaction with local communities have tried to square these symbolic and economic claims on land. Deborah James is Reader in the Department of Anthropology, LSE.

GAINING GROUND? ‘RIGHTS’ AND ‘PROPERTY’ IN SOUTH AFRICAN LAND REFORM

Deborah James

First published 2007 by Routledge-Cavendish 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 A GlassHouse book Routledge-Cavendish is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2007 Deborah James This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data James, Deborah, Dr. Gaining ground : “rights” and “property” in South African land reform / Deborah James. p. cm. ISBN 1–904385–62–1 1. Land reform—South Africa—Mpumalanga. 2. Land use, Rural— South Africa—Mpumalanga. 3. Political participation— South Africa—Mpumalanga. 4. Restitution—South Africa. 5. Blacks—South Africa—Claims. 6. South Africa— Race relations. I. Title. HD1333.S62M684 2006 333.3′16827—dc22 2006017362 ISBN 0–203–94539–5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–42031–8 (pbk) ISBN10: 1–904385–62–1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–42031–0 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–1–904385–62–2 (hbk)

TO PATRICK, BEN AND CAITLIN

CONTENTS

List of figures and illustrations List of acronyms Acknowledgements Map of Mpumalanga

viii xi xiii xvi

Introduction

1

1 ‘Rights’ or ‘property’? State, society, the law and the landless in South Africa

27

2 ‘A sentimental attachment to the neighbourhood’

52

3 Expanding restitution: the question of informal rights

79

4 Challenging restitution: African owners, African tenants and the politics of land reform

105

5 ‘To take back the land’: labour tenancy and the Landless People’s Movement

130

6 Between public and private: new property models

154

7 Rights, welfare or the market? The new redistribution

177

8 Land, power and people: chiefs, brokers and intermediaries

200

9 White power, black redress: the racial politics of land reform

225

10 Conclusion

252 259 271

Bibliography Index vii

LIST OF FIGURES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

Map of Mpumalanga

xvi

Introduction 0.1 0.2

South African land reform legislation Constitutional rights relating to land reform

4 5

Chapter 1 1.1

1.2

1.3 1.4 1.5

The Landless People’s Movement at the Durban meeting (Land and Rural Digest 20, Sep/Oct 2001, photo: Ronke Olusanga) Derek Hanekom, Minister of Land Affairs from 1994 to 1999, hands over a title deed to a labour tenant community leader (photo: Mark Wing, Afra News 40, March 1998) Thoko Didiza, Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs after 1999 (photo: Shelley Christians, africanpictures.net) TRAC march for farmworkers’ rights (TRAC annual report 1999–2000) History of TRAC-MP

28

36 38 43 44

Chapter 2 2.1 2.2

2.3 2.4 2.5

Doornkop returns (TRAC newsletter 30, 1995, photo: Cedric Nunn, africanpictures.net) Household goods are unloaded from government trucks at Doornkop, December 1994 (TRAC newsletter 30, 1995, photo: Cedric Nunn, africanpictures.net) Doornkop group photograph with Pentecostal missionaries, 1910 (photo: Dan MacDonald) Doornkop graveyard (photo: D James) Angel tombstone, Doornkop (photo: D James) viii

55

56 63 66 68

L I S T O F F I G U R E S A N D I L LU S T R AT I O N S

2.6 2.7

Naape Setoaba and view of Doornkop (photo: D James) Magdalena Sehlola’s house (photo: D James)

72 75

Chapter 3 3.1

Proving the racial discrimination basis of loss of informal rights

82

Chapter 4 4.1 4.2

4.3 4.4 4.5

South Africa’s ‘Property Clause’ Ndebele-speaking evicted farm worker Johannes Mnguni and his wife (Land and Rural Digest 15, Nov/Dec 2000, photo: Peter Mackensie, africanpictures.net) Jan Masina, squatter leader and spokesman (photo: D James) Naape Setoaba, Management Committee member, at home (photo: D James) Tenant and owner graves at Doornkop (photo: D James)

111

115 124 125 128

Chapter 5 5.1

5.2

5.3

Mpumalanga Labour Tenants’ Committee members Fana Mthethwa and Alfred Hlatshwayo (Land and Rural Digest 15, Jan/Feb 2001, photo: A Tshabangu) ‘Members of the Labour Tenants’ Committee, which was formed to fight back against the Wakkerstroom Commando, picketed outside the court’, Land and Rural Digest 13, July/August 2000, photo: Sizwe Samayende, africanpictures.net) Woman herding cattle (TRAC newsletter 32, February 1997, photo: Gille de Vlieg, africanpictures.net)

133

136 141

Chapter 6 6.1 6.2 6.3

Botho Sechabeng: a feeling of community (TRAC) Doornkop with CPA sign (photo: D James) Sizanani Secretary, Driver Ntuli (photo: D James)

158 160 166

Chapter 7 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4

Mrs Thamaga and friend in her orchard (photo: D James) Obed Matentje with his poultry (photo: D James) Mrs Matentje (photo: D James) The Matenjes’ house and yard (photo: D James) ix

188 189 190 191

L I S T O F F I G U R E S A N D I L LU S T R AT I O N S

Chapter 8 8.1 8.2 8.3

Siyathuthuka Trust Chairman, Amos Mathibela, at home (photo: D James) Landlessness protester confronts policeman at WSSD (photo: Times Media) Landless people and other anti-globalisation protesters at WSSD (photo: Times Media)

213 219 219

Chapter 9 9.1 9.2

Driver Ntuli in the kgoro (meeting place) (photo: D James) Driver Ntuli’s family’s house at Sizanani (photo: D James)

x

240 240

LIST OF ACRONYMS

ANC AZAPO CPA DA DLA ESKOM ICU LAMoSA LPM LRAD LRC MEC MLTC NGO NLC PAC SAIRR SANDF SLAG TRAC TRAC-MP UDF WSSD

African National Congress Azanian People’s Organisation Communal Property Association Democratic Alliance Department of Land Affairs Electricity Supply Commission Industrial and Commercial Union Land Access Movement of South Africa Landless People’s Movement Land Reform for Agricultural Development Legal Resources Centre Member of the Executive Committee Mpumalanga Labour Tenants’ Committee Non-Governmental Organisation National Land Committee Pan-Africanist Congress South African Institute of Race Relations South African National Defence Force Settlement Land Acquisition Grant Transvaal Rural Action Committee The Rural Action Committee-Mpumalanga United Democratic Front World Summit on Sustainable Development

NOTE ON CURRENCY The value of the South African Rand (R) varied during the period under consideration. In 2001 R1 sank to about 8 British pence. At the time of most recent fieldwork, R1 was equivalent to 10 pence; making R10 equal to £1.

xi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research for this book has taken an inordinately long time to complete. It started, in effect, while I was working as a researcher for the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) in 1981, and has only been completed a quarter of a century later. I have incurred debts to many people in the process. I was employed at SAIRR to conduct a case study investigation of apartheid removals, the third in a series of short booklets on the topic. I am grateful to those who appointed me, in particular to Carole Cooper, for the faith they showed in my abilities. Peter Delius gave me helpful advice at the time, and has given much more in subsequent years. Barry Streek made encouraging noises after reading the manuscript of The Road from Doornkop: a Case Study of Removals and Resistance. It was my lecturer, mentor and friend David Webster who had initially encouraged me to apply for the job. His assassination in 1989 by forces associated with the apartheid government have made it impossible for him to inspect the final outcome of the project he helped to initiate. My anger and sadness about his death have never subsided. After a long hiatus I was able to return to my interest in land matters in the 1990s. I gratefully acknowledge various grants which enabled me to do so: from the South African Human Sciences Research Council/Centre for Science Development; the University of the Witwatersrand Anderson/Capelli Grant; a Charter Fellowship from Wolfson College, Oxford and an Oppenheimer Fund Grant from Oxford University. Thanks to William Beinart, Stan and Barbara Trapido, Megan Vaughan and Gavin Williams for help and support during my stay in Oxford. To complete the research, and to gather material for parts of the book that refer to the most recent past, I was awarded – and gratefully acknowledge – a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK. The award reference number was R000239795 and the project was entitled ‘Property, community and citizenship in South Africa’s Land Reform Programme’. I also benefited from grants from the Staff Research Fund at LSE. Needless to say, opinions expressed are my own. xiii

AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S

Thanks for support, office space and collegiality to the School of Social Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, where I was a visiting fellow during 2001–2003, to Belinda Bozzoli for arranging my visit there and to members of the Anthropology Department for their welcome. I owe a debt of lasting gratitude to Geoffrey Mphahle Nkadimeng, Alex Xola Ngonini, and Mmapaseka Mohale of the same university, who did valuable work as coresearchers and assistants. In the field, numerous people gave up hours of valuable time to answer my persistent questions: they are too many to name but particular thanks to Geoff Budlender, Durkje Gilfillan, Kalushi William Kalushi, Eva Mankge, Philip Mbiba, Jan Masina, Amos and Hendrik Mathibela, Siphiwe Ngomane, Witness Phiri, Kobus Pienaar, Naape Setoaba, Henk Smith, Refilwe Tsehla, Marc Wegerif, Chris Williams. I was invited to discuss my work at various seminars and conferences. For various opportunities to present papers at the Max Planck Institute of Ethnology in Halle, thanks firstly to Tadesse Wolde, later to Julia Eckert, Andreas Dafinger and Andrea Behrends, and finally to Chris Hann, Franz and Keebet von Benda Beckmann and Melanie Wiber who arranged the ‘Properties of Property’ workshop in 2003. Thanks to participants in a variety of other seminars: in particular Jo Beall and Shireen Hassim who organised the ‘Fragile Stability: State and Society in Democratic South Africa’ workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2003; Sara Rich Dorman and Paul Nugent at the Centre for African Studies, University of Edinburgh who organised the ‘States, Borders and Nations: Negotiating Citizenship in Africa’ workshop in 2004; Graeme Rodgers at the Refugee Studies Programme, Oxford University; Mao Mollona and Alpa Shah at the Anthropology Department, Goldsmiths College; Insa Nolte who organised the Cadbury Fellows’ Workshop at the Centre for West African Studies, University of Birmingham in 2005; members of the Cambridge, Manchester, Sussex, Edinburgh and Goldsmiths Anthropology Departments; and Matthew Engelke and Catherine Allerton who convened the LSE Anthropology Staff Writing Seminar. For reading various bits of the manuscript, giving feedback, and moving me towards the eventual publication of this book, thanks to Derick Fay, Aninka Claassens, Kobus Pienaar, Paul la Hausse de la Louvière, Cath Wilkinson, Linda Waldman, Isabel Hofmeyr, Harry West, Richard Fardon, Beverley Brown, Martin Chanock and Colin Perrin. For all the above plus detailed comments on grammar and style, thanks as usual to Colin Murray. For general moral support of kinds too difficult to pin down exactly, my gratitude to Adam Kuper, Richard Wilson and Charles van Onselen. And thanks to all my students (you know who you are). For permission to publish photographs on the pages mentioned below, acknowledgements are due to Africanpictures.net; Chris Williams of TRAC–MP and Caroline Wilson of the NLC (pp 28, 43, 133); Mark Wing (p 36); Shelley Christians (p 38); Gille de Vlieg (p 141); Dan MacDonald xiv

AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S

(p 63); Peter MacKensie (p 115); Cedric Nunn (pp 55–6); Times Media South Africa (p 219); Sizwe Samayende (p 136). For drawing the map, thanks to Wendy Job of the Cartography Unit, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. For help with other photographs, thanks to my parents David and Jenepher James. They also gave me a home and kept me company during my stay in Johannesburg, as did my parents-in-law Norman and Lynnette Pearson. Eleanor Woods provided much-valued moral support to my family during my absence. For keeping home fires burning while I was away and for putting up with my absences and preoccupations, huge thanks to Ben and Caitlin. And my inestimable gratitude to Patrick Pearson, who has given me much support and encouragement from the very beginning of this long project to its very end.

xv

Map of Mpumalanga

INTRODUCTION

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 1

G A I N I N G G RO U N D ?

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 postCold War settings such as eastern Europe – transformation is occurring at break-neck 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 upon 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 welltrodden 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 twenty-first 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.

‘AN EXTRAORDINARY DEGREE OF PLANNING’ However, it remains a fact that land reform is seen as being of crucial importance in South Africa. Awareness of its implications has been highlighted by the Zimbabwean land invasions and the escalation, in South Africa, of black-on-white ‘farm attacks’, as well as the recent rise of the Landless People’s Movement (LPM) with its links to globalised organisations such as 2

I N T RO D U C T I O N

Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST). Lesser-known than these attacks, but equally significant, is the vigilantism practised by white farmers against African farm-dwellers. The ANC is aware that the outcomes of land reform could have a significant impact on the party’s credibility, effectiveness and future support. In a country whose former government statutes enshrined a division along racial lines, land reform could potentially exacerbate racial tensions, but handled correctly it could defuse these to establish new and fruitful partnerships. Would South African blacks imitate their counterparts in Zimbabwe and start to seize land from white farmers, given that members of social movements and some politicians were signalling support for these actions? The new South African government has been determined to structure the transfer of land as an organised process rather than allowing ‘land grabs’. Well before the Zimbabwe disturbances, policies and laws had been carefully designed to ensure that the ambitious target of transferring 30 per cent of farm land across the racial frontier would be carried out in a regulated manner. Rather than expropriation, there would be ‘market’-based acquisition of land: it would be bought from ‘willing sellers’ by ‘willing buyers’ but with the mediation of state officials. There was awareness both of the need to ensure the future well-being of the programme’s beneficiaries and to understand the importance of their historical experience. The recognition of a need for different categories of policy – restitution, redistribution and tenure reform – was based on an understanding both of differing needs in the future and of different communities’ divergent past experiences on the land. Historians and other researchers were brought in to provide insight into the nature of previous systems of landholding. The design of enlightened legislation, in consultation with members of the human rights law fraternity and the well-developed NGO sector, as well as a range of outside experts, would help to provide for future economic well-being as well as being founded on some awareness of past practice. Given a social context of rapid transition, many institutional and legal apparatuses were thus being consciously redesigned in order to make up for the shortcomings of the old order. South African blacks had been subjected to a ‘quite extraordinary degree of planning’ and legislation during apartheid (Crush and Jeeves 1993). There was recognition that equivalent levels of planning and law-making would be required in order to undo apartheid’s schemes. Those who follow current affairs, both outside of and within the country, have been aware of the succession of iniquitous laws which established separate territories for blacks and which robbed them of their existing land rights. There was the 1913 Natives Land Act, which legislated a distinction between white-owned areas making up over 80 per cent of the land area and ‘reserves’ (later ‘homelands’) which occupied the remaining 13 per cent of the land. Later there was the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act, which added 3

G A I N I N G G RO U N D ?

to the extent of these homelands in order not only to accommodate their existing population and its natural increase but also to provide space for the settlement of the thousands of people who were relocated into them with the infamous ‘population removals’ of the 1950s and 1960s. Accompanying the removals was a broader strategy of control which necessitated other laws. The Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 provided for the imposition of so-called traditional chiefs for the homelands. There was also legislation which allowed for planned agricultural development – so-called ‘betterment’ – within the homeland areas, in terms of which villages were replanned, their occupants moved into new residential areas, their cattle culled and their use of agricultural land ‘rationalised’. Here indeed is evidence of the ‘extraordinary degree of planning’ which had been required to carve up the map along racial lines. The series of Acts passed after 1994 were designed to provide systematic redress for the various ‘wrongs’ enacted over the course of the past century, while the new constitution established a legal framework for this. Ambitious Category

Date

Act

Intention

Restitution

1994

Restitution of Land Rights Act

To provide for the restitution of rights in land to persons or communities dispossessed of such rights after 19 June 1913 as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices. To establish a Commission on Restitution of Land Rights (CRLR) and a Land Claims Court

Restitution/ Redistribution/ Tenure Reform

1996

Communal Property Associations Act (CPA)

To enable groups to acquire, hold and manage property as agreed by members and using a written constitution

Tenure Reform

1996

Land Reform (Labour Tenants) Act

To safeguard the rights of labour tenants who had been remunerated for labour primarily by the right to occupy and use land

1996

Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act (IPILRA)

To protect people with informal rights and interests from eviction in the short term, pending more comprehensive tenure legislation (i.e. CLRA)

1997

Extension of Security of Tenure Act (ESTA)

To give farm occupants rights of occupation on private land. Establishes steps to be taken before eviction of such people can occur

2004

Communal Land Rights Act (CLRA)

To provide for legal security of tenure by transferring communal land to communities and provide for its democratic administration by them

Figure 0.1 South African land reform legislation.

4

I N T RO D U C T I O N

land reform ‘pilot programmes’ were initiated in all nine provinces in 1995. Their twofold aim was ‘the alleviation of rural poverty and injustices caused by previous apartheid policies’. It was to set right the effects of apartheid’s racially discriminatory laws, as well as those put in place well before the advent of the apartheid government in 1948, that the new legislation was designed and that the land reform programme overall was set in motion. But although the picture of starkly racialised dispossession is accurate in its broad outlines, the historical reality within specific regions was more complex. In the site of the present study, which encompasses parts of present-day Mpumalanga and Limpopo Provinces (formerly the eastern and south-eastern Transvaal), it is certainly the case that the story of land occupancy has been one of black displacement by white settlers, followed by state-endorsed separation of territory. But there have been as many differentiations within the ranks of black land-holders as there have been factors uniting them. The experience of land-holding and land dispossession has also differed widely from one regional setting to another. It was of these differentiated experiences that the designers of policy, through intensive research and much consulting of experts, attempted to take cognisance.

FROM PAST TO PRESENT: LAND OCCUPANCY AND THE TARGETS OF LAND REFORM To gain an understanding of how policy was both based upon and also fed into such differentiations within specific contexts, it is necessary to provide the briefest of historical ‘overviews’ of the area which is the site of the present study (see map on p. xvi). The region denoted by the map has seen a series of successive waves of population over the course of the past few hundred years. Groups of

25. Property 5 The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to foster conditions which enable citizens to gain access to land on an equitable basis. 6 A person or community whose tenure of land is legally insecure as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices is entitled, to the extent provided by an Act of Parliament, either to tenure which is legally secure or to comparable redress. 7 A person or community dispossessed of property after 19 June 1913 as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices is entitled, to the extent provided by an Act of Parliament, either to restitution of that property or to equitable redress.

Figure 0.2 Constitutional rights relating to land reform.

5

G A I N I N G G RO U N D ?

Bantu-speakers arrived from north of the Limpopo River, South Africa’s present-day northern border, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These groups were, in turn, displaced or re-aligned with the expansion and consolidation of nineteenth-century African chiefdoms. By the midnineteenth century, the royal houses of the Swazi and the Pedi held sway in the region, expanding their control over various local Sotho-speaking groups and jostling briefly with the Ndzundza Ndebele (Bonner 1983; Delius 1983, 1989; Krige 1937).1 The balance of forces began to shift with the establishment of a succession of Boer settler republics and with the presence of the British army. Both, at different times, did battle with the warriors of these African polities and secured their eventual conquest and subjugation. The Ndebele first sided with the British and the Swazi in a battle which resulted in the defeat of the Pedi under their chief Sekhukhune in 1879, and which drastically reduced the boundaries of his sovereign territory. One year later, in 1880, the Boers, in their newly-restored republic, succeeded in conquering the Ndebele under their chief Nyabela. Many of his former subjects were indentured as farm labourers on Boer farms. The Swazi, having sided with the British against the Pedi and eventually being granted sovereignty in the British Protectorate of Swaziland, nonetheless lost influence and land in the broader region further west. Of the families of herder-cultivators who had been subjects of the three African polities, Ndebele, Swazi and Pedi, some found their homes redesignated around the turn of the twentieth century as ‘crown land’. It was these areas which were later, under the 1913 Natives Land Act, classified as parts of native reserves where people could hold land by declaring loyalty and paying taxes to government-endorsed chiefs (Delius 1983; Schirmer 1994). They were to form the core of apartheid’s infamous ethnic ‘homelands’. The Pedi reserve, for example, was situated north of the Steelpoort River. Additional farmland was added to the area after the passing of the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act, and the reserve together with these Trust farms eventually formed the heartland of the Lebowa homeland. Postapartheid, and after the dismantling of the homeland authorities, it became Limpopo Province. Similar processes occurred in the case of the other ethnic homelands. Other Africans remained resident on the lands which had been newly allocated as farms to white settlers, south of the Steelpoort River, where they were redesignated in quasi-feudal style as ‘labour tenants’ or, if they paid rent, were inaccurately termed ‘squatters’. Finally, a minority of African groups, often those who had converted to Christianity and were following a mission way of life, raised the money to purchase their own farms, scattered amidst the white farming area, where some became successful peasant farmers. The process of land loss and the undermining of herder-cultivator livelihoods was accompanied by, although it was not initially the cause of, an 6

I N T RO D U C T I O N

increasing participation in South Africa’s burgeoning capitalist economy. Men, and later many women, became migrant labourers. The increasing reliance of the economy on these migrants was such that their homeland villages came to serve as little more than a labour reserve (Marks and Rathbone 1982; Wolpe 1972). But partly because of stringent influx control laws requiring permits to live in the urban areas, their connection to their rural homes was paradoxically strengthened by the long periods spent in the cities. New arrivals, meanwhile, were flooding into these villages from the farmlands of what were now designated as ‘white’ areas. These white farms were initially as important as the homelands in providing a home base for labour migrants. Here African cultivators, redesignated as tenants but also participating in the wage economy, became accustomed to balancing the labour requirements of farm owners against those of their employers in the cities. Such families, however, experienced increasing displacement as the twentieth century wore on. Evicted from these farms as white farmers demanded a greater proportion of their time or as white farming became more capital-intensive, or choosing to relocate to places of greater residential concentration where they could gain access to schooling, shops and services, they too started moving to the homelands (Schirmer 1994). The state-driven relocations of apartheid that were carried out from the late 1950s onwards but reached their peak during the 1970s were more visibly violent and disruptive than these earlier, less orchestrated evictions. Most notorious among these were the ‘black spot’ removals, in which the farms owned by black title-holders were seized by the state and their owners – as well as their African tenants – loaded into government trucks and unceremoniously driven to designated villages or ‘dumping grounds’ in the homelands. Removals of this kind, and others that accompanied them during the era of ‘grand apartheid’, received considerable attention, both in South Africa and abroad (Desmond 1971; Surplus Peoples Project 1983). Estimates of the total number of removals vary. According to the Surplus Peoples Project, 600,000 were moved from ‘black spots’ and two million from white farmland, but these figures disguise the occurrence of other resettlements which were apparently more ‘voluntary’ in nature yet were nevertheless undertaken under some duress. It is estimated that 3.5 million black people were relocated from white South Africa to these ‘homelands’ between 1960 and 1980 (Adams 2002; Simkins cited in Hart 2002:68).

Beneficiaries through restitution, redistribution and tenure reform The various categories of African title-holders and cultivators/herders who struggled to retain but eventually lost their land, or had their rights gradually whittled away while still residing on it, later became the targeted ‘beneficiaries’ of the land reform programme. But they did not always do so in the 7

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way predicted by policy-makers. This book shows how intended ‘beneficiaries’ often misunderstood policy, or attempted to shape it to their own ends. The most obvious ‘beneficiaries’ of reform were to be former title-holding landowners who had been relocated to the homelands during apartheid’s ‘black spot’ removals. Their property rights have been clearer-cut and rather easier to assert and retrieve – through restitution – than those of other claimants. They have also, as members of the nascent African middle class, had a greater sense of entitlement. Some had owned property in cities like Johannesburg as well, from which they were displaced in turn. The restitution programme accommodated these urban land claims alongside the rural ones. It was such communities’ highly-motivated efforts to reclaim land, well before the demise of apartheid, to which the initial growth of South Africa’s NGOs, especially those concerned with land issues, can in part be attributed (James 2000b; Levin 1996; Palmer 2001; Wotshela 2001). Aimed at people who had never previously had secure claims on landed property, and designed to enable them to group together and purchase farms with the aid of government grants, was a second policy subdivision, redistribution. Its intended beneficiaries – residents of the homelands, of white farms, or even of the cities – were more likely to belong to the poor and ‘historically oppressed’ (Lahiff 2000) than were those at whom restitution was targeted. They overlapped somewhat with the beneficiaries of the third subdivision, tenure reform, a policy thrust designed to encompass the land needs of both homeland residents and farm dwellers. The former were residing under chiefly control and holding land under ‘customary’ tenure. The latter defy easy classification, since they include both those who long ago left their homes on South Africa’s white farms and those who still reside on them. Between these two poles is a range of farm-dwellers expelled from – or voluntarily quitting – the white farms at various moments over the past half-century. Members of this category appear as beneficiaries in a range of projects, including not only the tenure reform and redistribution which were designed on their behalf, but also an expanded conceptualisation of restitution. Those evicted from the white farms many decades ago, but who had previously enjoyed long-term occupancy of them, have been viewed by designers of the programme as having held ‘informal rights’ and hence as being legitimate restitution claimants. Those who left the land more recently, without having lived for long on any specific farms, have joined the ranks of the shifting rural population. They seek to find a foothold in any convenient location, and are often derogatorily seen as ‘squatters’. But many of them still view themselves as entitled to claim what was historically theirs. The state, intolerant of squatting, has sought to channel such people’s aspirations away from restitution and towards redistribution instead. In some cases it has already – although unsuccessfully – settled them on redistributed land. But many African country-dwellers continue to reside on the white farms, where the policy of tenure reform is intended to give them greater residential 8

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security. Alternatively, as reluctant ‘exiles’ from the farms of particularly hostile owners, some farm-dwellers have taken up residence in urban areas. People in this category were among the founder members of South Africa’s social movement of the landless, the Landless People’s Movement (LPM). The historical background to land occupancy in Mpumalanga and in the Mpumalanga/Limpopo borderlands has thus produced a range of complex social and contextual distinctions. State planners have been cognisant of these and have designed policy categories to accommodate them, but are unable to predict precisely how people will position themselves in relation to these categories.

LAW, PROPERTY AND CITIZENSHIP It is against this historical and regional backdrop that the activities of South Africa’s planners, lawyers and legislators must be understood. The restructuring of land-ownership was a far-reaching exercise undertaken on behalf of its claimants as well as in consultation with them. For every scheme which failed to deliver the expected benefits there were lawyers and planners who developed even more sophisticated designs to remedy past mistakes. They brought huge energies to bear upon this project: drafting and redrafting legislation, planning and replanning legal systems of ownership, and subjecting existing plans to considered critique. The plans, although utopian in scope, were thus not uninformed. On the contrary, human rights lawyers, NGO land activists and government officials – working in close collaboration with each other or sometimes even combining all three roles at once – were aware of the extraordinary complexity of their task. They recognised that African land rights are often overlapping and multiple rather than exclusive and proprietary; and hence that flexible legislation would be needed to adjudicate conflicting claims and ensure that decisions taken would be adhered to. They also recognised that legislation alone would not suffice but that institutions enabling mediation and conflict resolution would have to be put in place (Claassens 2000, Cousins 2002). Here, what was envisaged was not so much a redrawing of the South African map but the restocking of the South African countryside with legal experts and judicious mediators. The protagonists’ nuanced understanding of the often informal rights they would be trying to enforce, and of the possible pitfalls involved, seemed to promise the success of this undertaking. But these imaginings – by people, activists, and officials alike – have so far remained largely unrealised. Land reform is a promise that is, as yet, unfulfilled. Understanding these processes means we need to pay attention to all these categories of people, to their interaction, and to the way in which their ideas and practices partly dovetail but partly diverge. State officers, human rights lawyers, NGO personnel and local claimants or beneficiaries have centred 9

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their activities on (although often disagreeing about the meaning of) ideas about the rights and entitlements of the citizen. Land, in this sense, is an idiom for the citizenship once denied to South Africa’s black majority. At the same time, land – restored or newly redistributed – seems to promise a means to future livelihoods. Much of the potency of ‘land talk’ lies in the way these two modes of discussion intersect: a legal discourse on rights and an economic one on livelihoods.

Considering economy, politics and law While this book aims to demonstrate the inadequacy of purely economic accounts – both those advocating and those criticising an economic path for land reform – it also acknowledges that land reform does have a material base. What has been described in the opening paragraphs of this chapter may have the appearance of an enclosed and self-referential system: a social experiment whose very ambitiousness has guaranteed the unlikelihood of its success. But it must be remembered that South Africa is not exceptional, and that its economy is implicated in global trends. Many difficulties that the country’s aspirant land reform beneficiaries initially viewed as specific to themselves have been experienced worldwide. South Africa, as many analysts point out, was incorporated into the sphere of global trade and industry during the 1990s on terms which made it difficult to compete in the world market. This led to a loss of jobs in industry, to the government’s adoption of strict restrictions on state spending (even anticipating World Bank dictates rather than merely responding to these), and to its pursuit of an economic restructuring similar to that currently being implemented in many other ‘undeveloped’ parts of the world. Where some writers have seen this as inevitable if regrettable, others claim that South Africa’s new political leaders showed an unwarranted enthusiasm in choosing the path of privatisation rather than delivering welfare and safeguarding the interests of the poor and marginalised. Such analyses place land reform alongside other initiatives of post-apartheid planning. They attribute the failure of all of these to strategies followed by the new elite within the context of the neo-liberal global economy rather than to the complex and particular history of South Africa or to its specific social and legal culture (Bond 2000; Marais 2001). Seen from the point of view of such writers, it seemed clear that poor people in post-1994 South Africa were destined not to enjoy much improvement in their well-being. It was almost a foregone conclusion that ambitious plans for restructuring the ownership of property and redistributing it, under conditions of neo-liberal austerity and without the back-up from state welfarist programmes or from the state subsidies which had supported white-owned farming enterprises during the apartheid era, would be virtually impossible to implement. The World Bank’s ‘small family farm’ model of ownership and production had a formidable influence on the design of South 10

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Africa’s land reform programme (Hall and Williams 2003; van Zyl et al 1996b). But critics have pointed to its inappropriateness as a means of addressing poverty, claiming that the World Bank approach would bolster the fortunes of no more than a small nascent middle class (Sender and Johnston 2004). And even where better-off people did become beneficiaries, as was increasingly the trend towards the end of the 1990s, the chances of their making a good living seemed remote, given that the supportive framework provided by the state marketing boards (Bernstein 2003:206) and state-planned economy of the apartheid era had long been abandoned (Hart 2002:227–8). A political perspective lends weight to the economic explanation: it must be recognised that South Africa was attempting to implement such plans, not at the height of an era characterised by optimism about the possibilities for overcoming inequality through the transformation of social structures, but at its end. These plans were being crafted in the final years of a century in which numerous similar reforms had taken place – and been found wanting – worldwide (Bernstein 2003). In a world context where ‘all programmes for improving the affairs of the human race’ seemed to have failed (Hobsbawm in Marais 2001:139–1), and where citizens had become increasingly marginalised and unlikely to participate in formal political processes (Hansen and Stepputat 2005), South Africans had eventually – and belatedly – been offered democracy and the fruits of ‘reform’. However, understanding South Africa’s land reform requires that we consider other factors: factors beyond the reach of neo-Marxist analyses of the neo-liberal global order, or even of accounts of post-modern political quiescence and apathy. It cannot be analysed without knowing something about South Africa’s pre-transition society and its social and legal culture. Land reform, in promising to provide a way of redressing past injustices, constituted an important part of the planning that underlays South Africa’s transition from an apartheid to a constitutional state. If land was seen as crucial in restoring citizenship, this was because it had earlier been central in denying the entitlements of the citizen. Apartheid’s ideologues and their colonial forebears had planned a system of customary tenure, closely allied to indirect rule. Such a scheme was designed to make communally held property – in separate ethnically defined territories – the basis of political dependence upon chiefs for the African population. It was this that had laid the foundation for the definition of rural Africans as chiefly ‘subjects’, rather than as citizens able to engage with civil society (Mamdani 1996:21–2). As endorsed within the grand plans of apartheid, formulated and refined during the 1950s, this system ‘mapped the social landscape’ (Ashforth 1990:158). The new landscape it created was an inexorably divided one. Apartheid denied citizenship – or assigned it on a second-class basis – through a planned relationship of ‘people to place’ (Ashforth 1990:158). Undoing it thus required the uncoupling of this relationship. A unity of territory and government must be created where previously there had been division. 11

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Space and territory were thus central to apartheid’s plans. Resistance to the implementation of these plans was likewise centred on space and territory (Bozzoli 2004). Land and rights became indissolubly connected in the public mind, partly because of clashes which became increasingly fierce towards the end of the 1980s between the state and the people whose property, land and citizenship rights it was threatening to destroy (Delius 1996; Seekings 2000; van Kessel 2000). But the connection between land and citizenship was also fashioned at the point where law and society intersect. South Africa, ironically given its ‘racist and oppressive state’, was home to a liberal social and legal culture that embodied principles contradictory to those which that state enshrined (Chanock 2001:20). While an increasingly coercive regime was enforcing a racial order in which African customary law, territorial segregation and the denial of property ownership were tools of subjugation, human rights lawyers and the NGOs with which they worked hand-in-glove were using liberal visions of the law, intersecting with ideas on African customary rights, to subvert this. It was through the interactions between such lawyers and their dispossessed African clients, in the years leading to South Africa’s transition, that the connections between land ownership and citizenship were partly forged. Liberal ideals thus co-existed with a ‘racial modernist’ regime (Bozzoli 2004): the stony immovability of the latter accounted, in part, for the heady and utopian quality of the visions it unleashed in reaction, particularly during its dying days. There were contradictory aspects to the conceptualisation of property rights as developed in the course of dialogue between African communities and the mostly white, English-speaking, middle-class activists devoted to restoring these rights. Among those who initiated the dialogue were African title-holders. They had been forcibly evicted when the apartheid state, conducting its infamous ‘black spot’ removals, removed African owners and inhabitants from so-called ‘white’ rural areas to the homelands. In the fight to reclaim their land, these people, often from mission backgrounds and sometimes eschewing the customary ways of their ‘heathen’ counterparts in the homelands, stressed their inviolable right to the land they had bought, the exclusivity of their property and the strength of internal community ties. This combination of independence with communality in turn owed something to the ideals of the nineteenth-century missionaries who had inspired the original African owners of such lands to leave the chiefly areas. Missionaries had yearned to recreate in southern Africa the class of self-sufficient yeomen farmers that was so swiftly disappearing in the context of an industrialising Europe (J and JL Comaroff 1989). Likewise committed to a merging of individual with communal land rights were legal practitioners and activists. In their bid to challenge the state in its removals policy, they were researching the nature of these communities’ concepts of land tenure. Their outrage at the apartheid state’s infringement 12

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of African ownership rights was fed by a liberal model of inviolable ‘private property’. Those in this constituency also emphasised egalitarianism: they saw this as deriving from African custom, but the emphasis drew, as well, upon a tradition in European thought which sees land as a common good for the benefit of all (Hann 1998:321; Stedman-Jones 2002). The resulting model of ownership was a hybrid combination. It attempted to base itself upon African ideas about land holding but filtered these through two contesting counter-discourses in European thought – one privileging the private dimension of property, while the other stressed the need to secure it for the public good (Hann 1998). This dialogical model of property ownership, developed at the interface between different cultural worlds (Long 2001; Long and Villareal 1994), combined private with communal, modern with traditional ideals of landholding and landownership, in sometimes contradictory ways.2 But it was primarily pressed into service, at least in the initial phases of the restitution programme, to enable the restoration of formally held property to its African owners. Projecting such debates and contestations from the past into the present, land reform has entailed continuing interactions between the landless, the state, and various activist lawyers, middlemen and other brokers. But the pursuit of land-based citizenship has not been a completely adversarial struggle defined along racial, cultural or class lines. Instead it has involved continual mediation between those from divergent racial, ideological and social backgrounds.

‘INFORMAL RIGHTS’ The ‘property/citizenship’ hybrid described above has been continuously dismantled and recombined in the process of debating how land ownership in South Africa is to be reformed. In particular, the pieces of the puzzle have been used to construct a new basis for the reclaiming and holding of property: that which has been termed ‘informal rights’. Lawyers and NGO activists, again in dialogue with the landless, have attempted to expand the restoration of property rights beyond the arena of formal ownership. Attending to the need for redistributive approaches to counterpoise the restorative ones, they have explored the possibilities of extending property/ citizenship to a wider range of the formerly dispossessed. The book explores how the people thus encompassed within the land reform programme but having less easy access to it have tried to operationalise these rights: how they have laid claim to entitlements by shaping aspects of the ‘property/citizenship’ complex to their own ends. Those who do so are mostly members of regional underclasses living on land they do not own. The areas they occupy include white farms and state-owned land as well as the restored farms of the African title-holders mentioned above. Developing 13

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an idea of ‘land as inalienable right’ from which no-one ought to be excluded, they have contested their exclusion from formally ‘owned’ property. In this way they strive to define their entitlements to citizenship and to participation in the public good. While their doing so fulfils the socially inclusive remit of the programme’s initial conceptualisation, it wreaks havoc with the neatness of the state’s increasingly bureaucratic plans to transfer land into the hands of African owners. Such people’s notions of inalienability, intersecting with and informing lawyers’ concepts of ‘informal rights’, often necessitate some kind of intermediary. Instead of involving a direct connection between people and land, people’s land access is mediated through their relationships to power-holders of various kinds: either chiefs, or different kinds of brokers. Poorer South Africans in the rural periphery have tended to follow the classic African pattern (Berry 1993, 2002b; Lund 2002) by allying themselves to leaders or ‘big men’ rather than feeling sufficiently empowered to establish their own entitlement to land. This pattern resembles earlier models of African law and landholding of the kind described by anthropologists. In Gluckman’s famous book on Barotse jurisprudence, he describes how cultivators’ land access was obtained through a hierarchy of ‘nested’ arrangements, with commoners enjoying secure entitlement at the household level while owing their access to the chief at higher levels of incorporation (Gluckman 1967). Rural Africans have thus long relied on paternalistic connections of various kinds for their land access. But this does not represent a survival of precolonial patterns or a nostalgic harking back to an imagined past. Instead, the poor have constructed networks of dependence on the better-off and the more powerful in an effort to minimise reliance on cash and commodities. Previously, in the heyday of South African capitalism, migrant wage labourers from rural areas had little option but to declare their allegiance to apartheid’s homeland chiefs if they wanted to retain access to their land and to secure a future for their families and themselves there (Vail 1989). But in this post-industrial setting – both within and now beyond the borders of the homelands – their reliance on patrons is crucial for different reasons. For the African poor in the twenty-first century, it is their need to keep land beyond the sphere of wages and commodities that leads them to embed it, instead, in a fabric of social dependencies. Here, as in many other settings worldwide, those who suffer the vagaries of unemployment are engaging in a last-ditch attempt to put their faith in subsistence farming (Nash 1994). They do so despite the increasingly inescapable recognition that farming is unlikely to be an effective fall-back strategy for the unemployed, given the need for cash inputs into agriculture. The insistence of landless and land-claiming people on their inalienable rights to land, mediated through their dependence on the paternalism of the more powerful, manifests the uncertainty of being cast adrift in a world of 14

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economic insecurity, in a context where the fixities of the old order have disappeared and have yet to be replaced by the assurances of the new.

The Landless People’s Movement These uncertainties produce great anxiety. For some of those trapped in the downward spiral of unemployment and subsistence failure, membership of South Africa’s Landless People’s Movement (LPM) appears to provide a measure of security. The organisation does not promise immediate material advancement, but its millennial visions of repossessing the countryside provide at least a rhetoric for achieving some kind of common identity. Its resounding slogans suggest that its members come from a single social and economic background, but in this they are misleading. The LPM was not formed in the crucible of, nor did it simply arise organically from, the ranks of a homogenous group of the ‘landless’. Rather, the organisation’s existence is the result of intensive interactions between the rank-and-file, NGO activists from middle-class or upwardly mobile backgrounds, and a variety of middlemen from various points on the class and political spectrum. The movement has a high media profile. It has attracted attention by holding meetings and demonstrations to coincide with international events, such as the 2001 United Nations Conference on Racism in Durban or the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. On these occasions it has joined forces with other protesters against the post-apartheid government’s policies. It has also swelled its ranks with invited representatives from other groups of the international ‘globalised landless’: including Palestinians, Guatemalans, Brazilians and Zimbabweans. The last in particular, closest to home and hence most threatening to the government’s chosen path of legal and regulated land reform, have lent rhetorical weight to LPM leaders’ exhortations to invade land. But these leaders’ vociferousness at such events and the movement’s profile in the media have given a perhaps misleading impression of its actual significance. This became clear when its calls for widespread land invasions on the occasion of South Africa’s 2004 national elections, and a voter boycott of these elections, were more or less ignored. If the LPM overemphasises the commitment and radicalism of its grass-roots membership, it also underestimates the potential extent of this membership. This book shows that there is a wider constituency of land-hungry and landless people, pursuing strategies of informal invasion and protest in rural settings, than has actually allied itself with or participated in the activities of the movement itself. The LPM, nonetheless, is committed to a vision of land as an inalienable right. It represents perhaps the most aggressive – but perhaps for that reason so far ineffectual – pursuit of the ‘informal rights’ which were built into the programme as initially conceptualised. The movement’s commitment to illegal strategies and its stated disregard for the principles of private property 15

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have led to the arrest of several of its members. For this reason it has alienated a number of those within the land sector: not only state officials but also land activists and many of those lawyers mentioned above. Despite their differences, however, protagonists from all these different arenas within the land sector are united in their common striving to expand the reach of land reform beyond its narrow, property-oriented remit.

MODERN LAW OR INDIGENOUS RIGHTS? Whether such activities by the LPM (or by land-seekers who have failed so far to join it) are pursued within or beyond the framework of the law, what has puzzled some informed observers is how the nature of that law has been conceptualised. Why in South Africa is the idea of ‘indigenous land rights’ so undeveloped? Why, if land claims in Australia and Canada are framed in terms of primordial ideas about autochthony and indigenous belonging, do those in South Africa appeal, instead, to liberal legal principles (Mostert and Fitzpatrick 2004)? The answer to this question has several aspects. Part of the explanation lies in the fact that most land occupancy has been fleeting and transitory. It is unusual to find any group which has occupied a swathe of land in perpetuity, as the brief regional history above makes clear. Lands were contested, defended and lost; and such mobility has not lent itself to strongly-felt discourses of autochthony, indigenous origin or long-term ancestral possession in the present day. Where stories of lives lived on the soil have been told or features of the landscape invoked to endorse claims to particular farms or clusters of territory, these tend to highlight moments in the experience of the claimants’ or tellers’ own childhoods or to emphasise the burial sites of their own parents rather than stressing long-term occupancy of the land. Even where new regional elites announce their intention to reclaim lost empires, as outlined in Chapter 3, their narratives stress conquest and military victory rather than celebrate ancient genealogies or long-term ancestral occupancy. There was recognition within the state that the shifting and contested nature of land occupancy could lead to a proliferation of claims and counter claims. If no limits were set, the scope of land restitution might be almost infinite and its social and economic ramifications too far-reaching to be contemplated. Intense political negotiations resulted in the controversial decision taken by South Africa’s first democratic government, the Government of National Unity, to restrict the scope of restitution. It allowed claims only by those who had lost land – as a result of racially discriminatory legislation – after the ‘cut-off date’ of 1913 (SAIRR 1992–1993:383; 1995–1996: 365).3 Although land reform was initially framed with sufficient breadth to allow non-title-holders to acquire land, their doing so was conceptualised in terms of ‘informal’ rather than ‘indigenous’ rights.4 16

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There is another reason why a discourse of ‘indigenousness’ was not developed. The legal framework within which challenges to the authoritarian apartheid state were mounted, and which continues to provide vigilance on matters of human rights, was a liberal one (Abel 1995; Chanock 2001). The elaboration of a discourse of ‘rights’ set within a framework of liberal legal ideals is incompatible with the idea of indigeneity. ‘Rights’ are forwardlooking; they allow for the aspirational envisioning of a modern future. Although such aspirations do not necessarily exclude aspects of what is seen as ‘African custom’, they primarily embody a vision of progress and civilisation. This vision owes much to the Christian ethos that was espoused by groups of early African mission converts, particularly within communities which became title-holders of land during the early twentieth century. It also permeated in hybrid form the ideologies of even those – the ‘tenants’ and ‘squatters’ – who were never formal landowners and who have thus had to seek for redress through other means. This book’s stories of reclaimed lands contain more echoes of biblical themes, rehearsing for example the Israelites’ journey through parting waters to the ‘promised land’, than resonances of aboriginal ownership. In this biblical factor underpinning South Africa’s ‘back to the land’ ethos we find ourselves directed once again to the liberal legal culture of that country as a key factor in explaining the trajectory of its struggles over land. Lawyers/activists in South Africa, particularly those who have been involved in protecting and defending the dispossessed, have imbibed from their clients a view of property, morality and the rights of the citizen which merges Christian and African influences, with the former sometimes predominating over or shaping the latter. It can be seen from this discussion that the ideologies, legal discourses, and cultural notions at play in the process of land reclaiming have been diverse and fragmented ones. Such ideologies have been produced at the point where divergent social groups intersect rather than arising from distinct social, ethnic or racially-defined groupings. But despite this, and although race was not a primary or uniform determinant of the various subcategories of policy – or of the groups of real people who positioned themselves to become beneficiaries – race remains a crucial factor.

THE RACIAL FRONTIER After a long history of shifting land access, as the earlier account shows, the area in the map on p. xvi was carved into ‘black’ and ‘white’ areas. At the height of ‘grand apartheid’ title-holders and tenant-cultivators were displaced from farmland in white South Africa’s south-eastern Transvaal (now Mpumalanga Province), northwards across the Steelpoort River, which was the newly-drawn racial frontier, to the then Lebowa homeland (now Limpopo Province). Whole swathes of the countryside were de- or re-populated in the 17

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course of a single generation. The map demonstrates the racial division with stark clarity. (Contentiously, the official border between the two provinces in the present day, at least in the area covered by the map, exactly replicates its apartheid-era counterpart.) The book analyses present-day attempts to reverse these historical patterns of racially-based relocation. Farms in Mpumalanga Province (squares on the map) which were owned by African title-holders or occupied by African tenants are now the object of restitution claims by their former occupants. All these restored or soon-to-be-restored lands are in formerly white South Africa. But only in one case which this book documents, that of Doornkop (B on the map), had the restitution been fully accomplished by the time of my fieldwork. In several other cases restitution was still under way but the land had neither been resettled nor had its agricultural use been resumed. Claimants, many of them labour migrants working in or near Johannesburg, were still domiciled in the villages of the former Limpopo Province, formerly the homeland of Lebowa (circles on the map) to which they had originally been moved. My field research ranged across the frontier, covering both those successful claimants newly resettled within Mpumalanga and those – the majority – in Limpopo who had not yet moved. I also investigated how the other two aspects of the land reform programme – redistribution and tenure reform – were interrelated with restitution. This involved conducting field research among farm labourers and farm tenants within the formerly and still mostly white-owned areas of South Africa: in the Highveld near Middelburg, and south-eastern Mpumalanga near Wakkerstroom, just north of the Kwa-Zulu Natal border. Some of these African farm-dwellers have been settled on farms under the redistribution programme (marked with stars on the map). Others – still living on white farms – were the intended targets of tenure reform on those farms themselves. Racially-based patterns of land occupancy and ownership seemed to have remained, for the most part, intact. The racial frontier appeared to be impermeable. The integral connection between territory and race, both during apartheid and in attempts to remedy its cruel social disruptions, should become clear in the course of the chapters that follow. But the racial frontier is more than a geographical border dividing white farmers from the African poor. Rather, the frontier is inscribed within the white farms themselves. It is on these farms, perhaps more than anywhere else in South Africa, that race has continued to be, or reasserted itself as, a pivot of bitter dispute. Yet my research revealed some blurring of the racial boundaries, as Chapter 9 reveals.

Farm attacks and white farmers’ vigilantism During 2000 alone, there were 800 violent attacks on such farms, in the course of which more than 100 white farm owners were murdered. A recent 18

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report characterised the country’s white farmers as being more at risk than their Zimbabwean counterparts, albeit in a manner less orchestrated and less visible to the media (Human Rights Watch 2001). The attacks, although motivated by a complex combination of factors, have often been seen as prompted by race hatred alone: even as ‘masterminded by government officials’ and thus as constituting an unofficial part of the ANC’s land reform programme.5 Responses to the attacks have been similarly racial in character. In defence and/or retribution, white farmers have hired fly-by-night private security firms, joined self-defence groups and (in particularly conflicted areas) collaborated with police and army reservists in so-called ‘commandos’, which use torture and terror tactics against African farm-dwellers (Segal 1990). This situation derives, most obviously, from the remoteness of the farms and their isolation from the broader public domain of South African society. It also derives from the extreme dependence of each farm worker on his own particular farmer/employer for both employment and for a place to live (Hall et al. 2001). Farm-dwellers in Mpumalanga, like their counterparts in other parts of South Africa, are amongst the poorest, most underprivileged and most disenfranchised section of the population. Initially unable to partake in, and later unable to benefit from, the kinds of urban-based group action – amongst trade unionists, members of youth organisations, and the like – which are credited with having played so large a role in the country’s democratisation, farm workers have remained spatially divided and invisible, and hence under-resourced in economic, social and educational terms. Seen from the point of view of white farmers, their vulnerability to attack stems from workers’ resentment of their lowly position coupled with the isolation of the farms, as well as the close proximity of the resident black workers and others living nearby who – these farmers fear – might wish them harm. Seen from the standpoint of these workers, the farms are like little republics where the rule of law counts for very little. At best, such workers have been subjected to arbitrary evictions: at worst, to the excesses of white farmer vigilantism. The lawlessness deriving from the rural isolation of the setting is both cause and result of the sense of vulnerability, although this is differently modulated in the case of owners and workers. White farmers consider themselves to be politically marginalised and deprived of the protection they once enjoyed from the organs of the state. Black labourers or farm tenants feel similarly unprotected by the law. They do so despite the advent of ANC rule and the passing of legislation – the Labour Tenants Act (1996) and the Extension of Security of Tenure Act (1997) – specifically designed to secure them on the land. This legislation, part of the policy of tenure reform, was designed in the spirit of securing rights for those with minimal entitlements to property. The second of these in particular, the Extension of Security of Tenure Act with its acronym ESTA, was intended to legislate the terms under which evictions from a farm could take place. According to some, however, the legislation 19

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posed a threat to farm owners, thus causing many who had lived for years in relative harmony with their workers suddenly to start mistreating or evicting them. The rate of evictions, and of atrocities such as beatings and other forms of maltreatment, is alleged by proponents of this view to have spiralled steeply shortly before the legislation was passed and to have remained high in subsequent years.6 Others claim that it has been, instead, the lack of access to legal support in the countryside which has made evictions so easy to achieve.7 Again, this points to the isolation of the farms as a cause of insecurity. Whatever the reasons, evicted tenants and workers have continued to flow from the white farms and to seek refuge in informal settlements or on pockets of African-owned land. Fierce debates have raged in the media. There is some circularity in the arguments. While farm evictions or white self-help defence groups verging on vigilantism are justified by reference to the perceived threat of attacks, the ferocity of these attacks is thought to be explained, in part, by the vigilantism. But the greatest disagreements emerge when attempts are made to go beyond these tail-chasing discussions and find a ‘deeper explanation’. Do the attacks – and the evictions and/or vigilante activity which both spur them and are exacerbated by them – have motivations more far-reaching, and fundamentally political, than mere criminality on the one hand and innocent self-protection on the other? Here the attacks appear to take on the character of a concerted and orchestrated assault on white-owned property; of an aggressive campaign of land repossession. Land invasions, encouraged by the state in Zimbabwe as an exercise in political patronage, eventually supplanted planned land reform in that country. Farm attacks in South Africa, despite parallels with Zimbabwe drawn by the media, have not done so: the government has made it clear that they are completely distinct from the official land reform programme. But these attacks form part of the social context in rural areas where that programme is being implemented, and have subtle effects on racial land access. By contesting the frontier of racial power, farm attacks have had the effect of blurring the boundary between the communal African land of the former homelands and the white farms. They thus, in effect, push back the racial frontier. But there has to date been no significant evidence of the covert ANC campaign to push back this frontier which some white farmers allege. Some accounts, to the contrary, see the attacks as motivated by nothing more than opportunistic theft. Since the former homelands of rural South Africa have become dumping grounds for the illiterate and the unskilled, and since the only sites of opulence in these districts are the white farms, these have become the targets for property crime and, in the process, sites of a murderous but casual violence. In one sense the attacks could be seen – in the light of the sheer weight of intersecting and accumulating factors – as inevitable. The social, political 20

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and economic context conspires, even if human agents do not do so, to make such violence unavoidable. As shown in a recent book by Steinberg (2002) about the murder of a white farmer in KwaZulu-Natal, the context is almost overdetermining. There is white farmers’ anxiety about the broader context of political transition and black rule; the ineffectiveness and/or perceived pro-ANC bias of the police who fail to bring the perpetrators to justice; evictions or vigilante activity by white farmers convinced that these are the only means to secure their livelihoods and lifestyle; the economic marginality and unemployment of Africans living on these farms and in the former homeland areas which border them; and the opportunism of local ANC councillors ready to exploit such conditions of poverty and insecurity to consolidate their own political positions.8 What concentrates all these factors is the lack of mutual understanding across the racial frontier. Particularly important are misunderstandings that arise from frustrated expectations among tenants/workers. Against the backdrop of a history of land dispossession, which in turn has buttressed an ideology of the land – although formally white-owned – as the property of chiefs and hence of their subjects (Steinberg 2002:63, 127–8), these expectations outline an ethic of inalienable land rights linked to expectations of paternalism. White farm owners are bitterly resented for failing to acknowledge their implicit obligation to sustain tenant livelihoods on their land by allowing some freedom of movement and – particularly – the right to keep cattle. My own work in Mpumalanga, however, presents something of a contrast to the KwaZulu-Natal case as described by Steinberg. Where Steinberg suggests a racialised misunderstanding so great that it leaves little possibility for the revival of paternalism, my book demonstrates that expectations of paternalism are still keen; that there are strong visions of its re-establishment; that white farmers and black country-dwellers alike subscribe to the idea that there is a need to reconstruct client-like relationships across the colour line; and that it is often state officers or consultants working in or for the land reform programme who find themselves charged with facilitating these relationships. Many of their negotiations are aimed at diffusing rather than reasserting the potency of ‘race’ as a rhetorical weapon in the land battle, as I hope to demonstrate. It is thus necessary to proceed with caution in the face of media suggestions that the predominant tone of interactions between black and white in the process of land reform is one of conflict. While the process has involved power struggles and bitter accusations between black and white, it has also witnessed the flowering of unexpected partnerships. In both contestations and collaborations alike, race is not necessarily the only or even the most significant factor. But the political setting, since the end of the exhilarating period following the first non-racial elections, has readily lent itself to racialised interpretations. 21

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CHAPTER OUTLINE Chapter 1 demonstrates a central tension between the land reform programme’s roles in restoring citizenship and in delivering economic advancement. The combining of these objectives – initially seen as reconcilable but later appearing incompatible – must be understood in the light of struggles between state and society over the proper uses of land and the question of who deserves it. These disputes are framed in terms that emphasise the difference between land as a matter of diffuse ‘rights’ versus land as ‘property’. The view of rights as protected by legal frameworks in order to safeguard citizens’ full entitlements harks back to the influence of the human rights lawyers who originally designed the land reform programme. Property, seen as a more concrete acquisition, connotes state pragmatism and achievable short-term goals. Chapter 2 illuminates the process of restitution by giving an account of the case of the African-owned farm Doornkop. It explains the owners’ sense of uniqueness within the region by reference to their history as a mission community with a biblically legitimated sense of connection to its landed property. Restitution, the chapter shows, has given property back to those whose original ownership of it assured them a middle-class status; it thus represents less an achievement of social justice than a re-establishment of the status quo ante. And restitution in its narrowest sense created new problems and contradictions in the process of attempting to solve old ones. Chapter 3 focuses on restitution claims based on the ‘informal rights’ of former African tenants of white-owned farms. Partly prompted by emerging policy discourses, iconic tropes of localised cultural experience such as grave sites, initiation lodges and cattle byres have acquired new significance: they became verifiable evidence of effective possession of – because proving what the Land Claims Commission calls ‘informal rights’ in – land. Members of the African nationalist political elite, in dialogue with lawyers, cherished one set of understandings while ordinary migrants/country-dwellers tended to hold to another. These diverging ideas have been mediated through the actions of officers in the Restitution Commission and the new discourse on informal rights. Chapter 4 considers the local-level politics of land reform. It demonstrates the contested relationships between evicted farm workers, seeking refuge on restored African-owned farms, and their mostly unwilling landlords. These relationships crystallise in ethnic as well as class terms. Landlords and tenants variously draw on repertoires advocating, or contesting, forms of moral good. These include two contrasting views of citizenship: tenants highlight the rights of all citizens to be equal, while the landlords’ view is grounded in the restored ownership of private property. Local government officials, mindful of the need to garner electoral support for the ANC and their own positions, are reluctant to intervene in defence of the rights of the property owners. 22

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Pursuing the discussion of tenants and farm workers, Chapter 5 discusses the construction of a land ethic arising out of these people’s historical experience. This ethic embodies elements of rediscovered history, interweaving these with a ‘trusteeship’ model of landholding that was entrenched during apartheid. It also draws on millennial expectations arising out of the 1994 election. Set against this backdrop, the chapter examines the case of the Mpumalanga Labour Tenants’ Committee, self-styled founders of the LPM whose threats to invade land have raised intermittent fears of ‘another Zimbabwe’. As well as being inspired by globalised social movements of the landless, their threats and protests were mounted because of their dissatisfaction over official responses to their plight on the white farms. Neither the NGOs’ attempt to protect existing rights nor the state’s resettling of farmdwellers elsewhere seems able to deliver an outcome satisfactory to the movement’s members. Neither solution represents an acknowledgement of the moral point that land, delivered without accompanying support and protection, is alienated because it is disembedded from the social dependencies which might render it usable. Chapter 6 focuses on the new property models arising out of the land reform programme. The kind of land occupancy recently advocated by the South African State is one which inverts the idea of land as an inalienable right. It aims to transfer land into private ownership. New models were drafted which enabled communities to own land. Their designers have subsequently reflected critically on this legislation because it places the entire onus of property ownership (including duties like land registration, policing of property crime, etc.) on communities, rather than placing the onus on the state to enforce and support land rights by performing such duties. Many among the poor now resist the new private/communal model of land ownership, advocating instead that land remain in state hands and fall under chiefly control. Mediated through conflicts between advocates of the ‘private’ and ‘customary’ models, a new variant of the old two-tier system of land ownership – one for the property-owning class, another for the African poor – is appearing in the South African countryside. Chapter 7 explores the retooling of redistribution in a new guise: as ‘Land Reform for Agricultural Development’. Unashamedly market-driven and focused on ‘property’ rather than ‘rights’, LRAD seemed more a strategy for black economic empowerment than a means to alleviate poverty. Towards this end, the Land Bank designed new loans and forms of matching finance, envisaging its new approach as one of ‘doing business with a development ethic’. The chapter documents cases in which people have tried to make use of these loan and development facilities. Many, in the process, have become doubly indebted – to the Land Bank as well as to ‘loan sharks’ – in attempting to gain access to cash inputs for farming. What policy makers ignore is the extent to which black South Africans have moved between town and country and have relied on multiple sources of livelihood in the process of this 23

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movement. Even those who have mustered their variously-acquired resources to locate themselves as fully-fledged ‘farmers’ within the new framework have experienced problems in becoming ‘beneficiaries’ of land reform. Chapter 8 examines how land reform, as one weapon in the armoury of post-apartheid transformation, is implicated in broader debates about power, governance and representation. In the new South Africa, the direction of present state policy, after initially de-emphasising chiefs’ power over land, now looks set to entrench it. Even where older forms of patronage have been discouraged, land provides grounds on which new ones spring up. If there is something in the popular memory that establishes land as an inalienable possession and an expression of social interdependencies, then the reclaiming of land lays the basis for novel kinds of patronage. The chapter assesses whether country-dwellers prefer to have their participation in national life based on their land access and mediated through affiliation to old- or newstyle leaders, or whether there are other more impersonal means through which they aspire to experience their rights as citizens of the new South Africa. Chapter 9 examines how racial conflicts and uncertainties play out in local settings. State officers play a crucial mediatory role. In cases of white farmer indebtedness, restitution officers have cannily used their knowledge of these debts to pressurise such farmers into lowering land prices in order to settle land claims more speedily. Such successes nonetheless beg the question: where farming is no longer viable in its current form, can land be any more successfully farmed by blacks than whites? Inter-racial relationships of trust and paternalism, merging into – or alternating with – those of domination, hatred and violence, are still very much alive in people’s memories. The moment when restitution claims became a political reality has crystallised such memories for those on both sides of this divide. Land reform has served as a sort of Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the South African countryside. For some African former landholders, the need to affix their names to land claims was driven more by a sense of wanting compensation and redress for past wrongs at the hands of farmers than by a present wish to reoccupy their land and farm it ‘as the whites once did’. The Conclusion gives a brief summary, stresses the recurrent theme of mediation, and briefly explores some questions about citizenship, sovereignty and public versus private ownership which arise from the material presented in the book.

Notes 1

These Ndzundza Ndebele were unrelated to the Ndebele of present-day Zimbabwe. Although both were offshoots of the Zulu kingdom, the Ndzundza Ndebele had left present-day KwaZulu-Natal more than a century before (Delius 1996; James 1987).

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2

3 4

5 6 7 8

The model was not a new phenomenon: it had multiple historical precedents, including nineteenth-century contestations between colonial-era chiefs and native administrators over the most appropriate way to conceptualise and legislate African landholding (Chanock 1991). wwwserver.law.wits.ac.za/lcc/about.html, consulted 22 September 2004. Attempts to develop the concept of ‘indigenous law’ for application in South Africa have been rare, but see the complex case of the Richtersveld, long-standing home of Nama pastoralists which was later appropriated for diamond mining. Richtersveld Community and Others v Alexkor Ltd and Another 2001 (3) SA 1293 (LCC); Alexkor Ltd and the Government of the Republic of South Africa v The Richtersveld Community and others 2003 SA 19/03 (CCT). ‘Second take’ The New York Times, 31 March 2001. Dan Mabokela, Nkuzi, Pietersburg, 22 August 2001; Maseleka Kgatla, Nkuzi, Pietersburg, 21 August 2001; South Consulting Service (2000:8); Hall et al. (2001), Euijen (2001). Theunis Roux, Wits Centre for Applied Legal Studies, Johannesburg, 22 November 2003. Steinberg (2002); see also Christopher Hope, ‘Under siege’ the Guardian, 1 August 2001; RW Johnson ‘A Dangerous Occupation’ London Review of Books 22(11) 1 June 2000.

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1 ‘RIGHTS’ OR ‘PROPERTY’? State, society, the law and the landless in South Africa

INTRODUCTION: THE ‘LANDLESSNESS = RACISM’ MEETING In August 2001, a meeting was held in the city of Durban, alongside the UN Conference on Racism, as a celebration of the foundation of the Landless People’s Movement (LPM) and as a culmination to the ‘Landlessness = Racism’ campaign organised by members of South Africa’s alliance of land NGOs under the rubric of its umbrella body, the National Land Committee. A series of marquees, pitched on the edges of a large and modern sports stadium, sheltered scores of participants who had arrived by the coach-load from various parts of South Africa. Transforming what was normally a venue for rugby matches into a colourful encampment, they spent several days listening to speakers’ testimonies or rising to their feet to respond in unison to variations on the familiar call-and-response slogans from the anti-apartheid struggle. Activists from the land NGOs had spoken to me earlier of the importance of this meeting, and of the new movement. Where several previous attempts to make land the focus of social activism had failed, these most recent attempts, they felt, had been more successful. They saw as flawed, in retrospect, their earlier efforts to organise the landless since these had been ‘hijacked’ by elites rather than being truly owned by the rightful, more ‘grassroots’, constituents of a landless movement.1 Yet, several of the land claimants who gave impassioned speeches at the meeting were indeed – at least in relative terms – members of an elite. One, for example, was the headmaster of a school in a small provincial town. His oratory was stirring. He used biblical phrases which evoked the Israelites’ exile in Egypt and which told of his wait to return to the ‘promised land’: the farm which his forefathers had purchased in the early years of the twentieth century and from which the apartheid government had summarily removed them some 70 years later. His ‘landlessness’, although pressingly urgent in his eyes, was a matter more of sentiment than of survival, since he was a civil servant with an urban residence and secure employment. Originally resulting 27

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Figure 1.1 The Landless People’s Movement at the Durban meeting.

from apartheid-era ‘black spot’ removals, the loss of his community’s land, like that of many similar groups of mission converts, was categorised as being appropriate for remedy by the restitution aspect of the land reform policy. The restoring of land to such groups was proving costly and timeconsuming for the state, and its failure to finalise restitution claims such as the headmaster’s was the reason for his presence at the meeting. Such claims did not, however, pose major legal challenges or require the reconceptualising of ‘rights’ or ‘property’. The land loss of groups such as those represented by this headmaster had earlier been a major concern of the land NGOs, and had indeed played a crucial role in the overall formation of the state’s land reform policy, in which NGOs had been central. But the activists and officers working in these organisations had also directed their attention at other, seemingly more deserving, beneficiaries of land reform: particularly those who had never before held formal rights to property. In proportion, as the state had seemingly lost interest in the plight of these more marginal people, NGO activists were beginning to prioritise them. Even within this more precisely defined category, however, there was a sense of ambiguity about the precise social attributes – and hence the entitlements – of the ‘landless’. Were they the country-dwellers living in extreme insecurity of tenure on South Africa’s white farms? Some speakers seemed to think so, like the representative from an NGO dedicated to protecting farm workers’ rights. He evoked the plight of those evicted from such farms, for whom the insecurity of being forced to 28

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leave one’s home at the end of a working life was a guarantee of a destitute and impoverished old age: The government takes no notice. Our farm workers are still being chased away. You work until you are 60 years old, then you must go. Government people must go to these white farmers, dressed in ragged clothes, to look for work. Then they will know how we feel.2 Was it equally necessary to return land in all these cases? Or was the greatest urgency that of attending to the needs of peri-urban slum-dwellers in search of a place to live? Other speakers at the meeting highlighted the recent ‘invasion’ of land at Bredell on the peripheries of Johannesburg. These invasions had become the focus of media attention in the weeks leading up to the meeting, fuelling fears about the possibility of ‘another Zimbabwe’ and even causing a steep fall in the value of the South African Rand. As unemployed people clinging to an existence on the fringes of the capitalist metropolis, such ‘land invaders’ were former rent-payers in urban slums attempting to move beyond the reach of their landlords and of the state, in order to avoid paying rent or to gain services such as water and electricity. This recent and high-profile peri-urban squatter invasion had set in motion a fierce disagreement between the land NGOs. While some NGO officers had pledged moral support and advice to invaders, others stressed the need to retain a close relationship with the state and hence to condemn all illegal actions. Relationships were to be subjected to further strain when members of the fledgling LPM held protest marches a year later, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.3

The power of ‘land invasions’ That the invasion motif was a powerful one was obvious from several of the speeches at the meeting and from the crowd’s response. But the resonance of the motif, like that of ‘landlessness’ itself, disguised considerable disparities in social background amongst those it yoked together: a matter which had long been recognised by those designing the programme. Although it was the peri-urban squatter invasion that had recently brought the urgency of the ‘land’ problem to South Africa’s attention, none of its participants was in fact present to address the workshop. (Such ‘invaders’ have subsequently joined the LPM and participated in protest marches mounted by a broad coalition of those opposed to privatisation; but their profile is that of the urban unemployed rather than of the country-dwellers or aspirant farmers towards whose needs land reform was originally addressed.) In contrast, those speakers present at the meeting who had illegally occupied rural land – and who were vociferously alerting others to the necessity of doing so themselves if the government failed to act timeously – were former title-holders 29

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who had filed restitution claims to have their former confiscated properties returned, but who had been frustrated by delays. They were hence more akin to the headmaster than to the (absent) peri-urban squatters. It was not only within the NGO community that these invasions had prompted a sense of crisis during the weeks before the meeting. They had also prompted an increasingly vociferous response from the state. The ANC Government, already determined not to tolerate such illegal actions, had now become even more resolved not to follow its Zimbabwean neighbour in its descent into lawlessness. President Mbeki in a recent speech had attempted to discredit land occupations by stressing that they had no connection – in personnel and intention – to earlier waves of anti-apartheid resistance within South Africa. Reacting to these attempts, speakers at the meeting stressed their links to constituencies way beyond the national setting. They emphasised the global character of the ‘landless’, validating their struggle by highlighting the continuity between such occupations and similar ones elsewhere in the world: President Mbeki says that the people who are protesting, and invading land, are not those who suffered in the struggle. But we are in the struggle now, and the struggle is not yet over. The struggle continues. Our struggle for land is the struggle that is happening in other parts of the globe.4 In similar vein, the variations on anti-apartheid call-and-response slogans used at the meeting enunciated a new globalisation of landlessness. In reply to the call ‘Amandla’ (power), instead of the old anti-apartheid call of ‘awethu’ (to the people) participants were encouraged to reply ‘intifada’, thus identifying their cause with that of the landless Palestinians. ‘Phanzi Israel phanzi’ (down with Israel) called for the defeat of the Palestinians’ oppressors rather than of some more local, and familiar, adversary. The effect was to ennoble these grievances by linking them to transnational struggles of a similar type,5 as well as giving an air of unity to the extraordinary social diversity of those attending the meeting. Without attempting for the moment to analyse this ‘global’ claim, one can assert that what the various ‘landless’ at this workshop had in common – what had brought them together here and what, if anything, would ensure the unity of their social movement – was that all had been assured they belonged together within the government’s programme of land reform but all were frustrated at the state’s delay in acting. In the sense that they had been united by this ‘single interest’ rather than by some commonality of class background or of broader social circumstances, they conformed to the classic definition of a social movement, with one uniting feature overriding other differences. But if people as diverse as headmasters and farm labourers (though not, for the moment, peri-urban squatters) were joining together on the basis 30

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of a motif at once as emotional and as undefined as land, the means to overcome their dissatisfaction would certainly have to be as varied as its diverse causes. To understand the full range of these diverse groupings, united here by frustration at the state’s delays, we must examine the origins and intentions of the land reform programme which first attempted to encompass them all. And, in exploring subsequent shifts in policy, we must explore the relationship between the South African State and the NGOs, in order to comprehend the nature of these shifting priorities and of the disputes which have underpinned such shifts.

UNITY IN DIVERSITY: THE LAND REFORM PROGRAMME Land reform was underplayed by many of those in South Africa’s liberation movement who, in the early 1990s, were gearing up to take their places in the new government. Its importance was nevertheless emphasised by some within the exile community and several networks of activists inside the country, as well as by the rank-and-file landless. As policy was gradually developed during the early 1990s, land reform’s significance was assumed to lie in its combining of moral and material aims. It would redress past wrongs by restoring property/citizenship rights; solve economic problems and ameliorate rural poverty; and establish a class of viable African farmers. These objectives, though resonant, have increasingly revealed themselves as contradictory. In the process, a tension has been disclosed between the programme’s ‘moral’ importance and its relative neglect in budgetary terms (Walker 2000). Untangling the different objectives in order to prioritise one over the other has been a matter of intense struggle, both within the state and between state and society, over the proper uses of land and the question of who deserves it – and over who the ‘landless’ really are. The relative political importance but relative fiscal weakness of the programme must be understood against the historical and legislative backdrop of earlier dispossession. The programme was underpinned by longstanding memories of the inequities arising out of South Africa’s 1913 Natives Land Act, infamous for having legislated that a mere 13 per cent of the land would be set aside for black occupation. It also drew impetus from the 1950s Freedom Charter, penned by the ANC, with its resounding slogan of ‘The land shall belong to those who work it’. Subsequently, however, land turned out to be a less than central electoral issue for that party. Since coming to power, and unlike the smaller Pan Africanist Congress which called for land to be restored to ‘sons of the soil’, the ANC has been criticised for privileging ‘urban-based struggles’ rather than rural ones and for increasingly having given attention to the needs of elites (Bernstein 1996; Dolny 2001; Levin 1996:364–5; Weideman 2003:124–50). 31

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Nonetheless, as already mentioned, land reform promised to provide a way of redressing past injustices and thus of restoring citizenship to those once denied it. In planners’ vision for the new South Africa, citizenship has been explicitly linked to the project of overcoming the past (Enslin 2000). The drafters of the new constitution saw land as central in defining the rights that had formerly been denied, and its restoration as a means to restore those rights and with them the sovereignty and full citizenship of the African population (du Toit 2000, Ramutsindela 1998). The intention to restore land to its former occupiers thus amounted to a reinstatement of basic civil liberties which had been removed, or denied, in the past: it was also seen as assuring the rights of such people to secure residence and to profitable livelihoods in the future. This was an important line of thought, due in part to the predominance of human rights lawyers amongst those developing it and to the prevalence of ‘rights talk’ in the broader social movements sweeping South Africa in the 1980s (Bozzoli 2004; Seekings 2000; van Kessel 2000). It initially enshrined an inclusive language of broadly-defined ‘land rights’ at the heart of debates about reform. ‘Property’ was important, but was seen in terms of a flexible and socially-adjustable system which could accommodate overlapping claims. ‘Rights’ and ‘property’ were thus reconcilable. But a second and increasingly predominant line of argument, partly influenced by the Bretton Woods institutions and in particular the World Bank, has foregrounded the economic benefits to be gained from secure ownership of specific lands (Lipton et al. 1996; van Zyl et al. 1996a; see Hall and Williams 2003 for an analysis). The two approaches were linked in the early years of the land reform programme, but the government’s subsequent shift towards more explicitly neoliberal economic policies has seen the broader emphasis on restored rights decoupled from the narrower and more pragmatic emphasis on the economic benefits of property ownership, with a tendency to favour the latter. ‘Property’ now trumps ‘rights’.

Complexities and policy categories From the outset, the programme acknowledged the complex interplay of moral and economic motivations – and the diversity of land reform’s intended ‘beneficiaries’ – by subdividing its intended activities into the three categories already mentioned in the introduction: restitution, redistribution and tenure reform. In theory, this would allow for the restoration of historical property rights as well as satisfying the demands of redistributive justice. In a 1997 White Paper, these three branches of land reform were acknowledged as interdependent, with the goals embodied in each seen as unlikely to be achieved without the corresponding implementation of the other two (DLA 1997). Restitution was aimed primarily at returning land to African titleholders who had lost their property during the apartheid era as a result of 32

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racial legislation. However, it was also aimed at the former holders of ‘informal rights’. Those with no historically-based rights who desired land would, it was thought, satisfy their demands by purchasing new farms with government help under the category of redistribution. This sub-category of land reform would enable people such as tenants and farm workers to pool their government grants and buy farms. Although, in the eyes of the NGO fraternity, redistribution increasingly seemed the only effective way of transferring significant amounts of white-owned land to the historically oppressed (Lahiff 2000), it had, at the time of the 2001 meeting, been recently deemed unworkable by the state and replaced by an alternative and more marketcentred strategy to promote the growth of African commercial farmers. Finally, tenure reform aimed to safeguard the rights of residents of white farms and state land in the former homelands. It was designed to protect poor people from summary eviction by securing their existing rights or by buying alternative land on which they could live. Policy subdivisions such as these, although perhaps a pragmatic necessity, tend to disregard long-term social, economic and historical processes, as critics of the programme have pointed out. Such discrete categories serve to gloss over the way in which more than a century of rapid social transformation, together with the legislation designed to control it, has produced a proliferation of different, but intricately interrelated, types of landholding. Since well before 1913, Africans have been moving from tenancies on white farms to black-owned land, from African farms to African reserve areas, and sometimes back to white farms again. Similarly, some ‘tribes’ under chiefs have occupied land outside the communal or homeland areas at the same time as individuals freed of chiefly allegiance have been purchasing land within them (Francis and Williams 1993; La Hausse 2000; Murray 1992). Despite this proliferation of diverse histories and experiences, class boundaries have begun to harden. The original ideological thrust of the programme encompassed a broad vision of restored rights, sovereignty and citizenship for the African population. In this broader sense, land reform initially presented a charter for social action on which state and society could agree. But a gap has opened, and has increasingly widened, between former (or prospective) holders of ‘property’, on the one hand, and those with no history or prospects of ownership, on the other, who have had little recourse other than with increasing stridency to assert their ‘rights’. It may puzzle those acquainted with the recent anthropological and socio-legal literature on property to hear ‘property’ and ‘rights’ spoken of as separate or even as dichotomous and opposite, since the one is usually conceptualized by reference to the other (von Benda-Beckmann et al. 2006). The contrast between the two ideas, within what one might call the South African ‘property regime’ (Verdery and Humphrey 2004), is a historical and situational one; the contrast has solidified and become 33

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increasingly immoveable over the past decade. ‘Rights’ was an inclusive concept, deriving its breadth and moral weight from the era of the antiapartheid struggle with its rather millennial character. Politically this discourse on land was originally used by a broad alliance of anti-apartheid actors, including both the internal and the external wings of the ANC. Although it was former titled property owners who predominated within the political elite, and thus whose ‘political demand for land’ drove the restitution programme forward, the rights discourse became sufficiently broad to accommodate other actors: particularly as interpreted by the human rights lawyers with their egalitarian emphasis. If one interrogates ‘property’ in this particular regime, it refers to an increasingly pragmatic process whereby the state and its bureaucrats have attempted to transfer specific pieces of land into the hands of groups of owners or – increasingly – individual owners. In short, ‘property’ has increasingly come to mean an individualised and commodified ownership of things, transferred into the private realm. Debates have raged, during the 10 years since the programme was first designed, over which of these two increasingly polarised principles should predominate. These debates have both been determined by, and influenced, the realities of land loss and changing land access. At issue have been questions about the nature of public morality, the division between the public and the private, the entitlements and obligations of citizenship, and who has responsibility for the welfare of the poor. All these debates have centred on the possession, or the lack, of ‘land’.

STATE, NGOs AND THE LAND QUESTION One way to conceptualise the contested nature of the programme is to think of it as a debate. The ‘motion’ has been proposed by the state of the new South Africa, in partial and occasional collusion with elements within society: particularly with NGOs. These organisations were crucial in helping to define state agendas about land from the outset: they have also been of key importance in carrying out state functions, despite their financial independence from the state. But where the motion has been opposed, it is these organisations, acting on behalf of their real or imagined constituencies in society at large – sometimes co-ordinating but sometimes giving way entirely to social movements welling up from below – that have mounted the challenge. The debate, then, has entailed and expressed a series of complex and intertwined relationships between the state and the NGOs. As in many other parts of the contemporary world, activities previously thought of as being the responsibility of the state are here carried out by apparently non-state actors (Fisher 1997; Trouillot 2001). While shared activities have blurred the 34

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boundaries between the state and NGOs, disputes have also sharpened the distinctions between them. In the process, new lines of conflict have been created even within the NGO sector itself, as certain organisations and groups of actors have aligned themselves with national policy while others have contested it. Altercations, least in evidence in local settings where people from state and NGO must work together to achieve practical outcomes, sharpen as they surface at the national level to create a more ideologically driven debate. To understand this process one needs to examine the contested social space encompassing – but also dividing – state and NGOs in South Africa. The last two decades of the apartheid regime saw a proliferation of such organisations, mostly funded by foreign donors and providing a variety of services. They performed various quasi-state welfare functions before and after the 1994 transition, as well as playing a self-appointed role as guardian of the nation’s moral conscience. The sequence of roles has been almost circular. Having served, during apartheid, as both political and occupational home for opponents of the state and as supplementary providers of services, they furnished an obvious recruitment arena for the civil service of postapartheid South Africa. They later reverted, in the post-apartheid phase, to being a haven for dissidents and a supplementary provider of services. NGOs have thus co-existed, even overlapped, with the state, on the one hand, and come into open confrontation with it, on the other. The land NGOs played a particularly important role in the design and implementation of the land reform programme. They emerged in a context where communities threatened with apartheid’s ‘black spot’ resettlement – and other landless people such as evicted farm workers – required help to defend themselves from state action (Nauta 2001; Weideman 2003; Wotshela 2001). Land NGOs include the organisation with which the present book is mainly concerned, TRAC-MP (The Rural Action Committee Mpumalanga, earlier Transvaal Rural Action Committee) in the former Transvaal. Others, similarly oriented within specific provinces or regions, are Nkuzi in Limpopo; AFRA (Association for Rural Advancement) in KwaZulu-Natal; SPP (Surplus Peoples Project) and FRRP (Farmworkers’ Research and Resource Project) in Western Cape; ANCRA (Association for Northern Cape Rural Advancement) in Northern Cape; SCLC (Southern Cape Land Committee) in Southern Cape; BRC (Border Rural Committee), ECLC (Eastern Cape Land Committee) and TLSO (Transkei Land Service Organisation) in Eastern Cape; and FSRC (Free State Rural Committee) in Free State. A broader coordinating body called the NLC (National Land Committee) emerged to facilitate communications between these organisations, which then became known as its ‘affiliates’. And in great demand by those in the land NGOs seeking to challenge the legality of the state’s forcible removals was the expertise of human rights lawyers in the legal NGO LRC (Legal Resources Centre) with its branches in various provinces (Abel 1995). 35

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The rights-based approach When, after the democratic elections of 1994, South Africa’s newlyredesignated Department of Land Affairs (hereafter DLA) under its new minister Derek Hanekom was charged with implementing the land reform programme, it needed a range of new staff. Many of those it took into its ranks had gained their initial experience in matters of land through their work in these land and legal NGOs. It was the high profile of these people within the programme that contributed to its initially strongly ‘rights-oriented’ character: a reaction to, but also a result of, apartheid South Africa’s character as ‘quite self-consciously a legal order’ in which ‘nothing was done without legal authorisation, from removals to detentions’ (Chanock, quoted in Palmer 2001). Despite the novelty of the Department’s new brief, there were thus some strong continuities with earlier practice. Like those responsible for the initial dispossession, those now championing the dispossessed were preoccupied with the law. They were convinced of its capacity to facilitate planned social change. Defending this legal, rights-based approach in retrospect, Geoff Budlender, a human rights lawyer who briefly served as Director-General of Land Affairs under Minister Derek Hanekom after 1994 but who later returned to his job as director of the Legal Resources Centre, reflected on his years in the government: ‘We wanted to create rights wherever possible. . . . people need rights they can hold the government to.’ Although admitting that there had been over-reliance on these laws as well as criticisms of these

Figure 1.2 Derek Hanekom, Minister of Land Affairs from 1994 to 1999, hands over a title deed to a labour tenant community leader.

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new laws for their excessively complex and legalistic character, he nonetheless defended them. The real vindication of the rights-based approach, he said, came after the second democratic elections in 1999. It was at this moment that the state moved increasingly towards privileging formal property transfer, and that many of the activists, frustrated at the eclipsing of their work on land rights, returned to work in the non-governmental sector. The new Minister, Thoko Didiza, was now attempting to downplay the importance of rights, claimed Budlender. But she was powerless to gainsay the legislation which had been passed during the earlier, rights-oriented phase. During this earlier period, for example, there had been a discussion about whether evicted farm workers, under a specific aspect of tenure reform, would have the right to claim a portion of the farm on which they had lived: . . . there was a provision which said ‘The Minister may make part of the farm available for worker ownership’. At the time, there was a dispute over whether the ‘may’ ought to have been ‘shall’. . . . The ‘shall’ won. And now the new Minister has closed down the programme. We were right to stick with ‘shall’ – the ‘shall’ will make a big difference now that the policy has shifted. One needs a hook, a definite point of reference, and the law can provide this.6 As Budlender and many of his colleagues moved back into the NGO sector after their brief four years in office, they thus found themselves in an anomalous position. Before 1994, the Legal Resources Centre – alongside the land NGOs – had used its legal muscle to challenge the apartheid state on its intent to shift the African population around the countryside. Now, after 1999, some of its members would be using that muscle in contests with the post-apartheid state. They would be doing so, specifically, by holding that state to the laws they had passed whilst briefly occupying positions and portfolios within it. (Many, nevertheless, continued to participate – at provincial and regional levels – in state land reform initiatives.)

Administrative continuities Continuities with the former regime could be discerned on levels other than that of the importance of law. Another connection was to be found in a preoccupation with spatial planning. If South African blacks have been victims of a ‘quite extraordinary degree of planning’ in the twentieth century (Crush and Jeeves 1993), then an equal preoccupation colours many post1994 policy debates concerned with undoing apartheid’s spatial plans via the land reform programme and via the delineation of new district boundaries (Makopi 2000:145–6). The resources currently deployed match those mustered earlier in character if not in scale, and ironically many of those now serving the state as planning consultants did so, previously, for the apartheid 37

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Figure 1.3 Thoko Didiza (middle), Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs after 1999. (Shelley Christians/africanpictures.net)

government.7 Although the propensity of the apartheid state to construct and carry out elaborate plans for the geographical placing of people is usually seen as having been motivated primarily by its racist ideology, such inclinations have been present since apartheid as well. They appear to be shared by states everywhere (Scott 1998). The carry-over of personnel was not restricted to consultants. There were numerous full-time staff who remained in state employ. Continuities in staffing from the apartheid era are even thought by some to have been sufficiently strong, during the period of Mandela’s presidency (1994–1999), to undermine the achieving of the new programme’s goals. The Department of Land Affairs and its Commission for the Restitution of Land Rights (hereafter referred to as the Restitution Commission) were staffed and run – below the level of senior office-holders – by a battery of administrators inherited from the apartheid regime. These apartheid-era officials seemed unwilling to bend to the authority – or share the broadly egalitarian vision – of their new masters, freshly recruited from the world of land rights activism: They believed that our policy was one which was designed to facilitate ‘squatting’, as they called it. They were only interested in dealing with people who owned the land. They had a bias towards title and private property, so they easily understood claims in which people had actually owned property beforehand, but not the ones . . . 38

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involving former labour tenants and rental tenants who had been removed from the land.8 Such officers were willing to pursue cases of restitution based on formal title-holding. But their reluctance to help in securing the rights or reforming tenure for ‘squatters’ (corresponding with a more narrowly-defined notion of ‘the landless’ in this chapter and in the LPM) was, according to this account, an important factor in the much-decried failure of the programme to deliver on its initial promises during the first five years of its existence. Other reasons have been cited by those charged with implementing land reform for its lack of success during this early period. These include the Department’s minuscule budget (though critics point out that this was underspent in any case). They also include the fact that Derek Hanekom, its first minister who held office between 1994 and 1999, was a white Afrikaner who was relatively junior in the ANC. Although his Afrikaner roots had – in the eyes of Mandela who selected him for the job – made him an ideal person to negotiate with white farmers, and although he was well connected in the ANC’s internal wing, the UDF, neither of these helped him to construct networks within the ANC among its black members who had returned from exile.

The shift in emphasis In analysing Hanekom’s ousting from the Ministry at the onset of the Mbeki regime, and his replacement by Thoko Didiza who advocated the new, more ‘economic’ and less rights-driven, approach to land reform, some caution must be exercised. Individuals’ retrospective assessments are largely coloured by their former positions in the Department. They thus serve as much to signal ideological and political positions as to provide an explanation of what actually occurred. According to one perspective, of those ousted from the Department soon after 1999, the clue to understanding the new policy direction lay in the disdain with which ‘squatters’ and other holders of ‘informal rights’ were viewed by apartheid-era administrators. This signals an ideological continuity between the state in its pre-1994 and its post-1994 guise which is seen as having strengthened after Mbeki’s new minister, Thoko Didiza, took office in 1999. Amongst the ranks of the ‘white left’ activists who left the DLA, several have disparaged those in the new regime. They remark on the irony whereby Hanekom – the white Afrikaner Minister appointed by Mandela – was more comfortable visiting rural communities in the countryside than sitting in his office in Pretoria, where his successor Thoko Didiza – the African Minister appointed by Mbeki – sympathised less with informal rights-holders than with elites who, like her own family, had long been title-holders. She felt more at home among the African middle class or in the company of chiefs, rarely spending any time visiting poor country-dwellers. 39

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According to this perspective, Didiza and her superiors within the post-1999 government share a disdain for the ‘landless riff-raff’ with her predecessors in the apartheid government. This view posits a parallel between older Afrikaner officials’ disregard for the rights and well-being of ‘squatters’ and indifference to their plight by the new Minister. It is these attitudes which are seen as having edged the land reform programme increasingly further away from its original objective of securing livelihoods for the poor, and towards its new orientation in favour of African commercial farming. For those holding this view, a similar unconcern appeared to underlie Mbeki’s dismissal of the Landless People’s Movement, mentioned earlier, as being ‘not those who suffered in the struggle’. Such have been the opinions expressed by English-speaking white activists on the left, some of whom have moved back to work within the NGO sector. (Others have taken up positions as consultants. But both have continued, in various ways, to collaborate with the state in implementing land reform.) A somewhat different position is enunciated if one speaks to those, mostly black, or white Afrikaans-speaking, officials who remained within the DLA’s employ after 1999. They counter the interpretation that the DLA, in prioritising aspirant property owners and in shifting from its earlier emphasis on the poor, has been motivated by a desire to reinforce existing privilege. Pointing to the DLA’s poor record at delivering land between 1994 and 1999, and to the fact that many poor people who were settled on the land under redistribution were merely ‘dumped’ there, without support, in a manner reminiscent of the apartheid removals, they claim that the new approach is more pragmatic and realistic and has a greater chance of success. Another point made by those remaining in state employ concerns the question of race. Where some of those white activists purged from the DLA claim to have been victims of ‘ethnic cleansing’ (Dolny 2001), the people who remained in the DLA refute the idea that race alone – or race at all – was at issue. Their explanation centres, instead, on questions of institutional culture and social networking. They point to the former dominance within the DLA of a cabal-like network of ‘white left’ activists from the NGOs (Lodge 2002:79) who had little skill at drawing their African – or Afrikaner – counterparts into the ambit of their ‘rights-oriented’ ideological vision. If there was any manifestation of racism, this view would have it, this was in fact to be found in the ‘white left’ cabal’s approach. Their insistence that black land reform beneficiaries should all come from the ranks of ‘the poor’ was tantamount to a presumption that blacks are necessarily paupers. Denying that African farmers can be commercially successful, and denigrating a programme which attempts to support them, meant being motivated too wholeheartedly by considerations of race. It would be more realistic to recognise – according to this view – that the earlier models of redistribution had mistakenly relied upon inappropriate models of communal landholding and were hence unviable. To remedy this, it would be more appropriate to 40

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adopt a model of ‘private property’ as a means of distributing and owning land.9 As can be gleaned from this brief summary, the disputes which played out in the DLA prior to its changeover, and which then raged in retrospective analyses of this transition, were extraordinarily bitter. And their outcomes have in some ways been ironic. If race was in any way at issue, it was only selectively so. While the alleged ‘white left cabal’ which ran the department – drawn from the human rights law fraternity of the mainly English-speaking middle class – was mostly sidelined, the largely white Afrikaner staff contingent which staffed the Department at its lower levels has mostly remained in place. From this it can be seen that the ‘race’ of those who hold these opposing beliefs was not all-determining. While at the national level there has then been a growing division between those (primarily in state employ) who encourage African commercial farmers and those (mainly in the NGO sectors) who stress the need to safeguard the rights of tenants and squatters, this division is simultaneously an interrelation, particularly at the provincial level. On the one hand, the land NGOs see their role as one of challenging the state, moving it beyond what has come to be seen as its narrow, even Thatcherite, focus on transfers of private property ownership. On the other, however much these activists may be committed to championing the ‘informal rights’ of the poor, they find themselves playing a supportive role to the government despite being financially independent of it in its implementing of the more ‘property’-oriented aspects of the land reform programme. In a few cases, this close collaboration has been facilitated by strong personal networks which continue to exist between the provincial-level state and the NGO sector (despite criticism from the more radical NGOs of their brethren for being thus compromised). Now, as during apartheid, NGOs often take on what would normally be considered duties of the state.

LANDLESSNESS REVISITED: ‘TENURE REFORM’ ON THE FARMS Despite some co-operation on practical matters, the ideological and social rift remained, and continued to widen, in the course of events such as the Durban meeting. Many in the NGO sector have focused attention increasingly away from the likes of the middle-class headmaster who spoke at that gathering, directing it instead towards the likes of the farm workers whose plight was brought to the crowd’s attention. That is, it has become overwhelmingly concerned with those sectors of the ‘landless’ whose insecurity of tenure was intended to be – but never effectively was – addressed from the early days of the programme: primarily through redistribution and tenure reform. Such people, sometimes referred to as the ‘rural poor’, are the equivalent of the ‘squatters’ about whose rights the new minister had been accused of being indifferent. 41

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These ‘poor’ are located in two separate geographical and social settings: state-owned land in the former homelands, held under a system of communal tenure as described earlier, and white-owned farms where scores of African workers continued to reside, some under quasi-feudal conditions, well into the second half of the twentieth century. The relative urgency of tenure reform in these two contexts has been a matter of some debate. Those who implemented the state programme, feeling strongly about the need to protect landholders in the former homelands from the arbitrary and tyrannical actions of chiefs, designed legislation intended to retain the flexibility of communal tenure as a ‘safety net for the poor’ while attempting to curb the vagaries of chiefly power (Adams et al. 2000; Claassens 2000). Their ultimate goal was to extend such protections by putting in place a Communal Land Rights Act (CLRA – see Chapter 8). Some NGO office-bearers, however, claim that these efforts were misdirected, arguing that few people in this setting effectively suffer insecurity of tenure. The proper setting for consolidating insecure tenure, according to this argument, is amongst those who most need it: the real ‘landless’ living on white-owned farms or attempting to find some security on the fringes of cities. In proportion to the state’s alleged lack of concern with this section of the landless, a vociferous grouping within the NGO movement – and later threatened with expulsion from it, in a fierce dispute which eventually split the NGO co-ordinating body (see Chapter 8) – began to voice the interests of this sector with increasing radicalism, culminating in their pronouncements in support of ‘land invasions’ at the Durban meeting and, later, in the run-up to the 2004 national elections. Such invasions, some NGO activists seem to be implying, represent the last hope of a broad swathe of vulnerable people without land access, including not only those on the urban peripheries near white cities but also those based in the countryside on white farms: two constituencies whose moral right to prioritisation had been enunciated by speakers in Durban.

Reforming tenure on the farms In contrast to the fierce disagreements between state and NGO over the legitimacy of the former (the peri-urban land invasions), both had found unity of purpose in attempting to ameliorate the plight of the latter (those living on the farms). Despite the new Land Minister’s apparent lack of interest in people lacking formal land rights, much effort at regional level was being directed by NGO and state alike towards helping such people. But personnel in the two sectors, although collaborating closely on various cases of tenure reform in the countryside, have nonetheless been driven by divergent motivations. A brief account of their disagreement will serve to illustrate the nature of the contestations over ‘rights’ and ‘property’, ranging far beyond the specific matter of farm workers, which are a central concern of this book. 42

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Broadly speaking, those in the NGOs consider inalienable rights to be more important than the realisable property that state employees prioritise. Recurrent themes can be discerned here. The discourse on rights as protected and enforced by legal frameworks and as containing the full entitlements of the citizen echoes the ‘rights talk’ of 1980s social movements against apartheid and the influence of the lawyers who designed the land reform programme. In contrast, the emphasis on property – a more material and concrete acquisition – brings with it associations of forward-looking state pragmatism. Those favouring property see the implementation of rights as excessively legalistic and cumbersome, instead they favour the achievement of realistic short-term goals. The interplay between these contesting positions can be illustrated by the case of a collaborative workshop I attended, in Nelspruit, during November 2003. The purpose of the workshop was to establish some common ground, and a common modus operandi, between NGO and state employees operating within eastern Mpumalanga. Workshop participants from both sectors had frequently been called upon to defend the fragile entitlements of African farmdwellers against the whites on whose properties they live and by whom they are in constant danger (as the Introduction makes clear, and as the speaker from the farmworker NGO at the Durban meeting emphasised) of being evicted. The participants in the workshop, employees of both the provincial NGO TRAC-MP and the provincial government, had expended much effort on giving force to the law by protecting farm-dwellers from summary evictions. This usually involved difficult and highly personalised negotiations between individuals – specific farmers and their workers or tenants – whose interests appeared increasingly to be utterly divergent. Although NGO officers and state officials had a common interest in facilitating negotiations like these, they also disagreed on some key principles. At first it was difficult to decipher what these were. The arguments were played out in the course of a simulation game, in which participants imagined a typical eviction scenario and listed the mediation strategies they

Figure 1.4 TRAC march for farmworkers’ rights.

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The Rural Action Committee of Mpumalanga Province (TRAC-MP) was formerly Transvaal Rural Action Committee (TRAC), which was established as a programme of the Black Sash Movement in 1982 to oppose the policy of forced removals. In the period 1982 to 1992 TRAC’s main objective was to stop forced removals, provide support to victims of this racist policy and to raise awareness about them. TRAC-MP was also a founding member of the National Committee against Removals (NCAR). The NCAR existed during the period 1986– 1992, when it was replaced by the National Land Committee (NLC), a network of Land Rights NGOs within South Africa committed to similar objectives, namely to promote and support the struggle for security of tenure within South Africa. Following the unbanning of the liberation movements at the end of 1989 and the beginnings of negotiations to establish a new democratic political dispensation in South Africa including a new constitution, TRAC’s role as anti-apartheid NGO changed. It contributed towards discussions about the formulation of a land policy for South Africa. These led to the inclusion of three fundamental constitutional rights to: Secure Tenure, Restitution and Redistribution in Chapter Two – The Bill of Rights in the South African Constitution as enacted in 1996. With the establishment of the Department of Land Affairs in 1994, TRAC-MP along with other members of the Network saw the state as a key partner in the protection of land rights and the promotion of land reform. The period 1994–1999 can be best described as a time of collaboration and constructive engagement between the state and civil society organizations in the implementation of the land reform programme on the basis of the established constitutional principles.

Figure 1.5 History of TRAC-MP. Source: www.trac.org.za/content/default.asp

would use. The imaginary scenario was as follows. A white farm owner dies. His children, no longer resident there, resolve to sell the farm. The new owner decides to switch to a new farming strategy. There are two groups of workers living on the farm. One has lived there for five years while providing labour under contract, while the other has resided on the farm as tenants for almost a century while its members work elsewhere or are unemployed but do not provide labour on the farm. It is the latter group which the farmer wants to evict. Its members, in the simulation game, ask for assistance. During the discussions about how to solve this made-up problem, the language used by those in the state and NGO sectors, respectively, gave some indication of the source of disagreement. Fieldworkers from Mpumalanga’s land NGO TRAC-MP insisted that no action be taken which would jeopardise the rights of these workers to live on the farm or to graze their cattle there. However impractical this seemed in the light of the imaginary farm owner’s determination to pursue eviction, their focus was on maintaining 44

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existing rights based on past practice, and on the need to ensure that these not be interfered with or downgraded. State functionaries from the regional DLA, in contrast, had a more pragmatic approach. They seemed to shrug off the importance of past precedent, insisting that future-oriented development was of greater importance. Instead of nostalgically adhering to an unviable way of life, they suggested, it would be better to look forward to a new one. ‘It is not right to say, just because people have been staying like this for 40 years, that this is fine,’ said Star Motswege from DLA, pointing to the environmental degradation which would result from allowing overgrazing by workers’ cattle. ‘Our aim is to improve the situation, to make lives better.’ These debates were fierce, but there was agreement, at least, over the separate but related question of payment. If these imaginary farm-dwellers had no option but to accept resettlement elsewhere, all present agreed that this should not be paid for by the state. Rather, it was the farmer’s moral obligation to do so. ‘This will be on the shoulders of the farmer completely, not on the shoulders of the government’, said Thomas Ngwenya of TRAC-MP. His government counterparts assented vigorously. All present agreed that to use ‘public funds’ for the purpose of buying land to settle evicted labourers – as members of the right-wing white farmer organisation Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU) had recently suggested to the outrage of all – would be to misuse them. Instead, it should be a white farmer’s obligation to buy land for his evicted workers. I later discovered that the workshop, the debate, and the concurrence over farmers’ moral/financial obligation had been sparked by an actual case. A group of cattle-owning farm-dwellers, threatened with eviction, had indeed visited the provincial government offices and sought advice from some of the DLA officers who were now present at this workshop. The response had been to use public funds. Government grants had been pooled to buy alternative land to which the evicted farm-dwellers could move with their cattle. Some months later the newly resettled people visited the land NGO, voicing their dissatisfaction with the new living arrangements that the government officers had facilitated, and particularly with the lack of grazing for their cattle. The NGO officers were critical of their government counterparts for having failed to clarify the farm-dwellers’ existing rights at the outset. The government, they said, ought not to have moved so swiftly to resolve the case through recourse to mere property ownership. The case ought if necessary, they insisted, to have been taken to the Land Claims Court in order to establish the legitimacy of these rights, since only the setting of legal precedents could enable progress in land reform. The government functionaries retaliated that the speedy resolution of the problem had required decisive action rather than allowing the building up of further conflict. Although they acknowledged that they had been mistaken in failing to insist that the farmer bear the cost of buying land to resettle the 45

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evicted farm-dwellers, they maintained that there would have been little purpose in establishing ‘rights’ in a situation where personal relationships were so fraught.10 What was not fully explored in the course of these discussions, although they underlay them implicitly, was assumptions about the obligations of white farmers. When participants insisted that farmers bear the costs of buying land to resettle workers off their farms, they were motivated jointly by a wish to save government money and a conviction that white farmers not be excused their moral duty. To illuminate how land disputes continue to centre on expectations about white farmer obligations, I must briefly step backwards to recall an earlier set of discussions, some two years previously, with employees in the affiliated land NGO, Nkuzi, which operates in the province of Limpopo to the north of Mpumalanga. This NGO’s successes in settling eviction cases had been relatively few, mostly because conflicts had often progressed too far before the organisation was informed. Where they did succeed, this was usually where the cause of the eviction had been contingent rather than based on intractable structural disputes. For example, the cause of one threatened eviction was the death of the owner, of another was the advanced age of the farm worker.11 Whatever the cause, NGO negotiations often required recourse to threats of legal action. A farm labourer called Toki Maphosa, for example, was threatened with eviction by the Venter family from their farm at Rooipoort, on the grounds that ‘there cannot be two farmers on the one farm’.12 The Venters offered to pay Maphosa R15,000 to cede whatever rights he might have had to remain resident on their property and to enable him to buy property elsewhere: an outcome equivalent to that pursued by the government functionaries at the Nelspruit workshop. The offer of the money was tempting since it would have provided part-payment for a house in a planned peri-urban township with services and amenities. But after taking legal advice, the NGO warned him not to accept this financial settlement. As a livestock-owner keeping cattle on his employer’s farm, he would have had to sell them had he moved to a township. With the help of the NGO legal team, Maphosa managed to establish his informal rights of occupancy and grazing on the land where he had been living.13 In the resulting agreement, someone whom the farm-owner would have been inclined to regard as having no more entitlements than a mere ‘squatter’ was proved to have rights by virtue of his long-standing occupancy. The farmowners fenced off a section of the farm for Maphosa’s use, and he was given legal title to the piece of land, which would be enforceable in any future dispute. Here, indeed, was a case in which ‘rights’ became ‘property’: where one of the ‘landless’ became formally ‘landed’ after lengthy negotiations. This resolution to the dispute mirrored precisely the outcome of the discussion described to me by Geoff Budlender over the clause stating that ‘The Minister may make part of the farm available for worker ownership’, in 46

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which the ‘may’ eventually became ‘shall’. In such cases, even where farmers prove less than amenable to recognising the tenure rights of their workers, NGO action, with the backing of legislation passed during the early phase of land reform, has forced an acknowledgement of informal land rights. The legislative power of the state was being harnessed by those in the NGOs to apparently good effect. Such protection of the rights of the landless, operationalised through the combined efforts of state and society, appears to fulfil the egalitarian promise inherent in the early years of land reform. But the success of such cases relies on a form of outsourcing in order to achieve state effects. It depends partly upon private white landowners playing some role in recognising farm workers’ rights to continue living on their farms. Such actions by NGOs amount to an acknowledgement that welfare provision for the ‘landless’ ought properly to be secured with the compliance of those private property owners willing – or forced through legal means – to bear this burden. There is an irony in evidence here. Paternalist dependency, often bitterly resented, lay at the heart of farmer/labourer relationships in an earlier period (van Onselen 1996): it was intended that the end of the apartheid regime would bring equity, a basis for independent citizenship, and hence an escape from such relationships. But for a farm-dweller such as Maphosa to have gained complete freedom from land-based dependence would have meant losing his rights as a rural cattle-owner and becoming an urban or peri-urban resident fully responsible for the payment of services. His rights as a citizen, although in one sense secured, would have been severely circumscribed. We return via a slight detour to the 2003 Nelspruit workshop. In the disagreements played out between state and NGO personnel during the simulation game, one can perceive the outcome of a decade’s debates over the question of land and its significance. The perspective focused on broadlydefined ‘rights’ involves a principled stand based on past practice, however impractical. Short of taking cases to the Land Claims Court, itself perceived as a lengthy and often unpredictable procedure, it has few means to implement these however, other than appealing to – or attempting coerced recognition of – the obligations of white farmers, also rooted in the past. The ‘property’ perspective, arising more out of pragmatic considerations, uses the rhetoric of future-oriented development. Where the ‘rights’ orientation seems to be motivated by a backward-looking traditionalism in its assertion of tenants’ needs to sustain their cattle herds, the ‘property’ orientation looks forward to modernity and progress in its preference for relocating country-dwellers in towns or urban-style agri-villages. In so doing, however, it proposes to remove such people from the frameworks in which they could rely on others, better off than themselves, to provide resources. The state’s model of the modern citizen is one who receives and pays for services, not one reliant on power-holders for goodwill. These attempted solutions to farm-worker landlessness evoke the dichotomous alternatives of herders freely grazing their cattle as they did in the 47

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past or proletarians displaced from the land into quasi-urban settlements. They indicate major discrepancies in how the two sectors visualise their respective roles in satisfying the demands of ‘the landless’. Contrasting the imprecisely defined rural rights based on a customary lifestyle, on the one hand, with definite ownership of circumscribed property, on the other, these cases illuminate the conflict between a populace defending customary forms of livelihood and a modernising state.

‘LAND INVASIONS’ Whatever disputes had emerged over national-level policy documents, there was, then, some agreement between government and NGO personnel at a local level. They agreed on the need to protect vulnerable farm workers from arbitrary evictions, even if each couched its actions in different rhetoric. Thus, despite NGO speakers’ inflammatory remarks at the Durban meeting about delays in land reform and the programme’s general inadequacies, these same people would the next day be returning to their collaborative work pursued in close communication with their government counterparts. But, if the plight of farm workers was of general concern, why were there not more of them at the meeting? Why was it the peri-urban squatter ‘invasions’ rather than farmworker insecurity which formed the rhetorical focus of proceedings, even though none of the invaders was present to enunciate his/her point of view? And why was it that the majority of the ‘landless’ addressing the meeting were drawn from the ranks of those who were probably destined to have their land rights eventually restored through restitution? The remainder of this book attempts to answer some of these questions, by giving ethnographic insights into the predicaments, and interactions with the state, of those in these different categories. Among the ‘landless’ at the workshop, former title-holders, who were among the most vociferous, have also been the most obvious targets of reform, as Chapter 2 explores. Buttressed by existing networks, expressing themselves in biblical rhetoric, and reasonably well-off in terms of both social and economic capital, they had the confidence both to attend the workshop and to voice their anger at land reform delays. Many other categories of ‘landless’, however, were not represented at the meeting. No matter how divergent a group of people the LPM was claiming to bring together by organising on the ‘single issue’ of land, the diversity of those to whom it was pitching its message seemed to defy any easy unity. Some of those discussed in this book were exploring a range of means other than mass meetings – and pursued beyond the remit of state or NGOs – to satisfy their land hunger. Farm workers, for example, constitute a broad and amorphous category. Many of those who left their tenancies on white farms in the 1950s and 1960s aimed to have their informal rights officially 48

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recognised and were waiting – with more patience than the headmaster – to become beneficiaries of restitution, as Chapter 3 discusses. Others evicted more recently have joined the ranks of the shifting rural population which seeks a foothold in any convenient location. Those described in Chapter 4 have become the new ‘squatters’, particularly targeting African-owned land which was itself recently restored under the restitution programme. Or, as discussed in Chapter 6, they have been resettled on redistribution farms. Although dissatisfied by state delays in helping them to initiate farming operations, they have some faith that the consultants arriving more recently will succeed in doing so. The ex-farm residents discussed in Chapter 5, as reluctant exiles from the farms of particularly hostile white owners, have taken up residence in urban areas. People in this category have joined – indeed, have claimed to be founder members of – the LPM, and were among the stalwarts protesting at the meeting. Lastly, there are those still dwelling in the geographical and social isolation of the white farms: those whose predicament has been the focus of state/NGO disputes as to how best to secure their tenure, as discussed above. Despite NGO efforts to overcome this isolation, and despite the attempts made by the LPM to encourage the membership – and the attendance at the meeting – of such people, these efforts have been met with limited success. Although some speakers claimed to be representing their interests, few were there. Of the invaders of peri-urban land, such as those who had moved onto land at Bredell on the outskirts of Johannesburg before they were summarily evicted, there was little sign. They had been at the forefront of media attention and had attracted notice from the government because of what seemed like a similarity between their actions and those of Zimbabwe’s war veterans. Such invasions threaten disregard for the rule of law, and hence undermine the sovereignty of the fledgling South African State which has staked its reputation on being in control of land reform. In particular, there is a worry that the tactic of invading land might spread to others within the fledgling social movement and inspire the ‘landless’, however divergent their actual social origins, to take the law into their own hands in order to secure it. It is perhaps ironic that this radical rhetoric of South Africa’s short-lived peri-urban land invasions became the means through which restitution claimants stated their dissatisfaction with state inaction. And that there was much heard but little to be seen of the more grassroots ‘landless’ whose cause the landlessness movement was now espousing. But what the meeting’s organisers lacked in real social constituents from within the country, they made up for by linking the South African landless to their equivalents in the international arena.

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CONCLUSION In the halcyon days after the birth of the new South Africa, ‘rights’ were thought of as encompassing ‘property’ rather than being eclipsed by it. Do the subsequent ideological contestations over the respective merits of restoring citizenship ‘rights’ or securing economically viable ‘property’ affect how different categories of the heterogeneous landless are viewed – and their landlessness addressed – by land reform? And has the South African State paradoxically assumed a more central and visible role in governance through having many of its responsibilities towards the landless performed – and many of its policy directions contested, even partly determined – by non-state actors, such as the land and legal NGOs? At a local/provincial level, or when concerning themselves with the practicalities of land access, these NGOs perform the role of a sort of extended civil service, carrying out functions which the Department of Land Affairs has neither the capacity nor the resources to perform on its own. Here, the discourse of ‘landlessness’ (and the actions considered necessary to remedy it) provides a basis for co-operation and convergence between the two sectors. It is here that the NGOs are most state-like in the purely administrative sense. At the national level, in contrast, a split between these two sectors has come into existence. And it was precisely the contest over the nature and extent of ‘the landless’ which progressively deepened this split. The original, inclusive vision of land rights – as symbolising and encompassing both economic well-being and the political entitlements of citizens – provided the means for state and NGOs, ideologically and practically, to merge. But as the difficulties in transforming the status of ‘the landless’ became increasingly clear, the state began to restrict its focus. Influenced in part by experts at the World Bank with its emphasis on the economic role of small farmers, it focused its efforts (inasmuch as it made any efforts at all – the programme was increasingly poorly-funded) on three areas. It restored the property of those who had originally been ‘landed’ or paid them compensation for the loss of this; it newly provided land through redistribution to those who might in future find gainful employment through its use; and – in the case of farm workers – it resettled them in quasi-urban villages. The narrowing of this focus was simultaneously guaranteed by the re-staffing of the department and especially by the change in its ministerial and directorial personnel. Thus did ‘land rights’ gradually lose their broader significance and become synonymous with – or eclipsed by – ‘property’. At this moment, from the perspective of those in the human rights legal fraternity who had moved out of state employ, the government, by ignoring the rights and hence neglecting the welfare of its poorest citizens, was failing to achieve one of its crucial functions. The NGOs, de-staffed and re-staffed in their turn, were beginning to elaborate their moral task as one of ensuring the well-being of the truly ‘landless’. 50

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When they reverted to a recognition that such welfare could be best assured by holding individual landowners to account for their farmworkers’ wellbeing, they were contributing to the outsourcing of state functions. But when they succeeded in pressing their government counterparts into acknowledging their responsibilities in respect of welfare provision, they were performing a role normally associated with the state.

Notes 1 Samantha Hargreaves, NLC, Johannesburg, 17 January 2001. See Levin (1996) and Levin and Weiner (1994) for activists’ puzzlement at the failure to organise on the basis of land. 2 Speaker at the meeting following the Landlessness=Racism campaign, 30 August 2001. 3 The outcome of these internal tensions within the NGO alliance, and the eventual censuring of the social movement, will be explored further in Chapter 7. 4 Dennis Brutus, 30 August 2001. 5 Some in the NGO sector were unhappy about the meeting, commenting that it had turned the plight of South Africa’s landless into something like a circus, preventing their grievances from being seriously reported in the press (Siphiwe Ngomane, Nkuzi, Pretoria, 3 September 2001). 6 Geoff Budlender, LRC, Johannesburg, 16 January 2001. 7 Andries Gouws of Fundile Afrika, Midrand, 4 September 1998; see also du Toit 2000. 8 Tony Harding, Johannesburg, 21 August 2001. 9 ‘Class, not race, behind Dolny’s departure’ Howard Barrell, Mail & Guardian, 7 January 2000; Chris Mulaudzi, DLA, Pretoria, 18 January 2001 and 13 July 2003. For details on the ousting of Helena Dolny, Joe Slovo’s widow, from her directorship of the Land Bank, see Dolny (2001). I am grateful to Stefan Schirmer for bringing some of these points to my attention. 10 ESTA workshop, TRAC, Nelspruit, 14 November 2002. 11 Dan Mabokela, Nkuzi, Pietersburg, 22 August 2001. 12 Siphiwe Ngomane, Nkuzi, Pretoria, 3 September 2001. 13 In similar vein, in Mpumalanga, TRAC-MP has succeeded in holding white landowners to their legal obligations, insisting that those who wish to evict a tenant or worker are obliged to provide a ‘suitable alternative’ for resettlement which would include access to fire wood, building materials, hunting and harvesting of medicinal plants. TRAC has in one case managed to force a farmer to pay R155,000 as compensation for three labour tenant families; the DLA then combined this with government grants to buy them a property for R650,000 (Chris Williams, personal communication).

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2 ‘A SENTIMENTAL ATTACHMENT TO THE NEIGHBOURHOOD’

INTRODUCTION Claims to land based on its former ownership – that of ‘black spot removals’ victims such as the headmaster who spoke at the Durban meeting, for example – have been pivotal in South Africa’s land reform programme. The relationship between these ‘black spot’ communities and NGO activists, developing over the course of the two decades leading up to 1994, made it almost inevitable that it was they who, in some senses, constituted the ‘ideal’ candidates for restitution. A further reason for the key role of this constituency in the restitution profile was the overlap between its membership and that of the African nationalist political elite in South Africa. Beginning in the late nineteenth century there was a division between early converts to the mainstream mission churches who purchased land, and those who continued as adherents of the chiefship and of ancestral religion in the African reserves. This demarcated, even where it did not exactly coincide with, the division between an urbanising middle class and the poorly-paid migrants who were forming the ranks of the wage labour force.1 This class of mission converts has been very influential, economically and politically, within South African society. On the economic side, its members formed the ranks of the ‘South African peasantry’: Africans who moved beyond the reserves to buy farm land and who for a time thrived by responding to market opportunities (Bundy 1979). Having more impact politically, and partly overlapping with this constituency, the ANC (African National Congress), earlier known as the SANC (South African Native Congress), drew much of its original membership from among the ranks of these mission converts. In light of the political influence of this social group, the government’s overall favouring of a restitutive over a redistributive approach has been criticised as a sign of land policy having been ‘ “captured” by elements of the local (black) bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie’ (Bernstein 1996:25). Of the removal victims who sought restitution,2 most were from this social category rather than being ‘tribesmen’ or adherents of chiefs. The farm 52

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Doornkop (Thornhill – B on the map on p. xvi), for example, was bought in the first decade of the twentieth century by 284 Lutheran bareki (buyers) (Land Update 1994 35:19–20; James 1983). Although the buyers did have a hereditary leader, one Seth Ramaube, whose close relationship to the Pedi chiefly family in Sekhukhuneland (now part of Limpopo Province) gave legitimacy to his position, he was not viewed by them as the owner or custodian of their land. The land was owned collectively by the title-holders. It was this sense of communalism that NGO activists emphasised most strongly in their campaigns against the apartheid regime on behalf of Doornkop’s owners after their property was confiscated (James 2000b; for a similar case, see Robins 2001). But the very fact of having owned the land, even on a communal basis, is an indication that its purchasers had a higher socio-economic status than Africans in surrounding communities. By documenting the reclaiming of the African-owned farm of Doornkop against the backdrop of national debates on restitution, the present chapter explores some of the contradictions of this arm of the land reform programme.

A LOST LAND RECLAIMED In December 1994, a party was held to celebrate the return of the farm to its former owners. To them, this farm was unique.3 It had been bought in the early years of the twentieth century by their great-grandparents from an Afrikaans farmer, Klaas Joubert, whom they nicknamed Ntumatlago. They bought it ‘below the ground and on the surface’ (ka fase le ka godimo), and they handed down to their descendants an injunction never to leave the place: ‘You must stay here, and your child, and your child’s child . . . as long as children are born, you will be staying here.’ Those attending the celebration had been evicted from their farm when it was designated as a ‘black spot’ by the apartheid regime because of its geographical position amongst white-owned farms. Its occupants – descendants of the original purchasers, together with a number of tenants – were forcibly removed from the farm by army and police in 1974 and resettled in the homelands. The Pedi landowners were resettled in Lebowa and their predominantly Ndebele tenants, somewhat later, in the newly-established KwaNdebele and in various other ethnic homelands (Desmond 1971, James 1983, Surplus Peoples Project 1983). The land was never reoccupied or sold, but was used by police as a range for target practice and an entertainment venue. Symbolically close to the rocky hill site of the original mosˇate (chief ’s kraal), a lapa (enclosed yard, a term adopted in Afrikaans to mean thatched picnic venue) was built in which policemen and their families had barbecues on Sundays. Former landowners had continued to bring home their dead to bury in the farm’s graveyard, and tried various strategies to get the land back. The sole MP of the liberal-leaning 53

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Progressive Party, Helen Suzman, was petitioned, lawyers were engaged, and later the land NGO TRAC (then the Transvaal Rural Action Committee) provided advice and support. Eventually, 20 years after the removal date, the campaign was successful. Under terms initially established by the apartheid government’s 1991 Advisory Committee on Land Allocations, but finally effected by the Minister of Land Affairs Derek Hanekom, only a few months after the birth of the ‘new South Africa’ in 1994, the farm was handed over to the descendants of its original owners. The whole process was accomplished shortly before the establishment of the Restitution Commission in 1995 (SAIRR 1992–1993:388; 1993–1994:225–31). Those who had gathered to celebrate the return of their land were jubilant. They marked the occasion, as described in an NGO publication, with a combination of biblical imagery and the symbols and practices of African Nationalism. Their exclusion from the farm had been like the Israelites’ ‘exile’ from the land of Canaan, and they knelt on the soil to give thanks to God for bringing them back to the ‘promised land’, while their singing of Nkosi Sikele iAfrika, chanting of ‘Viva Mandela!’ and hoisting of the new African flag linked the occasion to the broader reclaiming of the new South Africa (Land Update 1994 35:15, 19–20; 34:10). These combined themes of return from biblical exile and nationalist liberation point to some contradictory impulses. To stress the similarity to the promised land of the Bible is a reminder of the long-standing Lutheran faith of Doornkop’s original owners: a feature which marked them off as having a superior socio-economic status to many other landless people in the vicinity. But these contradictions were masked by the nationalist rhetoric and symbolism at the Doornkop homecoming ceremony, which emphasised how the owners’ interests were merged with those of the nation as a whole. Such unity on the ‘land question’ appeared, at least initially, to be a real possibility. The reclaiming of this farm, occurring in the same year of Mandela’s inauguration as President, augured well. It ushered in an era in which the returning of land to those rudely dispossessed of it was intended to be a priority. Primordial motifs of land were invoked at the ceremony by Joe Seremane, a victim of removals from a different Christian titleholding community who was soon to be appointed Chief Land Claims Commissioner: People regard earth as some kind of womb. It is where life comes from, so land is synonymous with life. It has broader implications – that each and everyone has land as a birthright. If you tamper with that, you tamper with where you come from, the womb, someone is tampering with your own mother. . . . Earth remains the source of your life. Of life itself. (Winberg and Weinburg 1996:39) 54

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Figure 2.1 Doornkop returns. (Cedric Nunn/africanpictures.net)

This remark indicates the symbolic potency of land in South Africa. But the images of solidarity in this speech have been counterpoised, in communities like that at Doornkop, by a strong separatist urge. As mission converts and as speakers of SePedi, Doornkop’s claimants have seen themselves as distinct: 55

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Figure 2.2 Household goods are unloaded from government trucks at Doornkop, December 1994. (Cedric Nunn/africanpictures.net)

both from traditionalists in the African reserves, and from members of other ethnic communities, particularly the Ndebele, in the region. The image of unity has also been counterbalanced by sharp differentiations of status within such communities of title-holders. Only some of Doornkop’s original purchasers were able to provide their children with the education necessary to improve their social standing and material well-being. These families had moved away from the farm to work or pursue careers in urban centres like Johannesburg well before the fateful date of the forced removal, leaving their older relatives and their less educated counterparts on the farm. It was they who bore the brunt of the removal itself. Few of the farm’s rightful owners followed up on these celebrations by returning to claim their birthright. It was not only these socio-economic divisions that were to blame for this. Questioned about why they had not returned, Doornkop’s ‘sons and daughters’ blamed their reluctance on government delays in providing basic services. But the government was hesitant 56

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to proceed with providing basic services until it had some idea of how many people were likely to return. In a further twist, while those entitled to go back hesitated to do so, a host of other people began clamouring to live on the farm. But a constitution drawn up by the original buyers in 1933 stated that no-one ‘who is not a legal purchaser of the farm’ (or a descendant thereof) may ‘dwell or settle’ there.4 Most of those who were entitled did not want to come, while those who wanted to come were not entitled. This meant that the farm – until the ‘squatter invasion’ of 2001, discussed in Chapter 4 – was scantily populated. It was also very little used for agriculture.

RESTITUTION: DEBATES AND CONTESTATIONS In the matter of restitution as in land reform overall, there has been a gradually intensifying ideological battle between those who prioritise broader ‘rights’ and those who give precedence to narrower conceptions of ‘property’. This also mirrors, because it partly lies at the basis of, a contest between two opposing ‘development paradigms’ in South Africa. One, arising out of the demand for restored property, is piecemeal and ‘demand-driven’ while the other, based on central planning, attempts a ‘shift . . . to broadly-based incorporative systems based on a principle of equity’ (Vaughan 1997). The former has attempted to reverse the effects of race discrimination but is in danger of concentrating wealth in the hands of those who already possess it; the latter has attempted to supplant it with an approach that is more redistributive in focus, but risks aiming for principles so high-mindedly egalitarian that it ignores structures of elite formation and leadership with long-standing historical roots. By 1994, extensive debates had already taken place amongst ANC members in exile who were gearing up for their positions in the new Government of National Unity (GNU). An insider account which documents these discussions tells of how the historical experience of dispossession had led to a ‘political demand for land’, which in turn ensured a ‘demand-driven’ approach (Dolny 2001:100). People must be given not just any land, it was maintained, but the land they had formerly owned and to which they were sentimentally attached. Restitution based on past entitlement and rights, rather than redistribution based on egalitarianism or future-oriented development, was thus bound to be the guiding principle of South African land reform. Parallel negotiations within the country had led to a similar emphasis on rights. Years of effort by lawyers and land activists had highlighted the plight of title-holding communities: victims of ‘black spot’ removals attempting to regain their land. The existence of historically-based property rights, often proven by the holding of a title deed to the property, was considered indisputable, and restoring them was imperative in the interests of fairness. Acknowledging the centrality of this property-holding constituency at the 57

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moment of South Africa’s transition, Geoff Budlender, human rights lawyer who from 1994 to 1999 served as Director-General of Land Affairs, said: When the programme first began, when it was developed by the ANC Land Commission, it was very much driven by people from the NGOs. Their experience of land issues was about forced removals, so the first instinct was to get the land back. . . . [T]he anti-apartheid aspect was of key importance. There was a strong political dimension to this; it has a deep emotional resonance for millions of people. . . . [I]t was about who owns the country, and about sovereignty. The restitution programme derives from this impetus.5 This emphasis on rights required new laws. When activists-turnedgovernment officials began the task of designing the land reform programme, the Restitution Act of 1994 was passed along with a series of other pieces of legislation. To replace the earlier, and more narrowly-focused, Advisory Commission on Land Allocation (ACLA) which had been set up during the dying days of apartheid, it established the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights, also known as the Restitution Commission. The Act also established a Land Claims Court to which all cases would have to be submitted. A date – 1 May 1998 – was specified by which claims were to be submitted, and a time limit of five years set by which they would be finalised. When assessing which of the many anticipated claims were to be given precedence, it was decided to prioritise those affecting large numbers of people, and those lodged by people who had suffered substantial losses from dispossession or who had the most pressing needs (SAIRR 1995–1996: 364–6). The new Commission and the Land Claims Court were committed to assessing whether ‘just and equitable compensation’ had been provided to those who had been dispossessed of their property by racially-based legislation and, if not, to restore their lands to them. But its remit was strictly circumscribed: it would neither concern itself with land lost prior to 1913 (the date of the infamous Natives Land Act), nor restore land whose owners had not previously held legal title. That these criteria were either not widely known or not accepted is suggested by the fact that many of the claims submitted did not comply with them. In the Restitution Commission as in the DLA overall, the presence of human rights activists is seen in retrospect as having led to extraordinary levels of commitment: ‘It was . . . unique . . . in that so many of the people in it had been activists, and they brought that vision with them into their work.’6 But the extent of such commitment did not prevent disagreements erupting over the restricted remit of restitution and the way it was eclipsing more redistributive approaches. Activists within the country and returned ANC exiles, initially agreeing about the importance of ‘rights’ and justice, now 58

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began to diverge. The former – members of the alleged ‘white cabal’ employed in the DLA after 1994 whose ideas had influenced those of the Minister Derek Hanekom – focused primarily on the redistributive use of land reform to combat poverty, downplaying the increasingly expensive process of restitution.7 Restitution, as a result, became ‘somewhat marginalised’ during the early years of the programme. Returned exiles on the other hand, mostly African and some from former title-holding communities who themselves were restitution claimants, remained committed to the policy of restoring land-based citizenship to former title-holders. When Mbeki later replaced Hanekom with the new minister, Didiza, in 1999, she restored restitution to its former prominence by settling large numbers of claims. That this – like restitution in general – was a palliative to middle-class interests is suggested by the fact that most of these were urban claims, lodged by people who had lived and been title-holders in townships such as Sophiatown, in Johannesburg. But the new minister’s policy of substituting monetary compensation – R40,000 per urban house/ plot – for land in such cases implies that the African middle classes’ ‘political demand’ for land was not as intractable as formerly supposed. With the original emphasis on restoring rights, and with the strong legal underpinning of the restitution process, it was presumed that considerations of ‘justice’ would be enough to drive the process forward. By establishing who had been deprived of their rights and on which land, it would be possible to restore these and thus to undo the wrongs of the past. Since only particular pieces of land could satisfy a ‘political demand’, the means to ascertain which was the correct land, in any given case, was through ‘verification’. As time went by, however, many practical problems emerged. There was the sheer weight of claims, which increased exponentially over time. Between May and October 1995, around 300 claims were lodged in Mpumalanga, but the numbers later swelled to 6,473, of which only 635 had been settled by March 2003.8 There were also problems with using the Land Claims Court. In an early case, that of Macleantown in the Eastern Cape, a judge had turned down a settlement upon which all parties had agreed in advance but which did not comply with the letter of the Act: the practical preconditions subsequently set by the judge delayed matters considerably and led to community mistrust of the process.9 Commission officers became convinced, as a result, that restitution cases should be kept out of the Land Claims Court wherever possible: We use the Court only as our last option, when everything else has been tried – we prefer not to have conflict. And the court takes time, and costs money. And once a case goes to court we no longer have control over what happens.10 59

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Countering this position, and showing a continuing commitment to ‘justice’ rather than to the demands of bureaucracy, human rights lawyer Durkje Gilfillan – who had briefly served as Restitution Commissioner in Mpumalanga before moving back into the legal NGO – bemoaned these developments. She regretted the fact that restitution, rather than being pursued through the Land Claims Court and establishing legal precedents which could safeguard rights and meaningfully further ‘the real cause of land reform’, had become a largely ‘administrative’ process.11 As she and other members of the ‘old guard’ left the Commission, they expressed their regrets at the way in which lofty ideals of justice had been replaced by the demands of practical necessity. But it was inevitable, according to officers in the Commission charged with implementing these high-minded principles, that the initial emphasis on justice would need to be modified: that ‘rights’ would have to give way to more pragmatic considerations. A gap thus developed, and gradually widened, between those foregrounding principles of justice and those who insist that on-the-ground practical realities take precedence. Here was to be found a parallel to the dispute between ‘rights’ and ‘property’ described in Chapter 1. However, it was not simply ideological splits between those designing and carrying out the programme at national level which accounted for the problems with restitution. Besides the obstacles, enumerated above, which had stood in the way of successful restitution (and which had led to the kinds of delays and frustrations experienced by the headmaster at the meeting in Durban, see Chapter 1), there were splits within local communities which emerged in the process of the programme’s implementation. Overcoming practical and social problems sufficiently to restore land (as in the case of Doornkop) thus proved to be almost as problematic as failing to do so (as in the case of that headmaster).

‘LET MY PEOPLE GO’ Doornkop’s purchasers had enjoined their offspring to live on the farm in perpetuity and to ensure that their ‘their children’s children’ should do so as well. These forefathers could not have foreseen the community’s forced removal in 1974: an event that made the injunction impossible to fulfil, at least in the short term. Perhaps it was prophetic in the longer term as well. Activist accounts of this removal and those in the liberal press – including one I wrote in the 1980s – focused on the violation of human rights, describing the victims of these removals uniformly as ‘discarded’ or ‘surplus people’. They emphasised the heartless way in which the removals had been carried out and the terrible conditions to be found in the ‘dumping grounds’ in 60

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the African homelands, where ‘surplus people’ were taken by government trucks (Desmond 1971; James 1983; Surplus Peoples Project 1983). Local residents, while similarly outraged, described the experience of removal in terms which merge the community’s Christian faith with its use of chiefly invocations: In the morning we woke up to find soldiers and police, they were knocking on doors and saying we must go and board the bus. . . . It was known, on that morning, that if enemies came people would hlaba mogosˇi (a distress call, invoking the chiefship). ‘Sebatakgomo’ was being heard from GaMotau to Soplai section where we were staying. The old men and women were gathering at the church to pray. The village is known for its devotion to Christianity: whenever people had a problem, they would pray. . . .12 This description makes it clear that mission and traditionalist discourses and practices coexisted on the farm, intersecting to create the particular relationship of this community to its land.13 Some local activists expressed their outrage in purely biblical idiom. Relocated people from a number of ‘black spots’ in the region later united – with NGO help – to form the Transvaal Land Restoration Committee (TLRC) in 1991. This later amalgamated with other groups to become the Land Access Movement of South Africa (LAMoSA): an organisation of restitution claimants which was formed to lobby and intensify pressure on the government and which later sent representatives to address the Durban meeting. Their pronouncements about the outrage of the removal combined Old Testament themes of exile and return to the promised land with New Testament expectations of millennial proportions. In a letter written to marshal support, one of this committee’s members, the Reverend Phasha, explicitly connected the plight of the people of Doornkop and neighbouring farms with that of Moses’ followers. It starts with a terse listing: Exodus: Author: Place: Date: Theme:

5.1 Moses M. Sinai 1420 BC LET MY PEOPLE GO AND RE-OCCUPY THEIR LANDS

and continues with a heartfelt prayer ‘Lord . . . restore peace, as we are waiting for your kingdom and the restoration of our lands’.14 Such religious sentiments, in turn, are echoed in the forms of expression used by the land NGO publications. Their description of the restoration of lost farms like Doornkop combined the themes of biblical-type exile with ancestral imagery to yield resounding calls for restitutive justice.15 These told 61

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of displaced people’s needs to leave the ‘barren’ places, ‘the wilderness’ or ‘foreign lands’ (Land Update 1994, 35:19–20) and to return to ‘ancestral land’ or to ‘visit graves and reconnect with our ancestors’ (Land Update 1994, 32:11–12, 34:10). These different accounts of the removal, mixing Old Testament quotations with references to ancestral graves and rights talk, provide clues both to the exclusive nature of land claims lodged by Christian/middle-class title-holders of this kind and to the means by which, through their interaction with the NGOs, they rhetorically ‘cornered the market’ on a certain kind of collective deprivation under apartheid. Their suffering and loss of citizenship, spoken of in the ringing tones of the Bible, became that of the nation as a whole while nonetheless remaining elevated above the rank and file. Through rhetoric, restitution became synonymous with land reform in general but claimed a special place.

‘MOST INDEPENDENT, AND INSOLENT’ The roots of this ambivalence, whereby land ownership both set people apart from others while providing some basis for unity with them, can be found in accounts of the farm’s purchase. As the narrative is retold now, buying Doornkop appears, in retrospect, to have provided a basis for a separate identity. The buyers had originally lived at the nearby Lutheran mission at Botsˇhabelo (A on the map on p. xvi). When they seceded to embark on the process of buying their own land, they were trying to separate themselves from structures of control imposed respectively by Lutheran missionaries and by the settler state – Paul Kruger’s Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) (Delius 1983:158, 168). They were also reasserting their independence from the political structures of African traditionalism. It was this impulse that had originally motivated them to move away during the 1860s from the political domain of the Pedi chief, Sekhukhune. Accounts of the Lutheran converts’ flight from the menace of Sekhukhune’s warriors are powerfully reminiscent of the Israelites’ flight from Egypt: When they arrived at the Tubatse River [now Steelpoort, see map], they crossed at a place where it was shallow. Sekhukhune’s warriors were behind them carrying spears. When these warriors were supposed to follow them across the river, great waves emerged, a flood came from the east and it started to fill the river. The warriors couldn’t cross the river to follow our parents and their saviour Merensky.16 The fleeing Lutherans, under Merensky’s guidance, then established themselves at the evocatively-named Botsˇhabelo (place of refuge). As with many land purchases at the time, Africans, taking advantage of a political 62

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dispensation allowed during Paul Kruger’s presidency of the ZAR and seizing a brief moment of opportunity before the passing of the 1913 Natives Land Act which was to legislate against Africans owning land outside the reserve areas, were here using a white ‘front’ to buy their farm. Fierce disputes over the farm’s true ownership ensued. To escape, and to secure land which would be incontrovertibly theirs, some of Merensky’s parishioners then raised money and initiated the purchase of the nearby farm Doornkop. The process of buying the farm was set in motion in the 1900s but took more than a decade to complete. In their dispute with the mission, strivings for territorial and political independence were merged, for some, with a wish to receive the truths of the gospel without missionary mediation. A number of the purchasers had followed an early convert, Marthinus Sebushane, in breaking away from the Berlin Mission Society and establishing the independent Bapedi Lutheran Church.17 Those remaining as mainstream Lutherans were later diverted to the ‘African’ wing of the church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of South Africa (ELCSA). A further group affiliated themselves, during the 1920s, to the Scots-born missionaries of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, which established an outpost on Doornkop. The community’s self-reliance puzzled the officials of what had now become South Africa’s Union Government. Authorities noted the purchasers’

Figure 2.3 Doornkop group photograph with Pentecostal missionaries, 1910.

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reluctance to ask for help or advice in buying the farm,18 and described their attitude as ‘most independent . . . and insolent’, explaining their ‘persistency’ by reference to their ‘sentimental attachment to the neighbourhood’.19 The basis for this attachment, and for the independence it generated, was to become the basis, almost a century later, of restitution’s ‘political demand for land’. The eventual restoration of the farm appears, retrospectively, to have vindicated the faith of the dispossessed. ‘I knew that through the power of prayer, God would one day bring us here’, said Rebone Ramaube. ‘My trust in God was ultimately confirmed by our coming back.’ Conversely, the difficulties people faced while ‘in exile’ are interpreted as an index of their loss of faith that the farm’s reclaiming would eventually be accomplished: Even the Bible confirms these things. I kept on referring them to the Bible, Isaiah 1: those who abandon their God will be punished. Yes, at Monsterlus [one of the resettlement areas, 10 on the map] we were suffering and that was God’s punishment for the fact that most people were beginning to lose hope in Him. Even in the book of Jeremiah, Chapter 5, it is said that the present laws are no longer being made by old people, but by children, and that we feed ourselves with difficulty. This was true because at Monsterlus we were not ploughing or growing our own food. We depended on buying everything. We were like the Israelites when they were in Egypt.20 All-in-all, title-holders’ retrospective accounts illuminate their present-day view of themselves and their relationship to their land, nourishing the belief that these lands, once reclaimed, should retain their independent status rather than becoming linked to any broader political or national structures. Such accounts invoke the authority of God, not as a motif to illustrate obedient membership of a missionary’s flock in his garden, but in support of sovereignty over their own swathe of the country, and of their right to run it as they please.

‘WE LONG FOR THE RELATIONSHIP WE USED TO HAVE’ The outrage expressed in these different accounts, whether Biblical in tone or focused on the violation of human rights, made for a simplified rendering of the story of ‘black spot’ removals. A picture is presented of a united group of people whose only obstacles have been those posed by the apartheid state. What is not portrayed is a range of social differentiations and conflicts. A key symbol of the former community’s togetherness is the church bell. When Elizabeth Maroga described her memory of her early childhood spent 64

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on the farm, she told of how everyone knew each other, how almost all were related, and how at the heart of this close-knit existence was the church. The church bell’s tones were so well-known that when it rang to call residents together they would know in advance the nature of the news they were to be given.21 The bell became a motif of another form of community solidarity. Its name was used for one among a sequence of age-groups (dithaka – s. sethaka). These paralleled closely the youth regiments of the Pedi heartland Sekhukhuneland, but rather than being initiated together their members were confirmed together in the Lutheran church. They were named in accordance with memorable events happening at around the time of members’ confirmation. One year, when the church bell was cracked, the group was accordingly named sethaka of the broken church bell (sethaka sa mausa tshipi). Others were named for more secular events: sethaka of chicken-stealing (sethaka sa mautswa dikgokgo) commemorated one member’s youthful mischief while sethaka sa matata a ma tala bore witness to a girl’s having fallen pregnant while ‘not yet ripened’. Confirmation meant that a young person was a ‘proper Christian’. It also – like its pagan equivalent koma – confirmed an adolescent’s readiness for marriage.22 Membership of the confirmation groupings integrated youths into a long-term set of community relationships by giving them an identity as a member of a specific peer group. These were particularly significant and enduring for women who, years after their confirmation, gave assistance to other members when one of their children, in turn, was confirmed or married. They made clothing, contributed money and food, and dressed in special and distinctive uniforms to commemorate these events as members of a group. Doornkop women’s regret that the forced removal had dispersed the members of the dithaka corroborated, in retrospect, the importance of these groups. Particularly memorable were occasions like Christmas, when children would assemble around the tree standing in the church to recite verses each had been given by the church minister (moruti); and Easter, when people prayed all night long and in the early hours of the morning proceeded to the farm’s graveyard to place candles on their forefathers’ graves. Elizabeth recalled a sense of plenty, which for her and others who lived there is captured in the memory of the peaches (diperekisi) they formerly cultivated and sold at nearby towns. But it was the sense of community rather than the thought of going back to the cultivation of peaches which inspired her to want to return after the farm’s reclaiming in 1994. ‘When I think of Doornkop, I feel I could fly and go there,’ she said. ‘We want to go back because we long for the relationship we used to have. Now we are split up and spread all over.’23 Community was defined by worshipping together, being confirmed together, and cultivating together on the farm. Memories about these experiences, sharpened by loss, set the parameters for a remembered community, but they also obscure divisions that had emerged within it. The farm’s occupants were 65

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Figure 2.4 Doornkop graveyard.

differentiated socio-economically; the division sharpened over time and had the effect of ‘scattering’ Doornkop’s descendants both geographically and socially. A division emerged between people who were still mainly living on the farm at the time of the 1974 removal and those who had moved, together with the economically active sections of their families, to nearby towns like Witbank and Middelburg or to Witwatersrand townships like Soweto and Daveyton. It is true that almost all Doornkop families had by this time come to rely on money earned in paid employment. But wage-earners in the former group were mostly blue-collar labour migrants residing in temporary ‘hostel’ accommodation while in town and returning to the farm at weekends. The latter, in contrast, had become permanently town-dwelling, house owning (or renting) and educated members of an African middle class. For members of this group, the experience of childhood on the farm – like that of Elizabeth Maroga, by 1997 a nurse at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto – was part of a life course which led inexorably to a relatively comfortable existence in town. The distinction between the two groupings was further entrenched at the moment of the forced removal. At this point, poorer people had little choice but to accept their transportation to the remote and inhospitable homeland ‘dumping grounds’ – Bothashoek, Monsterlus, Tafelkop (2, 10, 11 on the map on p. xvi) – and to set up house in the tin shelters which were then provided.24 Better-off people, in contrast, had heard about the move in advance and made alternative plans about moving their elderly relatives and 66

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the family’s rural assets to areas closer by. Correspondingly, after the farm’s reclaiming in 1994, many of those who returned had done so more out of necessity than choice. In contrast, those inclined rather to see the farm as a place for eventual retirement – or even a ‘weekend place in the country’ – were mostly town-based people with enough resources to make such a choice possible. ‘No-one ever had to go without,’ stressed Elizabeth Maroga, although acknowledging that there were differences of wealth.25 Her statement reveals the existence on the farm of patterns of paternalism binding richer to less well-off people. These resembled similar patterns among mission-based landowning communities elsewhere, such as those of the kholwa in Natal (La Hausse 2000; Marks and Rathbone 1982). The contemporary expression of this dependency has been the increasing reliance of poorer, less literate people upon members of the urban-based elite to represent them in the series of committees leading the land-back struggle, as discussed below. In the years between the farm’s return in 1994 and 2001 very few of those entitled to do so returned to live on the farm. One reason for this, apart from the most often cited fact of the lack of basic services, was a series of conflicts within the claimant community, centring mainly on the threat posed by those who want to ‘dwell or settle’ at Doornkop but are not entitled to do so. They are the Ndebele who originally lived and worked as labour tenants on surrounding white farms. A number of these people in the years before the forced removal had come to live at Doornkop as tenants and cultivated the land there, in the absence of many title-holders who had already left to pursue their education or careers in town. In debates about who has rights to claim portions of the farm, members of this group are spoken of as ‘sons-inlaw’. This denotes that it is only those Ndebele men who courted and married daughters of Doornkop while living on the farm or during the later period of exile who might be entitled to claim land rights on the farm. Current community opinion has it that a son-in-law may live and plough there, but only provided he is accompanied by his wife (the Doornkop daughter). An Ndebele son-in-law who tried to dodge this rule by arriving to settle with his second wife after the death of his first had his truck piled with possessions turned back at the gate to the farm.26 Reclaiming the land did not fufil its promise to reinstate the sense of community which is remembered as having been lost at the moment of the forced removal. Rebone Ramaube’s account, above, suggests that it was her tested and strengthened Christian faith which enabled her to live again amongst her own kind. Giving a similar impression was Eva Mokaungoe, who said ‘the law of Doornkop says that we should all be together, we cannot be scattered around’.27 This implies that returning to the farm would fulfil the promise of freedom sought by the original buyers. But there is a sense in which the loss of a moral community united by its common faith and practice – blamed upon the ‘scattering’ of Doornkop’s children – was irredeemable. As 67

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in other cases of restitution, such as that of District Six in Cape Town, their self-identification as a community may have been largely premised on their experiences of dispossession and later on their various diverse struggles to reclaim the area (Beyers 2005). Such a community might be even more difficult to reclaim than the land itself. In Magdalena Sehlola’s statement – ‘When we die we are brought back [for burial on the farm] so we can be together’ – is an implication that there is community only in death.

CUSTOM AND CHIEFS When Doornkop’s buyers renounced the missionary’s leadership and set up as independent property owners, their new life did not represent a complete break with the traditional past. The farm still came under the sway of a hereditary leadership. But the precise status of the chief has been a matter of dispute, becoming particularly contested after the chiefly family’s alleged

Figure 2.5 Angel tombstone, Doornkop.

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collaboration in the forced removal. Seth Ramaube, whose home near the rocky hill of the farm’s title was known to everyone as mosˇate (chief’s kraal), was the first in what became – albeit briefly, being cut short with the 1974 removal – a dynastic line. Being junior relatives or ‘children’ of the royal house of the Pedi chief Sekhukhune gave this family legitimacy, both for Doornkop residents and for state officials in the district who were putting together a system of ‘indirect rule’. But countering the idea that this family had a royal status, some residents insist in retrospect that it had been elected to its leadership role. They depict the Ramaubes as having occupied a role something more like spiritual guides or elected functionaries than traditional chiefs.28 What set them off from such chiefs, in particular, was the fact that they had no control over the allocation of land. The farm had been bought, and it thus belonged to all its title-holders.29 Joint land ownership by the community denied the Ramaubes of Doornkop the source of custom-like chiefly authority enjoyed by their counterparts in the African reserves which later became homelands. The descendants of Doornkop’s buyers represent themselves as self-governing, forward-looking, in favour of education and of improving the chances of the next generation, rather than being slavishly devoted to a chief like their counterparts in the homelands.30 They were thus more akin to the ‘citizens’ than to the ‘subjects’ of Mamdani’s book (1996). But it was not only the imperative of independence and modernity which shaped the attitudes of Doornkop people to their own particular chief. These attitudes also owe much to the experiences which led up to and followed their forced removal in 1974. Here, hindsight allowed people to draw a sharp contrast between the blind obedience of customary behaviour and the progressiveness – combined with stubborn independence – of land-owning Christians. By the time of the removals in 1974 the second Seth Ramaube had recently died, leaving his widow Miriam – designated ‘Tribal Authority’ by the apartheid state – to rule as regent in place of her young son, also called Seth. As in other cases of ‘black spot’ removals (Mulaudzi 2002), the chief was here thought of as having colluded with the apartheid government in relocating the farm’s title-holders from their land. What she has been blamed for, in particular, is her failure to prevent the influx of Ndebele tenants onto the farm in the 1960s and 1970s, and the resulting overcrowded and slum-like conditions. These, people say, provided the apartheid state with a justification for removing the farm’s entire population (James 1983). All-in-all, in a rather conspiratorial conception, this chief is alleged to have secretly plotted the removal ‘so, wherever we go, we would finally be under her control’.31 The impulse behind such a conspiracy, according to this line of narrative, is one which links chief and land as a means to dominate the inhabitants of that land once they have been resettled elsewhere. Miriam Ramaube is depicted as having been determined to separate her people from their 69

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independently owned farm and hence to make them completely subject. At the very least, she is seen as guilty by default: it was inadequate chiefly guidance, a failure to prevent the squatter influx and to stand up to the state which caused the loss of Doornkop title-holders’ property. This points to Christian landowners’ ambivalence about custom in general, and chiefship and customary leadership in particular. The story told here suggests a desire to have it both ways. Much of the antipathy towards the chief springs from the fact that she did not, in the end, behave as a chief ought to: she did not act as custodian of the land and protect it from invasion. But the ethos of communal land ownership suggests that title-holders ought to protect themselves rather than relying on ‘big men’ to do so.32

PEGGED PLOTS AND NAVEL CORDS By the mid-1970s, when human rights lawyers and officers in the NGO TRAC (then the Transvaal Rural Action Committee) had begun to concern themselves with Doornkop and other similar farms, the significance of the chiefly model of leadership was, in any case, beginning to diminish. In debates among exiled title-holders about how best to secure the farm’s return, modern and democratic forms of leadership had begun to predominate. But in the process of reclaiming the farm a subaltern custom-oriented discourse of leadership materialised. A deep cleavage split the prospective residents of the farm into two factions: the ‘modernisers’ and those espousing this ‘traditional’ approach. By the early to mid-1990s when official planning for the settlement of Doornkop was under way, disputes were so fierce, and the disputers so irascible, that the NGO for a period suspended its decades-long involvement with the redevelopment of the community. Visions of the future, and the forms of political representation which would ensure and safeguard these, became intensely contested issues. As long as these remained unresolved, it seemed, the farm would remain without its designated population. One faction was forward-looking. Their retrospective accounts portray each consecutive chairman of the succession of land-reclaiming committees as more modern and representative than his predecessor. A previous chair, for example, was seen as uneducated and as having had little knowledge about how to chair a meeting. His lack of consideration of his constituents’ opinions gave him the reputation of being authoritarian. His successor, by contrast, had a university education which equipped him to represent his constituents in the increasingly frequent dealings with people from the world of government and NGOs in which Doornkop leaders were needing to participate: The previous chairman is short of ‘heart’, short of temper. We 70

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thought the new one would be better as he has a ‘long heart’. And he is also educated. He can write. He used to take notes during meetings, unlike others who would just listen. When we went to report back . . ., or were arguing about something, he could recall exactly what had happened, with the help of his notes.33 It was this man and his fellow modernisers within the Management Committee who were charged with meeting government officials to arrange infrastructure such as water, sanitation and schools. During the course of these meetings, however, one of the older committee members and a few of his supporters expressed dissent: they wanted to settle on the plots they had previously occupied, and to return to living as small-scale cultivators. They wanted to go back to maruping (the place where one’s umbilicus is buried). The modernising group opposed this stance. Its members desired to live in the manner to which they had become accustomed in town, or – ironically – in the planned townships of the apartheid homelands to which they had been removed. They wanted a grid plan, tarred roads, street numbers, and the like. In the ensuing skirmishes the modernising group with its educated representatives enjoyed increasing pre-eminence. Its adversaries, with their leader modelled more on a customary chief and indeed related to the original Ramaube, lost popularity. The minority status of this latter group of diehards can be seen from the way its members were named. They were dubbed majela thoko (those who eat alone) or dingangele (those who contest or dispute) – terms used to describe opponents of a mainstream political view. They are alleged to have adopted guerilla-style tactics. They caused the mysterious disappearance, each night, of the pegs which local government officers had used to demarcate the new ‘planned’ plots where returning residents were to build their houses. When such tactics failed, the group’s leader Madileng Ramaube and his wife Rebone ignored the planners’ designs and returned to settle on their original plot. With the fields of corn which they resolutely planted, they encroached upon the surveyors’ neat grid plan. Several members of the diehard faction have simply remained in town. The conflict between them and the modernisers is yet another part of the explanation for why some of those who are entitled have not come back.

DEMOCRACY, REPRESENTATION AND THE NGOs If we examine the strategies of Doornkop’s Management Committee, and its relationship both to its constituency and to the wider political world with which it has interacted, we can see something of Doornkop people’s attitudes about political representation and democracy. This provides an 71

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insight into the relationship between owners’ independence and their reliance on structures and institutions within the broader political sphere. During the apartheid years, a succession of committees had engaged in alliances with actors on the political stage. Representations had been made to, and discussions held with, members of the then parliamentary opposition, Helen Suzman’s Progressive Party. But a more obvious political ally, the ANC, was not called upon – even after its unbanning – despite most Doornkop people having been clandestine supporters of this organisation. The reluctance to engage with the ANC is said to have stemmed from a need to avoid dividing the community through admitting conflicting political allegiance. Given that some title-holders belonged to smaller political parties such as the PAC and AZAPO, it was felt that evoking party loyalties would be a divisive tactic. It would undermine what for them – in this context at least – was more important: the unity symbolised by the land and the memory of that eloquent church bell. Owners’ independence predated party-political loyalties and was depicted by them as being more important than these. Rather than engaging with political parties, then, it was on the assistance of NGOs that the freeholders’ land-back committees had come to depend for help. But NGO workers, fired by the imperative to reverse the injustices of apartheid, experienced anxiety. The image they had built up of a community cruelly removed from its domicile was hard to reconcile with the reality. The fact that the sons and daughters of Doornkop, even before the

Figure 2.6 Naape Setoaba, Management Committee member, and view of Doornkop.

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removal, had been geographically scattered, and unequal in terms of status, wealth and influence, clashed with their picture of the utopian title-holding community: a picture which combined owners’ own descriptions of their past – like Elizabeth Maroga’s – with elements of internationalist development discourse (Mosse 1997; Wrangham 2005). The presumption of an egalitarian community engaging in participatory democracy was incompatible with Doornkop people’s increasing reliance, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, on an absentee educated elite to represent their interests. Forced primarily to deal with the members of this elite in its attempts to move forward with developing the farm, workers at the NGO sought instead to develop more immediate relationships with community members.34 Much effort was expended in finding ways to create direct links to ‘the community’: or, if representatives must be dealt with, to find some at least that emerged from the ranks of the poorest people rather than having been reared, as was the present chairman, through successive generations of an urbanised African middle class. In their keenness to eliminate leaders and brokers, these NGO activists failed to recognise that they themselves were acting as intermediaries, and that the broader process of reclaiming land – to which many of the land NGOs owed their existence – came about in the first place and has proceeded because of similar kinds of mediation. Many of the intermediaries in the NGOs have been members of the white middle class: their role is further explored in Chapter 9. Those outside the NGOs were people of ambiguous status, using their connection to – yet remoteness from – landowning communities to negotiate with broader political structures. The Reverend Othniel Phasha, radical theologian and author of the biblically-phrased letter cited earlier, has been enabled by his embeddedness within Doornkop to act as treasurer of the Management Committee, yet has transcended the local setting to play a role in broader land-based organisations such as LAMoSA. Another protagonist, Abey Maloma, campaigned for the restitution of several farms, even travelling to Parliament in 1991 to bring Doornkop and other farms such as Botsˇhabelo to the attention of the then opposition, the Progressive Federal Party, and its MP Helen Suzman. Doornkop’s claimants have both admired the achievements of these people and been suspicious about their bona fides. Perhaps, it was rumoured, neither was really entitled by descent to act on behalf of the community. Using much the same rhetoric as the NGO itself, Mr Phasha explained his involvement as resulting from the desire to get directly in touch with the people, and hence to forestall the involvement of other leaders, or of brokers with questionable motives: . . . I wanted the leadership to represent the community in the true sense of the word, and . . . I did not want either lawyers, TRAC, or the government to lie to the people. These things made the people 73

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trust me. I used to fight, especially when community leaders used to lie to the people. People in the government, TRAC, or whatever, should be bold enough and tell the community the truth. To lie to the people and make empty promises, because the community were building up their hopes in TRAC, government – the community would believe them. I used to take up the fight. I had the confidence of the people.35 In the process of reclaiming land, and later of development, a proliferation of competing brokers has emerged. Each has legitimated his entry into the fray as a means to prevent the undue influence of others (see Chapter 8). There is ambivalence in these accounts of leadership and representation. One one hand, the rank-and-file title-holders descended from the original 284 purchasers expect that their leaders, as educated and privileged beings, will interact with the wider world on their behalf to settle matters in which they themselves do not feel competent. On the other, an inclination towards self-reliance makes them distrust these leaders. People argue in meetings when Committee Members make decisions on their behalf which are not to their liking. ‘They have accused us of stealing. I am afraid even to go there to Doornkop, and admit that we have managed to achieve so little,’ said Kalushi William Kalushi, the Committee’s chair during the 1990s. He was acutely mindful of his constituents’ wishes and of the complex ways in which autonomy and dependence intersect. Even the modernising majority, like this chairman and his supporters who aligned themselves against the diehards and petitioned the government to request development, were nevertheless hesitant about allying themselves with national political parties because of the threat to the model of a united community. Shadowing owners’ fierce independence, at least within the modernising group, is a seemingly contradictory tendency towards resignation. This, according to NGO officers, could be seen at the 1994 restitution ceremony: after the highly emotional moment of reclaiming, with the flags, the press, the nationalist rhetoric . . . suddenly the officials and everybody else departed, and the people were just left there. They felt insecure. They did not go back to claim their original plots, they agreed rather that they needed a plan. ‘The government will come next week,’ they said. In the meantime, they built a squatter settlement, and called it ‘Crossroads’.36 These temporary shacks, a decade later, were mostly still in place. But this was not necessarily the result of meek and helpless dependency as this account implies. It must be understood, rather, in the context of NGO 74

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Figure 2.7 Magdalena Sehlola’s house.

expectations about self-empowerment. Dependency, for land NGOs like TRAC, was anathema, since it implied an inability to participate in creating the structures of one’s own upliftment or to ‘build capacity’. It suggested a reliance on others – leaders better off than oneself, the government, the broader political sphere. What the NGOs, and the diehards, saw as owners’ inability to fend for themselves as their forebears had done, Doornkop residents in the modernising faction experienced as the legitimate claims of a citizenry on its newly-elected government. The reliance on state initiatives can also be explained by apartheid South Africa’s peculiar version of state welfarism. Although the provision of housing, health, education and similar services showed marked inequalities, as is well known, its impact on many Africans, living in rural and urban areas alike, was to create and perpetuate a sense that only from the government could certain kinds of assistance and goods be obtained. It should be noted that there has been an increasing realisation, by people in all camps (and in Doornkop as in the country as a whole), that the electors of South Africa’s first democratic government were mistaken to expect all that government’s promises to be fulfilled. People have begun to recognise that they may need to practise participatory-style self-reliance – ironically, the kind the NGOs have always advocated – if there is to be any progress. ‘In the old days, if a dam was broken, we would fix it ourselves,’ said David Debeile, former chairman of the Committee and member of the ‘diehard’ group: 75

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Now people wait for the government to come and bring water. . . . We need to start collecting money so we can build our own schools, since the government has no money.37 To remedy such a situation, he seemed to be suggesting, the dependence of the citizen upon the state would of necessity be forced to give way to the autonomy of the independent farmer.

CONCLUSION What is the significance of the complex interplay between landowners’ independence and citizens’ legitimate reliance on the state? If one looks at the extensive use of Old Testament imagery by Doornkop’s owners, one might suggest that biblical metaphor cements the connection between land and people. To say this is not to make a primordial claim about land’s providing a source of ‘identity’, as the earlier quote from Commissioner Seremane suggested. Claims on land, whether apparently ‘primordial’ or deriving their authority from the Bible, must always be understood in political terms. When a breakaway mission group bought Doornkop a century ago, they did so in the context of an array of segregationist laws. After 1948 these laws fed into the harsher legislation of the apartheid regime. At the time, the state was assembling systems of African landholding which would lay the basis for apartheid’s version of indirect rule. Even missions such as those run at Botsˇhabelo by the Berlin Mission Society, although providing their converts with the basis of an existence separate from chiefly rule, were inclined to endorse the power of traditional-style chiefs within the communities they fostered, as well as underwriting converts’ obligations – in labour and taxation – to the holders of political power within the settler state (Delius 1983; Hexham and Poewe 1997). Title-holder narratives, in contrast to this acquiescence, stress the emancipatory experience of unfettered land access and speak of the promise of political sovereignty. But this sovereignty, briefly achieved in the early years of the twentieth century, was chimerical. The form of land tenure devised by the farm’s purchasers neither represented a complete opposition to the customary, chief-governed tenure of the reserves nor did it embody principles of private and individual ownership. The option for which the buyers settled was a form of communal ownership. According to this model, dependent relationships between the poor and those who were becoming middle class were underpinned by ideas of guidance and custodianship. The communality of land attempted to negate the differences between title-holders by glossing them as ‘children of Israel’. Despite being ‘scattered in the wilderness’, all were united by virtue of being sons of the soil. The Bible offered a repertoire of images for describing and legitimating 76

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title-holders’ autonomy, while nonetheless endorsing the fundamentally communal and interdependent nature of its protagonists. Christianity was, in this sense, a political phenomenon.38 Religion and its secular dimensions were fused, making Christianity, for Doornkop’s Pedi owners, a truly ‘civil religion’ as were other Protestant denominations for white farmers living in the neighbourhood and beyond (Moodie 1975). At the same time, however, the language of the Bible did not lay the basis, amongst all those seeking land, for a broader political unity: the absence of such a unifying discourse has been much lamented by activists working in land reform (Levin 1996; Levin and Weiner 1994). Although the scripture of land ownership – and its corollary, the scripture of land loss – endorsed strongly-felt emotions which tied communal groups of people to specific farms and gave them a ‘sentimental attachment to [particular] neighbourhoods’, it has not, despite events such as the Durban meeting, politicised the link between land and people more generally. It would be for other categories of ‘landless’ in the district and beyond, and for the lawyers and NGO officers attempting to broaden the exclusivist remit of restitution, to take up this challenge.

Notes 1 This division is perhaps best-known in the context of Zulu society in the former Natal, where mission converts were termed kholwa, but has been equally pervasive among other language groups of South Africa, including the speakers of SePedi who bought Doornkop. 2 Not all ‘black spot’ victims had purchased their farms. In some cases, ownership approximated the kind of tribal tenure which existed in the reserve or homeland areas. The farm Brakfontein, for example, was owned by a chief on behalf of his followers, having been ‘given to the Mampuru people by Stephanus Grove, a representative of President Paul Kruger, in 1881’ (Land Update 29:14). 3 This farm is not the only Doornkop to have been confiscated during the apartheid regime and restituted in the new South Africa. Doornkop near Ventersdorp in the Transvaal was restored to its former owners in 1995. See ‘Twenty years after the Doornkop community’s land was given to white farmers, the commission on land restitution restored their ownership’ Evidence wa ka Ngobeni, Mail & Guardian, 23 June 1999. 4 Copy of ‘The Constitution of Doornkop 42’ dated 26 November 1933, in Doornkop file kept by Kalushi William Kalushi. 5 Geoff Budlender, LRC, Johannesburg, 16 January 2001. 6 Geoff Budlender, LRC, Johannesburg, 16 January 2001. 7 The only restitution claim settled in Mpumalanga during 2002 – that of Kalkfontein – cost a total of R1.6 billion. Activists argued that the amount of money and energy expended on restitution would have been better directed towards projects that would benefit a wider range of people – especially poor ones. 8 Hall and Williams (2003); Ruth Hall, Ed Lahiff, Peter Jacobs, PLAAS, Cape Town, 5 January 2003. 9 Theunis Roux, CALS, Johannesburg, 22 November 2002, see also Brown et al. (1998).

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10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38

Kwape Mmela, Johannesburg, 21 November 2003. Durkje Gilfillan, LRC, Johannesburg, 19 January 2001. Godfrey Mathobela, Doornkop, 14 July 1997. These invocations had been used during the Pedi revolt of the 1950s in Sekhukhuneland (Delius 1996). Letter from Rev Othniel Phasha, 13 March 1992, in Doornkop file kept by Kalushi William Kalushi. These included TRAC Newsletter, published by regional NGO TRAC (Transvaal Rural Action Committee, later The Rural Action Committee), and Land Update, put out by the National Land Committee, the national body which co-ordinated the efforts of the regional land NGOs. Rebone Mmasegobe Ramaube, Doornkop, 17 July 1997. This church was subsequently categorised by Sundkler, in retrospect, as the first of the Ethiopian Churches which emphasised ‘Africa for the Africans’ (1961). Letter from Sub Native Commissioner, Middelburg, to Secretary for Native Affairs, 15 May 1906. Letter from Department of Native Affairs to Minister of Native Affairs, 7 December 1915. Rebone Mmasegobe Ramaube, Doornkop, 17 July 1997. Elizabeth Maroga, Soweto, 2 December 1997. Rebone Mmasegobe Ramaube, Doornkop 17 July 1997. Elizabeth Maroga, Soweto, 2 December 1997. This was the classic scenario of forced resettlement described in much of the advocacy literature in South Africa (Desmond 1971; Surplus Peoples Project 1983). Elizabeth Maroga, Soweto, December 1997. Kalushi William Kalushi, Johannesburg, 12 May 1997. Eva Moukangoe, Doornkop, 21 May 1997. Dorcas Phala, Eva Mankge and Makgwane Maseje, Doornkop, 19 May 1997; David ‘Frank’ Debeile, Soweto, 10 December 1997; Doornkop Workshop, information for submission, March 1992, Doornkop file kept by Kalushi William Kalushi. Josephine (Sophie) Ngcobo, Soweto, 4 December 1997. David ‘Frank’ Debeile, Soweto, 10 December 1997. Josephine (Sophie) Ngcobo, Soweto, 4 December 1997. The committee, according to one view, had by this time become ‘weak’ and had hence failed to take action to prevent the influx of tenants into Doornkop. Doornkop Workshop: information for submission, March 1992, Doornkop file kept by Kalushi William Kalushi. Abey Malele, Soweto, 14 December 1997. Greg Jacobs and Melinda Swift, TRAC, Johannesburg, 6 March 1997. Rev Othniel Phasha, Mhluzi township, 19 May 1997. Greg Jacobs and Melinda Swift, TRAC, Johannesburg, 6 March 1997. David Debeile, Soweto, 7 December 1997. This assertion is contrary to weaker claims that its converts – through a long ‘conversation’ – were more persuaded by its secular facets than by its religious dimension (J and JL Comaroff 1991, 1997).

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3 EXPANDING RESTITUTION The question of informal rights

We want to go back because we lived there, farming and keeping livestock. I was born and bred there, I grew up farming, and I want to go back, to feed my children and my children’s children. (Mr Mthethwa, land claimant) Property is, ultimately, about mediation . . . after vesting the rights, how you enforce those (after having engaged in the legal processes) is sheer negotiation. (Durkje Gilfillan, human rights lawyer and former Restitution Commissioner)

INTRODUCTION: CONTINUING ‘WHERE THEY LEFT OFF’ The demand for land of claimants such as Doornkop’s title-holders was, in essence, a demand for the restoration of lost rights. It might appear from the case of Doornkop, however, that high-minded contestations over conceptualisations of rights were of less interest to claimants themselves than divisive matters of ethnicity, religion, descent, the relative advantages of modernity or the traditional way, and where or where not to plant one’s rows of corn. But surveys conducted in the new province of Mpumalanga as a whole revealed that the restoration of historical rights had an abiding importance, even from the perspective of constituencies beyond former title-holders. The general African public was committed to ‘righting the wrongs of the past, providing . . . security of occupation, and [re-establishing] traditional and cultural ties with the land’ rather than simply to farming or making a living from it.1 Similar attitudes had been expressed by participants in a National Land Conference held in 1994. Compared with the alternative of redistribution, restitution was seen ‘as the more legitimate route . . . people want to “continue where they left off” ’ (Levin 1996:374). 79

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Thus, although it is arguably the case that the highest-profile episodes of land dispossession were those – like Doornkop – in which better-off people who had held formal title to their land were violently relocated at a single, and relatively recent, moment in time, there was also a wider ‘political demand for land’ (Dolny 2001:100). This was a demand generated by episodes less visible to the media, in which tenants or so-called ‘squatters’ had lost their rights over the course of many decades. But this demand, although perhaps keenly felt by such people during the decades since their slow dispossession, was sharpened by the promise of getting the land back. It was sharpened, in particular, by the process of evidence-gathering. The government required proof that such people had, indeed, held rights to land in the past, albeit only informal ones. The emphasis on informal rights (rather than, say, on ‘indigenous’ ones) owes much to South Africa’s liberal legal legacy and to the early presence of human rights lawyers in the Restitution Commission, as the Introduction explains. Leading the move in Mpumalanga to emphasise such rights was Durkje Gilfillan, lawyer at the Legal Resources Centre who served as Restitution Commissioner for Mpumalanga under Derek Hanekom (Minister of Land Affairs) before returning to the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) after 1999. Pursued with vigour by this Commissioner, the emphasis on informal rights survived her departure from that office. Long after she left government to resume her position within the LRC, officers in the Commission were continuing to carry out the mandate she had established. It has been her influence and that of like-minded colleagues, they claim, which has made several heretofore unthinkable land claims possible. Mpumalanga restitution officers speak fondly of Gilfillan as their ‘mother’, and of themselves, her metaphorical children, as the ‘babies of restitution’.2 Given the prospect of success by informal rights, the demand for land has thus found expression amongst those who might not formerly have entertained much hope of having such a demand satisfied. For former holders of such rights, their interests – and even their demand itself – have been shaped in the course of important social interactions. These interactions have taken place not only, as outlined in the previous chapter, with land activists in the NGOs and human rights lawyers such as Gilfillan. There have been intensive interactions with members of the emerging political elite: especially those in the ranks of the civil service and, in particular, people who were appointed to positions in the Restitution Commission itself. These people have been instrumental in directing and intensifying the commitment to getting the land back. First, these office-holders have been entrusted with the duty to ascertain precisely who is entitled to acquire land under the new dispensation and, in the process, to ‘verify’ the rights of such people through a series of procedures which combine evocative explorations of originary cultural landscapes with stifling bureaucratese. Second, many of these officers are drawn from the ranks of those who aspire, themselves, to get land back. They thus 80

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both mediate between the state and other beneficiaries of the process, and are themselves direct beneficiaries of the process. These officers, like the rank-and-file claimants they assist, have had to find recognisable and verifiable proof that they or their forefathers once lived on the land. This need for proof of what the jargon calls ‘beneficial occupation’ has led to the sharpening of memory and to an increased awareness, even a rewriting and rethinking, of history. In the attempt to find fixed proof of land occupancy, chiefs have attempted to challenge their subordination by other leaders; aspirant kings have tried to reconstitute empires; subjects have rejected their leaders and sought alternative affiliation; and anthropologists, restyled as consultants, have collected genealogies and traced the location of graves, cattle byres and initiation lodges. Graves, in particular, have acquired a heightened significance as sites for the concentration of social memory.

INFORMAL RIGHTS: THE CHEGO AND MASHA CLAIMS Restitution on the basis of informal rights posed problems of evidence. It was not difficult for claimants to satisfy the terms of the Restitution Act by proving that they had been removed from their lands by ‘racially discriminatory legislation’. The legislation was that issued in terms of Chapter 4 of the Natives Trust and Land Act of 1936, which had converted these occupiers into ‘illegal squatters’ and made their presence ‘unlawful’, thus effectively denying their land rights. The process of dispossession had been a slow one rather than occurring at a single moment. In a historical study of the area south of the Steelpoort River, Stefan Schirmer examines the gradual effect of this legislation, showing how the struggle for the land was waged within the district as a whole rather than over specific farms. If a family’s land rights were not able to be realised on one farm because of encroaching restrictions exercised by the farmer in compliance with the Act, then they could still be secured through that family’s ability to move from one farm to another (Schirmer 1994, 1995:522–3). But such freedom of movement was gradually whittled away, leaving some families little option but eventually to relocate into the homeland. An examination of the brown folders in the office of the Mpumalanga Restitution Commission showed that it was relatively simple for claimants to prove such removal, and to prove that no compensation had been offered. It simply necessitated the re-use of roughly the same form of words in each of an endless succession of documents. Actually finalising their claims on the basis of informal rights, however, proved to be much more tricky. Added to the kinds of disputes that had come to the fore even in allegedly straightforward restitution cases such as Doornkop, new sorts of contestations and problems emerged. Given the lack 81

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4 Land rights claimed . . . claimants were dispossessed of their unregistered rights of beneficial occupation of the property for a continuous period of not less than 10 years prior to dispossession. . . . Their relatives’ graves are on the farm and they have no free access to them. 5 Basis for the claim . . . past discriminatory law in terms of Proclamation 177 of 1956, issued in terms of Chapter 4 of the Natives Trust and Land Act 1936 (18 of 1936) [which] created separate living areas for people in SA based on their race . . . they were then deemed to be illegal squatters and their presence was ‘unlawful’. 6 Circumstances of removal . . . Africans could only stay provided they gave labour . . . they were told to leave for released areas that were reserved for African settlement. 7 Compensation None, as they held informal rights and hence were not liable. 8 Post dispossession profile No land found for them – they had to look on their own and ended up in areas like Ga Masha in Sekhukhuneland.

Figure 3.1 Proving the racial discrimination basis of loss of informal land rights. Source: files in the office of Restitution Commission, Mpumalanga.

of visible proof such as a title deed, there were greater possibilities for multiple claimants on any given piece of land. This placed more stringent demands on the officers charged with the bureaucratic process known as ‘claimant verification’, since this required extensive investigation into oral histories – notoriously inconsistent and subjective – alongside site visits to the lands in question to seek for visible proof. The inevitable result was further deferral of claims and frustration of heightened expectations.

The Chego claim One such case was that of a claim made by the Chego family group. During the Christmas vacation of 2001–2002, the South African newspapers reported a shocking event: one which would bring a heretofore unknown family to the nation’s attention, and which has since led to their almost daily mention on the radio. An open truck carrying about 50 members of the Chegos and related families had been on its way from their present place of residence – in the former Lebowa homeland at Magukubyana – back to gravesites at their original home around Tigerhoek to undertake an ancestral ritual. It had overturned on a steep and slippery mountain pass. There were 43 fatalities. In the furore which followed the shocking accident, the claimants’ misfortunes were settled on as symbols of broader problems. The accident itself was immortalised in a radio advertisement promoting road safety, but it also pushed the family’s ever-sharpening dissatisfaction about its 82

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unresolved land claim into the public gaze, making these an emblem of similar frustrations nationwide. One of the provincial Restitution Commissioners put in a special appearance at the funeral. He made a series of promises, asserting (rashly, as it later turned out) that the Chegos’ claim would be ‘fasttracked’ and implying that other, similar claims would likewise be settled speedily. Although it was the story of this accident that had brought the Chegos’ claim to my immediate attention, my knowledge of the longer-term history of this and related families’ gradual relocation from the white farming areas south of the Steelpoort River dated from an earlier period of fieldwork (James 1987). I knew that the grandparents of the present claimants, subjects of the Pedi paramount chief, had lived a semi-nomadic existence, cultivating and herding cattle, on the lands on either side of the river they called Tubatse in the area known by the same name. (This was the same river whose waters had miraculously parted, in biblical fashion, to allow the future occupants of the mission-oriented farm Doornkop to escape from Sekhukhune’s warriors.) The arrival of white settlers in the valley in the 1920s led to these lands being surveyed, fenced and named as specific farms: Buffelskloof, Luiperdshoek, Standdrift, Tigerhoek, Groothoek.3 The river, called Steelpoort by the settlers, was then designated as the boundary between white South Africa and the ‘native reserve’ of Sekhukhuneland, and the occupants of the land on this side of the river, now officially white-owned, were pressed into various forms of labour tenancy. By the time the older Chego claimants had grown to adulthood, around the 1940s, the demands of tenancy had become onerous. Justifying their actions by statements such as ‘there cannot be two farmers on a single farm’, white farmers were beginning to insist that tenants reduce the size of their substantial cattle herds. They were also unhappy that many of the young men residing on their farms were not available to do farm labour, but rather were spending at least six months of the year as migrant workers in Johannesburg. Under these conditions, families had begun to move away, resettling on other white-owned farms or within the ‘native reserve’ of Sekhukhuneland. Their relocation, although not ‘forced’ in the same sense as some of South Africa’s most notorious removals – like that of Doornkop – nonetheless took place under some duress. The fact that the process of resettlement was more gradual than the ‘black spot’ removals meant, however, that members of extended families were strung out across the countryside over time rather than having being resettled at a particular moment. Related families from groups of neighbouring white-owned farms, hearing about the prospects for a freer life, moved to new homes in close proximity to one another: this is how some of the Chegos and other families, with long-standing ties of marriage, were in a position to continue these marriage alliances after the move had taken place. But each relocating family branch left other sections of the 83

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family on the white farms. I discovered that there were presently seven Chego households still living at their original home, on and around the farm Tigerhoek. These remaining families had been included, alongside their scattered relatives, in the Chegos’ land claim. The continued presence of Chego family members on the white farms enabled some continuity in the relationship which their diaspora counterparts managed to sustain with their lands. The Chegos-in-exile had made visits back to the white-owned farms at Tubatse for weddings and funerals, and returned to the farms to tend graves and propitiate their ancestors (phasa badimo). Increasing substantially since the ‘land-back’ promises made in the run-up to the 1994 election, it was this ritual traffic reaffirming the connection to their ancestral homes that had resulted in the fatal accident. The social and cultural profile of claimants like the Chegos, although far from homogeneous, differed somewhat from that of title-holder communities. The family had diversified socio-economically since leaving the farms at Tubatse, but virtually all had depended upon migrant labour at some point in their lives. Its members ranged from archetypally ‘rural’ older people – retired men and their wives whose primary aim was to expand their cattlekeeping and ploughing activities – to younger ones who worked as labour migrants or, increasingly, were unemployed. There were also a few towndwelling teachers and civil servants. Virtually all were church-goers, but more belonged to the African independent churches which accommodate ancestral ritual and which are favoured by poorer labour migrant/country-dwellers (Comaroff 1985) than to the mainstream mission churches. Having got to know some members of the Chego family during fieldwork in the 1980s, and having later read press reports of the accident, I started to investigate their motivations for returning to Tubatse. Mmapaseka Mohale, a student who was working as my assistant, was also conducting her own independent research into the family’s land claim. The Chegos became anxious about our sudden interest and called us to a Sunday morning meeting. They wanted an explanation of why we were asking these questions. Responding to their call, we drove along the rough dirt road towards Magukubyana. The road led away from some of the more densely-populated parts of the former homeland, through smaller settlements and their fields, towards the edge of the escarpment where the high ground plunged steeply down towards the Steelpoort River. (Had we driven a little further rather than taking the turn-off to the village, we’d have been able to overlook the Steelpoort valley where the Chegos had originally lived.) We followed directions to the yard where the meeting was to be held. A group of people were sitting on wooden benches under a tree. Dignified old women in peasant-style cotton pinafores were clustered on one side. The grey-bearded community elders in the centre of the circle, wearing worn clothes and overalls, were clearly taking a morning’s rest from ploughing and cattle herding. Younger men and women in Sunday best were still arriving 84

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in car-loads from other settlements closer to the main regional town of Groblersdal. One of them, a teacher, chaired the meeting. After observing the opening formalities, he turned to us, voicing the Chegos’ worry that we were ‘spying’ for a rival group of claimants. But eventually he and his fellow claimants accepted our heartfelt assurances that this was not so. We were then asked whether we could give any advice and help in bringing their delayed claim to the attention of the authorities. On the basis of investigations we had been conducting into restitution procedures, we talked of the sheer weight of claims in Mpumalanga which the Commission was having to process. The Commission’s task had recently been augmented by a Land Claims Court judgement that holders of informal rights – like the Chegos themselves – were entitled to lay claims alongside former title-holders. This had opened the floodgates to a variety of claims from people who had not previously regarded themselves as entitled. But it was difficult for the Commission to confirm who had held such rights, and to which pieces of land.4 The issue of informal rights, we pointed out, might have presented particular problems in this case. Delays in the case had probably been exacerbated by rival claims to the same farm. A member of the Madihlaba family (one of those connected in marriage to the Chegos over several generations, and the one for whom we had been suspected of spying) had also named Tigerhoek as his ancestral land. The Commission’s project officers would be sending out fieldworkers to accompany claimants on exploratory walks on the farm, in order to confirm whether families could identify the sites of their cattle kraals and graves. If two rival claimant families were found to have knowledge of these key ‘cultural sites’, it might be concluded that both had enjoyed informal rights on the same farm: some way would have to be found of sharing the land between them. I later discovered from a Commission officer that this was indeed a factor stalling the Chego claim and many like it. The existence of rival claims, and the lack of skilled manpower within the Commission, had made it necessary to appoint a consultant to attend to ‘claimant verification’. But this had not yet been done. The Masha claim We drew their attention to an alternative strategy followed by a group – the subjects of chief Masha – whose land claim had recently been successful. Would it not be better to incorporate and unite with rival claimants, as the Mashas had done, rather than competing with such claimants? Also based on informal rights, the Mashas’ claim, centred on the farm Kalkfontein (E on the map on p. xvi), had been settled two years previously in 2000. What I had found out about this case, however, suggested that it was not merely the strategy followed which distinguished it from the Chegos’ claim. The Mashas, although never holding title to their land, had been forcibly removed 85

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from it. The eventual resolution of the case was thus facilitated by the claimants’ longstanding involvement with human rights lawyers and land NGOs in the wake of the forced resettlement. The involvement of these activists had been sparked not only by the evident injustice of the removal, but also by the fact that the claimants had links to political organisations and labour unions: links initiated before the moment of the removal itself, but strengthened by the experience of outrage which that removal generated. The forebears of Kalkfontein’s claimants, having lived on the site since the mid-nineteenth century, had, like the Chegos, continued to reside there after the land was demarcated into farms and settled by whites in the 1920s. Living under their chief, however, it appears that they were never transformed into a resident farm labour force as the Chegos had been: instead they had retained some autonomy on their land. It was this, enabling a livelihood as full-blown labour migrants rather than combining this with farm labour, that had laid the basis for well-developed union connections and political ties. It was this, too, that led to continual harassment by the soldiers and police of the segregationist regime even before the 1948 coming-to-power of Malan’s Afrikaner Nationalist Government. The eviction was officially endorsed and finally carried out by the army only after the 1948 election. When the threats of forced resettlement gathered momentum, many of the farm’s residents, having worked as migrants on the Reef and having cultivated urban-based political connections, called upon their ANC colleagues to help them resist. There were well-documented visits to the farm by the ANC’s Ruth First, among others. Also playing a part had been members of the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), a relatively short-lived but nonetheless significant precursor to South Africa’s later active trade union movement. It was these links and networks which were later to facilitate easier verification, given the high levels of media coverage afforded to the case at the moment of removal. This prominence in the media and in the files of government correspondence at the time had left a clear trail of evidence of rights – albeit ‘informal’ ones – for present-day restitution officers to use.5 The Kalkfontein claim, when it was lodged, drew on all these connections as well as on the support of the farm’s former residents and their descendants. Like the Chegos, the evicted occupants had settled north of the Steelpoort River in various parts of the reserve which later became the Lebowa homeland. In the customary manner, each of these settlement venues came to be known after the name of the chiefly family – as ‘GaMasha’ (the place of the Mashas). Some went to live with their chief himself – and later his successor – at the farm Strydkraal deep in the heart of Lebowa (1 on the map on p. xvi); some settled on the formerly white-owned farm Goedehoop which was later incorporated into Lebowa (4 on the map); and others settled in a part of Lebowa that was closer to their original home: at Apiesboom just across the Steelpoort River (8 on the map). 86

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In sum, there were differences between the Mashas and the Chegos in terms of the forcible nature of the removal, the levels of political involvement and influence, the media profile and the availability of evidence that they had been unjustly dispossessed of their land. But this should not, we suggested, make it impossible for the Chegos to follow the Mashas’ strategic lead. Led by their politically influential and far-sighted chief (a further point of difference), the Masha clan had incorporated rather than excluded its rivals by claiming nine farms on behalf of a range of interrelated families who had previously lived in the area: families which, on their own, would have lacked the networks and know-how necessary to jump through the bureaucratic hoops in order to make their claims in time for the deadline. Chief Masha had made clear his benevolent intentions by stating that he would relinquish particular farms by dropping these from the claim if specific families subsequently decided to individuate their own claims. Based on this and other examples, we suggested that cases uncomplicated by the demands of competing groups might receive preferential treatment by the Commission. Might the Chegos settle their differences with rival claimants rather than relying on the Commission, at much cost in time and resources, to do so? Whatever the contrasts with other more successful claimants, what all had in common was a revived interest in ancestral graves and associated artefacts of African ‘customary practice’ such as cattle byres. When the Commissioner or the hired consultant finally arrived, these customary sites would, it was hoped, serve as the markers of their former entitlements and hence as proof of their claim’s validity. Their suspicion of rival claimants was an index of, but perhaps served as a displacement for, the heightened expectations and resulting frustrations aroused by the promise of land restitution based on informal rights.6 Claims investigated in this way have generally proved as problematic as this case suggests. It was not only the difficulties of verification and the protagonists’ inability to unite strategically with counter-claimants that made it less likely to be heard. What also counted against them was the relative weakness of their ties to those with influence: whether in the government or in the human rights legal sector. The political demand for land of such claimants has perhaps been less concerted than that of other communities, largely because they possess less political clout and ‘cultural capital’ (Beyers 2005). But measured in terms of the suffering engendered by racially discriminatory legislation, the Chegos had certainly been subjected to indignities and difficulties as severe as those of the Doornkop or Kalkfontein communities, even if these were not concentrated into so short a period of violent disruption.

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LAND AND DISPUTED HISTORIES IN THE LOWVELD My discussions with both the Chego family and different segments of the Masha group confirmed a pattern of which I had become aware from numerous other conversations with claiming groups. The ‘land-back’ pledge made before the 1994 elections, with its promise of a former life regained, had sparked intense interest in the past. The pledge had proved particularly decisive for people, like the Chegos, who before 1994 had not actively entertained the possibility of returning to their previous homes. For such holders of informal rights, the undertakings of ANC politicians had the effect of emphasising land and the past life it symbolised. This interest was progressively sharpened, even streamlined, by the technical demands of the claiming process itself. People, often secretively, accompanied officers on strolls across the familiar contours of their former homes and pointed out the sites of cattle byres and ancestral graves. The re-awakening of memory, demonstrated by the story of the Chegos, was also evident in a number of other related cases in the Mpumalanga Lowveld. This process of remembrance also signals a more general re-engagement with the glorious African past and has found expression in the sometimes self-conscious reworking of history by recently-appointed public servants holding important office. At a more local and modest level, its effects are less ambitious and grandiose, more immediate. But both are underpinned by a spirit of cultural revivalism. In elite and popular consciousness alike, there is evidence of a renewed commitment to the traditional values of cattlekeeping and ploughing, interest in the rituals of initiation and circumcision, and dedication to ancestral propitiation and to maintaining the graves where this is pursued. All these practices are pursued within an overarching framework of African-style independent Christianity, which itself represents a hybrid of mission forms and customary rituals (Comaroff 1985). Located ambiguously between the elite and the more humble polarities of this continuum are officers in the Commission. Having worked with claimants on an everyday basis and acquired a thorough acquaintance with the contents of the National Archives on behalf of these claimants and of themselves, they find themselves newly fascinated with their own and their clients’ intertwined pasts. Their rediscovery of roots, although it might be seen as motivated by the promise of land gain, goes beyond mere material acquisitiveness. It is here that land in its symbolic aspect has part of its resonance. Regaining it is tied up with bids for power in the contemporary political world as well as signifying a more neutral restitution of history. In the early days of restitution, before it had become clear that claims needed to be clearly-bounded and verifiable (and despite the 1913 cut-off date), there were several submissions which represented an attempt to recapture the glorious past of ancient chiefdoms. Soon after learning of the 88

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restitution process, the Mashego clan association, which met annually to collect money for bereavement and annual celebrations, resolved to lay a claim. They aimed at the restoration of a huge area south of the Olifants River, stretching from the Vaal River and along the KwaZulu-Natal–Free State border to Swaziland (encompassing the entire area of the map on p. xvi, and beyond). They did this under the umbrella of the broader Sothospeaking Mapulana polity, which had ‘occupied the area before the Swazis came’.7 Such grandiose claims were later dismissed by Commission officers as ‘frivolous’ on the grounds that they dated back to the dawn of the colonial period. They referred to a time when the disputes over territory were between the chiefs of competing African polities rather than between white farmers and black tenants. The dismissal was also prompted by the fact that the claim was attempting to reinstate the jurisdiction of a chiefly polity rather than reflecting the land rights (based on actual use) of particular families. Although the Mashegos were then persuaded by their Project Officer to make a more realistic and supposedly ‘verifiable’ claim to the farms where their members had actually lived – around eight in number and centred on the ‘anchor farm’ of Roodewaal (G on the map on p. xvi) – it was clear that the restitution process had initially stirred imperial, and tribally divisive, visions of the African past. These were not only oriented to history, but also linked to the contemporary status of those lodging the claims. The chairman elected to represent the community was a person of some standing in the world of local politics, having been an activist during the apartheid era in South Africa’s dissident civic associations and in the trade union movement. Having earlier assumed a more ‘coloured-sounding’ surname (in part to disguise himself from his pursuers in the South African police), his current role as lead land claimant echoed his involvement with a more Africanist identity politics which highlighted his descent from the original chief Mashego. Urbane and obviously comfortably off, there may have been some opportunism alongside a genuine search for identity in his rediscovery of African roots. Similarly chimerical, yet motivated by equally intense visions of lost imperial splendour, were chiefly attempts to regain land across international borders of more than a century’s standing. Chief Mlambo Mahlalela attempted to lodge a claim on a vast swathe of land crossing both the Swazi and Mozambican borders, as Restitution Commission officer Philip Mbiba told me: . . . he is supposed to be a chief of the Swazi. He is claiming land in Swaziland, saying that his forefathers were never aware, when they put up the international boundary, that it was anything more than just a cattle fence. He also claims he lost land, jurisdiction, and tribute, in respect of some land which was demarcated as part of Mozambique. These people, although technically within Mozambique, have paid 89

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allegiance to Mahlalela: they get South African pensions, voted for the South African government, intermarry with people on the South African side of the border. Mahlalela’s unrealisable aspirations, apparently founded on memories of the historically distant European conquest, were in fact prompted by present and immediate events. He felt his authority was under threat from restitution claims by other groups who, for a time, had acknowledged him as chief. These claims, in turn, had been laid in order to reverse the effects of earlier state-planned resettlements. The process of claiming land, by a domino effect, was thus inducing a sense of insecurity among earlier occupiers. This was evident from Mahlalela’s fears. During the 1950s, he had given refuge to the subjects of chief Ngomane, forcibly removed from their land at Ten Bosch. The latter, in one of South Africa’s biggest restitution cases, have now made a bid to return to their home, claiming 350,000 hectares in the area between Nelspruit and the Mozambique border. This claim, according to Mbiba, poses a threat to Mahalela’s power and sovereignty and causes him great trepidation: ‘Mahlalela wonders, if the Ngomane get their land at Ten Bosch back, what will happen to him? He will lose tribute – he says he is no longer even a chief.’ The transnational knock-on effects of restitution claims and counterclaims seem to be limitless. Harking back to the pre-conquest map of the area, Swazi authorities, in turn, were lodging claims to swathes of South Africa: Likewise, the king of Swaziland says he used to have indunas (headmen) as far as Badplaas and Wakkerstroom. There . . . are subjects of Swazi princes . . . who are living in South Africa.8 Such claims, far larger-scale than the Chego or the Masha families’ ones in Tubatse, are in the Commission officers’ words also more ‘frivolous’ than these. In short, they are unrealisable. Since restitution is not a cross-border policy, the Swazi monarchy eventually resigned itself to attempting to resolve these matters through straightforward land purchase. But this approach backfired: There is the case of the Dlamini princess who owns land in South Africa next to the Swazi border. She is part of Tibiyo Taka Ngwane – a movement initiated by King Mswati to re-acquire some of South Africa’s land. Many of Mswati’s subjects are here in the Transvaal, have South African ID documents, and the like. Some of them bought farms and have title. Princess Dlamini bought land, took out huge loans from the Swazi bank, but could not repay them. They are now auctioning some of these farms . . .9 90

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The Swazi royalty’s reversion to land purchase, on a much broader and more ambitious scale, echoes a strategy of many who have lodged more modest restitution claims. Frustrated by their inability to prove historical ‘rights’, whether informal or informal, many claimants have satisfied their demands by simply buying ‘property’: either through the older redistribution programme or independently (Beinart 2001:320–1, see Chapter 7).

ELITE AND COMMONER HISTORIES These cases show how the historical memories evoked through restitution signal the waxing and waning of chiefly authority. The Ngomanes’ huge claim at Ten Bosch, which aroused Mahlalela’s fears, illustrates how the joint power of land and history may buttress the authority of the new political elite. Here, figures at the margins of the claiming process have coat-tailed on its central protagonists’ re-engagement with the past. They have other sources of influence, which restitution – and the history that goes with it – promises to augment. Jeri Ngomane, in 2002 the new mayor of Ehlenzeni, claims not to ‘know anything about the claim . . . it is my elders who are organising it’. But he has nonetheless developed an intense interest in the history of his forebears, which closely parallels the progress of restitution. Glorifying his family name also bolsters his position within the framework of re-ethnicised politics which the ANC in Mpumalanga was promoting. His vision of the ‘lost kingdom’ blended internet and archival sources in Britain and South Africa with his elders’ oral accounts, and which restitution had brought to the fore: I am writing a book on the Ngomanes. These old men are the ones who have told me about it. . . . I have also read the document by C Myburgh, and some work by an Afrikaner which I got from the internet. It tells how the Ngomanes extended into the Kingdom of Zululand . . . The story of the Bagangomane is in a document in the archives in Britain, written by H S Webb. . . . . The Ngomanes were a nation, like the Swazi nation. . . . There is a perception that this has always been a Swazi area, but this is not true. . . . This document shows the real scope of our original land, who ruled it, the history of the kingdom. The Ngomane area took in the whole of the Kruger Park, and the Underberg . . . It also took in parts of Nelspruit. The document tells about the beacons which marked this territory, which river, which mountain, and so on. It tells about how great the last king was – Matjembene. . . . It tells all about how the kingdom fell, and about the arrest of the first 91

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Ngomane who was imprisoned – in Lydenburg. And about the other chiefs who resisted. Malooth Park, South Africa’s most beautiful holiday destination, is actually Ebukhosini – the place of the kingdom, the royal kraal. We want to revert back to these names, we want to have our royal kraal remembered. There is a place described in Jock of the Bushveld, where they cut across the river. This was one of our kraals. We call it Mandabulela – meaning ‘a river that cuts through’.10 In such visions, history, inscribed in the land, is rewritten. In the process newly re-imagined ethnic identities come into play in the sphere of regional politics. Swazi hegemony in the Lowveld region of Mpumalanga, under contestation through claims and counterclaims across the Swazi border, is here further disputed by members of a new political elite seeking to bolster their ethnic power by rewriting the past. The relationship between claimants and Commissioners interweaves itself into these rewritten histories. Many Restitution Commission officers are simultaneously land claimants. From early on, the African researchers and fieldworkers appointed by the land NGOs to act as their translators, researchers or mediators had, themselves, been recruited from dispossessed and resettled communities. Some of them, after 1994, took up positions in the Commission and have continued to hold these. African land claimants occupy positions right up to the highest levels of office: they include both the original Chief Restitution Commissioner, Joe Seremane, and his successor, Wallace Mgoqi. But in addition to these elevated personages who are drawn from the ranks of former title-holders, there are others at lower levels in the Restitution Commission hierarchy who have laid claims to ancestral land on the basis of informal rights. They have correspondingly acquired a strategic knowledge of the kinds of historical evidence and forms of localist cultural knowledge which might be adduced in support of their – and simultaneously of their clients’ – claims. One such person is Restitution Commission officer Philip Mbiba. He has worked on a variety of cases in the Lowveld region and has himself laid a claim to the land where his forebears lived. In the process of investigating claims he has gained detailed knowledge about the history of the area, and of his own family. A history graduate, his work on the Ten Bosch claim has involved intensive work in the National Archives. Focusing more on the violence of the settler state than on glorious conquests of pre-colonial times, his version of the Ngomanes’ history is one which corresponds with the idea of apartheid’s ‘discarded people’ (Desmond 1971) and with the ‘struggle histories’ of the apartheid years. It is also more oriented to the practicalities of evidence which might yield realisable restitution claims.

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The Ngomane people, who’d been living at Ten Bosch and had formerly lived in the present-day Kruger Park, and had at one stage lived in Mozambique as well, were resettled, in order to accommodate returning white soldiers after the war. They were settled at Nkomazi, one of the former homelands. . . . The resettlement happened in 1954, and the Mahlalela were displaced in order to make room for these incomers. The land, formerly owned by one of these mining exploration companies to whom the occupiers had paid rent, was finally sold to Griffiths Engineering Company in 1944, and Griffiths decided to develop Ten Bosch: it began to put plots of land under irrigation. There is a whole file full of letters written to Jan Smuts and to the Commissioner: they were the ones who decided to remove the people. This was in the days before apartheid became official policy.11 In the archive he had been reading correspondence between Jan Smuts and the local Native Commissioner which demonstrated how the state with its then segregationist policy, upon which apartheid was subsequently modelled, had started to envisage population resettlement in the days well before the advent of the Afrikaner Nationalist Government. After Malan formed his new government in 1948, experimentation with one removal by the local state served as a stepping-stone which would later lead to another. Here Mbiba came upon an account of the Mashas’ removal from Kalkfontein: the group whose strategies of consolidation we had brought to the Chegos’ attention. Mbiba’s archival research was helping him to build a comprehensive picture of the state’s policy of forced relocation in the region as a whole, and to acquire insight into the interwoven stories of a number of resettled groups: Before this [Ten Bosch/Ngomane] removal, the Masha people living at Kalkfontein had been removed. The Chief Native Commissioner at this stage was Mr Balk, stationed in Pietersburg: he removed the Mashas in terms of Proclamation 84 of 1951, as a kind of experiment to see whether the Ten Bosch case could then be pursued. After the Masha removal, he served an eviction notice on Ten Bosch’s Chief Mpothi Ngomane, a Tsonga-speaker. The chief was deported to Vryburg, and they told him, ‘if you [and your people] refuse to be relocated to Nkomazi we’ll bring you here to this dry land’. They showed him the Native Administration Act, saying they would depose him if he didn’t agree. They asked him to sign a letter, and he agreed. By this time the community – or those who agreed – had already been removed. Others were scattered all over, some women and children abandoned their kraals and were never heard of again. There was a huge dispersal – some went to Witbank and some to Pretoria. 93

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They’d been rent tenants in 1920. Some were migrants, but others were seasonal labourers on Lowveld farms. There’d actually been a recruitment camp there, for recruiting seasonal labour. They seem to have had a traditional lifestyle, with cattle as a mainstay. In 1939 there was a cattle-culling, because of foot and mouth disease, and the community started to hate the agricultural extension officers because of this. There are very evocative stories of how the troopers came in to shoot the cattle. The Ngomane used dogs to scare the troopers, and the troopers shot the dogs and even some people. There are stories of people running helter-skelter, of the rivers running red with blood. They called this event Esitsotsongwane. (Such insights caused him to observe, laughingly, that ‘a new Oxford History of South Africa will have to be written’: something he will sadly be prevented from accomplishing by the sheer weight of effort involved in processing land claims.) Although neither the Ngomanes of Ten Bosch nor the Mashas of Kalkfontein had held formal title, these were two linked cases in which ‘racially discriminatory legislation’ and its enforcement had incontrovertibly resulted in communities’ dispossession of land, and where archival evidence was available to prove this as well as showing which lands had belonged to whom. Mbiba had tracked down this evidence in the archive, but his building of the Ten Bosch case required further validation. He arranged to hire an anthropologist-turned-consultant, At Visser, who spent months interviewing old householders, compiling genealogies and drawing up maps based on aerial photos from the 1930s, in order to put together a picture of land usage in that period.12 This subsidiary process of claimant verification on the basis of informal rights has led Philip Mbiba to a clearer understanding of the kinds of proof which might be needed in support of his own land claim. Being too smallscale and low-profile to have left a record in the archives, his family’s occupancy of the farm where they lived as tenants will have to be proved using other means. The catalogue of evidence he is slowly amassing includes things like graves, initiation lodges and cattle byres as well as the ruins of a school which some of his cousins attended. Redirecting our attention from cosmopolitan-style politicians attempting to reconstitute entire pre-colonial empires to the views of more humble localist claimants not unlike Philip Mbiba himself, we can see that the restitution process and such claimants’ frequent interaction with the Commission’s officers has led them to re-envisage the past in their own way. Mr Mthetwa, who currently owns a small taxi business, has a specific claim to the farm Heidelberg (H on the map on p. xvi) nested within the broader Mashego claim discussed earlier. His visions of the past, although less grandiose and 94

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politicised, and more localised and concrete, than those of his leaders, are equally intense. A former occupant of the farm who once worked as a cook for its owner, he has memories of a life once lived on the land, which contain the promise of a future there. The conditions of life he recounted – being paid only in kind but restricted from working for wages off the farm, having his quota of cattle gradually restricted and later confiscated, eventually being prohibited from conducting traditional rituals on the farm, and finally being evicted with his family – echo those of the Chegos and of many other former farm occupiers I have interviewed. But his lament was tempered by a sense that life on the farm had been preferable to his subsequent existence spent in a Trust farm village in the homeland and later an urban location: ‘it was not like where we live now, where we are packed together like chickens’. Asked about his motivation for lodging a claim, he said: We want to go back because we lived there, farming and having livestock. I was born and bred there, I grew up farming, and I want to go back, to feed my children and the future generations.13 Combining distress at past ill-treatment with a promise of better times ahead, his account is reminiscent of much of the ‘golden age’ testimony of resettled people (Beyers 2005; Harries 1987). It could be viewed with some scepticism. Although it is fruitless to speculate about what might have happened had he not been evicted, his subsequent life experiences, albeit disrupted, had probably resulted in far greater material well-being than he could have achieved as a mere farm-dweller. After working in a garage and then in a factory, he was later employed as a driver. He is now a successful entrepreneur who owns two minibus taxis and a bus, and employs people to drive them. He may well use his reclaimed farm as a means to ‘feed the future generations’. But as with many Africans who rely on multiple livelihood strategies, the success of his farming enterprise will inevitably depend upon monetary inputs from his business interests (Francis 2000; Murray 2000; see Chapter 7). This claimant’s aspirations are not unique. But for those with less entrepreneurial success than his, there is perhaps even more at stake. Reading through the brown folders of claim forms in the Commission’s Nelspruit office, claimants have recorded such statements as: ‘Presently many of our brothers are unable to find any employment and are prepared to go back and start farming as our fathers used to do.’14 Problems of unemployment have loomed large in the recent experience of rurally-based claiming communities; these, together with the vigorous activities of Commission officers, have sharpened people’s memories about the natural abundance of past lives lived on the land. But to ‘start farming’ without inputs from wage labour, or help and support from the government, is a 95

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difficult if not impossible enterprise. For the Chegos, Mashas, Mashegos and Mthethwas who are claiming land, supplementary sources of income will prove crucial if this land is to bring them any benefits (see Chapter 7).

ANCESTRAL GRAVES: SENTIMENTAL TIES AND EVIDENCE The importance of ancestral graves in the Chegos’ claim is echoed in Mr Mthethwa’s testimony. Central to his land claim on the farm Heidelberg is the presence of his parents’ and grandparents’ graves there. When he was forbidden to visit these graves during the intervening years, he felt his rights had been violated: . . . we visited, but the new owner did not want us to go there. He said ‘just take the people away from the graves and rebury them where you are staying’. I contacted the funeral parlour and the police, and they negotiated on my behalf. We negotiated with the farmer that I would always arrange to call him in advance, not just come along unannounced for what he called ‘a party’.15 Similarly restrictive has been the experience of other former farm-dwellers, as a glance at claimant files in the Commission testifies: ‘Presently we cannot visit our graves as the whites refuse us permission – or they put conditions and rules if they do allow us. It is difficult to follow our culture.’16 Mthethwa, like many others whose claims are under investigation, has accompanied the project officer onto the farm to show him ‘where we used to live, where the graveyards of our grandparents are’. Similar verification took place in the overarching Mashego claim of which Mthethwa’s is a subdivision: We still have some elders who know the places exactly. We have gone to the farms to identify the gravesites and so on. . . . They were able to say, ‘this site here was a burial place for the Mthethwas, together with Mzawe, Mashego’, and so on.17 As in other cases, the Mashegos had to do this clandestinely, since the farms in question are still in the possession of their white owners. Many farmers are increasingly anxious about the claiming process, aware in particular that graves are fast becoming the most powerful proof of former residence. As Mr Mashego told me: This we did underground – illegally. We still have access to the farm and some of our people are still staying there, so we do visit them. But 96

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it was rather difficult. We do still go from time to time to clean the graves. Initially the farmers did not mind but now they are resisting. These excerpts demonstrate how informants’ commitment to the specific sites of their forebears’ graves has, like the importance of the past more generally, intensified in proportion to the difficulties of securing access.18 It has been further exacerbated during the claiming process itself, as in the case of the Chegos. For the Chegos, interest was first aroused by the ANC’s election promises, resulting in a greater frequency of visits to discuss the claim with relatives still living on the farms and to perform ancestral rituals at the grave sites. This ritually-inspired intensification of traffic flow between the Lebowa homeland and the white farms at Tubatse then led to the terrible traffic accident, and this event, in turn, has further deepened the sense of community solidarity within the group, its commitment to the now tragically expanded community grave sites, and its determination to regain its land: . . . they used to hold claims meetings. I think that was the main cause of this accident. . . . We were visiting our people in Tubatse, and people from government also became interested . . . They wanted to validate whether the place was ours or not – then they went with us to see where our people were buried. . . . they took photos of our place and graves, and they told us, ‘You must go back to your place – Tubatse.’19 I think this [claiming] was brought up by the accident the Chego people had, even though the idea was there before the accident . . . The accident made them start thinking more about the land.20 The importance of grave sites is an incessant refrain in the activist literature documenting title-holders’ triumphs in regaining land. Showing a longing as acute as the Chegos’, Doornkop’s claimants, on their return to the farm in 1994, were desperate to ‘visit graves and reconnect with their ancestors’ (Land Update 1994 34:10; 35:15, 19–20). The intensity of commitment varies, however. For those who still live close to the farms where the graves are situated, and whose access to them is permitted by the farmers, graves feature less prominently among reasons to reclaim land. The case of Letty Masha, formerly resident at Kalkfontein, demonstrates this. She has been initiated as a malopo spirit medium, and is now a teacher of trainee mediums in turn. She thus needs access to ancestral burial sites in order to perform the special possession rituals through which she initiates her novices. The graves of her paternal grandparents are situated at Kalkfontein, from which farm she and related families were forcibly evicted in the 1940s. After their eviction, she and her husband settled in a homeland village near Apiesboom within easy reach of their former home (8 on the map on p. xvi). Asked about the importance of access to these 97

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graves in the land claim, Letty indicated that these had been accessible for years, and indeed that family members had been allowed to clean and tend the graves, to install granite headstones inscribed with the names of the deceased, and to hold rituals of possession like those at which Letty regularly officiated. These concessions were evidence of the community’s gradually improving relationship with the white farmer during the intervening years. These improved relations were fuelled in part by the farmer’s wish to avoid controversies surrounding the original eviction by keeping his former tenants happy, as well as by the gradually dawning realisation that the end of apartheid was nigh.21 The current importance of burial sites in South Africa is, then, perhaps motivated as much by the wishes of disrupted people to secure their own future burial, and hence their place in the genealogical line, as by the need to live close to a long lineage of already-buried ancestors (James 2000b). Although propitiation of ancestors is central to customary religious practice, the canonical texts in South African anthropology carry no indication of its needing to be carried out at grave sites. Traditionally, in any case, these were not marked out for special attention, being simply contained within the cattle byre. My own earlier research among Sotho- and Pedi-speaking migrant women indicated that such rituals could as effectively be performed by scattering snuff or pouring libations on the ground in the corner of a house – even in a servant’s domestic living quarters in town – as at the site of ancestral graves (James 1999). (In this respect, spirit possession ceremonies such as Letty Masha’s, described above, differ somewhat from normal ancestral propitiation – go phasa badimo – in being conducted at the burial site itself.) The emphasis on graves has, then, grown in inverse proportion to resettled people’s distance from them; it reflects a sense that graveyard access has been unjustly denied. To make such an observation is not to suggest a lack of authenticity in claimants’ insistence on access to forebears’ graves, but to demonstrate the intensifying significance of these in the cultural revival which has accompanied the land claims process.

CONFLICTING CLAIMS In my discussions with the Chego claimants it became evident that families formerly connected were being drawn into adversarial relationships by the need to demonstrate exclusive rights over specific pieces of land. Despite the apparent fixity of past occupancy which forms of proof – like graves and cattle byres – might be thought to demonstrate, questions remain about multiple rights to land. If informal rights are as inherently flexible and overlapping as they appear in the literature about African land ownership (Berry 1993, 2002b; Lund 2002), can the restoring of these rights allow informality to be reconciled with exclusive access? 98

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From well before the advent of written records, but even more so since the intense disturbances of the nineteenth-century difaqane, South Africa’s past has been characterised by patterns of population movement. In the mid- to late twentieth century, such movements, although equally prevalent, assumed a somewhat different shape. Population shift, in its most notorious and recent form, was caused by agents of the state enforcing the involuntary removal of people deemed ‘surplus’ to the needs of industry and farming. Simultaneously, the state made efforts to restrict whatever movements were not part of the broader plan, by making it compulsory to carry ‘passes’ affirming a person’s rights either to remain in urban areas or to move between farms. In reality, however – and whether sanctioned by the carrying of a ‘pass’ or not – there was a continual movement of African families across the landscape. Although never entirely ‘voluntary’, this was often less controlled by policy than state agents would have liked (see Schirmer 1994, 1995). My study of claimant files at the Commission evoked similar patterns of population movement. Evidence in these files demonstrated the fruitlessness, in many instances, of trying to ascertain the ‘correct’ piece of land for any given family. In several of these, claimants listed the names of three or more farms, detailing how their family members had been evicted from each of these successively as the white farmers’ demands became more restrictive. Over a period of years between 1920 and 1960, this would in theory allow for three equally valid claims to be submitted, even given the specification in the Restitution Act that claimants must have been ‘dispossessed of their unregistered rights of beneficial occupation of the property for a continuous period of not less than 10 years prior to dispossession’.22 The corollary of this was that for any given farm there were several files, each containing a claim lodged by a different family group. As in the case of the Chegos and Madihlabas, these claimants inevitably turn out to be connected to each other by ties of blood and marriage. It was often such relationships which provided those evicted from one farm with refuge on another; or, eventually, refuge in the Lebowa homeland. But even between interrelated families who cohabited on single farms, the promise of land regained has driven a wedge. One such case is that of the Tau and Maimela families who once lived together on Buffelshoek (D on the map on p. xvi), adjoining Kalkfontein. The Taus have linked their claim to the reestablishment of a chiefship which, they allege, has long been dormant but which once held sway in the region. Their relatives and former neighbours, the Maimelas, dispute that such a chiefship ever existed and refuse to be party to its revival. Both aim to re-establish themselves on the same reclaimed land. If the competition over promised lands was strengthening internal ties of descent and creating new rivalries between families, this was not the first occurrence of such a phenomenon. The introduction of land titling in Kenya in the 1950s witnessed an intense elaboration – even invention – of 99

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patrilineages as applicants used family as a means to legitimate their claims (Glazier 1985). It was suggested to me by Chief Masha of the Kalkfontein claim that this divisiveness, in the present case, was merely a continuation of the process already started with white farmers’ original arrival. It was the presence of white farmers on the land, he claimed, that had first sharpened tenant families’ consciousness of access to specific lands. It had caused boundaries to be drawn around villages in settings where land use had not previously been dictated by the membership of specific families: People were now losing the foresight that our forefathers had – they had lived there together, there were no boundaries. The boundary came after the farmers started to take their lands.23 If arbitrary borders were imposed during white settlement as he suggests, boundaries between families appear to have intensified even more after the state promised to give these lands back. Even within families like the Maimelas, some were suspicious that individuals, while claiming to represent the interests of the whole group, would later benefit at the expense of their kinsmen.24 Countering such divisiveness was the enlightened strategy of incorporation followed by Chief Masha. But it has not always proved successful. Masha explained his decision, at the suggestion of the human rights lawyers, to put in a general claim on behalf of all potential claimants: I knew that there are people who. . . might fail to claim. So I did this on behalf of them. . . . I was not going to settle on these farms. I just want the farms to ‘come home’. He made it clear that the ‘coming home’ of these farms entailed their restoration to the former African inhabitants of the area overall. Some, however, suspected his intentions: ‘What happened is that they [the Mashas] manipulated the poor people. . . . they told them “look, if you are not with the chief, your claim won’t be successful”.’25 Although Chief Masha’s own account convinced me that his motives were altruistic, it is nonetheless true that his paternalistic encouragement of community solidarity, and his own re-imagination of past community experiences, were playing a role in the construction of a particular kind of imperial vision – albeit in this case an apparently generally advantageous one. The designers and implementers of restitution were aware from the outset of the conflicts which overlapping land claims might provoke. As the former Restitution Commissioner for Mpumalanga pointed out: ‘Property is, ultimately, about mediation . . . after vesting the rights, how you enforce those (after having engaged in the legal processes) is sheer negotiation.’26 Mediation of conflicts which might obstruct the precise documentation of 100

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rights to a particular piece of land, and hence its eventual restoration, was always intended to be an intrinsic part of the policy (Cousins 2002). But where, as in the case of the Chegos, documentation and mediation did not neatly complement each other (or where, indeed, neither had yet been attempted) their interrelationship presented problems. Would land disputes best be settled by establishing legal rights more clearly, or could legal rights be more easily established once disputes had been solved? Masha’s strategy of creating a solidary community to expedite a land claim, like similar strategies deployed elsewhere in South Africa (Fay 2002, Fay and Palmer 2000), exemplifies the conviction that solving social disputes can resolve disputes over rights. On the other hand, the certainty deriving from claimants’ knowledge of a grave site or cattle byre is seen as a step on the road to formalising their rights through legal title, and corresponds with the idea that definite rights can solve social disputes. It is this approach which de Soto famously endorses as a means to empower the poor (2001).

CONCLUSION: LAND AND JUSTICE ‘Go home to your own place’ was Mandela’s injunction before the 1994 election. His government, and Mbeki’s after 1999, undertook to make this possible through the land reform programme. Such promises by politicians helped to revive the kind of interest demonstrated in the Chego case. Evidence from elsewhere in South Africa corroborates that restitution had different implications for elite or middle-class urban-based leaders and their poorer, rural-based followers with more practical concerns. Where better-off community representatives, motivated by politicised ideas about going back to the land, set their sights on particular farms, their followers were initially more interested in the practicalities of land access and land use, wanting a place, any place, where they could hold ceremonies, trade from home, farm, retreat at weekends, retire to, and die. Seemingly inspired by a more redistributive vision, they wanted a place that would be ‘theirs’ even if they had not owned it in the past.27 At first glance this seems to conflict with the findings of the survey discussed in the opening pages of this chapter: that ordinary people in Mpumalanga were committed to ‘righting the wrongs of the past . . . and [re-establishing] traditional and cultural ties with the land’. The mediating term between these apparently divergent views about restitution was, to some degree, the process of restitution itself, and especially the personnel responsible for its implementation. The statements and aspirations of African nationalist leaders – whether Mandela or lesser figures – have certainly been key in shaping the political demand for land. But more than the pronouncements of political figures however popular, it has been claimants’ interactions with the officers of the Restitution Commission which have 101

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sustained, informed and directed this demand. Reciprocally, these officers’ relationships with claimants have sharpened their awareness of the intricate historical details and complex procedures required as proof of former ownership or occupation. In this way, elite and commoner historical discourses, mediated through the brokerage of Commission officers, have converged to create some commonalities of conviction about the signicance of restored land. This chapter has shown how the bureaucratic processes of restitution attempt to authenticate the existence of informal rights. Such verification was originally conceptualised as necessary in order to satisfy the demands of ‘justice’: the principle that had animated the policy of restitution in the first place (SAIRR 1993–1994:224). But delivering justice – allowing land to assume its full value as restored citizenship – is predicated upon solving conflicts about to whom, exactly, it belongs: a matter which requires bureaucratic procedures. Restitution’s rights-based approach is thus a cumbersome one, in part because it attempts to combine two irreconcilable priorities. It aims, as Beyers shows in a study of the urban land claim in Cape Town’s District Six, both to ‘expand the number of beneficiaries of restitution and to expedite the settlement of claims’. This entails ‘institutional and procedural changes that carry the danger of ultimately restricting the transformative political potential of restitution’ (Beyers 2005). Concurring with this view about the risks of undermining restitution’s original promise, critical voices in the legal fraternity claimed that the turn to bureaucratic and administrative procedures was opening the way for the consideration of factors other than justice. Keeping cases out of the Land Claims Court (see Chapter 2) would certainly expedite matters, but it would also lead to certain cases being prioritised purely because they would be easier to finalise. Preference for the administrative route over the legal one would allow unfair preference to be given to arbitrarily selected cases: Why should the Minister hold one of her handing-over ceremonies in community X rather than community Y? . . . If you have rights, this should be sufficient – there should be no special priority given to any particular case. But the priority comes in when one considers land values, length of time before submission of claim, level of organisation of the community . . .28 It was on somewhat expedient grounds, and because of the existence of verifiable evidence, that cases such as the Mashas’ had been speedily settled where those like the Chegos’ would probably be subject to endless delays. The high media profile of the Masha case and, closely linked, the community’s long-standing connections to the ANC, the union movement and the human rights legal fraternity, had arguably combined to push the 102

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restitution of Kalkfontein to the front of the queue. The Chego case, despite the accident which brought their case to the nation’s attention, was being hampered by their lack of key networks and hence their reliance on lawyers of a lesser standing and with a less developed knowledge of the claims process. They were thus, and would probably remain, closer to the end of the queue. The original motivation behind the recognition of informal rights as a basis for restitution was a noble one. Paralleling the conventional wisdom on land rights in Africa more generally (Berry 1993, 2002a, 2002b; Cross 1992; Lund 2002), restitution originally envisaged ‘rights’ as flexible and socially negotiable. From the point of view of Restitution Commissioners such as Durkje Gilfillan, well versed in human rights law and experienced in defending dispossessed communities, justice and ‘rights’ appeared appropriate as guiding principles of restitution. But from the point of view of African nationalists with their political demand for land, and of civil servants attempting to steer a course between the petitions of claimants and counterclaimants while simultaneously researching their own claims, negotiated ‘rights’ must eventually founder on the hard rocks of ‘property’. ‘Property’, for these officers who were increasingly coming to see its possession as a provable fact, appeared as something which might enable an end to negotiation. If land rights are conceived of as negotiable, this is because they are conceived of as rights within the realm of politics and bureaucracy. They are rights against government. If, on the other hand, they are seen as private rights, enforceable against other private citizens by the courts, negotiability is not the issue: certainty and enforceability are. Restitution is still in its planning stages in all the cases listed above, but it remains to be seen whether the South African state will, in the final instance, back up its undertaking to restore land by defending the indisputability of ‘property’ in cases which bring private citizens into dispute with one another. What will happen where particular communities’ exclusive rights to particular lands have been verified and are thus considered enforceable? In those cases where ‘rights’ and ‘property’ converge to substantiate incontrovertible ownership, will such communities be supported by the state beyond the stage which the Mashas’ Kalkfontein had reached: that is, beyond ‘handing over ceremonies’ and the drawing up of ‘business plans’? The effective use of property entailed its own problems, as Chapter 6 makes clear. If justice could combine the verifying of rights with the solving of disputes, this might provide a satisfactory answer to the question so pertinently and presciently asked in Colin Murray’s book Black Mountain – ‘who’s land?’ (1992:280). Mandela’s election injunction ‘go home to your own place’ [my italics] might, under these circumstances, be accomplished in specific terms as well as simply through a generalised ‘homecoming’ for South Africa’s people.

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Notes 1 Mpumalanga West Consortium Land Reform Pilot Programme, 1997, Initial Community Surveys and Participatory Planning in the Mpumalanga Pilot Land Reform District, prepared for the Department of Housing and Land Affairs of the Mpumalanga Government, p. 2. 2 Philip Mbiba and Witness Phiri, Nelspruit, 13 November 2002. 3 The farms are clustered around Tigerhoek (C on the map on p. xvi). 4 This was the landmark Kranspoort case of 1999: see Kranspoort 48LS, LCC26/ 98, 10 December 1999 (LCC); wwwserver.law.wits.ac.za/lcc/summary.php? case_id=2468, consulted 22 September 2004. 5 This account is based on Schirmer (1994) and interviews with Chief Masha, Strydkraal, 26 November 2002; 11 February 2003. 6 This account is based on our meeting with the Chegos on 15 December 2002, as well as several other interviews in December at Magukubyana with members of the claimant group: Samuel Rampedi, Miriam Rampedi, Johanna Chego, Petrus Chego, Podile Chego and his wife, Daniel Chego; and the following interviews at Sephaku: Selina Chego, 10 December and Elizabeth Chego, 11 December. 7 David Mashego, Nelspruit, 30 January 2003. 8 Philip Mbiba, Nelspruit, 26 January 2003. 9 Philip Mbiba, Nelspruit, 26 January 2003. 10 Jeri Ngomane, Nelspruit, 13 November 2003. Jock of the Bushveld is Percy Fitzpatrick’s tale of the feats of a settler transport-rider and his dog. 11 Philip Mbiba, Nelspruit, 26 January 2001. 12 Philip Mbiba, Nelspruit, 30–31 October 2003. 13 Mr Mthethwa, Nelspruit, 13 November 2002. 14 Restitution Commission file KRP 2427, Buffelshoek and others, Phadzimane Community, Mr Madala Lawrence Maphanga. 15 Mr Mthethwa, Nelspruit, 13 November 2002. 16 KRP 2427, Buffelshoek and others, Phadzimane Community, Mr Madala Lawrence Maphanga. 17 David Mashego, Nelspruit, 30 January 2003. 18 Such denial was not universal, the attitudes of farmers towards tenant burial vary widely. But denial has been more common with the onset of white farmer fears that graves constitute proof of rights. 19 Johanna Chego, Magukubyana, 17 December 2002. 20 Miriam Rampedi, Magukubyana, 17 December 2002. 21 Chief Masha, Strydkraal, 11 February 2003. The culmination of this relatively co-operative relationship, in the 1990s, saw five of Kalkfontein’s six white owners willingly offer their farms to the Commission for purchase. 22 File KRP 1917, Frischgewagd 359 KT + Rietfontein 375 KT. 23 Chief Masha, Ga Masha, Strydkraal, 11 February 2003; see Clegg (1982) for a similar phenomenon in the former Natal, where competition over land between labour tenants on white farms led to violent disputes. 24 Philemon and Joel Maimela, Ga Masha (Apiesboom), 10 February 2003. 25 Philemon and Joel Maimela, Ga Masha (Apiesboom), 10 February 2003. 26 Durkje Gilfillan, LRC, Johannesburg, 19 January 2001. 27 Example drawn from Eastern Cape (R Kingwill, personal communication). 28 Theunis Roux, CALS, Johannesburg, 22 November 2002.

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4 CHALLENGING RESTITUTION African owners, African tenants and the politics of land reform

The reason why I have been moving around to different places up till now is that I wanted to do what I have been doing on the farms where I used to work . . . I want to plough my crops like beans. (Jack Mthombeni, Doornkop ‘squatter’)

INTRODUCTION Restitution was, in part, a response to a perceived demand from the ANC’s broader constituency. In recognition of the fact that only specific pieces of land would satisfy the political demands of ANC constituents, the programme set out to establish which these were. Although couched in generalised and symbolic terms, restitution was, in practice, narrow in scope. Though some holders of informal rights have succeeded in getting their claims recognised, many were finding it difficult to do so. Restitution’s muchvaunted aim of ‘honouring the promise of the constitution’, originally conceived of as a nation-building exercise, was instead beginning to yield conflicts between different categories of claimants. It has, then, been primarily former title-holders such as the owners of the farm Doornkop who have benefited from this aspect of the programme. Inasmuch as land purchase was a strategy adopted by those who strove to better themselves despite the racially-based ownership restrictions enshrined in the 1913 Natives Land Act, it underpinned the emergence of an African middle class. When the most successful members of this class began basing themselves in urban areas in the mid-twentieth century, their land came to serve as a residential and livelihood base for tenants. These were mostly people evicted from or choosing to leave white-owned farms, who then paid rent to the African owners of the adjoining farms where they settled. The programme, by returning such properties to their former owners and by minimising tenant claims in the process, appears to be reconstituting or reconfiguring long-standing social divisions in South African society. Divergent 105

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views about such divisions contain echoes of opposing positions on broader questions of poverty and wealth. The government has undertaken nationbuilding strategies which obscure these socio-economic fault-lines, but a gap remains, and is increasing, between rich and poor in South Africa (Marais 2001:50–1, 90). This chapter examines how the contests play out locally. Dissatisfaction at the slowness of reform, instead of being focused on the government, is levelled at those whom these reforms have already benefited. Conflicts develop between haves and have-nots: the restored owners of land and those settling on it as tenants or squatters. Each side draws on repertoires advocating, or contesting, forms of moral good, and two contrasting views of citizenship become apparent. One is grounded in the restored ownership of private property while the other emphasises rights to universal equality. What is at stake here – as in similar scenarios elsewhere – is a contest over values and modes of social being. When tenants stake their claim to land, they are stating a sense of entitlement to welfare, security and a variety of forms of protection which they assert, based on past precedents, the state has a duty to provide (Lazar 2006; Robins 2005). Perceiving the state as indivisible from the ruling ANC, tenants have remoulded national political agendas to make them fit with such claims. Where a political party using state apparatuses to build support is held answerable by supporters from different classes or socio-economic groupings, contradictory demands are made. One aspect of state/party blurring is politicians’ use of state instruments to pursue political objectives. Another is the converse: the process in which local constituents manipulate or reconfigure parties’ political agendas or ideologies to fit their perceptions of how politicians, via the state, ought to be delivering on their election promises. The ANC, which Doornkop’s owners supported from a time well before Mandela was incarcerated on Robben Island, has been locally reshaped, by its tenants, as the party representing their interests and hence opposing owners’ ones. The Doornkop owner–tenant conflict thus illuminates two aspects of local-level politics. It tells us not only how politicians manipulate state functions, but also how local constituents reshape political parties. This, in turn, gives us more insight into recent analyses of post-transition South Africa. Writers highlight the ANC’s difficulties in reconciling the interests of its richer and poorer constituents, pointing to how the party’s ideological nation-building project attempted to downplay ‘the socio-economic faultlines in our society’ (Morris, quoted in Marais 2001:90). Emphasising racial and nationalist unity is an attempt – mostly unsuccessful – to hide these fault-lines (Marais 2001:50–1). How far, ask another set of commentators, can the economic consequences of embracing competitive market capitalism, with its inequalities in the capacity to generate wealth and own the means of production, be mediated by a political system that promotes equality and egalitarian rights (Adam et al. 1998:189)? 106

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Local perceptions of party and state, constructed in the course of owner– tenant conflicts on African-owned land, represent a kind of ‘manufacturing of consent’ by the landless themselves. ANC discourses are sufficiently diverse that local antagonists can justify divergent positions by reference to (perceived) government policy and political imperatives.

OWNERS AND TENANTS IN SOUTH AFRICA: THE BROADER CONTEXT To outline the history of African owner–tenant relationships in South Africa’s rural areas is to examine the origins of a basic fault-line in South African black society. A division came into being and began to grow, early in the twentieth century, between a class of better-off longer-urbanised and ‘respectable’ people and an underclass of poorer people, usually arriving later in towns (Bozzoli and Nkotsoe 1991:123; Bozzoli 1983:21; Marks and Rathbone 1982:19; Stichter 1985:7–16). In the case of the former Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal), a study by Marks outlines the social connections which lay at the basis of this division. These were relationships between African landowners and the peasant cultivators who, displaced from their former landholdings by white farmers, increasingly sought refuge as tenants on these African owners’ land. As tenants were pressed into labour migration in cities, so the farms on which they paid rent to live were gradually transformed from agricultural sites into residential reserve areas (Marks 1986:63–4). Black title-holders elsewhere in South Africa likewise established themselves as landlords, either leasing their land to be farmed by others or giving it over to full-scale ‘shack farming’ (La Hausse 2000:163,173; Marcus et al. 1996:13; Murray 1992:118). Historical studies give some insight into the complex reasons why such owners found this a more suitable use of their land than farming proper. The now familiar story of the ‘fall of the South African peasantry’ tells how the terms of trade were gradually set in such a way as to favour white farmers and sideline their African counterparts (Bundy 1979; van Zyl et al. 1996b). In light of this disadvantage, many African farm-owners were using their land as a basis for social mobility through means other than agriculture. This mostly involved leasing or mortgaging property in order to fund higher education or other forms of expenditure appropriate to an aspirant middle-class status (Murray 1992). Such owners initially favoured leasing their land to white farmers because black ones could not afford to pay an economically viable rental, but this became increasingly impossible after the state’s racialised restructuring of land use through the 1936 Natives Trust and Land Act. African title-holders were then left with little option but to let their land to African tenants or sell it to the South African Development Trust, which would then use it to augment the reserve areas. Or, where African middle-class landowners were engaged in 107

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farming, they might own several farms in different provinces, leaving at least some of these available for rent to African tenants who would farm it in their place (van Onselen 1996:414–5). During the course of the mid-twentieth century, the prospect of settling on such farms or even eventually purchasing them seemed initially more promising than that of resettling in the officially designated ‘homeland’ areas, which were more remote and less hospitable. But increasing pressures were brought to bear by the state on the inhabitants of African-owned farms – owners and tenants alike. Because of these pressures, tenancy on such farms was merely the first step on a longer road that led inexorably to the African homelands (see van Onselen 1996). When the infamous ‘black spot’ removals eventually occurred, they were the most visible and obviously punitive but not the only means used by the apartheid authorities to accomplish this departure from white South Africa. Owner–tenant relationships were shaped by the struggle against these removals. The struggle, which assumed different forms in different regions, reached its height during the 1960s to 1970s. In some cases, like that of the Daggakraal in south-eastern Mpumalanga (near Wakkerstroom, see map on p. xvi), tenants were disparaged by some in the owner community but seen by others as a valuable source of income. These tenants later supported the fight against removals and became part of the radical anti-apartheid civics movement. Indeed, the strength of this united resistance on the farm was one reason why its community’s removal was never accomplished (New Ground 1993). Even in cases where resistance was eventually quashed, such as in Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal), owners helped tenants in allowing them to move onto their land ‘at the last minute’ so that they could then legitimately claim land after having been relocated into the new ‘removal’ townships (Hart 2002:102). In other cases, in contrast, members of the two groupings were brought into conflict by the threat of removal. Tenants and owners were left on either side of the political fence. Tenants, tempted by the promise of secure residence in the homelands and allying themselves to chiefs in order to secure this, appeared as ‘collaborators’ with the state, while owners – often absent from the land – offered fiercer resistance and allied themselves with the civics movement and ultimately the ANC (Wotshela 2001). Indeed, such owner–tenant splits were sometimes manipulated by the National Party Government as part of a ‘divide and rule’ strategy (Hart 2002:65), although this was not always successful. Detailed examination of a single case, like that of Doornkop, reveals nuances which are not evident in these broad generalisations about collaboration and resistance. There was a waxing and waning of enmity and amity depending on a variety of factors. The case also shows that, although the owner–tenant distinction has some value for understanding class divisions in South African society, these categories must be further subdivided to yield a subtler analysis. Many of those in the owning group are, in fact, so poor that 108

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they have more in common with tenants than with their better-off fellow owners, while many present-day tenants are neither newly evicted farm workers nor the offspring of former tenants, but have simply taken advantage of a relatively lawless local context in order to live cheaply in the short term (Marcus et al. 1996:30–2). Doornkop also demonstrates an interesting inversion of collaboration and resistance. Tenants agreed to their own removal during the 1970s and were disparaged by the stalwart ANCsupporting owners as ‘collaborators’ with the apartheid regime. These tenants (and their successors and hangers-on) are now seen as supporting the ANC’s promise of equality for all, while the owners are dismissed as having joined forces with the Afrikaner and the supporters of the former regime.

‘WHO’S LAND?’ Land reform’s relatively high profile in transition plans for South Africa was due, as mentioned earlier, to its combining of moral and material aims. It was charged with redressing past wrongs by restoring property/citizenship rights; solving economic problems and ameliorating rural poverty; and establishing a class of viable African farmers. These objectives have increasingly revealed themselves as contradictory, and a tension has emerged between the programme’s ‘moral’ importance and its relative neglect in budgetary terms (Hall and Williams 2003; Walker 2000). There is a far larger constituency of land-hungry people, convinced of their entitlement to land, than is allowed by the programme of restitution (even one based on informal rights alongside formal ones). This constituency’s demands appear far greater – and more complex – than can be easily satisfied through the alternative subdivisions of the land reform programme, such as redistribution or tenure reform. Not only have certain tenants – such as those who formerly rented land at Doornkop – attempted to move back to the land they previously occupied, but new waves of people continue to be evicted off farms in the South African countryside and to settle on African-owned land. Social divisions are thus being newly constituted rather than simply remade. The existence of these broader demands was certainly acknowledged during the design of the programme. Largely as a result of input from land NGOs and human rights lawyers, there was early recognition that people with ‘lesser’ rights had been living on African-owned land and that their land hunger would need to be satisfied. Although it may be generally accurate to say that the land NGOs concentrated on the title-holder victims of ‘black spot’ removals (Levin 1996:373), tenants were not neglected. In the Eastern Cape, for example, the plight of tenants on African-owned land was often at the forefront of NGO attention (Wotshela 2001). Practical experience with tenants’ problems translated into theory and later into policy when the land reform programme was designed. The 109

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deliberations and published writings of human rights lawyers gave attention to the co-existence of different levels of rights on the same pieces of land. Outlining what she called the ‘community land ethic’, Durkje Gilfillan, the lawyer later to become Mpumalanga’s Restitution Commissioner, claimed that this ethic, in recognising fragmented land rights and thus challenging unitary ownership, would ensure better protection for holders of lesser rights. It was only when this ethic came into conflict with ‘absolute private ownership’ – when ‘private landowners use their absolute ownership rights under common law to deny tenants those social entitlements rightfully theirs under the community land ethic’ (Gilfillan 1995:36) – that tenants on African-owned land would be left vulnerable. Such views ere echoed by the land NGO officers who relied on Gilfillan and other lawyers for advice. Their researches yielded some insight into landlord– tenant rights and relationships on the African-owned farm of Kwa-Ngema, in south-eastern Mpumalanga (then known as the Eastern Transvaal; KwaNgema is near Daggakraal and Wakkerstroom, see the map on p. xvi). Explaining why his African landlord accommodated him, a tenant quoted in the newsletter of the NGO TRAC claimed that: ‘God created the earth for all people to live on, so all people should have a place to stay. In our culture we cannot refuse someone land to live on if it is available’ (TRAC Newsletter 24, 1991). Analysing these sentiments, the report states that ‘this philosophy stands as a reproach to free market ideas which encourage people to forget about community’. The report reveals an assumption that for title-holders to have refused to accommodate evicted farm workers would have been to fly in the face of African concepts of community. Such assumptions about African communality, often too stark or oversimplified, came to be enshrined at the heart of land reform (James 2000b), and eventually to be realised in the new property-owning ‘legal entities’ to which land was restored, as Chapter 6 demonstrates. Idealistic as these notions may sound, lawyers recognised the need to set limits. It had been unfortunate that African-owned farms had absorbed the impact of the large-scale farm labourer evictions of the 1960s and 1970s: these farms, once restored, should not again have to absorb evicted people. If former tenants had rights, conceded Gilfillan, it might be fairer to restore these through broader processes of land reform than to enforce them on the African-owned farms where they had once resided. People might, indeed, need to be ‘excluded’ in order to avoid re-establishing slum-like conditions on African-owned land.1 The practical realities of ensuring land access were here favouring the ‘private’ dimension of ownership over the ‘communal ethic’: favouring exclusive ‘property’ over generalised ‘rights’. If the land hunger of former African tenants was to be satisfied, state planners eventually decided that this would be achieved through ‘redistribution’, via a Settlement Land Acquisition Grant (SLAG) of R15,000 110

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(later R16,000) per household. Families could pool grants to buy land, which would, in theory, allow former tenants to become owners in their own right. One approach was to incorporate a plan, alongside the accomplishing of restitution, to honour the informal rights of tenants by using the state grants to buy farms nearby where these rights might be realised. At the time of writing, this option was being explored in the case of the recently restored farm of Kromkrans in Southern Mpumalanga. But Doornkop had been restored before any of these options had been thought through. Owner–tenant relationships complicated the conceptualisation of land reform and its purpose. ‘Private property’ had been thought to pose a problem, but it was assumed that it would be the entrenched interests of white owners which might derail the programme. When the principles of land reform were initially debated, concern was expressed that the controversial ‘property clause’ in the constitution, which protected the rights of existing owners, might confirm black landlessness, homelessness and poverty. Steps were taken to avert this when the clause was adopted (SAIRR 1995–1996: 370). There is little indication that, at this stage, the ownership of private property by black owners was considered a significant problem. But the case

25. Property 1 No one may be deprived of property except in terms of law of general application, and no law may permit arbitrary deprivation of property. 2 Property may be expropriated only in terms of law of general application – A for a public purpose or in the public interest; and B subject to compensation, the amount of which and the time and manner of payment of which have either been agreed to by those affected or decided or approved by a court. 3 The amount of the compensation and the time and manner of payment must be just and equitable, reflecting an equitable balance between the public interest and the interests of those affected, having regard to all relevant circumstances, including – A the current use of the property; B the history of the acquisition and use of the property; C the market value of the property; D the extent of direct state investment and subsidy in the acquisition and beneficial capital improvement of the property; and E the purpose of the expropriation. 4 For the purposes of this section – A the public interest includes the nation’s commitment to land reform, and to reforms to bring about equitable access to all South Africa’s natural resources; and B property is not limited to land. Figure 4.1 South Africa’s ‘Property Clause’. Source: www.info.gov.za/documents/constitution

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of Doornkop shows that such owners have often been as recalcitrant as their white counterparts in acknowledging tenant rights. The existence of an owner–tenant divide within the ranks of African landholders de-racialises the issue of land reform. But it also renders Colin Murray’s question – ‘who’s land?’ – more difficult to answer (1992:280). On a former African-owned farm, does the restored farm belong to its original purchasers and their descendants, to their former tenants who may have lived there almost as long, or to other people in the region with ‘greater need’ who now demand with increasing stridency to be given a place to stay? Notwithstanding the various proposed solutions to the problem of tenants’ demands, many former tenants continued to assert their entitlement to the land where they – or relations, or other more remote social acquaintances – had lived before the time of removals. That African-owned farms had historically been the first port of call for evicted people has been demonstrated. That they are once again settling on such farms, despite the best efforts of planners and policy makers, and despite the fact that redistribution grants are intended to allow them to buy their own farms, is the main thrust of what follows.

‘PRACTISING APARTHEID’ As discussed in Chapter 2, the farm Doornkop, close to the town of Middelburg, was bought in the early years of the twentieth century by a group of Lutheran Sotho-speaking families in a bid to establish their independence from the Berlin Mission Society settlement of Botsˇhabelo. It was subjected to ‘black spot’ forced removal in 1974, by which time several of the owners had settled in cities and much of the farm was occupied by rent-paying tenants, most of them Ndebele. Those owners still present were forcibly removed to various villages in the homeland of Lebowa. Bothashoek was the officially selected ‘compensation farm’ but many preferred to settle in more developed settlements, more accessible to white urban centres and remote from the chief whom they saw as having betrayed them by agreeing to the removal. The tenants were later resettled without resistance, mostly in the new homeland of KwaNdebele. Doornkop became the property of the South African Defence Force. After the farm’s official reoccupation in 1994, there was a re-emergence of earlier class/status differences within the owner community. These were reinforced by divisions between those opposing and those accepting the re-emergence of tenancy on the farm. Restored owners’ antipathy to tenancy had formerly been little more than a generalised repugnance. It was born out of a memory that the state had used the unsanitary conditions in which the farm’s then huge tenant population was living as a justification for the 1974 removal of the entire community (James 1983; see also Beyers 2005 for an equivalent justification in 112

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the case of District Six). A fear that similar conditions might lead to state interference in the future made owners reluctant to re-admit tenants to the farm. But the historical charter for this anti-tenant feeling was of longer standing. Owners invoked the community’s original constitution, drawn up by some of their forefathers in 1933, which states that no-one ‘who is not a legal purchaser of the farm’ or a descendant may ‘dwell or settle’ there.2 The apparent xenophobia in this injunction was linked to the sense of religious exclusivity which had led Doornkop’s owners, like many similar mission/ Christian communities, to buy land in the first place. This religious exclusivity echoed an ethnic one. The original Christian purchasers (bareki) of the farm were primarily Pedi while their rent-paying tenants (bahuri, those who hire) were mostly Ndebele. These tenants’ forebears had lived as indentured workers on white farms under conditions of virtual slavery since the defeat of the Ndzundza Ndebele polity in the late nineteenth century (Delius 1989). As indenture ended or became transformed into labour tenancy, so the Ndebele had gradually moved off farms during the 1960s. A number had elected to live at Doornkop. Doornkop’s Pedi owners, like other Pedi-speakers in the region overall, have tended to stereotype Ndebele as unsophisticated and inclined to paganism (James 1990). Owners were uneasily aware, however, that their opposition to tenancy echoed the ethnic/racial exclusivities of South Africa’s past. This was evident from well before there was a tangible threat that the farm might be resettled by tenants. In one incident, several truckloads of Ndebele, having been refused permission to resume their tenancies on the farm, accused Doornkop’s Pedi title-holders of ‘practising apartheid’. It was also rumoured that the Mpumalanga housing director had refused to provide services to Doornkop until it abandoned its elitist stance as a Volkstaat (lit. ‘people’s state’, an ironic reference to the separate homelands for Afrikaners once proposed by the far-right Conservative Party). Some were ambivalent. They stated their opposition to the arrival of those not entitled by birth to live there but recognised that this exclusive ethos would disadvantage the community by endangering government assistance in its development.

NEW- OR OLD-WAVE TENANTS? When I went back to Doornkop in the summer of 2002–2003, almost a decade after some of the farm’s owners had reclaimed the farm, the landscape had changed considerably since my earlier visits. The village itself looked the same. The grid plan laid out by the original planners was still in place. I saw the familiar rows of neatly-fenced residential plots laid out along the rutted dirt roads, each with its partially-built house. Although a few of the richer title-holders based in town had erected more solid and imposing structures, most of the houses – just as on my previous 113

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visit – were little more than shacks or simple dwellings of mud bricks. These were the structures which title-holders belonging to the modernising faction had put up as a form of temporary accommodation whilst ‘waiting for the government’ to build proper housing. Just as before, I saw the houses set apart from the rest where the few members of the dissident maruping faction had established themselves. Their orchards and maize fields, although few in number, were burgeoning with the new season’s growth. On my previous visits, these crops and fruit trees planted by the dissidents had been the only sign of agricultural activity. The majority of title-holder claimants had still been ‘waiting’ for the planners to initiate agricultural activity. What had changed in the interim was that new fields of crops were now in evidence on the slope opposite the village, new vegetable gardens had been laid out and new cattle byres built. New dirt tracks had been cut from the earth. Most noticeably of all, there were hundreds of new shacks. A ‘new wave’ of tenants, I discovered, had begun to settle on the farm in early 2000. At first sight, it appeared that the new arrivals, although mostly Ndebele, were unconnected to the people who had lived there before the removals in 1974. The sequence of events was recounted by Chris Williams, a former government officer who had newly assumed his post as director of the land NGO TRAC. In December 1999, the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Land Reform visited Doornkop, among other places, to investigate delays in land reform. At the time, there were a few squatters living on the farm who had been brought there by the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) to whom the farm still officially belonged despite its having been ‘given back’ in 1994. Although Doornkop’s residents had agreed to let the squatters stay there as an interim measure until they could be re-housed, they took this opportunity to question the delays in removing these unwelcome visitors. The Mpumalanga MEC for Housing, who was attending the meeting on behalf of the province, made a public statement to the effect that ‘Africa is for everyone’. His remarks were interpreted as meaning that the government had recognised squatters’ rights and given them equal status to that of owners. Rumours of his speech spread like wildfire, and within a short time several hundred households had moved onto the farm and built shacks there. Certain of the legitimate residents then took advantage of the situation to charge rent to the new arrivals.3 Some viewed the new occupiers as having some historical entitlement: ‘Some of these Ndebele are people who have come back. When they arrive, they point to their marupi (original sites) and go there.’4 Others thought there was no historical precedent for their occupation: ‘. . . They are not 114

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those who lived here before . . . These new ones came from farms: near Hendrina, Arnot. . . . [and] they are not only Ndebele.’5 The ensuing disputes once again evoked memories of apartheid. Picking up on the Housing MEC’s statement that the land of Africa should not be kept for the exclusive use of any particular group as it previously had been for whites, the moral case for the squatters centred on their poverty and landlessness and tapped into local memories of Ndebele dispossession. But, although many of these shack-dwellers were indeed poor, not all had been driven to the farm out of dire necessity in the sense of having no alternative place to settle. Some had elected to move there from Middelburg’s nearby township of Mhluzi, in a desire to avoid paying expensive rents and service charges. Others, having left their tenancies on white farms only after the removal of Doornkop, and having then moved from one squatter area to another around the district, had been attracted to this specific farm by the promise of farming land where they could plough, keep cattle and enjoy the benefits of the life they had once known while living on white farms.

Figure 4.2 Ndebele-speaking evicted farm worker Johannes Mnguni and his wife. (Peter Mackensie/africanpictures.net)

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The reason why I have been moving around to different places up till now is that I wanted to do what I have been doing on the farms where I used to work . . . I want to plough my crops like beans. Even if I am expected to pay rent here, I know it’s worth it because I’m farming in my own yard.6 Finally, one woman, who was single-handedly building a house out of mud bricks, complete with metal fitted windows, was doing so in order to secure a residence closer to her husband’s workplace, although the family already owned a six-room brick house in the former KwaNdebele homeland. Such cases bear out the observation that squatting, rather than necessarily being a last resort, is often preferred because it allows proximity to work and access to food garden sites, and provides those who do not wish to make long-term investments in housing with a relatively mobile and flexible option for short-term residence (Marcus et al. 1996:30–2).

Kinship links These people had apparently settled on the farm with the randomness often attributed to squatters, who flock to empty land like ‘birds in the cornfield’ (Stadler 1979). But on closer investigation it became clear that many were in fact linked to the original tenants, and to each other, through ties of kinship which corresponded with those of ethnic identity (see Cohen 1969). The rumour that Doornkop was ‘open’ for African residence had, indeed, ‘spread like wildfire’ as Chris Williams suggested. It been transmitted on the local ethnic radio station, Radio Ndebele. It had also spread through family links between aunt and nephew, grandmother and granddaughter. To understand the significance of these kinship links and their part in recruiting the new tenants, one must recognise the process through which domestic groups divide and proliferate. New squatter households in South African cities often begin when young men and women move out of parental homes and marry (Hunter 2005; Meintjes 2000). If ‘landlessness’ is a factor encouraging the expansion of rural squatter settlements, it is newly spawned in each generation. What appears as a new wave of tenants is thus merely the most recent manifestation of an older wave. This goes some way towards explaining these occupants’ strong sense of moral entitlement to the land. The case of Rose Mahlangu and her husband illustrates this point. It also shows that it is difficult to draw distinctions between people in terms of the ‘informal rights’ they once enjoyed, since the present-day occupiers of Africanowned land, white-owned farms and the former ethnic homelands – apparently socially and spatially disparate – are often connected by kinship ties. The profile of Rose’s family was the classic one of Ndebele farm-dwellers. With her parents and siblings she had lived on a bewildering succession of white farms in the Middelburg district. From each of these the family had 116

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either been forcibly evicted or more subtly persuaded to depart. When they eventually arrived to erect their shack at Doornkop in 2000, they had not previously lived there. Rose’s father’s sister, on the other hand, had done so. After being similarly evicted from a white farm, she had taken refuge at Doornkop, becoming one of the farm’s Ndebele tenants who were later resettled in the KwaNdebele homeland in the course of the ‘black spot’ removal. Although this aunt had opted to remain in the vast settlement of Siyabuswa, in the former KwaNdebele, rather than returning to Doornkop, it was her residential history on the farm which suggested to Rose and her father, some 30 years down the line, that they might find a home there. In Rose’s case, ties of marriage had also pointed to Doornkop as a site where they could build an independent dwelling, since her husband – also mainly reared elsewhere – had briefly schooled on the farm while staying with some relatives who had been Ndebele tenants there prior to 1974. There were, then, historical precedents for an Ndebele sense of entitlement on the farm, as a local Ndebele notable and civil servant suggested: At Doornkop in the 1970s, Pedis who were the legitimate owners of the land had given hectares to Ndebele who were renting those places. When the government decided to move people away from Doornkop, it was only the owners whom they evicted, because they were the ones resisting. There was no problem in getting the tenants to move. Now, the new system allows only the owners to return. But through the historical understanding, the Ndebele also returned, because they used to stay there as well.7 But the full story of Doornkop’s squatters goes beyond this. Several of them as already mentioned had no specific basis – ethnically or in terms of kinship or prior occupation – for a sense of entitlement to this particular site. Others asserted their entitlement, but this was merely one among a series of strategies deployed within the area overall. Ever since the mid-twentieth century, people evicted from white farms in the Middelburg district had explored, or been forced to settle for one of, a range of possible alternatives. The range became more restricted as population increased. When evictions spiralled with increased white farmer paranoia before and during the 1994 elections, pressure on existing sites became more intense: some people, like Rose’s family mentioned above, moved to other farms from which they were to be evicted in turn; others settled at Sango village, specifically established in 1994 to house those evicted from farms, or at one of several informal settlements dubbed ‘wag plaas’ (lit. waiting farm): a name signifying the temporary nature of the refuge they offered.8 Limited numbers had used their grants to become ‘beneficiaries’ of redistribution on farms next door or nearby to Doornkop (Chapter 6). The prospect of filing restitution claims had also opened up. Centred on the conviction that Ndebele would regain farms 117

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where their chiefs had historically been based, some members of the Ndebele elite initiated the Sibuyel’ Ekhaya (we are going home) movement. It lodged claims on the derogatorily named farm Kafferskraal9 and 13 others to the east of Groblersdal (see map on p. xvi). Kafferskraal was restored to its claimants during 2003. But there was no chance of settling there in the immediate future, and, in any case, the farms were remote from centres of urban employment. Despite the apparently wide range offered by these alternatives, the insecurity of most of these meant that Doornkop, close to the town of Middelburg and also offering apparently limitless possibilities for cultivation and cattle-keeping, was more attractive. It promised a chance for multiple livelihoods which combined wage labour with subsistence farming and the avoidance of incurring costs for water or electricity.

CURRENT CONFLICTS The story of Doornkop’s squatters is similar to others elsewhere in the country. It is the story of a loose agglomeration of people at whose core is an ethnically defined group seen as an underclass in relation to other Africans nearby. A sense of historical and moral entitlement, combined with expedience, has driven them to reassert historical land rights. In so doing they have become the focus for a further concentration of the disenfranchised and ‘landless’. Owners are divided. Some feel that such problems would never have arisen had tenants been excluded from the outset, while others maintain that tenants ought to be allowed to stay in the interests of fairness and egalitarianism. In the midst of all this disagreement, the situation is fraught with promises of conflict. Violent confrontation has occasionally been the result. Owners complain about thefts and assaults by squatters. Squatters have been beaten up and their houses burnt or destroyed by groups of owner vigilantes. In turn, these squatters then mutter darkly about possible retaliation. Much of the blame has been laid at the door of a state policy implemented too soon with too little proper planning. Doornkop, it is argued, represents a very early stage in the restitution process; much has subsequently been learned from the mistakes. Had the farm been ‘developed’ straight after its restitution, larger numbers of people from within the legitimate owner fraternity might have moved back, leaving less room for tenants. Had tenants’ needs been taken into account from early on, land – perhaps on neighbouring farms – might indeed have been set aside for them from the start, as has been done in other more recent cases. Furthermore, had formal property rights in the farm been transferred more speedily from the hands of the state into those of the former owners, the squatter problem might not have arisen in the first place. (Such delays have been legion in South African 118

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land reform.)10 Once squatters had arrived, the farm’s legally recognised owners would have been empowered to request the police to evict them. These mistakes have certainly informed the further development of nationallevel restitution policy. But rectifying them locally has been left either to various actors within local government structures, or more commonly to the consultants they employ. Could solutions proposed by the human rights legal fraternity have solved owner–tenant conflicts in a specific case like the one described here? These lawyers had made concerted efforts to balance the principles of private ownership against those of communal property, and against generalised and informal ‘rights’. They undoubtedly recognised the possibilities of conflict over land under whichever regime, as is clear from Durkje Gilfillan’s statement that ‘property is, ultimately, about mediation’ (Chapter 3). Her conviction was that ‘vesting the rights’ was of far less significance that ‘enforcing’ them through ‘sheer negotiation’. The need to balance exclusiveness against egalitarianism, and to solve disputes through negotiation, were here acknowledged in principle. But in the particular case under present consideration, especially after changes in the DLA since 1999, there were no means by which this balance could be achieved. It was neither possible to achieve the clear vesting of rights for which Gilfillan had called, nor were facilities for negotiation in evidence. And, according to arguments proffered by the activist fraternity, the broader context of state policy had, in any case, changed since the turn of the twenty-first century. Within a framework privileging the interests of ‘owners’ overall, policy now seemed to be geared particularly towards ensuring the prosperity of commercial African farmers. Given this new policy direction, commentators have shown that attempts to downplay divisions between South Africa’s rich and its poor have become increasingly less credible. As inequalities of wealth intensify, so ‘rights talk’ in its most egalitarian sense becomes less convincing (Adam et al. 1998:189; Marais 2001:50–1; 90). The chances of balancing egalitarianism and exclusiveness here seem remote. What is at issue is the success or failure of a hegemonic project: a ‘manufacturing of consent’ (Burawoy 1979; Lippman 1997) by South Africa’s ruling ANC. Success would require that constituents within various layers of the increasingly differentiated social fabric perceive their interests as indivisible and their needs as being fulfilled within the current political dispensation (Marais 2001:232–3, 240), but this appears progressively more unlikely with the escalation of actual differences in wealth. Its unlikelihood is further intensified given the ever-greater centralisation of power in the hands of the ruling elite and its tendency to exclude political influence from below: a pattern which was often commented upon in the media and by acquaintances during fieldwork in 2003. But to see all this as a failure to ‘manufacture consent’ is to fail to grasp the importance of local political contexts in which land access plays a crucial role. The poor and landless, so inadequately 119

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served within the current climate, have some capacity to reshape political imperatives. The ANC has attempted to ‘take control’ of this reshaping process by responding to it, partly through tapping into and pandering to the regional/ethnic electorate. To understand this, one must recognise that in the respective condemnations and justifications of tenancy expressed by those interviewed, the moral positions adopted were, not surprisingly, closely linked to perceived material interests. They did not necessarily coincide with the owner–tenant division. Those members of the owning community who had fewest options for making a living outside the rural context were most ready to ‘sell’ or let plots. Their expressed views echoed those of tenants: that land should be available to all rather than being privately owned, and hence that the basis for owner exclusivity was invalid, since this went against the promises made at the 1994 election.

Letting or selling land The opinions of tenants on the morality of tenancy scarcely differed from those of the few owners who had invited them onto the farm. Lekwetsˇe Ratau, for example, was one of a small number of owners who had been chided for letting land out to tenants, while Jack Mtsweni, considered the major offender against the tenet of exclusively owned property, had been assaulted – and (unsuccessfully) charged – for similar but much more pervasive practices. He had ‘sold’ several hundred plots on the farm. For example, tenant Enoch Mabuza asserted that land should be freely available to all: . . . we voted to stay anywhere in South Africa. They say that this place belongs to their forefathers. But how could someone chase you away, when you have voted in South Africa?11 Mabuza’s words were echoed by those in the title-holder group who had been responsible for land ‘selling’. Lekwetsˇe Ratau, for example, said ‘All people have the right to stay – the law does not allow people to be treated like this . . . They just want a place to lay their heads.’ Similar sentiments were expressed by the land seller I will call Jack Mtsweni: People have been thrown off farms, they’re suffering. As a black person I can’t allow a fellow black to suffer, so I help them to come here. The national government doesn’t believe in keeping people separate, so why should we keep them separate here?12 Such statements downplay the ‘private’ or exclusionary aspects of land ownership. Echoing the sentiments of the Kwa-Ngema tenant cited earlier in the chapter, they seem to embody a ‘communal’ dimension of land 120

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ownership underpinned by broad and inclusive ‘rights’. They even hark back to the customary model which formerly had operated during the apartheid era in the homeland areas: We want land to be under government control and that is where we want to stay. If the place is under government, it can always assist us in times of need. If the place is my property, I will have to provide everything for myself, such as buying this and that. I don’t want that. I want the government to tell me: ‘stay here, there is water, your house, your toilet’.13 Although this model had been established only during the 1930s and 1940s (Murray 1992:132), it had been firmly entrenched as the ‘customary African’ practice by the time of writing. Expressing a very different vision, those owners opposed to tenancy, like Mr M O Mohlala, insisted on a model of private ownership: Doornkop is a private land – a bought land – like any other land that has been bought by a farmer. You cannot just enter a farmer’s place and say ‘it’s a democracy’. They have got this wrong. They are trespassing – this is private property. This owner was aware, however, of the kinds of conditions which had driven tenants off the farms in the first place: The Ndebele came here because South Africa got freedom and democracy, and this implies that they must also have access to a living place in case they need it . . . They came here also because the conditions on the farms where they used to stay are bad.14 In the pre-1974 period, as now, admitted Mohlala, the occupiers of Doornkop best able to use its productive resources were these tenants. By way of proof he gestured towards the area where the tenants had taken up residence. Here, in contrast to the more planned layout of the owners’ residential section, scattered corrugated iron shacks were flanked by well-built cattle byres stocked with beasts and surrounded by the verdant growth of this year’s vegetable crop: ‘The Ndebele people who grew up here might be able to do farming. And they are best placed to do it – they have experience, since they have lived on farms for many years.’ In disputes about who had the greatest entitlement to live on the farm – its absentee owners or the squatters with their immediate material needs – ideas of morality were expressed in a discourse of custom and culture. Measured against the promises made by the ANC during its election campaign, squatters perceived it as unfair to allow one group of privileged people to own 121

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land of which they clearly had no need, while another group was being denied land despite being much better placed to use it.

LAND AND POLITICS Strongly-held tenant views that the ANC promised ‘land for all’ have been translated into concomitant tenant threats of withdrawing voter support: ‘If they chase us from here, I will never vote again.’ There is a recognition, among those owners who have derived financial benefit from letting or ‘selling’ land, that the restitution process had been undertaken with electoral backing of the broader population: ‘We got this land back through other people’s votes.’ Political considerations of this kind lie at the basis of the local reshaping of political ideologies and alignments mentioned earlier. Landowners like the original buyers of Doornkop had formed the core membership of the ANC in its earlier incarnation. But their present-day refusal to let their land be used for the ‘greater good’ was now leading the illegal tenants on the farm to recast these landowners as supporters of the opposition party: the DA. The ANC, in contrast, had been recast as the party of the tenants, of the common people, intent on defending the landless and the poor. This perceived realignment had occurred, in part, as a result of the efforts of local ANC ward councillor Piet Tlou. His life history traced the resettlement trajectory of those of many of his constituents. His Ndebele name, Khambani (Go Away!), was given to him in recognition of his parents’ eviction from their home on a white farm on the day of his birth. He had subsequently lived as a tenant on Doornkop, and had moved after the 1974 relocation to yet another white farm. Having successfully resisted an attempt by the farmowner to expel him, he was now encouraging Doornkop’s tenant occupiers in similar forms of defiance. As a councillor of a ward in which evicted farm occupiers and other landless people were predominant, he made no bones about his view that African owners were being unfairly discriminatory on ethnic grounds. He was spreading the message of defiance as far as possible: When the farmers evict Ndebele, they have no other place to go to except Doornkop. So as councillor, I was asked what do I say about this? I told them that the government has not stipulated anywhere that Doornkop is only for Pedi and that others there must be chased away.15 That the ANC was seen locally as the party of the poor was confirmed by our discussions with one of the owners. Land-seller Lekwetsˇe Ratau identified herself, unlike her better-off counterparts, as an ANC sympathiser, on the grounds of her fellow-feeling for the Ndebele: 122

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The ANC people here are those who come from the farms – those who have been chased away from the farms – the bakgopedi (those who ask). They should not be called bahiri (tenants): the law does not allow that label as these people are also landless and are asking to be accommodated. I feel that these people must be allowed to stay. But most people from Doornkop are not in sympathy with these farm-dwellers.16 She made clear her opinion that to align oneself with the property-owning group – officially known as the Communal Property Association (CPA) (see Chapter 6) – was to demonstrate one’s sympathies with the DA (Democratic Alliance). This party, the official opposition at the national level, had recently won the local elections. In the local arena it consisted of a loosely allied coalition of opposition forces centred on white farmer interests. Lekwetsˇe’s analysis of the situation betrayed some confusion about whether it was political parties or property-owning entities which were designated by the confusing array of acronyms involved. But it nonetheless revealed much about this perceived political realignment: They usually don’t call me to meetings, so I have lost touch. Does the farm belong to the ANC? ANC, CPA, DA – I don’t know which organisation is the owner. Which of these do you belong to? I am ANC. I am not a CPA person – this means you have isolated yourself from others. In the beginning the DA came, and said they were going to bring development: this would be done by the state. Later we started to co-operate more with CPA. But DA and CPA seem to be connected to each other. Displaying similar levels of conviction, and underlain by suspicions of conspiracy, was the opinion of squatter leader Jan Masina. His analysis echoed the old theme of ‘practising apartheid’. In a setting of increased white farmer anxiety about the concentration of African settlement so close to Middelburg, he informed us that the predominantly white/Afrikaner DA was manipulating Doornkop’s property owners. By asserting the sanctity of private property they would be reinforcing ethnic exclusivity. According to his logic, the eviction of the Ndebele tenants would return Doornkop to its status as an exclusive Pedi enclave. The DA would then make political capital by asking the ANC government ‘Isn’t this an example of a Volkstaat? You have allowed it here, yet you deny us Afrikaners the right to have ethnically separate communities.’ The DA was thus using African title-holders to help get rid of squatters in the DA-dominated area.

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Figure 4.3 Jan Masina, squatter leader and spokesman.

The political shift These analyses of the squatter scenario, albeit perhaps far-fetched, are indicative of a rapid political shift over the period since the second elections in 1999. They suggest that the ANC at local level – and in a ward where it was currently in the minority – had been refigured so thoroughly by local interests and the perception of local voter priorities that it was pursuing policies distinct from those it was advocating at the level of government. This can surely be the only way to explain why a party which was nationally pursuing a project to put ownership of land and other assets into private ownership and distance itself from welfarist functions was locally invoked as the defender of the destitute against property interests. The national and local levels were not, however, as disarticulated as this might suggest. Such was the opinion of another of the owners, Naape Setoaba. He pointed to the ANC’s need to appease, and hence attract and maintain voter backing from, former supporters of the ethnic homeland governments in the old South Africa. Contradicting tenant claims of owner collusion with the opposition DA, he was a ‘loyal member of the ANC’. He was nonetheless astutely perceptive about and critical of his party’s ploy. In 1993 when we were moving towards elections, there was an Ndebele party called Intando ya Sizwe. Near Nelspruit, where we had had KaNgwane [the Swazi ethnic homeland], there was Enos 124

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Mabuza and his Swazi party. As we approached the elections, the ANC wanted to swallow these parties, and give positions to some of these homeland leaders. So Enos Mabuza [the Swazi leader] and James Mahlangu [the Ndebele leader] both got positions in the government. . . . Because the ANC in Mpumalanga mainly consists of these two pre-existing parties, we had to appease them and give them positions. The Pedi here are very few. The Ndebele are in the majority; there are Swazi too. We need their votes.17 Setoaba’s statement also threw further light on the ethnic jockeying for power of the new Mpumalanga elite discussed in Chapter 3. The ANC at national level was aware of the significance of ethnic allegiances in provincial settings. The Ndebele, often disparaged by better-off groups as illiterate and uneducated, were in the majority in West Mpumalanga. They also constituted a significant section of the populace in Mpumalanga province as a whole, where smaller-scale ethnic divisions – between Zulu, Swazi and

Figure 4.4 Naape Setoaba, Management Committee member, at home.

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Ndebele – had begun to be transcended in the name of an overarching ‘Nguni’ identity. Both national and provincial levels were invoked when Doornkop’s sePedi-speakers complained of ethnic strategising. People muttered darkly about the high offices held by Ndebele in municipal structures – alleging, for example, that the Mayor of Middelburg (an Ndebele) had been appointed on ethnic grounds alone. They also claimed that the former Mpumalanga provincial Premier – Matthews Phosa (a sePedi-speaker) – had been excluded from his office in recognition of the importance of the ethnic vote, and a premier from the Ndebele-speaking majority – Ndaweni Mahlangu – chosen in his place. The reluctance by the police and other functionaries of the local state to help evict the squatters could, according to Doornkop owners, be explained in similarly ethnic terms. It was attributed to the recognition by Ndebele notables and office-holders of the plight of the farm workers from whose ranks they themselves had come, and to whom they felt an obligation. (Such allegations were, of course, a partisan account of political realities. And those making them could perhaps not have foreseen – or hoped – that the party’s reputation of excessive corruption and perceived inefficiency within the province would eventually become so bad as to generate a backlash. About a year and a half after the end of fieldwork the Mpumalanga Government, much criticised for its corruption and nepotism, was replaced, and a new executive council and premier, sePedi-speaker Thabang Makwetla, who had been born and raised at the Lutheran mission Botsˇhabelo, was put in place.) Subsequent events notwithstanding, these interpretations of political shifts revealed something about the continued, and revitalised, significance of ethnic mobilisation in South Africa. At the same time, they pointed to the flawed logic of returning land as a basis for restoring citizenship and embarking upon a project of national unification. Although land as a broader motif resonates with generalised notions of shared nationhood and appears to transcend narrower ethnic identities, the act of reclaiming it makes people remember their specific histories. Reclaiming land thus conjures up particularistic ethnic sentiments akin to those which the old South Africa had so notoriously emphasised. To revive communities’ ownership of lands was, it seemed, to invite the renewal of ethno-nationalism: a process which was reinforced when the ruling party tried to strengthen its support base through ethnic forms of mobilisation. When Ndebele shack-dwellers, located at the core of a heterogeneous assortment of landless people, railed against the immorality of ethnic exclusivism and claimed that ‘the land is for all’, they were tapping into historical memories about Ndebele entitlement to broad swathes of the Highveld. The ANC, by playing into this strategy, would not be acting in such a way as to transcend ethnically-based claims: to ‘build a nation’. Instead, the party appeared to be acting against the minority ethnic groups from amongst whose elites it had earlier drawn its key support.

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CONCLUSION The case of Doornkop makes clear that understanding the relationship of politics to class in post-apartheid South Africa, and the role of land reform in mediating this relationship, requires a recognition that multiple agendas are being pursued in the name of the ANC, sometimes contradictorily. In one sense, the ‘nation-building project’ (Marais 2001:90) was proving successful. The poor were being kept on board by the party for whom they had cast their votes in South Africa’s landmark democratic elections in 1994. But the ‘manufacturing of consent’ was not serving to create racial and national unity. Rather, the interests of better- and worse-off voters were here diverging. These interests were fragmenting along the lines of class, which reinforced those of real or imagined ethnic identification. As Chapter 6 will explore, it was on the basis of this local-level balkanisation, rather than in any broader image of national unity, that the future for Doornkop’s inhabitants was being foreseen. Despite the impassioned pleas being made by local ANC councillors such as Piet Tlou on behalf of the poor, the solution to this farm’s ‘squatter problem’ was being sought beyond the realm of politics. It was being looked for, instead, in the world of ‘development planning’ (Robertson 1984, Ferguson 1990). In the process, the state was devolving its responsibilities to private consultants. Despite much opposition from amongst the tenantry, a redistribution land reform project was being hatched to house the squatters, under the Siyathuthuka Trust, on a nearby farm (I on the map on p. xvi) bought with their combined government grants. This was not the only respect in which attempts were being made to outsource state functions. Conflict resolution was also effectively being privatised. Rural restitution entails transferring land into community ownership: this devolves the responsibility for law and order, and other public duties, away from the state and into private hands (Pienaar 2000). The local state was effectively using Doornkop’s restored owners to solve on their own land the problem of evicted and landless farm workers, a problem which might otherwise have become a broader one within the region as a whole (see Chapter 6). It is worth reconsidering the question of political parties and state–society relations. Reading the Doornkop owner–tenant conflict as a case study of such relations yields a complex script. State recognition of, and attempts to redress, the lost rights of its key constituency through land restitution has been politically strategic in one sense. But it has promised to reinstate, or exacerbate, socio-economic differentiation. A broader constituency has forced itself – and imposed its own interpretation of events – upon the attention of the state through its local councillors. Owner–tenant relationships on African land do not irrevocably reconstitute pre-existing classes and the divisions between them. But neither do they transcend such differences, as those promoting the nation-building project might prefer. 127

Figure 4.5 Tenant and owner graves at Doornkop.

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Notes 1 Durkje Gilfillan, Pretoria, 13 June 1997; Johannesburg, 19 January 2001. 2 Copy of ‘The Constitution of Doornkop 42’ dated 6 November 1933, in Doornkop file kept by Kalushi William Kalushi. 3 Chris Williams, TRAC, Nelspruit, 26 January 2001. 4 Lekwetsˇe Ratau, Doornkop, 10 December 2002. 5 Magdalena Sehlola, Maria Riba and Lucas Mashabela, Doornkop, 8 November 2001. 6 Jack Mthombeni, Doornkop, 10 December 2002. 7 J B Mahlangu, KwaMhlanga, 25 November 2002. 8 Mpumalanga West Consortium, Initial Community Surveys, March 1997. 9 The name denotes an African homestead, but using the derogatory term ‘kaffer’ now considered wholly unacceptable in South Africa. 10 ‘Coming in to land’, Stephan Hofstatter, Financial Mail, 4 November 2005. 11 Ephraim and Fanie Mabuza, Doornkop, 6 November 2002. 12 Jack Mtsweni (a pseudonym), Doornkop, 8 November, 2002. 13 Ephraim and Fanie Mabuza, Doornkop, 6 November, 2002. 14 M O Mohlala, Doornkop, 10 December 2002. 15 Piet Tlou, Middelburg, 27 January 2003. 16 Lekwetsˇe Ratau, Doornkop, 10 December 2002. 17 Naape Setoaba, Doornkop, 8 November 2002.

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5 ‘TO TAKE BACK THE LAND’ Labour tenancy and the Landless People’s Movement

They say ‘we are indigenous people of Africa, and we don’t want to pay for the land that belongs to us’. (Mampho Malgas, Department of Land Affairs officer)

INTRODUCTION When Ndebele landless challenged the private ownership of Doornkop and asserted their right to land they did not own, they were drawing on, as well as helping to construct and modify, a broader ethic of land as a right: an inalienable possession. Echoes could be heard here of the statements about ‘land that is rightfully ours’ at the Durban meeting (Chapter 1); of the words of Commissioner Seremane at the 1994 Doornkop reclaiming ceremony that ‘each and everyone has land as a birthright’ (Chapter 2); and of the ‘communal land ethic’ which human rights lawyer Gilfillan had discerned in the course of dealings with her clients (Chapter 3). There were also resonances with similar views recorded earlier in that century. In 1931, D R Hunt, the Native Commissioner of the time, wrote of the insistence of the Pedi royalty that ‘they should not buy what already belonged to them’ (Hunt 1931).1 In their broadest sense such views appear to dovetail with the hybrid model of land ownership discussed in the Introduction. Developed at the interface between overlapping but different cultural worlds (cf. Long 2001; Long and Villareal 1994), particularly that between dispossessed title-holders and the lawyers who represented them, the resulting model combined private with communal – and modern with traditional – aspects of landholding and land ownership. But this discourse of ownership has not gone unchallenged. Where the private threatens to outweigh the communal and inclusive dimensions, as turned out to be the case with restitution farms such as Doornkop, the poorer landless have reacted by attempting to restore the balance in favour of universal land access. Linked to this are expectations that land should form the basis for 130

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benevolent paternalism. Such expectations draw upon various earlier relationships: between chiefs in the homelands and the subjects who paid them for permission to occupy the state land which they held in trust; and between African landowners and their tenants. More recently, the ethos of expected paternalism has extended to encompass the relationship between state officials and those whose land rights they are attempting to restore. In practice, these different kinds of relationships vary widely (and few of them actually deliver the expected benevolence). But in that they all are counted upon to provide – ideally – some protection for the African poor, they are seen as having some moral equivalence. The present chapter discusses one key context in which such expectations have arisen: the white farms where farmers and their labourers have been locked into a century-long interdependence. Those familiar with the South African rural context will be surprised to hear it suggested that relationships on the white farms had any basis in benevolent paternalism, given that master–servant relationships on these farms were often so brutal (Delius 1989, Segal 1990, van Onselen 1992). But paternalism did establish the wherewithal for viable farmworker livelihoods over the course of more than half a century. Based on present-day experiences of life on the farms, on residual recollections of such lives by those who formerly cultivated and kept their cattle there, and even on memories of long-standing land occupancies which pre-dated the arrival of these white farmers, farm-dwellers view the land as a site of morally-based social relationships. Holders of power and wealth, it is implied, have an obligation to protect and shield their less fortunate dependants. An expectation of land as an inalienable right underlies the rhetoric enunciated by the Landless People’s Movement (LPM) in its public statements (Chapter 1) and echoed in the pronouncements of its individual members. It was on the basis of labour tenant experiences that the movement was originally founded. At the same time, the idea of inalienability is irrevocably shaped, even distorted by this rhetoric. Pronouncements are rooted in the land ethic but have ‘globalised’ it. The ethic of inalienability also exists more widely than the membership of this movement might suggest. There are farm-dwellers not formally affiliated to the movement but who share similar concerns and sets of expectations. The movement, like its forerunner in the 1920s and 1930s, the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), represents a ‘tip of the iceberg’ whose potential constituency exists outside the ranks of the organisation itself. The links forged by the LPM with cognate organisations in the global arena represent a tacit admission that it has failed to mobilise the landless on its own doorstep, and an attempt to substitute for this omission by bolstering its membership transnationally.

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‘WE ARE ENTITLED TO THOSE FARMERS’ LANDS . . .’ The official founding of the LPM can be traced to June 2001, when the press carried emotively worded reports of the activities of the Mpumalanga Labour Tenants Committee (MLTC). This was a hitherto unheard-of group of people based in south-eastern Mpumalanga, near the town of Wakkerstroom just north of the border with KwaZulu-Natal (see the map on p. xvi). The group was reported to have held a meeting in Johannesburg during which it threatened ‘Zimbabwe-style land seizures’ if the government failed to ‘conclude a solution for landless people in the area’ within a week.2 Subsequent reports made it clear that the group had a wider geographical reach. Soon, in conjunction with a second group which called itself the Free State Farming Community, they were demanding that ‘farmers voluntarily donate 40 per cent of their land to farm workers and labour tenants, or face a land invasion’. High-profile land seizures had already proved unsuccessful, however, since a recent attempt by members of yet another group, the Northern Capebased ‘Groot Vlakfontein community’, had been met with the arrest of 19 community members. These arrests had, in turn, prompted further threats of invasion by the same group.3 There followed a series of disputes in which the newly forming LPM – at this stage co-terminous with the MLTC though other members were soon to join – continued to warn of imminent invasions, while government spokesmen responded that their opposition to the land invasion strategy was ‘unshakeable’.4 The flames were further fanned in 2001 and 2002 with a series of meetings and events already referred to in Chapter 1. A fierce war of words ensued. Its intensity showed that the pronouncements of the fledgling LPM reflected sentiments and trends throughout the country. The formation of the movement was thus in a sense inevitable. It was more akin to the proverbial ‘accident waiting to happen’ than to an unforeseen mishap. An examination of the background of the MLTC gives some insight into the nature of these more widely felt sentiments. Nonetheless, this group represents an extreme and somewhat untypical case. If the sentiments its members enunciate about land as a universal right are deeply felt, they are also somewhat idiosyncratic. Although the 2000–2001 press reports about the MLTC portrayed it as a novel phenomenon,5 it had actually been in existence for about a decade, and its complaints were motivated as much by concerns about labour relations and criminal justice as by demands for land. Its precursor, the Eastern Transvaal Labour Tenants’ Committee, had marched on the town of Piet Retief near Wakkerstroom in 1994 to protest about misconduct by white farmers. The nature of their present-day demands was similar. They wanted the return of impounded livestock, the rebuilding of tenants’ houses, and an end to harassment by the police whom they accused of collaborating with 132

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white farmers. Also on the list was a request reminiscent of the state–NGO debate over rights and property in Chapter 1. The MLTC was asking that they be given back the farm land that they had occupied for years and to which they considered they had a right. They rejected the government’s idea that they should be forced to purchase land with the aid of government grants through a market-driven system.6 My eventual meeting with this Committee, in 2002, gave further insight into the circumstances in which the present-day members found themselves. The MLTC consisted of a number of men who described themselves as being ‘in exile’ from the farms around Wakkerstroom where they had grown up and where, in some cases, their families were still living. Currently working as newspaper vendors in Johannesburg city, and residing in the densely populated Denver and Jeppe hostels for migrant labourers in south-eastern Johannesburg or in the small backyard servants’ quarters of houses nearby, they formed part of a network of interrelated Zulu-speaking migrants with links to rural communities in northern KwaZulu-Natal and south-eastern Mpumalanga. But unlike most of their migrant counterparts, they stated that they were unable to go home, except occasionally, in secret, perhaps in the dead of night.

Figure 5.1 Mpumalanga Labour Tenants’ Committee members Fana Mthethwa and Alfred Hlatshwayo.

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The reason for their ‘exile’ was that certain white farmers in the Wakkerstroom area were mounting a campaign of intimidation aimed at forcing them and their families to leave the farms. The campaign was now far more violent than it had previously been. Well-known farmer tactics in the past had included cutting off access to water, restricting the number of cattle each family could keep, and refusing the right to bury relatives on the farm. But now farmers were using electrocution, beatings, blindings and more. These atrocities were being perpetrated allegedly by a single white farmer together with a group of black vigilantes whom he had recruited for the purpose.7 (Those who refused to join his team of vigilantes soon, in turn – like the MLTC members – became victims of vigilantism). Charges had been laid, but the local police were alleged to be in cahoots with the vigilantes and hence no action had been taken. This maltreatment by the farmer, in its most serious form, had begun after the 1994 election, and had partly been prompted by anger at its outcome. Did he used to beat you before the election? No. We had a very nice relationship with him then. Why has he changed now? I think he is undermining the black government. He even mentioned that Mandela is fooling us: ‘Mandela is a black president not a white president. Here on this farm I am the president. Mandela will never do anything for you.’ He told us that they had taken us with their trucks to the voting station to vote for Buthelezi but ‘you voted for Mandela’. They wanted us to vote for Buthelezi.8 (Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the Zulu leader of the traditionalist Inkatha Freedom Party, was the favoured African candidate of many white farmers unwilling to accept ANC rule.)

The struggle between tenants and farmers The election, however, had been merely the culmination of a much longer struggle over the conditions in which these African tenants were allowed to live on white farms. It emerged that some farm owners in the district had been trying for years to limit the number of cattle which each family could graze on the farm, and to insist that only those who were actively employed on the farm could live there. This restriction went to the heart of labour tenant freedoms, since it prevented young men living on the farms from working in town. While such work had, in an earlier period, been a short-term endeavour aimed at enabling young men to earn money for bride price, it had subsequently become a longer-term undertaking. Working in town for long periods prevented men from fulfilling their labour obligations to white farm-owners. Some tenants had tried to get round this by 134

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persuading or hiring relatives to work in their place, but farm-owners had grown wise to this and set out to stop it. Soon after 1994 white farmers began to intensify their onslaught against this practice of labour tenant migration and against related freedoms. They were combining a pragmatic incentive to rationalise farming methods with anger at the dawning of a new political dispensation. Driven by this complex mixture of motivations the farm-owners were determined to drive the remaining tenant families from the land. The MLTC retaliated by taking direct action against these farmers. This took the form of ‘marches’. Delegations travelled to farms in hired coaches and handed over memoranda to offending farmers, who were then required to acknowledge receipt with a signature. One such memorandum called on the farmer to ‘take steps to . . . repair [his] relationship with the community within one month from today’, threatening to ‘call on the government to use its powers to . . . Take Back the Land’ if he failed to comply. It stressed that the farmer had an obligation to show consideration for people poorer than himself: You must treat black farm dwellers whose ancestors owned this land before it was stolen, with respect, and . . . you are obliged to cooperate and support poor black farm-dwellers in the community, even if this means allowing them access to your land to pass through or to pray at the graves of their ancestors.9 Farmers were learning to respond to the attempted delivery of such petitions by remaining steadfastly inside their houses. Stopping short of outright cowardice but demonstrating considerable prudence, one white farmer had left to attend a rugby match, leaving his wife to receive the petition in his place! Soon after meeting the MTLC members I discovered that their tactic of ‘marching’ and handing over memoranda was being used more widely in Mpumalanga. Much further to the north-west, on the highveld near Middelburg and Doornkop, farm workers were hiring buses to protest against white farmers’ actions towards them. These people, from the self-same constituency that had yielded Doornkop’s new-wave tenants, were however not members of the LPM, as Ndebele notable and self-appointed mediator J B Mahlangu explained: . . . it’s not the same movement – just an informal action around that farm. . . . There are many cases of doing this without that movement. They just agree on a meeting – ‘Let us fight against it’.10 Such marches were similarly prompted by matters like threatened evictions. And farmers’ responses were similarly prudent: 135

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. . . there is a farm owner, Anton Coetzee. He was trying to force a certain family to move. The occupiers and the labour tenants came together and took a bus to his farm, to say ‘no, you are not doing this now’. The farm owner, Anton Coetzee, decided to stay in the house until those people left. Threats of eviction crystallised broader conflicts. Other grievances expressed during these Middelburg farm worker marches included farmers’ padlocking of gates in order to impede their workers’ vehicle or pedestrian access to the farms where they were living, and attempts to restrict the size of workers’ cattle herds and charge rental for any cattle held in excess of these quotas. They also included disruption of life-cycle rituals such as the Ndebele wela (initiation): On the day of the function, the farm owner just decided to go to that family and interrupt everything, taking the meat, calling the police, throwing everything around.

Figure 5.2 ‘Members of the Labour Tenants’ Committee, which was formed to fight back against the Wakkerstroom Commando, picketed outside the court’. (Sizwe Samayende/africanpictures.net)

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The function was for young boys of 18–20, coming back from an initiation ceremony. . . . There were maybe seven of them, the farmer told them that only two can remain, the other five must go. He did not say ‘I will take you to the gate and then you will be safe there to get your transport’ – no, he scattered them all around. One went alone in one direction . . . they didn’t know how to find each other. . . . or . . . where their mothers and fathers were. Farm worker protests were thus carried out in retribution not only for evictions and the homelessness which these entailed but also for more insidious threats against a way of life on the farms.11 At both the LPM’s ‘official’ marches on farmers and those occurring without its imprint, it was not the wish to ‘invade land’ which provided the primary motivation. In fact, no ‘invasions’ of farm land have been carried out by the movement to date. (The only land occupied by its members has been peri-urban, such as the Bredell invasion near Johannesburg discussed in Chapter 1. Most such incidences have been high-profile confrontations with the police intended more as protest action than to establish sustainable living spaces.) Most marchers in rural settings recognised that land, on its own, would be of little use to them. Instead, they were drawing attention to farmers’ obligation to their tenants/ workers. If the idea of a social contract binding farmer and workers was based on past practice, it was also more than a little far-fetched. Historical evidence points to considerable farmer brutality, for example, towards indentured Ndebele labourers and labour tenants in and around the Middelburg district at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But this evidence also demonstrates that conditions on the farms were such as to allow the emergence and survival of an Ndebele tenant subculture there. Distinctive house-painting and beadwork styles had evolved, cattle had been kept and exchanged in marriage arrangements between families. Perhaps most importantly in the light of the story above, farmers, however brutal, had permitted male initiation ceremonies, considered crucial in tenant self-identification as ethnically Ndebele, to be held on their farms (Delius 1989). If demands were now being made to restore a social contract which had once been in force but which had since been violated, this contract had not been a particularly benevolent one. But it had for a time enabled a sustainable way of life to continue.

FEUDAL THROWBACKS OR PROLETARIANS? In what sense should the experiences of labour tenants be seen as untypical, even idiosyncratic? Labour tenancy, once prevalent in some parts of the South African countryside, has been gradually whittled away. Its official 137

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demise was marked by the 1979 statute outlawing the practice, but the institution remained intact on small pockets of farmland. The unevenness and patchiness of attempts to abolish labour tenancy – and the strength of African resistance to these attempts – have been the topic of fierce debates between historians of South Africa (Beinart et al. 1986; Bradford 1987; Morris 1976; Schirmer 1994; Williams 1996b). Where some accounts see this form of tenancy as akin to feudalism in Europe (Morris 1976), stressing the inevitability of its eventual disappearance as capitalism became the dominant form of social organisation in the South African countryside (Bradford 1987; 1990), others point to the fact that waged and non-waged forms of labour have often been combined in various flexible ways which are neither classically ‘capitalist’ nor ‘non-capitalist’ (Williams 1996b; Schirmer 1994: 6–10). Similarly, where some writers emphasise the role played by overwhelming capitalist forces in abolishing seemingly archaic and quasi-feudal social forms, others stress the initiative of African tenants themselves. They point out that tenants are creatively combining wage labour migration with landholding, rather than simply preserving outmoded forms of livelihood. The overall drift of apartheid legislation seemed to be motivated by the ‘abolition of feudalism’ approach. It was aimed at eliminating the institution of labour tenancy. The 1979 statute represented the culmination of a centurylong attempt to control, and finally eradicate, African residence on whiteowned farm land. Despite these official attempts, labour tenancy continued in some pockets: one being the area around Wakkerstroom in south-eastern Mpumalanga (formerly eastern Transvaal) from which the MLTC originated. African cultivators here had temporarily resisted proletarianisation but were being subjected to increasing pressure from employers to yield more labour or leave the land. As farmers have increasingly preferred to employ seasonal farm labourers who could be fetched at will from the homelands or informal settlements (Marcus et al. 1996:46–52), or even from across international borders, the pressure on ‘sitting tenants’ was gradually becoming more intense. But broad generalisations tend to underplay the extent of local variation. Even within the Wakkerstroom area, different farming styles co-existed. Where one capital-intensive farmer decided to solve the ‘labour problem’ by relying on imported contract workers, another continued to allow labour tenancy with its corollaries of ploughing and the keeping of cattle on his land. What suddenly intervened in this natural evolution of capitalism in the countryside, however, was the new political dispensation and the state’s new legislation, after 1994, to be discussed in the next section. The battles being fought on the Wakkerstroom farms from which vigilantes were now attempting to evict the members of the MLTC – over the numbers of livestock, the acreage of ploughed land allotted to tenants, or even the right to remain on the land at all – had already been waged, and lost, in other parts of Mpumalanga and of South Africa in general. Most of those 138

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restitution claimants mentioned in Chapter 3 – the Chegos, Mr Mthethwa and others – had several decades earlier succumbed to white farmer pressure. Where MLTC members were still asserting their right to keep herds of cattle on white-owned land, many of their equivalents in the Lydenburg or Middelburg districts had abandoned the fight to do so at the moment, some 30 or 40 years earlier, when they left to move to the homelands. The herding way of life had often been abandoned in the process. Labour tenancy, in this sense, did represent an extreme situation, even a throwback. It was anomalous. But inasmuch as memories of a life lived as cultivators and cattle keepers informed the present-day experiences and provided motivation for the restitution claims of many rural people in the homelands who had left the white farms years before, labour tenancy was pivotal and lay at the heart of the demand for land as a universal right.

LABOUR TENANTS’ ‘RIGHT TO LAND’ What the formal protest actions of the MLTC and similar actions by other farm-dwellers point to is not a simple one-to-one relationship between land and people – its ‘tillers’. Instead, a custodial link is posited between the land, its occupiers and those who hold land on their behalf. The memorandum given to the farmer suggested this, with its injunction that he ‘support poor black farm-dwellers in the community’. To ‘Take Back the Land’ was envisaged by its drafters not as an act of repossession but as one of retaliation for failing to offer such support. To highlight the ‘land’ aspect is, in fact, to misrepresent the situation by obscuring tenants’ need to maintain a fine balance between wages, cattle and land. Such a balance has been maintained by means of various strategies over the course of the twentieth century. At a time before labour tenancy contracts became prohibitively restrictive, causing many – like the Chegos – to escape them altogether, men had some leeway to leave the farms and seek waged employment as migrants for as much as nine months a year. Since the need for money was often dictated by the demands of stages in the life-cycle, such as the need of young men to pay bride price, these episodes of migration did not necessarily mean full-scale involvement with the cash economy. Wage labour allowed a degree of freedom from complete dependence upon the farmer, but it also required the absolute certainty of land access under the rubric of white farmer ownership. Migrant wages earned by tenants were, in turn, invested in other forms of wealth. Foremost among these were cattle. They were important as a senior male’s store of wealth for bride price and other purposes (Ainslie 2005; Ferguson 1990). Cattle keeping was also viable given that land for grazing was one of the perks of tenancy. Tenants – like the sharecroppers who cohabited with or had preceded them in many areas – often owned huge 139

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herds of cattle. The best-known example, thanks to van Onselen’s magisterial biography The Seed is Mine, is south-western Transvaal sharecropper Kas Maine, whose herds dwindled and grew as his circumstances changed but at times multiplied so rapidly that they led to white farmer resentment, contributing in turn to his family’s eviction from a succession of white farms (van Onselen 1996). For the labour tenants of Mpumalanga, as for Kas Maine in the southwestern Transvaal, cattle keeping tended to preclude permanent settlement. Alongside white owners’ cultivation of maize, Transvaal farms became the site of a ‘phantom’ culture of African transhumant pastoralism. Tenant cattle keepers intermittently settled on one farm after another, from each of which they were uprooted or opted to move with their herds across the landscape in search of better conditions on other farms. Former farm-dwellers I interviewed achieved herd sizes that approached those of Kas Maine. Members of the Chego family (Chapter 3) said variously that their fathers had been ‘very rich’, had had ‘hundreds of animals’ or – more modestly – owned ‘60 cattle’ before they left their homes on the white farms at Tubatse. Some of these cattle had been sold to them or given to family members in return for herding duties by white farm owners. Purchase, where it occurred, was achieved not only by using migrant earnings, but also through the sale of the maize harvest.12 Cattle thus served as stores of wealth earned through other means. But white farmers began to show increasing disquiet about increasing herd sizes. They reverted to the old refrain, ‘there cannot be two farmers on one farm’, causing the Chegos to move to the homelands in the late 1940s. In the midst of this transhumant existence, some tenants found that their cattle furnished them with the means to escape from the dependency of tenancy contracts altogether, in circumstances where pressures from farmers were becoming too onerous or where people perceived that their future on the farms would mean that their ‘children will be slaves, they will never be free’.13 I came across several instances of tenants who had sold cattle in order to buy independent landholdings.

Selling cattle to buy land But to exchange cattle for land rather than using it as a store of wealth in its own right was a lesser-known and riskier alternative. In one case, the decision to do so proved socially divisive. It also turned out to have been rash. After their 1940s forced removal from the farm Kalkfontein (Chapter 3), members of the Masha group were divided over their settlement prospects. One faction proposed to sell its cattle so as to provide part of the purchase price of the farm Goedehoop (4 on the map on p. xvi), at the time not yet within the borders of the homeland although later to be included within it. Others, alarmed at the prospect of losing their cattle in such a risky venture, 140

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Figure 5.3 Woman herding cattle. (Gille de Vlieg/africanpictures.net)

opted not to participate in this purchase, choosing instead to remain at Apiesboom under chiefly custodianship and on a ‘customary tenure’ basis (8 on the map).14 The group that chose independent land purchase later discovered that they had been defrauded. Although the white owners of Goedehoop, after the payment of a cash deposit and the promise of further instalments, had permitted the Mashas to settle on the farm, the land was never registered in their name. Holding out the prospect that the title deed would later be transferred, the white owners – a family of wealthy potato farmers based further south, near Bethal – are said to have tricked the new occupants of Goedehoop into undertaking to provide free labour. Each family was obliged to send its unmarried daughters to work on the infamous Bethal potato farms (see Bradford 1993; Murray 1997; Sampson 1956) for a period of 10 years. Rather than providing independence as its purchasers had hoped, the farm Goedehoop had thus been used by its owners as little more than a ‘labour farm’: a well-worn strategy of white farm owners in their incessant battle to secure farm labour. To make matters worse, when Goedehoop was later included within the homelands, under the 1936 Natives Trust and Land Act, the Mashas found themselves arbitrarily placed under a chief and subjected to his capricious and authoritarian actions. Here, their attempt to seek refuge from the uncertainties of reliance on their white farmer overlords by buying land had backfired. They were now dependent on an equally fickle authority figure.15 141

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However, buying land with the proceeds from selling cattle and thus replacing one source of security with another was definitive in some cases. It provided a bridgehead between the uncertain world of continuing tenancy and that of the more stable landed peasantry from whose ranks the urban middle class arose. The clear social division between an ‘owner’ and a ‘tenant’ class, which had become entrenched by the mid-twentieth century, had origins in land purchase which was achieved through the sale of cattle. The African owners of ‘black spots’, although seemingly so socially distinct from their tenants towards the end of the twentieth century, were, in some cases, simply people who had converted the rural asset of cattle into that of land at its beginning. Doornkop was one such case. Driefontein near Wakkerstroom was another. Josie Adler, long-time NGO activist, told me a moving story about the purchase of the latter farm. The profile of its owners, by the time the battle over their ‘black spot’ removal was being fought during the 1980s, was that of typical title-holders. Community leader Saul Mkhize, who was shot and killed by the police in the course of these struggles, was an ‘owner’ and a member of the urban-based middle classes. The farm had been bought by the Native Farmers’ Association of South Africa Limited, with founder member of the South African Native National Congress (later ANC) Pixley Seme playing a key role in its purchase. But part of the price of the farm had been paid by people like Saul Mkhize’s grandmother from the sale of the family’s cattle. She had walked the herd several hundred miles to Johannesburg to sell them there rather than in the local cattle sales at Amersfoort, so determined was she to get a fair price for them.16

Balancing wages, land and cattle For those not selling cattle so as to escape paternalist dependencies, it was crucial to keep several sources of security in balance. They needed to maintain access to land (where food could be grown and cattle kept), wage-labour (with the proceeds of which cattle, as well as other things, could be bought), and cattle themselves. It was this kind of balance which had been enabled by the ‘ideal’ labour tenant contract, as remembered by many interviewees who had long ago left the farms. Such a balance had been possible in some cases, and at particular moments, despite the waging of a constant struggle to fend off white farmers’ ever-increasing demands to cease wage-work and to devote more time to working on the farm. At a time when such contracts existed – or are remembered as having existed – dependency upon the farmer was not yet at its most extreme. The tightening of such contracts made it impossible to remain in migrant employment. This also made it more urgently necessary that access to land could be relied upon: but this could only be secured if young men were prepared to continue working as farm labourers. As farmer demands for such labour increased, youths became progressively less willing to fulfil 142

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them. Many tenants in Mpumalanga – like the Chegos and others I have interviewed – had left the farms and settled in the homelands long before the time of the present research. Whether or not accompanied by the desire for children’s education and the wish to be nearer to the schools, churches and shops which signified ‘civilisation’ (James 1999:148–50; Schirmer 1994), the factor that most often prompted whole families to move off white farms and into the homeland areas was young men’s refusal to follow in their fathers’ footsteps and work on farms ‘for no pay’ (James 1987; Schirmer 1994:306). When such tenants finally departed from the farms to settle in the homelands, this represented a bid to recreate the conditions in which wages, land and cattle could be finely balanced against one another. But many families were unable to achieve this balance. Given contests over family’s assets between men and women, and between members of different generations within households, the shock of this new life was experienced in divergent ways. For men, it was the loss of their herds which was most catastrophic. When leaving the farms for the homelands, they either dispersed their herds amongst relatives remaining on white farms under more benign farmer landlords, or were forced to sell them at knock-down prices. The few who did attempt to take their herds along found that circumstances in the homelands were not conducive to cattle keeping: their stock gradually dwindled over subsequent generations. For women, in contrast, it was the forced entry to the cash economy which was most distressing. As was emphasised by ex-farm-dwellers now living in Lebowa whom I interviewed in 1983, the biggest difference between the farms and their present circumstances in the homeland was that everything, from firewood to food, had to be bought. Perhaps most shocking of all, even the land where they lived had to be paid for. Glossed as ‘rent’, dues were owed to the chiefs or, in more urban-type settings, to the municipal authorities: . . . we have to pay rent although we are not working – how? I will have to sell my clothes to pay the rent, and will end up naked! We were dropped here, with no jobs, but are still expected to pay rent.17 A similar sense of loss – similarly divided along gender lines – was experienced by those who had lived as tenants on African land, who then became the victims of forced removals into the homelands. For the male members of such families, it was the loss of their cattle ‘in which they had invested most of their savings’ which was a ‘source of intense anger and frustration’. For women, in contrast, it was the ‘shock and stress of having to pay for everything and the imperatives of generating cash income’ which were most memorable (Hart 2002:94). The few families who survived the state’s onslaught on labour tenancy and remained on the farms – like those in Wakkerstroom – both retained 143

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their cattle and found it increasingly difficult to engage in the money economy. White farmers were placing restrictions on their rights to work in the cities as long as they remained resident on the farms. They were paying for tenants’ services ‘in kind’ rather than cash. Later, threatened by the new political dispensation and keen to avoid tenants’ assertion of tenure rights over their land, these farmers began making life unbearable in other ways. At the moment of South Africa’s political transition, tenants found themselves in an untenable situation. The possibility of sustaining the delicate balance between land, labour and cattle was far less than it had been for their counterparts who left the farms a generation or two earlier. Those who managed to continue working in urban centres would face certain eviction from the farms. Being evicted would in turn mean losing their cattle. Such a loss at this stage was particularly severe, since it was becoming ever more difficult for young men to earn the wherewithal to pay bride price, and thus to secure the lineage membership and paternity of their children. The trauma of tenants’ inability to meet these ritual demands, and the sense of being squeezed between immoveable forces, is well conveyed by Steinberg in his book on tenancy in KwaZulu-Natal: There are two ways of dying from poverty. The first is when you have no food and you slowly waste away. The second is when you have no cattle and your sons cannot marry. They will have children, but the little ones will not be your grandchildren. They are vagrants, human beings with no ancestry. And then you have died because your family has died. You have disgraced everyone who came before you. . . . This is more devastating than a physical assault. The white man assaults your dignity, your very being. He spits on you like you are a beast with no name and no history. (Steinberg 2002:230–1) The depth of feeling expressed in this extract was echoed by the members of the MLTC. Living in towns away from the land would be a kind of suicide on two counts. It would mean participating in the world of cash, commodities and basic services without the means to survive there. It would also mean abandoning the means, in cattle or cash, of legitimate marriage and hence of securing a future for a family’s children. Such deeply-held sentiments lie at the basis of tenant antipathy to the solution which, they said, was all the land reform programme could offer them. This was the ‘property’ solution proposed by the government officers discussed in Chapter 1. Instead of affirming their ‘rights’ on the farms where they had been living, they would be moved away from the farms and into townships where they would live in ‘matchbox’ houses.

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‘DUMPING’ OR GIVING US ‘MATCHBOXES’: THE OFFICIAL RESPONSE There was an acute awareness of the situation of labour tenants, alongside that of farm-dwellers overall, within the ranks of activists who designed the land reform programme. As early as 1992, the future Minister of Land Affairs Derek Hanekom, then head of the ANC Land Commission, spoke of the need for strong interim measures to prevent people falling victim to various legal and social forms that were leftovers of apartheid. Before the 1994 election he promised that the ANC would refuse to tolerate farm evictions (SAIRR 1992–1993:390; Williams 1996b). Considering the plight of farm workers and labour tenants to be one of the key areas where such victimhood might be experienced, he spent his time in the ministry focusing on this aspect of the land reform programme, even giving it priority over restitution.18 The two pieces of legislation which were passed during his term of office to protect the victims of a continuing apartheid in the countryside were the Land Reform (Labour Tenants) Act of 1996 and the Extension of Security of Tenure Act of 1997 (known as ESTA; see Figure 0.1). These Acts are thought by some to have intensified rather than mitigated the effects of ‘apartheid after the event’, particularly by promoting more evictions than they avoided. Both pieces of legislation attempted to secure the rights of farmland occupiers or to provide alternative sites on which to accommodate them. Both have ignited controversy amongst those anticipating their probable consequences and later analysing their effects. The first to be passed, the Labour Tenants Act, tried to safeguard the rights of people who had lived on farmland for several generations and who had been remunerated ‘predominantly in the right to occupy and use land’[1 (ix), (xi)]. Almost every aspect of this Act has sparked disagreement. There were the technicalities of registration by a certain cut-off date, with NGO spokesmen pointing to the difficulty and costliness for farm-dwellers of travelling to central registration points. There was the question, raised by members of the white farmers’ unions, of whether there were sufficient numbers of tenants to justify specific legislation addressing their needs. Disputing NGO claims that labour tenants still numbered about 20,000, a farmer spokesman claimed in 2000 that ‘only about 700 labour tenants remained when labour tenancy was outlawed 21 years ago’. Most important, and with greatest implications for the African land ethic discussed earlier, there was the question of how far the passing of such legislation would curdle the milk of paternalism. As another farmer spokesman put it, ‘the Act tries to make labour tenants independent and therefore severs good relationships between them and farmers’.19 The Labour Tenants Act aimed to protect farm occupiers by securing their existing rights and by restricting the possibility of being thrown off the land. But evictions and atrocities have continued. Some even claim that the 145

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presence of the legislation exacerbates rather than abates these, as farmers felt the threats of a changed dispensation in the countryside. Abuses of the kind alleged by the MTLC have been occasioned not only by white farmers’ fear of ‘attacks’, but also by their wish to restrict the numbers of people residing on the farms and hence able to claim rights on them. The fact that both Acts were made retrospective to foil such tactics merely fanned the flames further. Further abuses have, almost certainly, been prompted by farmers’ frustration at the intractability of those who remain determined to reside on their land. In extreme cases like that of the MTLC, the result has been ‘exile’, but has occasioned a determination to retaliate and return to ‘our rightful place’. Policy makers had acknowledged from the outset that efforts to secure tenants’ rights might fail, and that there would probably be a need to accommodate many farm workers away from the farms where they had been living. A solution proposed early on was that of ‘agrivillages’ built to house those evicted from farms (SAIRR 1995–1996:369), which was later criticised as an ‘outdated apartheid policy for displacing people’.20 But many of the off-farm settlements which eventually resulted – the ‘matchboxes’ – could be characterised in this way. An acknowledgement of the difficulty of securing existing rights was built into the Act. It thus contained a central contradiction. By seeking both to entrench existing and historically derived rights and to initiate new prospects for accommodation, this legislation simultaneously envisages the continuation of existing paternalistic relationships on the land and their dissolution (Williams 1996b).21 That the dissolution of paternalism was more likely than its continuation was to be ensured, not by law itself, but by its location within a broader political and social context. It was not the law as set out within the Act but its political effect in a specific and volatile rural situation which resulted in Wakkerstroom’s beatings and electrocutions and in Middelburg’s evictions and disruptions of initiation ceremonies. The demise of labour tenancy was also ensured by broader social circumstances: specifically the lack of recourse to legal aid in the countryside for poor people seeking protection under these Acts, and the fact that so many officers of the law in these areas have close connections to the white farming fraternity.22 The broader social setting in which the new legislation took root was certainly one ridden with conflict. But how did farm workers and labour tenants themselves envision the nature of their land rights? What relationship existed, in their eyes, between rights to ‘their land’ and rights to protection from vigilante attacks engendered by struggles over this land? And, bearing in mind that many groups or generations of farm-leavers had left relatives on the farms who were continuing the struggle to remain there, was there a link between the seemingly rather particular situation of present-day farm occupiers and the broader project of restoring lands lost long ago? Did the 146

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assertion of an inalienable right to land, in other words, have a broader reach than the specific situation of labour tenants? In answer, it is certainly the case that labour tenants viewed restitution – rather than any other aspect of land reform – as their entitlement. Restitution, they felt, should be a policy for all. Attempts to subdivide land reform into separate categories for different sectors of society – such that restitution serves title-holders while tenure reform attends to farm workers – have served only to confuse matters, and to generate resentment and bitterness. Members of the MLTC, like other tenants, lodged restitution claims on the farms where they were residing, certain that their right to live and keep cattle on these farms would thereby be safeguarded, as NGO fieldworker Thomas Ngwenya of TRAC–MP explained: . . . in 1998 when the applications for restitution opened, everybody lodged claims. This is because proper information was not disseminated to the people, to distinguish between those who were supposed to lodge a claim and those who were not. Everybody just lodged claims. . . . [but] some of the people did not qualify in terms of the Restitution Act.23 Although others among them, in a manner subsequently judged more valid, applied instead for registration under the Labour Tenants Act, or hedged their bets by trying to use the routes provided by both restitution and the Labour Tenants Act simultaneously, neither approach has so far, they claim, proved successful. They attribute the failure of their bid for land to problems of bureaucratic causes: to rapid staff turnover and excessive reliance on consultants – . . . the people working for DLA in Ermelo are contract workers or consultants. When the contract expires, the new person will say he does not know where those files are. Therefore files tend to disappear.24 They complain that the absence of any visible white presence on certain farms had lulled their occupiers into a false sense that the land might already have officially become ‘theirs’ (see also Steinberg 2002:219–22). As Sipho Mkombothi said of one group of claimants in the area: These people lodged a claim in 1996, because the owner had deserted it. The problem was when they dragged their feet thinking that the farm already belonged to them. They should have pressured the government. All of a sudden, this [new white] man emerges as the owner – someone who bought the farm. We suspect corruption in all this. 147

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They complain about the inadequacy of what the state has so far provided: ‘dumping’ people by the roadside or in ‘waste lands’ or – using the government grants – the ‘agrivillage’ solution: ‘moving us into townships and building us these “matchboxes”. These houses are very small – they are for two people, not a family.’ Such ‘off-farm’ solutions fall far short of what they claim to have been led to expect in terms of the promises made at the election: I don’t want to move from the farm where I used to stay. I want to go and farm. I am not used to staying in a township. I am a farmer – I like cattle. . . . We want our land back so that we shall end destitution. . . . Before we voted, the ANC slogan was ‘land to the tiller’. If they had not promised us this we would not have voted for them. Resettling labour tenants and providing them with ‘matchboxes’ represents a solution to the problem which foregrounds ‘property’ over the restitution of ‘rights’. The alternative is to find the means to settle them on the original farms. Chapter 1 showed how this is regarded by activists and NGO officers as the preferable option, since it can be seen to abide by the principles of ‘land reform’ in its most ‘rights’- and justice-oriented sense. Under this option, tenants or workers may settle on a portion of the farm where they had previously lived and worked. Alternatively, as happened in one case worked on by TRAC–MP, landowners wishing to evict a labour tenant have been forced under pressure from the NGO to abide by their legal obligation to provide a ‘suitable alternative’ for the tenant’s resettlement.25 This kind of outcome might appear to be a step on the road towards de Soto’s approach: to formalise property rights and thus unleash the entrepreneurial potential of the poor (2001). But such an outcome might eventually leave former tenants without patronage or protection. Having secure rights to land without a cash income is no security at all unless tenants can retain ‘the goodwill of the farmer’. Without this, it may be hard to retain ‘employment and the wages and other benefits which they earn’ in order to sustain cultivation of the land (Williams 1996b). Retaining the ‘goodwill’ of farmers, although arguably a central feature in tenant conceptualisations of the moral economy of land, is also the one most notably absent in extreme cases like that of the Wakkerstroom farmers and their tenants in the MLTC. But its absence makes the insistence on its restoration all the more strident. Although to ‘Take Back the Land’ was used as a threat in the memorandum to farmer van Zyl, land on its own without the broader social framework in which it could be made useful is of little worth. Land within the framework of client-style relationships, whether this be provided by benevolent white farmers in terms established during the misremembered ‘golden age’ of tenancy, or by the envisaged welfarism of the state, is what is being demanded by the MTLC, the LPM, its real or imagined constituents and those who have yet to join it. 148

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THE LPM: POLITICAL, SOCIAL, GLOBAL When MLTC members, self-styled founders of the LPM, complained about the inadequacy of the government’s response to their plight, their account did not go unchallenged. Beleaguered government officials, working overtime to process claims and applications, pointed out that some LPM members had, in fact, benefited from land reform; ‘that one got his title deed . . . we actually gave it to him,’ said DLA regional director Star Motswege of an LPM member on a protest march.26 Government officials also called into question the legitimacy of the LPM’s protests. They ascribed to it ‘political’ motivations, particularly those of the marginalised Pan African Congress (PAC). This interpretation was also subscribed to by some in the NGO sector, despite their greater sympathy for the LPM. ‘Groups like PAC and AZAPO (Azanian People’s Organisation) hijack the movement with their slogans like “the settler to the sea”,’ said Siphiwe Ngomane.27 That this opportunism is secondary to the movement’s true orientation, however, is asserted by one of its chief protagonists, activist and university graduate Andile Mngxitama. He insists that the LPM’s actions reflect its members’ grassroots concerns with their own ‘landlessness’ rather than arise out of partisan political allegiance:28 We do not see this as a party-political matter. . . . The PAC has tried to capitalise on our movement, by calling on its members to demonstrate. . . . But this is just opportunism – we don’t see ourselves as aligned with PAC, which has become a weakened political force. Political parties cannot answer these questions – not even a socialist revolutionary party. What you need is a big mobilised civil society, to exert pressure on the organs of the state, so that the state can act in response to these pressures.29 As with social movements elsewhere, it is the single issue of land, rather than a broad-based political ideology or orientation, which gives the LPM its focus. This basis in a single issue is what enables its leaders and rank-and-file members to interact with equivalent groupings in other countries, such as Brazil’s MST, low-caste groups in India, and landless people in Guatemala, the Philippines and elsewhere. Such connections give rise to – as much as they arise out of – stated beliefs like the following: Conceptions of land of African people are the same as those of the Maya people, who see land as their mother – how can you sell your mother? It gives life to you, when you’re dead it takes care of you. There is no conception of selling of land. You can’t sell land, it’s part of you, it defines you.30

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Partly deriving from these global connections, members’ rhetoric has a uniform ring to it, as though deriving from a continual repetition of mutually agreed slogans. Contrasting with individual statements grounded in real labour tenant experience, the ‘ideological’ version of the movement’s charter, as enunciated by Sipho Mkombothi, does not reflect aspirations to restore paternalism. Instead it stresses a simple ‘demand for land’: We need land. There is land from Heidelberg to Piet Retief which is not being used – or only used for planting trees. We want to have farms where we can feed our families and feed people staying in town. People in town are suffering from crime or they get killed. Farmers are keeping their land but not using it. . . . AIDS is spread by poverty – people sell their bodies to buy food. But if we had farms we would not have to do this.31 It is easy to allege the movement’s connection to dissident ‘political’ forces or to reject its ‘globalised’ version of landlessness as inauthentic. The movement’s authenticity had been called into question in much the same way by Thabo Mbeki, who dismissed its members as ‘not those who suffered in the struggle’ (Chapter 1). But the concept of land as a universal right and inalienable possession underlies such statements, as well as arising out of them. The LPM – as demonstrated by the case of the spontaneous farm worker demonstrations mentioned earlier – represents merely the tip of the iceberg. The importance of earlier forms of rural protest like that of the Industrial and Commercial Union (ICU), similarly, was in their enunciation of existing sentiments held more widely than by their own membership, rather than in their bringing-into-being of new sentiments (Bradford 1987, La Hausse 2000).

CONCLUSION By pointing to the social underpinnings of tenancy on South African farms, this chapter has delineated a set of experiences about land which have been tapped into by, and have also helped to form, the discourse of the LPM in South Africa. For poor people who for years have endeavoured to maintain a delicate balance between various means of fending off poverty, there is an obvious appeal in occupying land owned by a more powerful person or institutional presence, provided that owner is prepared to abide by certain unwritten rules of paternalism. If the time of hoping for such persons or presences is long gone (or never really existed), the grounds for expectantly imagining them are nonetheless fertile. Far more than other constituencies, the farm occupiers and tenants discussed in this chapter and the last equate to the ‘rural poor’ whose needs 150

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are frequently evoked in media critiques of land reform. The ‘rural poor’, asserted writer Stephen Friedman in 2000, require ‘urgent land redistribution’ but have been condemned to a marginal existence by the new land policy. Calling for a deepening of democracy, Friedman bemoaned the fact that this group is neither represented by, nor able to build alliances with, trade unions.32 If it was people living on, recently evicted from, or in ‘exile’ from South Africa’s white farms of whom the author was writing, his article was prescient in anticipating the LPM’s founding a year later. It is difficult to disentangle the intellectually derived inspiration of the LPM’s university-educated patron in the NGO sector, Andile Mngxitama, from the more grounded motivations of the movement’s humbler rank and file. As in the case of many social movement leaders and their followers, the two had formed each other in a series of reciprocal interactions. Mngxitama’s description of the movement’s rationale, stressing the inclusiveness of a single interest as a uniting motif, sounded like a textbook account of social movements everywhere. At the same time as echoing the statements of the Committee members cited earlier, it also resonated with the ideas underlying Brazil’s MST. It combined all these into a seemingly impossibly utopian view of the possibilities for grassroots-based social action. In Mngxitama’s vision of landlessness as a basis for social action, the historical ‘rights’ invoked in restitution were repudiated in favour of a more flexible and future-oriented redistribution: . . . ‘landlessness’ is an elastic category. From the rights-based point of view, the concept is historically focused: it is restricted to particular dates, is focused on the past – it distorts history. But from our point of view, it is able to go backwards and forwards in time. Landlessness can come to mean something new – someone who doesn’t have a job, for example. It allows people who do not have a historical link to the land to be defined as ‘landless’ – because they want to establish a new link to the land. We have people on the outskirts of Gauteng who were not necessarily farmers before, or who were maybe farm workers. They have seen farming, and they have seen it decline on some of these farms. Some of them are youths, most of them have given up on getting a job. They see the possibilities for using some of this vacant land.33 The use of this kind of rhetoric might seem to endorse pessimistic views about South African activism in the post-apartheid era. At best, such activism is described as having ‘disintegrated’ into new social movements ‘guided by identity politics that tend to gravitate less around ideologies and programmes than around “an amalgam of slogans and emotions” ’ (Marais 2001:140; see also Robins 2005:8). Its leaders’ vanguardist speeches, although invoking utopian visions of the future, may appear somewhat remote from 151

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the lived realities of their followers’ lives. Some of the members of the LPM, however, speak from experience, as this chapter has shown. This experience, where it does appear in the rhetoric, has been stripped of its ‘contextual particulars’ and ‘distorted and aggregated’ to make it fit with larger collective issues (Tambiah 1996:81).34 But if the movement is the ‘tip’ of a much bigger ‘iceberg’, many of its potential members have not yet joined it. They may, as Chapter 8 demonstrates, never do so, given how certain of its leaders are accused of having cultivated a narrowly clientelistic following: making ‘fiefs’ out of specific groups rather than allowing the movement to gain a wider purchase. As the case of labour tenancy demonstrates, however, the sentiments are no less passionately espoused than those which played a key role in South Africa’s transition. In this sense, Mbeki’s alleged dismissal – cited at the Durban meeting – of the LPM’s members as ‘not those who suffered in the struggle’ was inaccurate.

Notes 1 See also Delius (1983), and for KwaZulu-Natal, La Hausse (2000) and Steinberg (2002). 2 ‘Land invasion threat in Mpuma’ 27 May 2001 News24.com. 3 ‘Govt blasted over farm arrests’ 25 July 2001 News24.com. 4 ‘NLC supports land invasions’ 26 May 2001; ‘Settle land claims, govt urged’ 1 July 2001 News24.com. 5 Low-level invasions of white farmland had been going on for years: indeed, since well before the end of the apartheid regime – Wotshela 2001; Beinart 1998; Steyn 2002; Geoff Budlender, LRC, Johannesburg, 16 January 2001. 6 ‘White warlords in Wakkerstroom’, Land and Rural Digest 13:26–9, July/August 2000; ‘Farm workers’ tales of terror near Volksrust’, Land and Rural Digest 12:6–9, May/June 2000; SAIRR Survey 1994–1995:105. 7 For similar practices in Natal see Steinberg (2002). 8 Alfred Hlatshwayo, Johannesburg, 4 December 2002. 9 Document entitled ‘Memorandum from the LPM (Mpumalanga) to Mr Ben van Zyl, Emmanuel Farm, Wakkerstroom, 9 November 2002’. 10 J B Mahlangu, KwaMhlanga, 25 November 2002. 11 Such conflicts on the farms cannot be understood without looking at the broader backdrop of ‘farm attacks’ in which large numbers of white farmers had been killed over the course of several years immediately prior to these events. See Introduction and Chapter 9. 12 Samuel Rampedi, Magukubyana, 15 December 2002; Johanna Chego, Magukubyana, 17 December 2002; Podile Chego and wife, Magukubyana, 19 December 2002. 13 Document entitled ‘The revelation of the land of peace: by Rev Johannes Kgogudi Mashigoana of Bafaladi Suikerboschplaats Groblersdal’, copy in the author’s possession. 14 Petrus and Letty Maloma, Ga Masha, Apiesboom, 9 to 10 February 2003. 15 Abram Masha, Moomane, 27 November 2002; Chief Masha, Strydkraal, 11 February 2003; Frans Masha, Ga Masha (Moomane), 9 February 2003. 16 Josie Adler, Johannesburg, 16 December 2002.

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17 Resettled labour tenant, Bothashoek, 1983. 18 This was later held against him and used as one of the justifications for replacing him. Geoff Budlender, LRC, Johannesburg, 16 January 2001. 19 These various disputes are discussed in ‘Rush to register labour tenants’, Land and Rural Digest 11:43, March/April 2000. 20 ‘Massive farm worker resettlement slammed’ 13 December 1999 News24.com. Many such workers ended up in settlements on the edge of big or small towns rather than in ‘agrivillages’. See Margie Pretorius, ‘How white is our valley’, The Witness, 17 November 2005. 21 Chapter 1 discusses how the NGO fraternity and the state, driven by conflicting ideological considerations of ‘rights’ and ‘property’ respectively, attempted to secure these different outcomes. 22 Theunis Roux, CALS, Johannesburg, 22 November 2002; Geoff Budlender, LRC, Johannesburg, 16 January 2001; Andile Mngxitama NLC, Johannesburg, 17 January 2001. 23 Thomas Ngwenya, TRAC–MP, Nelspruit, 15 November 2003. 24 MTLC members (Sipho Mbkombothi, Isaac Vilakazi, Tommy Mhlongo, Jabulani Mbuli and others), Malvern, Johannesburg, 10 November 2003. 25 TRAC–MP managed to force the farmer, under the Labour Tenants Act, to pay R155,000 as compensation for three labour tenant families; the DLA then bought them a property for R650,000 (Chris Williams, personal communication). See Chapter 1. 26 Cited by Mampho Malgas, DLA, Nelspruit, 15 November. 27 Siphiwe Ngomane, Pretoria, 6 February 2003. 28 Andile Mngxitama and Ann Eveleth, NLC, Johannesburg, 25 October 2002; Andile Mngxitama, NLC, Johannesburg, 4 November 2002. 29 Andile Mngxitama, NLC, Johannesburg, 4 November 2002. 30 Andile Mngxitama NLC, Johannesburg, 17 January 2001. 31 MLTC members, Malvern, Johannesburg, 10 November 2002. 32 ‘SA’s poor lack effective voice’ Mail & Guardian, 2 June 2000. 33 Andile Mngxitama NLC, Johannesburg, 17 January 2001. 34 I am grateful to Peggy Froerer for bringing the Tambiah book to my attention.

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6 BETWEEN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE New property models

INTRODUCTION The kind of land occupancy advocated by the state, especially since the 1999 elections, has stood on its head the idea of land as an inalienable right. A central aim of the land reform programme has been to put land into the hands of the country’s black population. In contrast to the custodial model used during apartheid, in which the state owned land and held it in trust for its African occupants, the new approach involves transferring land into private ownership, through the purchase by ‘willing (black) buyers’ of the property of ‘willing (white) sellers’ with the help of state support and finance. It is this purchase of land, and its transfer into private ownership – originally for groups but increasingly now for individuals – that has been the aspect of state policy most fiercely resisted by the LPM, on the grounds that ‘we cannot buy what already belongs to us’. According to some views, the state’s new embracing of private ownership is the central flaw of the programme. Although it is true, as Hardin once asserted (1968), that privatising resources can provide certainty about rights and responsibilities, it also threatens, in the absence of any form of public or state intervention, to alienate these resources from their new owners, by allowing for the later possibility of their sale (Platteau 2000; Verdery 1999). But there is a more immediate threat. At least in the interim before the sale of restored or redistributed land becomes a possibility, there is a fear that allocating land to ‘communities’ along semi-private lines can render its management so chaotic that it becomes effectively unusable, as this chapter will demonstrate. In disputes on this matter, putatively backward-looking visions of landholding have been pitted against the forward-looking approach which the state seems determined to promote, thus creating an apparent dichotomy between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’. The dispute counterposes two positions. One, in line with the assertion that resources owned in common are misused since no-one takes responsibility for them, is that securing land ownership on a private and individual basis can provide certainty about rights and 154

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obligations. The other is that ensuring or perpetuating the private ownership of land threatens either to lead to its eventual alienation from its new owners or to make it effectively unusable by placing it under ‘community’ control without state support. The dichotomy between modern/private and traditional/state-owned harks back to the apartheid era. Although planners envisage a wide variety of tenurial types, depending on whether the land in question is in the former communal areas or one of the privately owned farms of white South Africa, some land activists nonetheless express anxiety that a bipolar division looks set to be further entrenched overall. As is the case in other transforming regimes, however, the boundaries between these apparently opposed polarities are blurred. Neither ‘traditional’ nor ‘modern’ is quite what it may seem. The traditional models of landholding now defended by poorer landless people were less the product of pre-colonial experience than the result of apartheid’s extensive planning regimes.1 Conversely, forms of ownership now endorsed by the state, although private, often transfer land to communities rather than individuals. Boundaries are also blurred within the apparently public arena of state planning. While the present regime is committed to privatising land, it currently relies on a public legal/bureaucratic planning apparatus in order to achieve this. Such has been the complexity of the new frameworks generated, however, that they have, in turn, required the intervention of private consultants for their design and implementation. These private consultants nonetheless act on behalf of and are paid by the state. New intermediate layers emerge between private actors and government, combining private and public elements which interweave in a bewildering manner. Ownership becomes so complicated that some local people, by contrast, idealise apartheid’s earlier system of custodial/state ownership. Private ownership carries a promise of autonomy, but this is tenuously balanced against the dangers of operating with reduced state support. The state aims to transfer ownership of farms to groups, thus privatising responsibility for development, social services and the adjudication of disputes. Activists and lawyers point to the resulting lack of clarity on the nature of rights and responsibilities, on how disputes between communal owners are to be resolved, and on exactly who is entitled to make decisions about land use. Where communal owners do, despite such uncertainties, succeed in using landed property as loan collateral, debts incurred by individuals threaten to deprive whole groups of their land. Lobbying by NGOs has challenged the state in its intention to transfer responsibility for such lands, pointing out that it is the fully alienable nature of land entailed in unprotected ownership which renders its owners vulnerable. As a result, there has been intensifying debate about the role of chiefs. Although these leaders were thought of as deeply compromised during the apartheid era, their obligation to protect their subjects is cited by many as a reason for retaining apartheid’s ‘customary’ or 155

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chief-based models of landholding, since it is thought to entail the back-up of state protection. Owners, in short, find themselves in a risky and difficult position. They must attempt to pursue the freedom of private ownership while safeguarding themselves from its vulnerability by calling upon assistance from a state increasingly unwilling to supply it. They must juggle the demands of communal responsibility against the risk-taking of the individual entrepreneur. They find themselves balancing the promises of modernity against the security of the well-trodden path.

COMMUNAL PROPERTY: LAWS, MODELS AND PRECEDENTS During the first few years after the 1994 election, South Africa’s new ‘land reformers’, both in state and NGO sectors, designed new forms of legislation to provide a legal framework for the ownership of restored land. The CPA (Communal Property Association) Bill was drafted and approved by Parliament in 1995, and the CPA Act passed in 1996 (SAIRR 1995–1996:369; Klug 1996:194–5).2 It stipulates that each CPA must have a constitution, a system of governance such that individual members elect a committee, a means of transferring property upon the death of individual members, and the like. Almost a decade after its original design, the CPA model has been much criticised. It is seen, on the one hand, as inadequately geared to the needs of particular kinds of communities for particular kinds of ownership but, on the other, as attempting to cater too much for these special needs. Where one set of commentators calls it ‘ill-matched with the real needs and capacities of the rural poor’ and criticises it for assuming too much in the way of experience and leadership on the part of rural leaders, another view disparages it for stultifying all entrepreneurial initiatives in its assumption that African people are different from other property owners in being inherently ‘communal’.3 The new ‘land reform’ ownership model is, then, both denounced for embodying an inferior ownership specific to Africans and for being too complicated for rural Africans to understand: it is either insufficiently – or overly – different from normal ownership. It balances communal against individual, and public against private, in an uneasy combination. As a model it is not unprecedented. But it would be inaccurate to see it as rooted in African tradition. Instead, this ‘hybrid model’, as discussed in the Introduction, combines diverse – even contradictory – social, political and intellectual influences. When dispossessed African title-holders such as those at Doornkop struggled to reclaim their land during the decades before 1994, they interacted with land activists who took up their cause. The dispossessed, having in some 156

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cases distanced themselves from tribal forms of religion and authority, combined peasant cultivation with labour migration before succumbing to the forced removals of grand apartheid. The lawyers and activists were mainly white, middle-class, left/liberal people outraged by the inhumanity of these communities’ resettlement. The dealings between these sets of actors, so different in their social origins and yet converging on this morally charged issue, produced a series of convictions concerning the nature of communal ownership: particularly concerning its egalitarian and inclusive character (James 2000b, Robins 2001). An NGO-published booklet Botho Sechabeng/A feeling of community (TRAC 1992), based on interviews with African title-holders, reveals strong convictions about the moral benefits of communal ownership and a certainty that individual title would lessen ‘the unity of the area by undermining the feeling of community’. Such convictions sprang, in part, from the threat or experience of resettlement. Memories of an earlier existence, sharpened by the intensity of loss, had added an extra dimension to ordinary nostalgia (Beyers 2005; Harries 1987). The insistence on community solidarity was also partly tactical in nature (Pienaar 2000:329). Lawyer-turned-RestitutionCommissioner, Durkje Gilfillan, stressed the strategic necessity for concerted community action by all claimants if they were to persuade the government to take land claims seriously. Her advice did not constitute a mere machiavellian tactic, but was informed by ideas of egalitarian community central to a vision of reform shared by many South African activists. In its idealisation of African communality, it represents a partial misunderstanding – perhaps derived from a dichotomy between private/individual and communal ownership which prevailed in nineteenth-century Western thought – of the collective element in traditional land tenure systems (Hann 1998:321).4 Other precedents for the new ownership models likewise combined the demands of private ownership with those of communality, although initially privileging the former. These were provided by ‘development experts’ schooled in third-world agriculture. Policy makers from the World Bank, initially attempting to lead but later influenced by South African opinion, attended a series of local workshops during the early 1990s where they made proposals to liberalise agriculture and to transform land ownership. The resulting hybrid combined developers’ models, a reading of Kenyan land reforms of the 1950s, and an acquaintance with Bundy’s influential 1979 book The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry. The small family farm was initially proposed as the most efficient ownership unit, but subsequent persuasion by local land activists led to a modification of the proposal, allowing ‘communities and not only individuals to acquire land’ (Francis and Williams 1993:398–9; Hall and Williams 2003).5 Through these policy workshops, land reformers’ images of ‘communal property’ were further shaped. The ideological and historical basis for South Africa’s new model of communal property was thus one which combined community with the 157

Figure 6.1 Botho Sechabeng: a feeling of community.

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exclusivity of private ownership. In the case of ‘black spot’ communities, previous experiences of land ownership provided part of the basis for this model. International development discourse, positing an intended ideal of the future, also played a role in shaping it. The result is a standardised legal framework which offers owners a limited range of fixed alternatives.6 Prospective beneficiaries of land reform projects are advised about the need to choose one out of the range of possible property models, each of which specifies a slightly different ‘legal entity’. Once the choice is made, a standard set of bureaucratic procedures follows. A constitution is drawn up and committee elections organised, the CPA or Trust is registered, and a certificate of ownership is issued. The farm will now be officially owned, and governed, by its own particular ‘legal entity’. The choice of model has changed over time. In restitution cases initiated early in the 1990s, the CPA, as an embodiment of the strong communal ethic involved in ‘getting land back’, was preferred and advocated by state and NGO officers alike. As time went by it was realised that CPA ownership often led to a paralysis of decision making. Driven by this realisation, prospective buyers in a recent redistribution project, through a process of extensive ‘workshopping’, have instead opted for a Trust-style legal entity on the grounds that it will facilitate decisive action. They envisaged greater cohesiveness in future which would enable them to switch to communal ownership ‘after land transfer, when the community has become closeknit’.7 The contradictory nature of these newly designed legal frameworks can be seen if one looks at cases already discussed. Do claimants and beneficiaries see these as too modern or too traditional? Do they relate to these complex legal entities at all?

RESTITUTION: ‘EXACTLY WHAT THEY HAD BEFORE’? One case in which the interactions between restitution claimants and land activists produced an image of a strong community is that of Doornkop. Earlier forms of political representation, involving various committees during the period of diaspora, have now been expanded to encompass technical matters of ownership as well. The CPA, to which the land was restored, is governed by an elected committee, whose members are called upon to exercise considerable expertise and judgement. What complicates the already onerous duties of this committee is the social division between it and its constituents. Socio-economic differentiation in the community, already entrenched when the farm’s occupants were forcibly removed in 1974, gradually increased during the diaspora years. By the time of the farm’s restitution in 1994, it had become entrenched in 159

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Figure 6.2 Doornkop with CPA sign.

leadership–rank-and-file divisions. Those resettling on the farm had relied, and continued to rely, on a mostly absentee elite – whom they elected to the committee – to represent their interests. Apart from providing services like water and residential housing, a major task for the committee was to deal with (and to engage in) disputes over the re-emergence of tenancy on the farm. Where poorer CPA members had ‘sold’ plots, illegally, to these tenants, and where the CPA Committee was unanimously opposed to this practice, the rest of the community was divided over whether to evict or accommodate the tenants (Chapter 4). In the resulting crisis matters of leadership and ownership were closely intertwined. The farm had taken far longer than expected to be legally transferred from the SANDF. People were thus uncertain about their entitlements as property owners. Residents claimed that if they had been certain of their specific property rights from early on (a matter of ownership), they – or their representatives, the CPA Committee – would have been empowered to evict the squatters on their behalf (a matter of leadership) before the problem escalated. Lack of certainty about ownership likewise caused vacillation amongst co-owners about whether they could hold other members of the CPA accountable. Had there been less uncertainty, the illegal seller of land himself might have been more swiftly disciplined. This might even have entailed excluding the prime offender, Jack Mtsweni, from the title-holding community altogether, as one onlooker observed: 160

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he should lose his position – and his membership – with immediate effect. Otherwise, where are people going to get their idea of private property? . . . Different people say different things, and no one is clear on the government’s policies.8 Such a sense of uncertainty seems a far cry from the spirit of self-reliance which African title-holders pursued during the period of resistance against forced removals and immediately after reoccupying their land. The earlier independence of some of these farms has now been augmented, but in a distorted form, by the effects of the private–communal hybrid model of ownership. Ironically, at a time when restored owners are positioning themselves to take up full citizenship in the broader society, these farms have become, in effect, more separate than ever. On this point, human rights lawyers, continuing to engage in debates over communal ownership models and now somewhat critical of their earlier practices, have expressed regret. In retrospect, Kobus Pienaar of the LRC felt it was a mistake to have set up CPAs so as to leave them so isolated from the public realm. This had led to a corresponding reluctance of the state to intervene in their affairs. The hybrid model of private–communal ownership had induced uncertainty, he said, about the specific rights of individual members. Disputes between members, or inactive committees, have led to the withholding of the consent which is required by the CPA constitution in order for individuals to use or transfer their land. The result has been paralysis. The remedy to this, according to Pienaar, lies in holding the state responsible, as it formerly was, ‘in respect of the allocation and ongoing administration of the rights of individuals to use the land’. It also lies in a clearer initial definition of people’s entitlements: people’s rights ‘to various kinds of assets within the broader communally owned unit must be ensured’.9 Effectively, this is a call for the individual items in what some have called a ‘bundle of rights’ to be more clearly specified. It is a call for an eradication of the ‘fuzziness’ of property (von Benda-Beckmann et al.; Verdery 1999). These kinds of uncertainties, and the community conflicts which underpin but are also intensified by them, highlight the extent to which communally owned ‘land reform’ farms have come to be viewed as separate arenas, despite their occupants’ wish to exercise the citizenship rights of those in the broader society: . . . while the trust or communal property association tries to draw boundaries around itself to protect resources, it adds to the danger of creating an abnormally isolated zone. (Lund 1998) Based on his experience with several CPA-owned properties, Pienaar 161

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asserted that such problems would be obviated by treating land reform beneficiaries as though they were governed by society’s normal legal frameworks, rather than by special forms of legislation. The implication of this, he said, would be to recognise that the state has a role to play in administering relationships, and regulating conflict, between co-owners, as much as it does between neighbours in a city context: Other property relations in society do get a lot of state support from local government, which helps to define your relationship with the street, your neighbours, the area in front of your house, and so on. There are public institutions, like the Deeds Registry, the SurveyorGeneral’s office, which perform these functions. . . . It is presumed that people in CPAs must take charge themselves, but no-one would expect this in the case of normal individually-owned property.10 Authors Cousins and Hornby have made a similar point. As they show, the absence of support for these new institutions: . . . raises serious questions about the contractual underpinning of membership rights in common property institutions because contracts are only as good as the capacity of parties to enforce them. Contractual rights become meaningless where that capacity is eroded . . . if there is no neutral institutional support for individuals and groups to assert their rights (2001:21). The case of Doornkop shows that individual and communal aspects of ownership combine in ambiguous ways, resulting in many of the disadvantages of private ownership with few of its concomitant benefits. A model of communality, combined with inattention to the precise nature and content of property rights, has served to paralyse leaders and followers alike. In reaction, landholders have reverted to models of chiefly authority and ownership: somewhat surprisingly, given their history. Doornkop’s purchasers had separated themselves geographically from the wellsprings of chiefly power in the late nineteenth century, and had long insisted on elected rather than traditional forms of leadership. During the 1980s and 1990s, the farm’s claimants were speaking scornfully of all forms of patrimonial authority. But by the early 2000s at least some title-holders were sufficiently disillusioned with committee-style CPA government to be idealising the chiefship in retrospect: ‘We thought there would have been a chief here – if so, he would have been responsible for everything.’11 These sentiments were echoed by a claimant at another restitution farm, Kalkfontein (Chapter 3): ‘Now we have no master. We are ruled by a hundred rats, not by one lion. There are many committees ruling us now – we prefer to be ruled by just one chief.’12 162

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A land researcher to whom I mentioned these attitudes agreed that there had been a general reawakening of chiefship in South Africa, in reaction against the putatively ‘democratic’ alternative: Chiefs are seen as champions – strong people with clout, not people bogged down by bureaucracy. People think, ‘if only we had a strong leader’. . . . One can relate this to the appeal of authoritarianism to the poor in other settings.13 As in other parts of Africa, people faced with government failure to secure reliable land access were here turning to traditional authority even though they may formerly have opposed it (Andersson 1999; Hammar 2002; Oomen 2005; West 1998). Such sentiments should not be seen, though, as a wholehearted endorsement of traditional leadership. Rather, they represent a critical commentary on the opacity and ineffectiveness of CPA committees: groups of (mostly male) office-holders whose deliberations and machinations are a mystery to most, who fail to deliver on numerous promises of development, and who in many cases do not even live on the restored farms but travel there infrequently from the cities where they reside and work. Similar problems, widely reported, suggest profound flaws in the assumption – enshrined in the original legislation – that communal landholding would automatically be translated into harmonious and conflict-free leadership. Instead, there is a ‘breakdown of communication between the leadership and members’, as well as ‘inequitable allocation of assets based on self help; mismanagement; the squandering of opportunity; a disregard for internal rules’. The result has been that ‘infrastructure and land are left to deteriorate’ (Pienaar 2000:327, see also Beinart 2001:320). In the face of such problems, chiefs appear to present an alternative model of ownership, and leadership, which contrasts favourably with ‘government by committee’. The problem here appears to be that no-one has sufficient authority and clout to act in the way that truly ‘private’ owners of land might do. In search of such authority, people revert to a perhaps misremembered past in which chiefs acted with decisiveness and authority rather than being crippled by indecision and doubt.

REDISTRIBUTION: ‘FUTURE-ORIENTED’? In the new South Africa, as with other regimes focused on reforming land ownership, there has been consciousness of a need to provide redistributive justice alongside reparative justice, since land restoration focuses entirely on historical conditions without taking into account the dynamics of the present or the demands of the future. 163

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If restitution was turning out to be a backward-looking enterprise, redistribution appeared to promise new, perhaps liberatory, ideals of community based on an orientation to the future. It seemed to exemplify the best features that modern technical/legal planning could offer. In cases of restitution – ‘these people have a history – they want to claim back exactly what they had before. . . . But in redistribution cases, it’s “this is how we will do it”. It is future-oriented.’14 If, then, restitution farms have been seen as rooted in their own past and as needing CPAs which recognise earlier precedents, redistribution farms are perceived as requiring a design which recognises the challenge of communal ownership in a forward-looking manner. It does so in the absence of historical authority models by specifying, in minute detail, the precise content of different kinds of entitlements, responsibilities and obligations. Detailed and enlightened planning on redistribution farms should, it was thought, solve the problems posed by earlier-settled restitution cases like Doornkop. Planners have attempted to meet the challenge, along the lines outlined above by Pienaar, by disaggregating the bundle of rights normally entailed in property ownership (von Benda-Beckmann et al., 2006) and specifying the precise content of different kinds of entitlements and obligations. They have tried to produce an enlightened policy aimed at rectifying the ‘failure’ of existing projects. The cases of two redistribution farms near Doornkop demonstrate this. One is the earlier-settled, and already ‘failed’, Sizanani. The other, Siyathuthuka, is presently being designed to forestall a similar ‘failure’ (I and II on the map on p. xvi). Sizanani is a casualty of an early phase in the redistribution process. It is typical of this phase in its use of the approach derogatorily referred to as ‘rent-a-crowd’. A system of government subsidies or grants was devised whereby Africans could procure an amount of money, either to help with the purchase of an urban house or to put towards the purchase of land. The policy was designed to ensure equity as well as to be compatible with a marketbased model of land reform by stimulating entrepreuneurs to initiate their own land purchase. But the cost of farm land forced poor people to recruit others at random. Beneficiaries, sometimes with nothing in common other than their shared position as evicted farm workers, began to pool their grants in order to buy white farm land.15 Often these were ‘beneficiaries’ in name alone. Their names and identity numbers would be collected and given to the authorities as proof that a sufficiently large pool of people had been recruited. These groups often lacked the capacity and resources to start farming on the land. This approach was later replaced by one geared towards encouraging aspirant commercial farmers with their own sources of matching finance (Chapter 7), but it left numerous unsuccessful ‘rent-a-crowd’ projects in its wake. Given the large number of ‘shadow’ owners, Sizanani’s prospects of effective representation were slim from the outset. But these were made even more 164

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remote by the group members’ lack of experience of commercial agriculture, finance or business. Although many had worked on farms, their habituation to a decades-old despotic regime as labourers for white farmers made egalitarian models of participatory democracy unfamiliar: The problem they have is with management. There are seven families who are working on the farm from the previous farm owner. They do have experience with farming but the previous farm owner was in the position of farm manager and they were working by instruction. But now they need a person who can manage them – and they . . . have this problem of not respecting any of their own members.16 Their lack of experience did not lead to the members being excluded from participation altogether, as happened in Zimbabwe. Here, government officials had argued for the exclusion of farm workers from resettlement schemes (even ones involving the farm on which they had been living) on grounds that they would be unable to work effectively without an external overseer (Rutherford 2001). The remedy proposed in the case of Sizanani, as in that of many like it in South Africa, was to appoint an outside expert with managerial and commercial farming experience to run the farm in the interim. He would share his knowledge with the new owners until they were ready to take over from him. In a rather grotesque caricature of earlier apartheid practice, the person proposed – in this as in similar cases – was the former white farm owner: While he is busy assisting them, at the same time he is teaching them how to manage the farm. . . . Maybe I’m a farm owner, I decide to sell my farm, but I want to be there for three years to train the new farm owners. Then when they are able to run it on their own, I leave them.17 However, not all CPA members were enthusiastic about accepting the former owner as manager. They felt bewildered and unable to assert themselves in the face of the grandiose schemes this owner proposed, and resentful about his promises which, as they later said, were ‘never fulfilled’. The CPA secretary, Driver Ntuli, was thus relieved when agents from the development wing of the parastatal Eskom (formerly Electricity Supply Commission, now Electricity Supply Company) took over the management. These agents confirmed CPA members’ suspicions by telling them ‘not to work with any white people, because they are going to rob us and later dispossess us of our farm’.18 Such assurances seemed to provide a sense of security by pointing to a mutually agreed-upon enemy which could be blamed for the CPA’s, and the farm’s, misfortunes. But it remains to be seen whether Eskom’s agents are more reliable than the earlier candidates for the position of manager. 165

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Figure 6.3 Sizanani Secretary, Driver Ntuli.

They, in turn, plan to outsource the training of Sizanani’s owners to two black-owned companies of ‘service providers’. What will certainly remain true for the foreseeable future is the perpetuation of the CPA members’ present sense of dependency. The representatives of Eskom and of the Department of Agriculture were shrilly insistent that Sizanani’s farmers/owners must now be independent rather than continuing to rely on employment by white farmers. But many of the owners felt pessimistic about being able to make an independent living on the land and were hence reluctant to relinquish their jobs as labourers on nearby white farms, as this extract from my field diary shows: Meeting at Sizanani, 26 January 2003 George Mahlaela (from Eskom Development Foundation): You no longer work at makgoweng (the place of the whites) – makgoweng is 166

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here, work is here. You are the farmers – you are your own bosses. Your children are your eyes and your ears, they must be involved. Do not come and tell us that your children are in town working. You must get here in time for meetings. This place belongs to you. Male CPA member: Who is going to control the money? Rose Msibi (from Department of Agriculture): You will get it every month – but only if you work. Female CPA member: If we start farming, who’s going to pay for this? Will we be paid if we start to farm here? George: I must refer you to the service providers. They will deal with this during training. (Rose continues to speak, very emphatically. She talks about maize, poultry, cattle. Every so often she punctuates her words with the query ‘do you hear me?’ And people murmur in affirmation.) One of the ‘service providers’: The boer has now gone – we can no longer blame our failures on the boers. But you need training to do farming – running a farm is like driving a car. If you try to do it without training you will not manage to do it at all. . . . Female CPA member: What is the government going to do? When are they going to give us water, electricity, and so on? When is electricity going to be laid on here? George: These things will be settled by the service providers. . . . (Some people get up and start to leave. Rose gets upset.) Rose: We want to have a general meeting every month. . . . We would like to have the meeting on a weekday – this will force people to attend and thus to stop their work on farms. If the meeting is on the weekend, people will just carry on working on farms during the week. People should not be working on farms here. You’re your own bosses – you are like whites. Male CPA member: If you have it in the week, some will come, and those who are working will not. George: We could have it at 5 o’clock, or 6 o’clock, to accommodate them. (They take a vote to hold it on a weekday afternoon). Male CPA member: (defiantly) I cannot make it in the week – I work on a farm. (Everybody laughs). This exchange shows the state and its agents attempting to foist the responsibilities of ownership onto land reform beneficiaries. While employees of the state, of parastatal development agencies or ‘service providers’ attempt to reshape reality by portraying Sizanani’s members as independent owners responsible for their own future prosperity, the members themselves recognise that their poverty will continue to render them reliant on white farm 167

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employment and on state welfare. The fact that the former is dwindling and the state has shown itself increasingly unwilling to provide the latter makes the position more parlous. Because of the perceived failure of communal ownership and responsibility in projects such as Sizanani, new models have been developed which allow for the individualisation of rights. There are moves towards styles of ownership which – as suggested by the World Bank – privilege the family farm or foreground the individual entrepreneur. Groups of ‘landless’ people remain who still, however, feel unable to own or run properties as individuals. In Mpumalanga, as elsewhere, many of these are displaced farm labourers. Such farm workers came to Doornkop as tenants or illegal land-buyers (Chapter 4) and settled there without any immediate prospects of a redistribution project or CPA membership. It was for these – the Doornkop tenants – that Siyathuthuka was designed. It proposed to do away with the cumbersomeness of the CPA in favour of a more streamlined ‘Trust’-based arrangement. In this case, individual ownership within-the-commons has been perfected – at least in theory.

NEW-STYLE REDISTRIBUTION: PLANNING TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS TO POLITICAL PROBLEMS In the process of making new plans to overcome old problems, consultants gain considerable experience. They develop expertise at constructing ‘business plans’ for use on communally held lands. These plans, with their complex provisions for sub-letting of communal property, were intended to address the failures of earlier CPA constitutions: in particular their failure to specify individual rights to assets. The sophisticated subdivision of rights and responsibilities proposed by these new plans was undoubtedly designed to ensure the accountable use of communal assets: to overcome the ‘tragedy of the commons’. But requiring cash-poor people to pay for what they see as a common good, and establishing trust that the funds would be responsibly used, seemed insuperable obstacles given the problems of resources and leadership outlined earlier. In the absence of reliable systems of community representation, the plans could be seen as typifying much third-world development, by substituting planned technical solutions for political ones (Ferguson 1990; Robertson 1984). In preparing to purchase a redistribution farm where Doornkop’s tenants would be settled, the consultants drew up a business plan for a landholding ‘legal entity’ which would be known as the Siyathuthuka Trust. It allocated resources in such a way as to avoid a scenario in which a failure of responsible leadership might result in wasting assets. The ‘commons’ here have been conceptualised as a resource, owned by the Trust, which members must lease: 168

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The Trust will be responsible to collect rent from each beneficiary and people operating small businesses that will then be used to maintain infrastructure and to pay for services.19 The specified grazing arrangements are similar: . . . an amount of R5 to R10 per month per head is paid to the Trust for the grazing. . . . The reason why a rent should be asked is that the property belongs to all the beneficiaries collectively and that those that use the grazing use the assets of other individuals; it is therefore reasonable for the advantaged to compensate the others for the use of the Trust’s common assets. The consultant laid out the rationale for this co-operative ownership schema, claiming that its ‘somewhat autocratic’ nature was necessary in the interests of sustainability. This sophisticated model attempts to compensate, through elaborate technical specifications, for the ambiguities entrenched in the legal outlining of communal property arrangements. At the same time as guaranteeing the proper custodianship of ‘the commons’, it thus appears – at least on a technical level – to satisfy some of the requirements outlined earlier for a clearer initial definition of people’s rights over specific assets. This plan entailed two drawbacks, however. It conceived of rights as something earned through continuous enterprise rather than guaranteed by the state. Using a commercial model, it seemed to embody an assumption that cattle-owners would be generating cash income from their enterprises, and would thus be in a position to pay rent to the new ‘Trust’. In this way, it was out of kilter with the priorities of most tenants, who kept cattle as a form of long-term saving but were reluctant or unable to make continuing monthly investments such as payment for grazing. Instead of assuring the citizen’s inalienable entitlements as pledged by the state, the plan proposed a model of citizenship based on post-welfarist propositions about self-sustaining individual enterprise. A second drawback lay in the plan’s misrecognition of existing social realities. In the same way that it seemed to take little account of members’ incomes by failing to recognise that few were in a position to pay rent for grazing, it also ignored both their aspirations and their shortcomings on the level of managerial or organisational skills. In both these respects, the consultant’s plan thus fell into the old trap of the communal property model which it was attempting to transcend. Without extensive state intervention and agricultural support it was unlikely that its way of ‘privatising the commons’ could feasibly be put into practice. That tenants’ aspirations were being ignored had already become evident to me from several interviews: 169

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. . . we don’t want it. . . . In fact, they have gone behind our backs. Firstly, we were told to simply register our names and we later realised that our housing grants were used without our consent to buy the farm.20 Such objections were founded on a model in which the state should be the rightful owner and custodian of land. They were based on the trusteeship model of the homelands (Murray 1992:132), but had been newly reconstituted as a form of resistance against the state’s plans for private land ownership. Here, again, there seemed to be a misrecognition of the lack of managerial and organisational skills. This was suggested to me by Hendrik Mathibela, the father of the youthful chairman of this proposed Trust. The problem with business plans, he said, was that they were too complex for ordinary people to understand. The ‘workshopping’ beloved of both state and NGO practitioners in the land sector did little to improve matters: Now we have people driving from Pretoria,. . . . They talk, talk, and not a single person will ask a question. . . . It’s not that they are scared, it’s that they don’t understand.21 What made these workshops worse, he implied, was that the elaborateness of these abstract plans was matched by a failure to deliver any material, practical progress. Land for the tenants/squatters was forever being discussed at meetings but never handed over. He likened this to a meal much planned-for but never actually forthcoming: You can’t tell people ‘I have made food; I’m going to give you food’, from the morning till the sun goes down – people are waiting. Tomorrow when you we say, ‘We must go and eat’, they say, ‘There’s no food’. All-in-all, he was suggesting, the designing of complex plans for commercial farming was serving only to frustrate those for whom the plans had been made. While they would have been happy to settle for a much simpler solution, the process of planning was serving to render all solutions equally remote. It was thus promoting passivity among those planned-for. His account certainly confirmed squatter shortcomings on the level of ‘managerial skills’, but suggested that to require such skills was inappropriate in the circumstances. It would appear, then, that consultants’ technical elaborations on the communal property theme, although seeming to promise a fine-tuning of the original crude model, were so complex as to be virtually incomprehensible to their intended recipients. Although they might, with much public 170

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funding, have been realisable, it was precisely this support that was becoming increasingly rare under the new privatising regime. While much was being invested by the state to pay for consultants to design sophisticated property regimes, implementing these was generally left to communities with very little assistance. The state’s ‘hands-off ’ approach was being justified with such statements as ‘the point of land redistribution is to give a community their land, not run it for them’ and with the insistence that they ‘have to be more accountable for their own fate’.22 In the absence of ‘post-settlement support’, the assumption was that plans could be conveyed to their recipients through ‘workshops’. In a manner which has been widely noted in the world of development, this embodied a presumption that more effective channels of communication would enable planners’ modernising paradigm to be shared by those planned-for, and ignorance replaced by rational knowledge (Hobart 1993; Rossi forthcoming).

Communal property: complexities and contradictions In the one-size-fits-all world of communal property, things are not as they seem. In the case of restitution communities, it was presumed that their origin in long-standing group ties would provide precedents for democratic communal ownership. Instead, members ended up crying out for a return to a traditional model based on chiefly custodianship. But this call for despotism disguised a demand for state involvement and for the continuation of apartheid’s particular version – albeit a partial one – of welfarist, modernist planning. Redistribution groups, in contrast, appeared to promise a future untrammelled by communalist precedents: they provided a blank slate upon which consultants’ increasingly sophisticated schemas of entrepreneurial modernity and private ownership could be drawn. Instead, and in reaction, participants longed wistfully for apartheid’s model of state land with communal tenure. This apparently regressive vision, however, masked ideas about democraticstyle modernity. Deriving from the election’s promises of egalitarianism and participatory democracy, redistribution beneficiaries expressed their convictions that there should be wide consultation about future outcomes rather than allowing planners to ‘go behind our backs’. The state and its agents, it can be seen in this exchange, were attempting to foist the ideologies and responsibilities of ownership upon land reform beneficiaries. While state employees or those working for parastatal development agencies were convinced that they could turn ‘squatters’ into self-motivated entrepreneurs, the squatters themselves emphasised their dependence – ‘Will we be paid if we start to farm here? . . . When are they going to give us water, electricity?’ It is the perceived failure of communal ownership and communal responsibility in projects such as Sizanani that has led to an increasing emphasis on 171

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individual property or, where this cannot be achieved, to communal models which allow for the individualisation of rights under the communal rubric. Given that the CPA and Trust ownership models are flawed, alternatives have been sought, like the LRAD approach discussed in Chapter 7. But although there are increasing moves towards models of ownership which favour the family farm or the individual entrepreneur, such moves take little account of the on-the-ground realities faced by Department of Agriculture staff and the consultants they hire. Particular needs and problems at the local level frequently prompt practitioners to continue designing and implementing projects for groups of ‘landless’ people – many of them displaced farm labourers – who continue to feel unable to manage and thus effectively to own their properties.

INALIENABLE OR ALIENABLE LAND? If landed property becomes alienable and short-term gain outweighs longterm considerations, the public aspects of property may atrophy (Hann 1998:33). It remains briefly to mention the risk to newly-installed owners of alienating land altogether. Allowing alienation of land through non-redemption of mortgage loans may seem a mere technicality: a step on the road to a more modern form of property ownership which ensures access to credit and allows for greater flexibility. But alienation can become an actuality if lenders call in their loans. The possibility of land loss through indebtedness has loomed like a dark shadow in the background of South Africa’s land reform programme, threatening private-but-communal ownership. One such case is that of the Khomani San in the Northern Cape Province whose land was restored in the 1990s. When debts of up to R150,000 were incurred by three CPA committee members to a local shopkeeper (who was also the former owner of one of the farms), a magistrate ordered the land sale while the CPA leaders persuaded the rank-and-file membership to allow the land to guarantee their loans after the fact.23 As an interim solution, the Director-General of Land Affairs was pressed into custodianship of the CPA. In the case of the ‘rural poor’, then, the state has continued to intervene, partly under pressure from the NGO sector, in order to ensure that the gains made under land reform are not prematurely lost.24 Prospective land reform beneficiaries envisaging ownership under the newer, post-1999 dispensation, with its greater orientation to conventional private property regimes, began to perceive or be informed by their government advisers of these shortcomings. As I was told by Philip Mbiba of the Restitution Commission in Mpumalanga, people owning house plots in homeland areas were at a real disadvantage in this regard:

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. . . middle-class people want to have individual title, especially because they want to borrow from banks. When you want to move away, you can dispose of your property and invest somewhere else. Our current houses in the homeland can only be sold to a cash buyer: there are no loaning facilities, since the land is not titled to individuals and hence it is not really owned.25 In line with this perception, he was inclined to advise the claimants of the recently settled restitution case of Kromkrans to insert a clause allowing them to use their land as collateral. They rejected the CPA, because it would not allow them to borrow money at the bank. They want to be able to alienate their rights. We put a clause into the constitution that these rights will be sold first to other community members, and only secondly to outsiders. So it is still a CPA, but with a clause that allows this alienation. But what of the higher-income individual owners now starting to be favoured as beneficiaries of the programme? It is too early to assess whether land alienation is occurring within this group. There are, however, suggestions that a cautious and judicious approach which combines Land Bank loans with leasing and long-term payback arrangements to former owners will safeguard at least some of it (see the case of Thabo Tseki, Chapter 7). The increasing predilection of the Department of Land Affairs for such schemes has been roundly criticised by those on the left who feel that it is neglecting ‘the poor’. In defence of this new tactic, however, project officers point to the resounding failure of the earlier rent-a-crowd schemes, and to the greater apparent sustainability of the new approach. But the history of African land ownership tells us that even the middle classes, for whose identity and status landowning formed such a crucial basis, have fallen prey and might well again fall prey to land loss. Whether in the 1890s, as described in La Hausse’s book on African Christians in Natal, or during the 1920s and 1930s, as discussed in Murray’s work on African Christian farm owners in the Orange Free State, there was always the threat that mortgage debts might not be able to be repaid and thus that land would be forfeit. Such owners historically relied on sources of income other than farming and were thus susceptible to downturns in the economy which threatened their nonfarm sources of finance for repaying the debt. These sources included migrant labour, transport riding and ‘shack farming’ (letting out land to tenants for shacks) (La Hausse 2000:161–4); or leasing land to whites who would farm it instead (Murray 1992:98). Both cases illustrate the exceptional vulnerability of African farm owners in situations where the economic, legal and political odds were against them. At least, one might argue, the cards are now stacked in favour of African 173

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owners, with favourable loans being available from the Land Bank and the like. But this situation entails its own risks. Since well before the 1994 transition, the state has been unwilling to provide farmer support as it once did. Many of the white farmers selling to the state for land reform are doing so because they have become heavily indebted since the withdrawal of such support in the late 1980s (see Chapter 9). Middle-class land loss thus remains a distinct possibility.

CONCLUSION In conclusion, we may return to a theme outlined at the beginning of this chapter: the putative contrast between traditionalist and modern visions of property, and the possibility that, mediated through disputes between the two, a new variant of the old ‘two-tier’ system of land ownership – one for the middle class, another for the poor – is being entrenched in the South African countryside. The context of property-holding in South Africa is one of political transition: a context in which all models of ownership appear to be negotiable and under redesign. The change of regime presented an ideal opportunity to unbundle the complex components of the property package, selecting only the most appropriate parts and streamlining property ownership to suit a changed dispensation. To the most utopian land activists and their constituents, it seemed to promise a chance for re-negotiation of some of the most fundamental inequalities in society, by combining the independence of landowning with the security of state support. The resulting models combined private and public, modern and traditional, in unexpected ways. There is the still-resilient commitment to communal ownership on the part of civil society activists, human rights lawyers and consultants, partly drawing on but partly being imposed upon their constituents’ views. There is the co-ownership of property by better- and worse-off people, with the poor concomitantly dependent on better-off people to represent them or serve as intermediaries. Different models of property thus converge and their boundaries blur. Historical struggles and contemporary disputes over land and the way it ought – or ought not – to be owned have left their mark upon present-day policy and practice. The past weighs heavy and leaves its imprint, enshrining a view of apparent communality which leaves in place many of the features of individual property. When the hybrid ‘private/communal’ model was found to be problematic and unsuited to the demands of redistributive justice, planners attempted to refine it by specifying individual entitlements in greater detail. But the resultant models of property-holding are too complex. They also rely on a presumption about the capacity of poor people to behave as investors and rent-payers. As a result, the poor and landless appear to be 174

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excluded as real ‘beneficiaries’ of land reform. Unable to benefit from private ownership, they press for protection from its dangers. They affirm apartheid’s familiar model of customary landholding, which seems to promise land as an inalienable right. Resisting the state’s insistence on private property, they insist on their own interpretation: that ‘land cannot be bought and sold – it is for everyone’.

Notes 1 Murray (1992:132 passim). Apartheid planning is described by Bank, after Rabinow (1989), as embodying ‘middling modernism’ (2002). 2 In contrast, its twin legislation, the often redrafted Communal Land Rights Bill, provoked major controversy concerning chiefs’ role and was only passed in 2004. 3 For the first view see ‘Didiza’s recipe for disaster’, Ben Cousins, Mail & Guardian 22 August 2000, ‘We can’t deliver the land, admits government’, Sharon Hammond and Justin Arenstein, Mail & Guardian 21 January 1999; for the second see ‘Community projects drown in ideology’, Saliem Fakir, Mail & Guardian 1 July 1999. 4 Evidence similar to that presented in this chapter has subsequently caused Gilfillan, along with others in the human rights legal fraternity, to refine their ideas on communal ownership: they now favour a model of individual rights encompassed within a broader collective (personal communication). 5 For joint analyses by World Bank and South African policy makers, see Mbongwa et al. (1996) and other articles published in van Zyl et al. (1996b); for a critique see Williams (1996a). 6 CPA ‘is not so much one size fits all, but . . . in the early examples we . . . did not realise that if you do not give attention to how allocation would happen and be managed prior to transfer and settlement, it is very difficult if not impossible to do it later’ (Kobus Pienaar, personal communication). 7 Amos and Hendrik Mathibela, Doornkop, 28 January 2003. 8 Amos and Hendrik Mathibela, Doornkop, 28 January 2003. 9 Henk Smit and Kobus Pienaar, LRC, Cape Town, 15 January 2003. 10 In his growing awareness of the problems of communal ownership Pienaar shares the attitudes of others in the human rights legal fraternity, such as Gilfillan (cited earlier). All have come to recognise the point that, although African patterns of landholding have some collectivist elements, these do not equate to communal farming as practised under African socialism (Hann 1998:321). 11 Eva Mankge, Doornkop, 11 December 2002. 12 Simon Tshehla, Strydskraal, 26 November 2002. 13 Ruth Hall, Peter Jacobs, Ed Lahiff, PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 15 January 2003. 14 Andries Gouws, Pretoria, 13 December 2002. 15 ‘Land Affairs Divides and Conquers’, Ann Eveleth, Mail & Guardian, 20 April 1999; ‘Didiza’s recipe for disaster,’ Ben Cousins, Mail & Guardian, 22 August 2000. 16 J B Mahlangu, KwaMhlanga, 25 November 2003. 17 J B Mahlangu, KwaMhlanga, 25 November 2003. 18 Driver Ntuli, Mooiplaas, 28 January 2003. 19 ‘A business plan for the settlement of the Siyathuthuka Trust of Doornkop’, Fundile Africa, Pretoria, 2002. 20 Ephraim and Fanie Mabuza, Doornkop, 6 November 2002. 21 Hendrik Mathibela, De Jager’s Doornkop plot, 15 December 2002. 22 ‘Shattered dreams of the San’, Yolandi Groenewald, Mail & Guardian, 10 June

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2003. For a devastating account of similar failures see ‘Coming in to land’, Stephan Hofstatter, Financial Mail, 4 November 2005. 23 ‘San risk losing their land’, Yolandi Groenewald, Mail & Guardian, 15 September 2002; see also Robins (2001).Thanks to Derick Fay for clarifying some aspects of this case. 24 It is possible, in this case, that the intervention of the state was perceived as more feasible – and more desirable – because it was a case involving indigenous people, often seen as closer to nature, more vulnerable, less likely to be able to protect themselves. 25 Philip Mbiba, Restitution Commission, Nelspruit, 30–31 October 2002.

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7 RIGHTS, WELFARE OR THE MARKET? The new redistribution

INTRODUCTION South Africa’s official programme of land reform has, from the outset, been conceptualised by bureaucrats in terms of discrete categories. Lines were drawn between rights-based and welfare-oriented land demands. According to some critics, this created false distinctions (Levin 1996:390). But the subdivision was probably driven more by the imperatives of state planning than by any intention to be socially divisive, and it did not initially appear to compromise the overarching goal of restoring citizenship to those formerly denied it. The interdependence of land reform’s three branches, aimed at three subcategories, was acknowledged by the government: the goals of each would not readily be achieved without the implementation of the other two (DLA 1997). What was not recognised by policy makers was the extent to which local people – the intended beneficiaries – would conflate, or blur the boundaries between, these three policy subdivisions. In their attempts to secure land, the landless were ready to bring their diverse origins, contacts and sources of livelihood and identity to bear. An individual member of the landless might thus appear in any one of a number of different guises. Land reform’s beneficiaries did not fit into easily identifiable categories. Restitution claimants were often living in second dwellings in townships in Johannesburg. Evicted farm labourers applied to the government for redistribution grants while still viewing themselves as having lodged rightful claims evidenced by racially-based dispossession. Above all, what policy makers seemed almost wilfully to ignore was that black South Africans have depended on migrant labour, have moved between town and country, and have constructed multiple livelihoods in the process of this movement. However innocent the policy categorisations of land reform, political meanings soon came to be read off from the prioritising of one subcategory over the other. Restitution, for example, despite having shaped many of the models and priorities of the programme overall, had been somewhat sidelined during Mandela’s presidency by an emphasis on the redistributive 177

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approach and on reforming tenure for the poor. The backlash against this, following the 1999 election and under the leadership of the new minister, brought the restitution element to the fore once again, primarily through an emphasis on settling urban-based claims. This initiative placed no less focus on ‘rights’ for those who had once enjoyed them. But on an official level, at least, it represented a narrowing of restitution’s remit. Within this new order, aspirant farmers in search of land were to have their goals met within the terms of a newly redefined subdivision of the programme which would replace redistribution. With the earlier version of redistribution rejected because of its generally accepted unworkability (as demonstrated by ‘rent-a-crowd’ examples such as Sizanani in Chapter 6), the government announced an approach aimed at fostering the rise of a commercial farmer class. This was dubbed Land Reform for Agricultural Development (LRAD). In place of the earlier grants of R16,000 per household across the board, LRAD proposed a sliding scale of grants and loans to individual farmers. There was more money offered, but with the requirement that grantees make an ‘own contribution’ in cash, labour or kind. The loans were to be administered by the Land Bank, former bastion of the white farming class, which was now in the process of being restructured and of reformulating its priorities to favour those ‘previously disadvantaged’. After the temporary cul-de-sac of redistribution, which had offered grants to people too poor to do more than pool their grants and resettle on new lands, it was proposed that African farmers would now find their feet and drive the economy forward. A project officer explained this: . . . we have reached an understanding of the problems, and we now aim to move away from the ‘rent-a-crowd’ phenomenon. Instead, we want to develop groups of individual farmers who are committed to farming, and who will move up the ladder of success until eventually they become commercial farmers. . . . Many so-called poor people will not be able to make the grade. But this is still a better system than putting 100 or 200 people together, who might come into conflict and fight with one another as they had nothing in common in the first place. We formerly found that people were being brought together without a common goal. You’d find that only 25 per cent of the people would work the land, but the other 75 per cent would expect returns at the end of the year. And their hopes would be dashed. Farming is a more serious business than most of these people realise.1 The forms of criticism or praise with which those from different sides of the political spectrum greeted these changes of direction were predictable. The earlier redistributive approach, if flawed in its actual results, had – claimed critics of the new policy – at least been focused on the needs of the poorest. Judging that the targets of this new policy would be drawn from a more 178

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middle-class constituency than the ‘landless poor’ who had attempted to secure land under broad-style restitution and redistribution alike, these commentators condemned the new privileging of commercial over subsistence farming.2 Those in favour of this more commercially-oriented approach – like the officer quoted above – welcomed its prospective contribution to the country’s economy and condemned the government’s earlier blundering attempts to resettle large groups of people on unproductive land. In the course of such debates, the two principles identified in this book’s title became gradually polarised. Where proponents of old-style redistribution alongside restitution and tenure reform were still inclined to see land reform as a matter of recognising ‘rights’, those who championed the new-style nurturing of progressive farmers saw the way forward as that of securing the non-negotiable ownership of ‘property’ for these fledgling agriculturalists. As this suggests, the new approach was animated more solidly by considerations of the free market than by an aim to regulate and legislate social change. The policy makers of Mbeki’s presidency, although still concerned to restore ‘rights’ through restitution, as the constitution had promised, were becoming influenced more markedly by the principles of neo-classical economics. But even if planning and the principles of the law were now to be eclipsed by pragmatism and commercial considerations, some planning and regulation would still be required. This was because black farmers, however commercially viable they might eventually become, would still require a leg-up in order to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their white counterparts. In this respect, LRAD was to take its place alongside other forms of black economic empowerment rather than being readily comparable with rural settlement schemes for the poor. It was towards this end that the Land Bank was envisaging its new approach as one of ‘doing business with a development ethic’ (Dolny 2001:99–129). A close examination of the sets of assumptions contained in these new LRAD proposals reveals something about the mingled but ultimately irreconcilable priorities inherent in the original programme. Between the various designers and implementers of land reform there had always been ambivalence, if not outright dispute, about its intended targets. LRAD attempted to conceptualise and describe them in more precise terms. This redefinition was motivated, and was aimed at people assumed to be likewise driven, by market forces and considerations. But like the earlier policy which it replaced, this new approach remained flawed. It took as its targets ‘rural’ people, hoping to encourage their development as progressive farmers. The present chapter will demonstrate the illusory nature of this category: showing, in agreement with Sender and Johnston (2004:144), that the phenomenon of ‘efficient and egalitarian family-operated small farms’, in the context of South Africa, ‘does not exist’. It will also show that the members of other categories who have attempted to position themselves as farmers have largely been further disadvantaged by the new policy’s misdirected targeting. 179

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In sum, after some years of an uneasy cohabitation between market-driven and planned or legislated social change, the market-driven approach gained ascendancy, envisaging the ideal agriculturalist as a black full-time farmer with middle-class aspirations. While planning was still needed to get such farmers started since they were at a disadvantage, this planning was unable to counteract what the market had revealed: it had become difficult if not impossible for any farmers, black or white, to make a living from the land alone, at a time when South African agriculture has the lowest level of state protection of any country in the world (Hart 2002:227–8).

OFFICIAL DISCOURSE ON TOWN AND COUNTRY This recent policy development is rooted in a set of longer-term assumptions and policy practices. Showing striking continuities with the development discourse of the apartheid era, it envisages the worlds of town and country as separate. By presenting Africans either as rural ‘farmers’ or as urban ‘wageearners’, it ignores the interplay of rural and urban sources of income and identity and the extent to which most South African country-dwellers have pursued ‘multiple livelihoods’ (Francis 2002; Murray 2000). In this new policy, rural and urban appear as separate worlds, with plans to bolster the agricultural sector and to plan for the future of farming being seen as largely unrelated to people’s capacity to earn a living in, or derive a sense of belonging within, the urban-based industrial economy. In South Africa, as elsewhere on the continent, representations of rural– urban have been politically loaded (Ferguson 1999). Apartheid’s planners, attempting to envisage and legitimate a way of controlling the flux of African movement to the cities, had mapped these distinct spatial and social worlds with strict separation. From an official point of view, as shown in various Government Commissions on ‘the Native Question’, defining people as being ‘from another place’ was the basis for denying their political inclusion and rights of common citizenship (Ashforth 1990:129). Where some of the earlier Commissions addressing this question had been inclined to deal with the unprecedented influx of people by planning to provide sanitised and separated housing in town, the definitive Tomlinson Commission of 1955, building on earlier plans in the 1930s (Delius 1996), laid out the apartheid government’s new political vision by concentrating on keeping Africans in rural areas. The Commission envisaged an alternative citizenship for the African majority because they ‘belonged’ elsewhere – within ethnically defined cultural units with specific territorial bases, the heartlands of the reserves which later formed the basis for the homelands. Rather than concentrating on finding ways to integrate African labourers into the urban economy as some earlier policies had done, the Tomlinson 180

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Commission thus focused on the rural ‘home’ areas to which, it was claimed, Africans really belonged. In the process a plan was authored for ‘betterment’: the agricultural development of these areas through creating a viable small- to medium-farm economy. But the recommendations of this Commission, involving social engineering on a grander scale than apartheid’s implementers were ever to accomplish, were never carried out. In the report’s insistence upon the need to set aside these areas as part of a master plan of divided citizenship, it revealed itself as a manifestation of apartheid ideology rather than as a blueprint for workable rural development. It became an excuse for resettling large numbers of Africans from white South Africa into the homelands (Ashforth 1990:177–8; Delius 1996:140; James 1983). The political charge of this Commission’s findings, like other aspects of apartheid policy, was evident, as is shown by analyses which contest the strict separation between ‘rural’ and ‘urban’. Historians and anthropologists, writing in a radical tradition, emphasised the proletarian and/or urban nature and future of the African population. They explored the interdependence between the urban and the rural poles of the migrant world, while speaking out against the cruel ironies of a system which required a man wishing to support his rurally-based family to live apart from them for most of the year. A man had little choice but to support the agricultural enterprises of his dependants since this represented an investment in the rural social system on which he would be dependent when returning home after retirement (Murray 1981; Vail 1989). Similarly ironic was the fact that men have undertaken virtually life-long participation in the urban labour market as a means to preserve a primarily rural way of life (Delius 1996; McAllister 1980). At the level of individual households, this interdependence was evident in the difference, and the relationship, between the de facto residents (migrants’ dependants residing in the countryside) and the de jure ones (the wage-earning migrants themselves) (Baber 1996:274; Murray 1981). The decline of the country’s mining and manufacturing industries since the 1990s has seen a corresponding decline in the rate and extent of labour migration, and hence in the degree of success of such strategies. Many households’ cash component is now provided by state pensions rather than by a migrant wage, and many more migrants than before have abandoned their rural homesteads and settled on a more permanent basis in urban areas (Bank 1999). But the two worlds remain fundamentally interdependent. Recent studies show that the interaction between the wider industrial economy and the local, rural one remains crucial in enabling apparently rural people to sustain themselves in the countryside (Baber 1996:275; Cross 1996; Francis 2002; Murray 2000; Schirmer 2000). But such research has made little impact on the bureaucratic mind. Instead, it is the legacy of apartheid planners such as the authors of the Tomlinson Commission which can be discerned in South Africa’s land reform policies. These – and LRAD in particular – have been directed at 181

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people conceptualised not as dependent on multiple sources of livelihood but as rural-based farmers.

TOWN, COUNTRY AND LAND REFORM If the Government Commissions charged with curbing Africans’ movements to town have developed forms of discourse which obscure the links between urban and rural sources of income and identity, what relevance does this have for the process of land reform? In answering this question it is illuminating to refer to a series of academic writings and publications which have, at different stages, had some influence upon state policy. Some of these are the result of independent or development agency funded research, while others resulted from research undertaken for a government think-tank, the Land and Agriculture Policy Centre. Researchers of both kinds contributed to a series of ‘Land Reform Pilot Programmes’ undertaken by the government throughout the country soon after 1994. Written and published materials on these matters straddle the separate worlds of academia, NGO work, government service, independent policy making, and combinations of all four. Some of these writers advocate and others criticise the ‘commercial farmer’ orientation. But both advocates and critics tend to speak of the countryside as a separate place counterposed against the city. There is little evidence of an awareness that the ‘stakeholders’ in the rural context may equally ‘hold stakes’ in urban settings (Lipton et al. 1996; Mbongwa et al. 1996; van Zyl et al. 1996b). Typifying this interpenetration of different institutional frameworks is the work of Richard Levin, a former university lecturer who later took up a senior position in government employment implementing land reform. His work with Daniel Weiner, collecting local perspectives on people’s need for land (Levin and Weiner 1994) and researching specific restitution claims such as that by the Mojapelo people of Limpopo Province, bemoans rural people’s lack of organisation and representation. Rejecting the pact-making by elites which he and others see as having characterised the ANC’s style of government since it came into power (Levin 1996:364–5), he claims that most of the significant struggles precipitating the demise of apartheid were brought about by town-based people engaged in town-based concerns (rental, wages and the like) rather than by rural people seeking land access. Although Levin acknowledges the existence of ‘multiple livelihoods’ which straddle the urban and rural economies, his main focus is on the ANC’s need – ‘given its earlier failure to develop an adequate rural programme’ (1996:366, see also Hart 2002:229) – to make improved efforts at organising ‘rural people’ so that they come to recognise and act upon the land hunger they have in common. He conceptualises these matters as part of an overarching ‘agrarian question’. The phrase, borrowed from Lenin, reveals that 182

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South African country-dwellers are conceptualised primarily by reference to their relationship to land, seen as a productive resource and hence as the basis of class identity. Writing well before the official introduction of LRAD, he concluded that ‘a market-led land reform programme in the context of a neo-liberal macro-economic planning framework would exclude most of apartheid’s rural victims’ (Levin and Weiner 1994:291; see also Wixley 1994). His work represents a critique of the ‘market’ approach which played a role in the initial design of the land reform programme (Lipton et al. 1996; van Zyl et al. 1996a). But it converges with this approach in its insistence on a separate ‘rural’ sphere. Those advocating the ‘market’ approach were a number of South African and South Africa-based academics who, in collaboration with World Bank economists, were making the case for ‘agricultural land reform’ in South Africa. They suggested that poverty reduction could be combined with increased growth and efficiency by promoting small family farming among Africans. The reason why this had not been realised in South Africa, argued the authors, was that the profitability of this sector – previously a thriving one in the early years of the twentieth century on titleholder farms such as Doornkop – had been gradually downgraded because of its sidelining by the state subsidisation of large-scale white agriculture. If they were to be freed from such forms of state interference and allowed access to the free market, African farmers would once again prove their capacity (Mbongwa et al. 1996; van Zyl et al. 1996b). Arguing along similar lines, Merle and Michael Lipton, long-term champions of the cause of small- to medium-farmer development in South Africa, claimed that egalitarian-style redistribution and commercial farming were mutually compatible. They acknowledged that the imperative to redistribute land might be sidetracked by a focus on ‘emergent’ or ‘elite’ black farmers, similar to the model originally outlined by Tomlinson in the 1950s (Lipton et al. 1996:xv). But they were nonetheless keen to promote the development of the African farming sector as an alternative to employment in the fast waning industrial and mining sectors. They argued against the view that an entrenched ‘migrant culture’ had turned the rural areas into nothing more than places of retirement and refuge for labour migrants, and that young South African black men’s averseness to working at agriculture was due to its being culturally defined as an unmasculine form of labour. Such attitudes, they suggested, were not due to long-standing cultural practices but rather were rational responses given the context of sustained institutional bias which had favoured large-scale white agriculture and opposed the growth of African farming. A shift in policy and a reversing of this bias ought to have the effect of overturning such forms of entrenched opposition to farming as a worthy means of livelihood. In sum, these authors all advocate commercial agriculture as a land reform strategy. Although they show some awareness of the dependence of rurally resident people on urban wages, they suggest that successful agricultural 183

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development could and should render such dependence unnecessary. Such analyses, which argued for the primacy of the market after almost a century of state interference, provided the intellectual climate for LRAD. LRAD was now proposing to open up the arena of agriculture to market forces while still providing extra support to black farmers, via Land Bank administered grants, to help them ‘move up the ladder of success’. But a brief look at many of the communities of prospective or actual ‘beneficiaries’ discussed thus far demonstrates that none had been, nor envisaged themselves as being, solely reliant on farming. From the restored title-holders of Doornkop many of whom have lived their lives, and remain resident, in town (Chapter 2), through the displaced farm tenants of the Chego and the Kalkfontein claims, to the comfortably-off taxi-owner Mr Mashego who aims to start farming at his former home of Roodewal (Chapter 3), most restitution claimant families have at least one urban wage-earner. Of those still residing on white farms – who mistakenly claimed restitution unaware that they were intended instead to register for land under labour tenant and related legislation – the situation is more complex. It was precisely over the right to earn urban wages while residing on such farms that the struggles between white farm occupants and their owners, recounted in Chapter 5, occurred. But at least some such tenants, most notably the MLTC members discussed in that chapter, ended up working as newspaper vendors or casual labourers in Johannesburg while living in hostels or the cramped ‘servants’ rooms’ of their wives or female companions. Perhaps fitting the migrant profile least neatly are Doornkop’s squatters/ tenants (Chapter 4), the beneficiaries of the Sizanani redistribution project (Chapter 6) and the proposed LRAD owners – drawn from among the Doornkop squatter constituency – of Siyathuthuka (Chapter 6). These people have been no less wage-dependent than their migrant counterparts, but their cash income has been earned more typically as workers on white farms than in urban employment. Their wages have, as a general rule, been correspondingly lower than those earned in the industrial/urban sector. But all have relied on some form of paid labour to make a living. In the light of this evidence from amongst Mpumalanga beneficiaries, it is pertinent to enquire further about the category of ‘farmers’ at whom LRAD and the Land Bank were directing their efforts. Were they specifically ‘rural’ in their identities and projected forms of livelihood? Did they indeed belong to a more closely-defined group within the ranks of those formerly targeted for ‘redistribution’? Or did they rely on a variety of livelihood sources, thus further blurring these policy categories? Were some of them, in addition to being LRAD beneficiaries, also drawn from among the intended beneficiaries of restitution and tenure reform – and, if so, was this problematic?

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FARMERS, THE LAND BANK AND LRAD The clear demarcations and definite boundaries between land reform’s subcategories, although designed to eliminate confusion, in fact invited it. Echoing the misunderstandings of those who were intended to benefit from labour tenant legislation but who attempted restitution claims instead (Chapter 5), there was similar confusion over who was entitled to gain access to the new LRAD grants and Land Bank loans. There was also suspicion of what might be lost in the course of doing so. It emerged from my conversation with then Mpumalanga Director of Agriculture, George Fraser, that there were, in practice, no restrictions on who might use LRAD. But by pursuing this line of access a person feared forfeiting other, more ‘rights’-based claims which had the underpinning of moral entitlement: There is confusion between the different programmes. [In one case] . . . there are labour tenants on a farm. The owner wants to sell the whole farm to them. If the tenants choose to use the labour tenant legislation they will get R16,000 per family. If they go through LRAD they can get R28,000 per individual. So instead of 10 families each having R16,000 you might have 30 individuals each having R28,000. That way they can buy the farm and still have money over to develop it. But in this case, it has been hard to persuade them to waive their rights as labour tenants. This took a lot of management and a lot of trust.3 Here LRAD’s promise of ‘property’ could trump ‘rights’, but with a sense of irrevocable loss. Where ‘rights’ were even less in evidence, as in the case of the Doornkop tenants who were occupying African-owned land, these new LRAD grants were being cannily used by DLA officers and the consultants who worked with them. The proposed solution to the ‘Doornkop squatter problem’ was to buy the nearby farm in the name of the Siyathuthuka Trust. This would be achieved by pooling the squatters’ LRAD grants: an option judged preferable to old-style redistribution since the bigger grants would allow for more in the way of ‘post-settlement support’. Strategic knowledge of different options was not restricted to administrators of the programme. From the early days of land reform there had been a keen awareness amongst some prospective beneficiaries that failure to gain access to land through any one aspect of the programme might require close attention to – even wily manipulation of – various other possible routes. One such person was Matthews Ngobe, member of a group of related families who had claimed a farm in the Mpumalanga Lowveld on the basis of having formerly lived there. He soon recognised that redistribution offered quicker access than the rights-based alternative of restitution. He gathered a group 185

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of people who were prepared to pool their grants, and they leased the farm with DLA help: He farms there and sells produce. . . . DLA used grants to finance the planting, . . . Matthews lives quite far away, and comes there to work on the farm. But, in a scheme like this one, lots of the other people have left. He realised that restitution would take too long, so he rather formed a group of people with their grants. But he was the only one who had equipment to farm with, so he managed to farm without getting into debt. The other people involved, having no equipment, got into debt, and soon dropped out of the scheme.4 Different levels of indebtedness resulted from such schemes, with some beneficiaries gaining much, usually based on their original cash input from wages or urban-based employment, while others lost what little they had. This case shows that even the pre-LRAD style of redistribution, although allegedly more ‘poor-oriented’, was bound to have inequitable results once its beneficiaries with their different levels of input were exposed to unbridled market forces. By focusing on motivated individuals rather than formless groups, LRAD and its associated Land Bank loans seemed to be aiming at eliminating, if not the inequities, then the inefficiencies of this earlier approach. Such individuals, in at least some cases, were more likely to be set on a course as commercial farmers than were amorphous groups of householders like those at Sizanani: householders too poor to afford farming inputs and whose interest in land was simply that of a secure place to ‘lay one’s head’ (James 2001). In such cases, LRAD certainly represented a more realistic approach to the encouragement of commercial farming. Its success owed much to the commitment of loan applicants themselves as well as to the strenuous efforts of their project officers in the regional offices of the Department of Land Affairs. One such officer, Chris Mulaudzi from the Gauteng office, had been working with an aspirant farmer, Thabo Tseki, over the course of several years to ensure a beneficial outcome. Tseki had some knowledge of farming, based on his father’s experience running a dairy farm for its owner in the Free State. Having worked as a security guard, among other things, and having taken some law credits, he decided to go into business selling chickens and wood, and leased a farm near Boksburg, on the western edge of one of Johannesburg’s sprawling townships, from its owners. After two years of earning money in this way, he made an application to the Department of Land Affairs under the new LRAD scheme. As part of the application, he asked the Land Bank for a loan of R25,000, which was granted and which he soon repaid. Under the scheme, he was obliged to contribute towards the purchase. He offered 186

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R50,000 as well as a contribution ‘in kind’ of three cows and a tractor. After the Land Bank had decided on the value of his contribution, the Department of Land Affairs then combined the R50,000 with the stock and the equipment in their valuation, and gave him R57,000 towards the purchase. The purchase negotiations then entered into were between the elderly owners of the property and their son-in-law who acted as agent. Tseki then expanded his money-making enterprises. He started cultivating cabbages and other vegetables which he sold to retail outlets in the township, as well as buying several bee-hives. At the time of writing Tseki did not yet hold title to the property. Being unable to afford the full purchase price, he entered into an extended lease agreement with the owners, specifying that he would make no repayments during the first year of purchase, and that the purchase price would then be repayable over a period of 10 years. The Department’s project officer who set up this judicious repayment arrangement, Chris Mulaudzi, estimates that Tseki will pay the debt, and hence become the titled owner, long before that period elapses.5 The case of Tseki would certainly seem to validate the claims of those advocating ‘market-driven’ land reform. Indeed, he has become something of a cause célèbre, with regular visits to his farm by government ministers and policy officers from the World Bank alike. But other, humbler, cases illustrate the difficulties of acquiring land and/or agricultural equipment through LRAD and the Land Bank. They also show the multiple livelihoods and sources of identity of supposedly rural people, as well as demonstrating the interpenetration of the different categories of land reform they tried using to satisfy their ‘land hunger’.

‘I use pension money to buy seeds’ Among those who wanted to use their land for farming were restitution claimants already settled on their restored lands, such as those at Doornkop. Where Mrs Thamaga, a pensioner from the ‘modern’ faction, could rely on her son’s lucrative business earnings to help her realise her dream of reviving the farm’s traditional peach crop, others, especially those who belonged to the dissident group (Chapter 2), applied for loans from the Land Bank. These were the diehards who had opposed the urban-style planning of Doornkop on the grounds that their forefathers had intended them to reoccupy and cultivate the original plots where their navel cords (marupi) were buried. So convinced was pensioner Rebone Ramaube of her right to use the land as she pleased, for example, that she and her husband had planted maize soon after returning in 1994, encroaching on and in direct defiance of the surveyors’ neat grid plan. Obed Matentje, another pensioner member of the diehard group, had moved back to his father’s plot, some distance from the grid-planned plots, in express defiance of the Doornkop Management Committee and the planners. During 1996 and 1997 he planted an orchard 187

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of peach trees, a grape vine and several hectares of maize. He was herding cattle on the farm and keeping poultry. Becoming aware of a scheme by which the Land Bank would provide tractors, both Matentje and Ramaube availed themselves of it. Matentje explained: I borrowed a tractor, and a plough. We were supposed to buy it after selling the crop. With the tractor, the Land Bank said that there will be a rent – or interest – of R500 a month – but we could not manage this. The tractor has only been useful in the rainy season, it cannot make you an income during the rest of the year. Since neither of these farmers was able, from the sale of crops or from their pensions, to service their loans, the tractors were repossessed, leaving those concerned somewhat embittered at the disparity between their stated and actual value: After they attached the tractor, which was second-hand, it was sold for R3,000 through auction. But when I had wanted to buy it, they said that I must pay R36,000.6 Perhaps somewhat more pragmatically, and envisaging more certain returns, another of Doornkop’s title-holders had used his Land Bank loan to

Figure 7.1 Mrs Thamaga and friend in her orchard.

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Figure 7.2 Obed Matentje with his poultry.

buy bags of coal for resale. The Land Bank’s officials were aware of such non-agricultural deployment of its loan schemes, and had tried to guard against this (Dolny 2001:110–17). The borrower in this case was none other than Jack Mtsweni, the man who had allegedly ‘sold’ land to several hundred tenants. His presumption that his tenant following would be faithful customers proved, however, to be misplaced. They refused to buy his coal, claiming that it was overpriced. Title-holder neighbours disparaged his squandering of the loan. He ‘ate his money’, said one, using a favourite African metaphor for the wasteful and non-sustainable expenditure of resources which ought to have been wisely invested. But in the event neither this mis-user nor his more legitimate counterparts were able to make long-term gains from their Land Bank loans. Nor were they able to establish their family farms – or shops – as viable self-sustaining enterprises on the basis of these. They were unable to service or repay their debts from the proceeds. As one critical neighbour noted, this may have been due to their lack of business acumen. Given that both Ramaube and Matentje were pensioners and neither was oriented towards full-scale profitable farming, this neighbour suggested that it would have been more rational for them to pool resources and share a tractor together with several other cultivators on the farm than for each to acquire his own. Such an approach had been proposed to Obed Matentje but he was, he said, reluctant: ‘We were not on good terms with each other so we were worried about fighting.’ 189

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Figure 7.3 Mrs Matentje.

The sense of community which had allegedly prevailed between the farm’s claimants during the period of diaspora had dissolved in the course of the acrimonious disputes attendant upon its restoration, as Chapter 2 demonstrates. Trust and community harmony, if these had indeed ever existed, had been further undermined by the uncertainties entailed in the communal ownership and management of the land (Chapter 6). From the perspective of policy makers advocating the ‘commercial farmer’ style of land use, Rebone Ramaube’s and Obed Matentje’s ‘failure’ might be explained by the fact that both had modelled their approach to farming on that of an older generation rather than viewing it as a modern, entrepreneurial activity. For Matentje, like many former migrants with a foothold in the rural areas, cultivating the land was a supplement to his pension and a means to protect his family against economic vicissitudes. Having spent his life as a wage-earner in the urban sector, and as the owner of a house in a township near Johannesburg, which was currently inhabited by one of his adult 190

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Figure 7.4 The Matenjes’ house and yard.

children, he had now returned to the countryside and was attempting to generate further income during his retirement – ‘I use pension money to buy seeds’ – rather than to earn a living as a full-time farmer. He saw the possibility of his children’s or grandchildren’s return to the farm, and of their cultivating the land as he was doing, as a fall-back position. We will leave it all to our grandchildren. . . . Even if my grandchildren decide not to come now, I can get stands for them, as they may later decide to come back, if they experience bad things, or if they cannot afford to pay rent.7 Such people had an intransigent opposition to bureaucratic state planners. In strikingly similar fashion to the authors of the Tomlinson Commission, planners were busy devising modernising schemes for the more rational use of Doornkop’s farmland and for moving returned title-holders into the grid-planned residential plots on which water and other services would be provided. The diehards’ antipathy was based, in part, upon a recognition that these plans would have them living ‘under government’ in a ‘township’style settlement where they would be liable to pay: 191

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. . . what we fear is paying rent. If you are asked to pay for your own place, it means you’re no longer in control. Mandela said, ‘go home to your place – go back to where you stayed before you were moved.’ We own these stands. ‘Paying rent’ would not only be a threat to title-holder independence. Having to make such payments would also threaten the fine balance between various sources of income: between the different strands of people’s ‘multiple livelihoods’ (Francis 2002; Murray 2000). If policy makers were unaware of this balance, policy implementers such as former Mpumalanga Director of Agriculture, George Fraser, were well aware of it. They knew that African migrant cultivators needed to retain access to different income sources since none on its own could be relied upon. Full-time farming exposed such people to risks by cutting out the customary migrant strategies for minimising risk: . . . when the cycle is at a bad point, people go home to the rural areas and stay there until things start getting better. . . . When there is no work they don’t want a stake in town – they go ‘home’. Likewise, when we started a chicken project, we found that, as soon as one of our participants finds a paid work opportunity, the project is just left behind. This is an opportunity lost. If you design a project, the rewards should be above a certain level if you want people to stick with the project. If a person earns R3,000 he will stay. But if he only earns R800, as soon as he gets a better job in town, he will leave. This kind of thing has been going on for 20 years.8

‘This is my dream, to have a farm’: debt or promise? However, such marginal farmers, with pensioner incomes, multiple livelihoods and few existing assets to bring to the table, were not those at whom the Land Bank’s new loan schemes, or the LRAD policy overall, were targeted. Further evidence of difficulties entailed in gaining access to the Land Bank’s new range of financial ‘products’ (Dolny 2001) is offered by the case of an apparently more committed, aspirant farmer and his wife from the Steelpoort River valley. The farmer, Frans Tshehla, is the son of a family evicted from Kalkfontein in the 1950s. I met him and his wife Refilwe, now both in their mid-forties, during a series of visits to Apiesboom (8 on the map on p. xvi), the resettlement village a short distance across the river from Frans’ original home, Kalkfontein (E on the map). They told me about their aspirations – ‘This is my dream, to have a farm,’ as Refilwe put it – which had led them from restitution, through old-style redistribution, to becoming Land Bank clients, all without much success to date. Frans’ revived interest in farming in adulthood drew on his earlier 192

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experience. Both before leaving Kalkfontein and after resettling at Apiesboom, his family’s livelihood had been derived from senior males’ wages earned from work on the Witwatersrand, which had in turn been invested in ploughing. Frans’ father, during vacation periods and after retiring, had worked with him on the family fields at the foot of the mountains. After finishing school, Frans had worked in town and later found work as a security guard at the government clinic in the village, where Refilwe too was employed. Their revived interest in farming since the mid-1990s had been prompted by their awareness of the precariousness of job security in the current economic climate, as well as by foreseeing the need to obtain an extra source of livelihood after retiring. Based on the older generation’s precedent of investing wages in cattle and other rural assets, farming seemed to promise both Frans and Refilwe a secure form of investment for the money they earned in government employment. As Frans put it: ‘Most people are becoming aware that life is ploughing – we depend very much on ploughing for our life.’ They were thus motivated by considerations similar to those which drove Obed Matentje, but were able and willing to invest rather more money in pursuit of their farming enterprise. Although the family, together with hundreds of others, were registered as restitution claimants on Kalkfontein, the prospects of that farm’s viable re-use seemed abstract and remote. And its stony terrain did not appear to offer great prospects for dryland farming. Seemingly more promising was a proposed redistribution project. Members of the broader Tshehla clan were offered the possibility of buying a white-owned farm close to their home at Apiesboom, by the owner on whose farm some of them had formerly been employed as workers. Given that people from a neighbouring area of the former Lebowa homeland had started stealing firewood and crops from his farm, this white owner’s keenness to sell was probably prompted not only by his stated altruistic interest in returning the land to its tillers, but also by a degree of self-interest (see Chapter 9). The farm owner saw the redistribution programme as a means to escape from an untenable situation and told his former employees, ‘I am experiencing a problem with this farm so I want to sell it . . . talk to your people to buy this farm, and there will be some grants from the government.’ Frans was one of the 330 people who combined their R15,000 SLAG grants in order to purchase the farm in 1996. The farm, de Hoop (Hope), was transferred into the ownership of the Tshehla Trust, a ‘legal entity’ designed along the same lines as those discussed in the previous chapter. Problems relating to the effective management of communally-owned property soon came to the fore, however, persuading Frans and Refilwe that their dreams of farming were not to be fulfilled via the redistribution route. As was the case in many other such projects, dominant individuals took control of the finances, leaving other members sidelined: ‘Due to tensions amongst us, there was corruption and that money was not properly used.’ 193

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Cash left over from the purchase of the land and intended for spending on agricultural equipment was allegedly embezzled by the Chair of the Trust – he confiscated the minutes book and cheque book and used both with impunity – meaning that little productive enterprise or commercial success could be achieved. Refilwe claims, in retrospect, to have been suspicious of communal ownership all along: . . . from the beginning I didn’t like the group thing. I experienced that at the clinic . . . everybody used to come up with bad or good ideas. . . . I think government, when giving us the farm as a group, thought that because we were related we’d work together in peace. But they found out that operating as a group does not work well.9 Whether or not as a result of this experiment, Frans claimed to be ‘the kind of person who likes doing things for myself’. The obvious next step was thus to move beyond communal farming in pursuit of the private/individual ownership which government was now beginning to advocate, in line with its support of small commercial farmers. The couple heard about the new loans available through a friend who had recently borrowed money to fund his farming operations. Spotting a 19-hectare plot of land for sale in a former white farming area near Roosenekal, about an hour’s drive from their home at Apiesboom, they approached the Land Bank to help them with the purchase price of R30,000. In line with its new policy, the Bank agreed to lend them R20,000, leaving them to find the remaining R10,000. This left the couple in a quandary. Despite their both being in government employ, they were far from being comfortably off. They had stretched themselves to the limit to put two adult children through further education institutions in or near Johannesburg: even being compelled at one point to withdraw their daughter from her studies. They had no spare cash with which to meet the matching finance obligations required by the Land Bank, and thus decided, under some compulsion, to borrow the rest of the money from a loan company, Agisˇanang. Thus was the Land Bank requirement – that aspirant farmers match a loan by contributing their ‘own assets’ – being reinterpreted. That the Agisˇanang loan was made on terms unfavourable to Frans and Refilwe can be deduced from their monthly repayments: R500 to Agisˇanang (on a loan of R10,000) and R200 to the Land Bank (on one of R20,000). Such has been the extent of their debt that they could not afford, for the first three years, the cash inputs necessary to plough the land or plant or fertilise crops. Land, credit and debt Credit and farmer development thus appear to be inextricably interlinked, but not necessarily in the way policy implementers such as George Fraser 194

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envisaged. George saw the secure ownership of land as a means for farmers to guard against vulnerability to ‘sharp’ moneylenders, by entitling them to Land Bank loans under the new, enlightened dispensation. His enthusiastic advocating of land ownership as providing access to credit appeared to endorse de Soto’s approach (2001): his conviction that bringing the poor within the ambit of the formal property system can also make them prosperous. One reason why there is such a big need for land – it is the key to gain access to a whole series of other resources. If you have no security of tenure, you can’t get access to credit. . . . There are a lot of people writing on development who have stressed the role of rural credit. . . . It is now being claimed that credit is what unlocks development, not the other way round. . . . This means that if people are on land already, they can get funds, and they can then unlock development for themselves. Where people have no land, the Land Bank will not loan the money and, instead, they have to go to these moneylenders who will take them to the cleaners. . . . If you have land you can get a loan from the Land Bank at 14 per cent interest, while if you go to the money lender you’ll be paying 100 per cent.10 But the Tshehlas were paying both! Their indebtedness resulted directly from their ownership – and attempt to unlock the creative potential – of land. Their struggles to keep from being swamped by debt appeared as a repudiation of de Soto’s theories on the value of property ownership in promoting entrepreneurship amongst the poor. I had once been told confidently by agricultural consultant Andries Gouws that ‘black farmers have fewer lifestyle needs than white ones . . . so are less likely to get into debt’. The Tsehla family’s money troubles came not from extravagance, however, but from an urgent need to aquire both land and the means to work it simultaneously. Their case demonstrates that farmers, even with the advantages of state aid aimed to empower them or give them a competitive edge in farming, may stumble and fall during the race for land ownership. It was before the crucial moment of acquiring the land – the ownership of which ought, by all accounts, to have opened up access to credit on favourable terms – that this couple was forced to rely on credit and so found themselves massively in debt. And this on a very small farm! Frans and Refilwe faced fresh difficulties when, in their fourth year of ownership, they did find the money to pay for ploughing. The problems they encountered substantiate Sender and Johnston’s refutation (2004) of the ‘small family farm’ model. Finding cash to pay the ploughman turned out to be merely the first of several inputs needed. Another was manure, which they could not afford. Another was labour. Refilwe used her Christmas bonus from the clinic to pay local women to do some weeding. Since this had 195

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proved ‘too expensive’ at a cost of R2,000, she was considering the alternative of paying for weedkiller in the coming season. Finally, there was security. The Tshehlas lacked cash to spend on guarding the crops from theft. What had made the plot affordable to this family was its situation in a formerly white farming area – Roosenekal – which landowners were now abandoning, motivated mainly by the increasing predominance of African squatters and informal tenants. It was these incomers who were thought to be engaging in crop theft (see Chapter 9). ‘Black people are . . . stealing from white farmers’ farms. Maybe that is why whites are selling their farms,’ said Frans. He acknowledged that such thefts had now, in turn, become a source of harassment for African farmers like him and Refilwe. Their continued reliance on government salaries from the clinic made it impossible for them to be present on their plot at Roosenekal to guard against such theft. Even had they been able to do so, claimed Refilwe, to challenge such thieves at night when they were stealing would be dangerous, even life-threatening. Galled by the bold impudence with which the thieves were attempting to sell the stolen maize back to people in Apiesboom, in full view of its rightful owners, she was proposing, as an alternative, to hire a practitioner of traditional medicine to doctor the crops, trusting that the threat of supernatural harm would deter the thieves. Lacking the initial wherewithal for ploughing, the couple could not have relied for any of the further inputs required – weeding or crop security – on the ‘abundance of family labour’ which small farmers are assumed to possess, since their children were all resident, and seeking work, in and around Johannesburg. Having told me about the quandary in which they found themselves, they asked my advice, putting me in the awkward position which every supposedly dispassionate researcher dreads. How, they wondered, could they escape from the anomalous position of using so much money to service their debt as to make them barely able to put their land to productive use? At something of a loss, I suggested they investigate the LRAD programme: F: Do you know of any place where I can get money to buy ploughing equipment? DJ: The only place I know is LRAD (Land Restitution for Agricultural Development). The government stopped the old system of offering R15,000, and they have started a new system where they are trying to help people who they expect will do good farming. I am not sure whether they help people who have already bought farms . . . but maybe you can try them. F: I know this, but they refused me and required me to contact the Land Bank, and I can’t go to the Land Bank because I still owe them.11 196

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I was unaware at the time that they were disqualified on the grounds of having previously benefited from the state’s grant system through their involvement in the earlier, unsuccessful, SLAG-based redistribution project, but this was later explained to me by then Mpumalanga Director of Agriculture, George Fraser: SLAG was linked to LRAD – you could have one or the other, but not both. In a lot of these cases, the SLAG was linked to the housing grant, which left only R4,000 over after the purchase of the land. This linking made it a no-go situation. The places bought under redistribution have now become poverty traps. But in the new situation, you can get a house in a planned settlement, plus a piece of agricultural land.12 Such statements about the advantages offered by the ‘brave new world’ of LRAD were persuasive. The possibility that farmers whose aspirations had not been fulfilled under the old system might still be aiming to get access to land under the new one seems, however, not to have been envisaged. Like many other well-designed development schemes, this new-style redistribution had been planned as a solution to a ‘base-line’ set of problems and with a specific ‘end-target’ in mind. It was not evident to the policy makers that many of the problems to be solved might have come into being because of, or might have at least been exacerbated by, earlier ‘development solutions’ (see Crush 1995). What the original system of grants was based on, and the new Land Bank loans were further designed to allow for, was that aspirant farmers would ‘self-select’ rather than require to be chosen through unnecessarily bureaucratic procedures (van Zyl et al. 1996b). The design of this aspect of the programme, particularly its most recent refinement, was thus quintessentially ‘market-driven’ despite being gently guided to empower those formerly disadvantaged. But the self-selected applicants for these loans were finding themselves troubled rather than empowered by them. Instead of being able to generate sufficient returns, through agricultural production, to repay their loans, their purchase of land was tying them up in debt repayments such that productive enterprise was proving difficult.

CONCLUSION More than those preceding it, this chapter has been concerned to chart some economic effects and influences upon land reform. It may seem obvious from the strength of feeling of the various ‘landless’ people discussed in foregoing chapters that there are countless South Africans determined to gain access to land by one means or another. Less obvious are the reasons for their 197

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determination. A constant assumption underpinning the policy frameworks of the programme – however changing – is that land will provide the basis for, or at least contribute to, viable livelihoods. In the earlier version of land reform, with its subcategory of redistribution, this was conceived of as small-scale cultivation activities which might aid ‘the poor’. In the later version, with LRAD and the Land Bank loans, the assumption was that small family farms might burgeon and flourish to provide the basis of viable, fulltime farming. For both, land has been seen as the fundamental requirement for making a living. The question ‘why land?’ thus seems to have an easy and obvious answer. But the cases documented here, like many similar cases in South Africa, involve people who already have some land but who do not fit neatly into the category of ‘the farmer’. In both cases, it was gaining access to the means for using land rather than to the land itself which was exposing aspirant farmers to excessive levels of risk. The necessity of having to rely on waged employment, and to retain connections to or ownership of houses – and dependants or wage-earners – in town, made it impossible to invest all resources in farming: to put all one’s eggs ‘in one basket’. Such a strategy, in any case, would have been unwise. The present policies, like those contained in apartheid’s Tomlinson Commission, were attempting to construe ‘rural’ Africans as farmers. They were based on the assumption that reversing the former institutional bias in favour of white agriculture would render its black counterpart viable. This, in turn, would modify the ‘migrant culture’ by which rural areas were seen merely as places of refuge or retirement, and thus overturn the entrenched opposition to farming as a worthy means of livelihood (Lipton et al. 1996; Mbongwa et al. 1996; van Zyl et al. 1996a). A presumption that all this would eventually lead people to relinquish other income sources was pervasive in the world of policy and implementation. When the agricultural officer enjoined Sizanani’s members to abandon their commitments as farm labourers – ‘you are now the white man’ – she was encouraging them to see themselves as ‘proper farmers’ like those they were replacing, rather than remaining reliant on multiple sources of livelihood (Chapter 6). But initiatives designed to encourage such an outcome, just as in the heyday of apartheid’s schemes for agricultural betterment, seem set to empower only a very few such farmers. Even the ‘white man’ of her impassioned statement has been reliant on off-farm sources of income alongside the massive state subsidies he received. Farming for both this ‘white man’ and his new black replacements has become a risky and uncertain enterprise, as Chapter 9 will demonstrate. When I enquired about the reasons why such empowerment schemes often failed, the standard response was ‘maybe here the support was not forthcoming’. Shrewd implementers of policy recognised that this ‘support’ stretched beyond the area of agriculture as narrowly understood. It extended to 198

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‘training, management, keeping CPAs going’: all problems concerning the effective ownership and use of jointly owned property as discussed in the previous chapter. The presumption inherent in the new and more streamlined, market-led strategy of redistribution was that it would pick, through selfselection, the most appropriate recipients of such ‘support’: support which could then be given more judiciously and less haphazardly than in the early days of land reform. It was presumed that receiving such support would direct such people ever more accurately along the route to a full-time farming livelihood. But this chapter has demonstrated, in accordance with Sender and Johnston, that this narrowly defined group does not exist (2004:144).

Notes 1 Chris Mulaudzi, DLA, Pretoria 18 January 2001. 2 ‘Who will really benefit from land reform?’, Ben Cousins, Mail & Guardian, 22 September 2000. 3 George Fraser, DLA, Pretoria, 3 December 2002. 4 Philip Mbiba, DLA, Nelspruit, 26 January 2001. 5 Chris Mulaudzi, DLA, Pretoria, 5 November 2002; 4 February 2003. 6 Obed Matentje, Doornkop, 10 December 2002. 7 Obed Matentje, Doornkop, 10 December 2002. 8 George Fraser, DLA, Pretoria, 3 December 2002. 9 Frans and Refilwe Tshehla, Ga Masha (Apiesboom), 10 February 2003. 10 George Fraser, DLA, Pretoria, 3 December 2002. 11 Frans and Refilwe Tshehla, Ga Masha (Apiesboom), 10 February 2003. 12 George Fraser, DLA, Pretoria, 3 December 2002.

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8 LAND, POWER AND PEOPLE Chiefs, brokers and intermediaries

INTRODUCTION ‘The depressing thing about the new South Africa,’ said a Department of Land Affairs contact I interviewed during my fieldwork, ‘is that wherever a piece of land becomes available, someone finds a gap, inserts himself into it, and makes a profit.’ His comment reminded me of the anthropological literature on patron–client relations – and in particular on brokers – which was predominant in the political anthropology of the 1960s and 1970s. Some writers, at least initially, had taken a neutral stance on such relationships. When organs of the state did not reach the local level this created a political vacuum. In settings where peasants or poor people felt unable to influence state officials and the ponderous bureaucracy they operated, or to gain access to the market without some help, they developed a parallel system of personalised reciprocity with the more powerful. Clients depended upon their patrons, often through the intermediary of a broker. What lay at the heart of such relationships was potentially open access combined with attempts to limit this access (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1980). The client abdicated autonomous access to the political centre and/or major markets, in order to gain mediated access on the basis of an exchange relation with a patron. Anthropologists’ initial neutrality about such relationships was difficult to maintain, especially given the self-perpetuating character of patronage: many of the conditions for which the poor needed assistance arose because of the patronage system or were at least sustained by it. Patrons, brokers and intermediaries, by exploiting the difficulties of access, were simultaneously weakening the system of government (Blok 1988; Boissevain 1966). Although more recently anthropologists have neglected such matters, political scientists writing on Africa continue to pursue them, analysing how clientelist politics in post-colonial states have undermined good governance and the rule of law (Hyden 1995; Mwenda and Tangri 2005). Their judgement on the matter, seen in relation to land, echoes the despairing remarks of my Department of Land Affairs contact. But not all the relationships which provide access to land have been seen in a negative light. 200

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It has by now become more-or-less conventional wisdom that land in Africa, for example, is dependent on the connections – often between those with less influence and the powerful – through which the latter may have to negotiate land access (Berry 1993, 2002a, 2002b; Lund 2002). That formal titling and the official ownership of property are less important than such relationships is perhaps to be decried, but at least the possibilities of negotiation allow the landless to find a niche for themselves. Between the image of land brokers as profiteering small-scale crooks and as benevolent agents acting on behalf of the poor, there is something more to explore. What is of interest is the peculiarity of such brokers’ social and cultural backgrounds, and the way they deploy a repertoire of diverse styles and languages and, in the process, not only mediate between diverse cultural worlds but also bring new kinds of social identities into being; something that seems particularly apposite in the context of a new society which is itself in the process of being born. Writings on popular culture are useful here. Popular culture has been described as a ‘decisive area where social conflicts are experienced and evaluated’ (Rowe and Schelling 1991:12); as ‘the ground on which . . . transformations are worked’ (Hall 1981) between the often contradictory interests of diverse social categories and classes. Likewise, ‘popular consciousness’ is constituted out of, and can serve to hold together, otherwise unstable alliances of social groupings (Glassman 1995). It is often the creative efforts of popular cultural brokers, usually people occupying a liminal status between more easily-recognised social categories or classes, which serve to traverse the interpretive gap: to interweave the diverse and disparate social threads from which popular culture is made (Barber 1987; Erlmann 1991:116–38; La Hausse 1993). Playing a crucial role, for example, in creating the ‘heterogenous urban mass’ in the wake of rapid industrialisation in various parts of Africa (Barber 1987), the activities of such brokers seem to be particularly noticeable at moments – or in arenas – of tumultuous socio-economic change. Such insights are germane for understanding the role of intermediaries in accessing land. Land brokers in South Africa arise from within the ranks of beneficiaries, using their slightly better acquaintance with the ‘rules’– or with various conflicting sets of ‘rules’ – to help their less adept counterparts ‘play’ the land game. That benefits will accrue to them in doing so is beyond doubt, but to see them as motivated only, or primarily, by greed would be mistaken. As often, they are driven by a desire either to help those who share their social origins but are less experienced, or to keep other (less scrupulous) brokers at bay, or both. And their actions are endorsed, although critically monitored, by the rank-and-file landless who place their hopes in them for land access. Facilitating land access on behalf of heterogenous groups, often those who have fallen through the cracks of the official land reform programme, brokers have drawn on diverse and often conflicting normative discourses of citizenship. 201

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Given that their constituents are most commonly drawn from the regional poor and landless, the discourse to which they most frequently have recourse is the broad and inclusive one of rights. This gestures towards the modern egalitarian, trans-ethnic and democratic values of the new South Africa. But tradition is another important element. To understand the potency of this, we need to consider the question of chiefship.

CHIEFS, LAND AND PEOPLE The arguments of writers such as Berry (1993, 2002a, 2002b) and Lund (2002) about socially negotiated land access are convincing in some contexts. One might have expected such kinds of access would be less likely, however, in South Africa. Here centralised planning and the formal legal system have played an inordinately powerful role, and the state – even after apartheid’s demise – has attempted to exercise control over land transfer and distribution. But South Africa, with its wide discrepancies in wealth, literacy and access to resources in general, provides fertile terrain for the growth of patronage and brokerage. This possibility has preoccupied land activists and state policy makers alike. Their disquiet about land’s potential for fostering dependency has centred on one set of actors in particular: South Africa’s chiefs, whose effective control of the state-owned land in apartheid’s homelands had been the basis of the country’s system of ‘bifurcated despotism’ (Mamdani 1996). Fears that this control might perpetuate the legacy of chiefly power after 1994 fuelled fierce controversy over the future of these territories. In the resulting stalemate, a bill governing so-called ‘communal land rights’ and proposing the reform of existing tenure arrangements in the homelands, initially planned soon after the 1994 election and subsequently endlessly redrafted, remained in draft form until 2004. Conflicts over the accommodation of chiefly power caused the delay, but have not been solved by the finalising of the legislation. In its eventual and definitive form, the Communal Land Rights Act (CLRA; see Figure 0.1) transfers lands into the hands of those ‘communities’ already occupying it, thus formalising informal existing systems of de facto rights and institutionalising the power of existing ‘tribal authorities’ where they are already in existence.1 In responses to the legislation, those advocating the modern way have been ranked against those who speak out in favour of traditionalism. Modernisers desire to transform former communal rights into individual title, so as to secure investments or enable the use of land as loan collateral. Traditionalists, and the chiefs who claim to represent them, are opposed to individual title, feeling that this will render the land liable to alienation.2 The two positions also enunciate divergent views on the entitlements of citizens. Where the modernising approach posits the need for people to enjoy rights to land, and 202

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other forms of property, as independent beings, the traditional approach lays the ground on which chiefs and other intermediaries can build up political followings on the basis of land access. The former, although leaving owners vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the market, seeks to protect them from the vagaries of power-mongers or from the dangers of being excluded from land access on the basis of tribal or ethnic affiliation. The latter posits benevolent despots who will provide protection from the ravages of privatisation, but threatens to perpetuate the racially divided ‘two-tier’ system of land ownership which apartheid’s planners put into place.

Chiefs in apartheid There has been a long history of ‘land grabbing’ by chiefs and headmen – allegedly on behalf of their subjects – both before and after South Africa’s transition in 1994. The link between land and political patronage which developed in the process of ‘grand plan’ apartheid did not invariably consolidate chiefly power. But even where there was resistance to chiefly power, alternative forms of authority were modelled along lines which seemed to draw from the model of the chiefship. A detailed insight into land-based patronage by Luvuyo Wotshela, in the Eastern Cape during the years leading up to 1994, shows how even the opponents of the chiefship, at a time when chiefs were thoroughly discredited by their opponents in the anti-apartheid struggle, made use of the repertoire of customary leadership in their dramas of land occupation and allocation (2001). Wotshela’s study shows how the apartheid regime’s grand plan to make every African an ethnic subject of a traditional leader was doomed in advance by the sheer scale of the population movements which the state itself had unleashed. Territory bought by the state for what it envisaged as ordered population settlement in the Ciskei was being invaded by ‘big men’ and their followers before planners could have their say, turning the land into an object of battles between opposing leaders intent on securing territory for the resettlement of, and hence consolidating the allegiance of, their followers. Dislocated people would drift in, without prior affiliation to any political leader but merely wanting a place to reside, thus becoming ‘useful tools’ by means of which big men – some chiefs who were apartheid stooges and some anti-apartheid leaders – could ‘crystallise . . . control’ over areas (Wotshela 2001:198, 224, 310). While claims to land translated into allegiance to a particular leader, allegiance to a leader became a means of realising claims to land. In the pre-1994 period as now, the element of patronage made rational state-planned reform a difficult if not impossible task. Even leaders aligned with the oppositional ‘civics’ movement employed the rhetoric and style associated with the chiefship, and those mounting challenges to chiefs often did so in terms which continued to endorse, rather than contest, that institution. 203

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And the civics were not driven so much by anti-apartheid ideology as by the urgent desire for land on the part of the rank-and-file, and, in turn, by local leaders’ wish to garner support from them. Studies such as this one demonstrate an antipathy to chiefs expressed through alternative loci of leadership. This was echoed in other parts of South Africa. A range of activists and members of ANC-aligned groupings, in the period immediately before 1994, condemned the chiefship for its role in implementing apartheid’s grand plan of social and territorial engineering (van Kessel 2000). The subsequent wariness about allowing a consolidation of chiefly power in the post-1994 era translated into an antipathy towards the institution among the designers and implementers of land reform, many of whom had formerly worked in NGOs and had actively campaigned against chiefly power. It was such sentiments that found expression in some of the earlier drafts of the CLRA aimed at protecting the occupiers of the former homelands’ communal lands. The history of chiefly control over land in South Africa, pre-1994, thus provides ample warnings about the possible future misuse of power, perhaps ominously suggesting that chiefs will, in future, be able to ‘grab land’ on behalf of their subjects in the name of custom. Land officers thought of this as a ‘danger’, and acted to prevent it. Procedures for claiming restitution were being designed by provincial restitution officers to explicitly exclude chiefs, or – at best – to grant them the status merely of one among a number of ‘ordinary claimants’. This was not necessarily, as has subsequently been claimed, the result of an irrational overemphasis on egalitarianism or of an ideologically-driven bias against chiefs. Rather, it was prompted by anxieties about the possibility of fraud. In the early days of restitution, when policy was being formed ‘on the hoof ’, Commissioners and their assistants became acutely aware that any individual with royal pretensions able to attract a crowd of followers could, and probably would, lay claim to land. In the case of Maleoskop, near Groblersdal, a claim by the descendants of those formerly occupying the land over a long period was blithely challenged by a man putatively descended from a Swazi chief who had ‘conquered’ the original occupants: on this basis he tried to claim rights which trumped those of the evicted occupants themselves. Here, again, was a case where the new ethnic tussles over land were playing themselves out. Likewise, Brakfontein was under claim from two groups owing allegiance to rival chiefs. While one group had clearly demonstrable ties to the farm, restitution officers could find no evidence that the other group had ever lived there; they were wary of the praise poems which a former chief’s putative descendant regularly faxed to them in support of his historical entitlement to the land. Such experiences, making restitution sceptical about those whose land claims seemed designed merely to extend political influence, led them to privilege material ‘use’ over chiefly ‘jurisdiction’ as a basis for restoring land.3 204

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This cautiousness was shared by many activists. Sociologist Richard Levin, later an office-holder in the DLA, claimed, for example, that chiefs’ control over land was, by the mid-1990s, ‘widely resented’. But in the same breath he acknowledged that restitution was likely to bolster the power of traditional leaders and claimed that ‘the chieftaincy will emerge as the key institution for filing successful claims’ given that it provided bounded and substantial social units rather than the vaguely-defined, splintered and overlapping identities generated by family- or clan-based claims (Levin 1996:366–9, 377–8; see Chapter 3). Indeed, it was often only the chiefs and their henchmen who were acquainted with the possibilities of making land restitution claims. Those of their subjects who were aware of it mostly believed, in any case, that its purpose was to restore chiefs to their former areas of jurisdiction (Lahiff 2000), as did the chiefs themselves.4 Left-leaning activists and restitution officers thus recognised that land provided possibilities for the expansion of political influence, and were convinced that ‘only independent access to land will facilitate secure citizenship, unmediated by patronage’ (Wotshela 2001:198). But the political landscape had started to change. Despite the ANC’s initial commitment to replacing the chiefs with a universal system of democratic government (Hart 2002:274), there were growing – and worrying – signs of the party’s intention to defend the institution. This accompanied, and was perhaps prompted by, a groundswell of support amongst the populace in some areas (Beall et al. 2004; Capps 2003; Delius 1996; Marcus et al. 1996:54; Oomen 2000a, 2000b, 2005). As restitution officer Philip Mbiba observed: Chiefs, to a lot of people, are legitimate. They will be with us for a long time still: they resist attempts to get rid of them, and they have support. Poverty is what will keep them in place. The poor exist in the periphery, and they depend on the chief, for justice and other things. It is this which will ensure their survival.5 Other observers question the benevolence implied here, but recognise that the institution is enjoying a revival of some sort. While on one level a practical battle has, then, been fought over particular pieces of territory, this has been shadowed by an ideological conflict, in which notions of individual rights have been pitted against communal-style obligations, identities and bases of power. In both, there is awareness of the inextricable links that connect chiefs, land and people. And the new availability of land can lead to the appropriation of control by other leaders alongside, or instead of, chiefs. Such figures have either consolidated their power by fiercely dismissing – or legitimised it by endorsing – ideas of customary African authority. More often, they combine both apparently contradictory impulses.

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LAND FOR SALE: THE CASE OF BREDELL Despite the best intentions of South Africa’s ‘land reformers’, replacing dependent relationships with rights-based access to land or with definite property ownership has been difficult to realise. Even where the acquisition and disbursement of land are carefully planned for, as in the restitution programme, it has been virtually impossible for the state to prevent intermediaries from inserting themselves into the process. But this has been even more the case where land occupations are informal or unsanctioned. The incident which more than any other brought illegal land-selling and its associated brokerage to the public’s attention in recent years was the Bredell invasion, an event often alluded to at the Durban meeting (see Chapter 1). In 2001, several thousand people, over the space of a few days, occupied and began building shacks on a portion of land at Bredell, an area on the northeastern fringes of Johannesburg which was owned partly by the government’s Public Works Department and partly by private companies. Public and press commentary on the invasion and on the subsequent eviction of the squatters drew parallels between this invasion and those in Zimbabwe.6 This event prompted claims that the ‘lawful’ land reform programme had been a failure. But what is clear from press reports and from my interviews with land NGOs is that the invaders were not the intended ‘rural’ beneficiaries of ‘land reform’. They were drawn from the ranks of the urban unemployed: tenants from nearby African townships no longer able or willing to afford to pay rent to their African landlords. It was financial and political opportunism which had led to the signing-up of potential residents in exchange for a one-off fee of R25, and thence to the invasion itself.7 The opportunist was either a PAC councillor or an African Renaissance Civics Movement leader, depending on which account one follows. The money was viewed by many as a payment for the land: a conviction reinforced by the issuing of receipts for each transfer. Said one invader, Thandi Dandala, expressing fierce opposition to the government’s stated intention of relocating the squatters, ‘Now I have a plot for R25 and no one would dare to take it away from me.’8 Journalists who tried to trace what had happened to the money declared themselves mystified. PAC councillor Daniel Ngwenya, alleged to have pocketed some R175,000 from this land sale and to have been involved in other land invasions in the early 1990s as well as in other criminal activities such as extortion, arson, robbery and the possession of illegal firearms, was not charged with fraud.9 Whoever was responsible for the Bredell swindle, the opportunity for political point-scoring was not lost. The disputes were public and very bitter. They ranged from in-fighting within the PAC itself (with the party’s president issuing an ultimatum to officials to account for the money) to mudslinging between political parties. ‘The poor’ were much invoked: the ANC accused the PAC of stealing from this constituency while the PAC countered 206

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with threats of further land invasions on behalf of it. Human rights activists pointed out that it was the tardiness of government land and housing programmes that had provided the opportunity for such accusations. As lawyer Geoff Budlender commented, ‘this creates a situation that is ripe for political exploitation’.10 The scares about land invasions which were prompted by this case were somewhat misguidedly focused on the Department of Land Affairs and its land reform programme. There were calls for a ‘Land Summit’ and statements about the need to view the Bredell invasion as a ‘wake-up call’.11 The government acknowledged the seriousness of the situation but pointed out that an urban land issue was here being made to masquerade as a rural one. There was talk of ‘confusion in public debate over the relation between land and housing policy; between land utilised for agriculture and housing’.12 In effect, the invasion had been prompted by the dissatisfaction of African tenants living on African-owned land. In this respect it reflected the existence of the owner–tenant divide discussed in Chapter 4. But the specifics of this particular case should not blind us to the more general prevalence of illegal land sales resulting from the new provision of rural land, and people’s need for it. As the police record of the man said to have pocketed the Bredell squatters’ money demonstrates, and as Wotshela’s material on the Eastern Cape confirms, land invasions have been a long-standing feature of South African life. They are invariably initiated by a leader and accompanied by the transfer of money and/or the extension of patronage.

LAND SALES AND THE IDIOM OF CHIEFSHIP

The poorest ‘may not even be on the list’ In rural settings, by contrast to peri-urban cases, leaders have taken the chiefship as a model. The promise of restitution has, in some cases, nourished myths of earlier chiefly ownership and promised the restoration of lost kingdoms: a promise of particular benefit to new regional elites (Chapter 3). Here lead claimants are responsible for nurturing the myth of the chiefly past: they give land, but for a price. The enormous Ten Bosch land claim discussed in Chapter 3, which encompasses 20,000 hectares and will cost the state an estimated R3.5 billion, provides an example. From early on, say committee members, they were instructed by the Mpumalanga Restitution Commissioner not to lodge claims as separate chiefdoms under the four chiefs whose ancestors, with their followers, had originally been relocated. Instead, she advised each chief’s constituents to elect four representatives onto a single, consolidated, Ten Bosch Committee. The consolidated claim, thus bringing together the followers of four chiefs,

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was judged by the consultant investigating it to include around 9,000 claimants. But the number of claimants has now increased. Restitution officers discovered that places on the list of registered claimants were being ‘sold’, at prices which started at a modest R25 but escalated to R500 as the settlement of the claim became imminent. Most of those who came forward as claimants have been businessmen, eager to stake a claim in whatever material prosperity the claim might promise. And those committee members selling places on the list – themselves members of the chiefly clan – are alleged to have enjoyed a rise in fortunes as a result of registering claimants for money. Restitution officers, meanwhile, express their anxiety that the poorest people, who really should get the land, may ‘not even be on the list’ of people, as they would not have been able to pay. In this case, the exclusion of chiefs and the establishment of an elected committee to represent all claimants, although driven by a wish to encourage representative democratic practice, have bolstered the influence of alternative leaders. These leaders’ assurance that they have sidelined chiefs from the claim seems less than reassuring: ‘Things are not the same now as they were before – the chiefs will not control the land fully. Instead the land will be controlled by the mayor.’13 This mayor was mentioned in Chapter 3 as one of the members of a new elite that has bolstered its ethnic power by drawing on the restitution process to glorify the past of the chiefly clans to which they belong. Part of its economic and political clout lies in its capacity to promise land in return for payment: a transaction which overrides historical entitlement or adds a bizarre reinterpretation to it. In this as in many other matters, restitution officers have learned from experience, incorporating lessons from earlier mistakes into future strategies. As a former officer explained, officers in the Commission, newly aware of the dangers of allowing local committees to register claimants, have subsequently taken steps to exclude this possibility: We would like to involve as few people with a stake in the success of the claim as possible. . . . I and others in the Commission recognise the huge problem posed by such people, but feel that there is nothing we can do. We cannot report it to the police, since it would be impossible to get evidence.14 He added that they had become equally wary of allowing local politicians – local ANC councillors like Piet Tlou (Chapter 4) – to have anything to do with land-claiming or redistribution. Any such intermediary tries ‘to own the process’ or derive political advantage therefrom. In the case of the Ten Bosch claim, then, the sidelining of chiefs seems merely to have opened the way for more powerful operators, with a broader constituency and hence a more modernising ethnic power base, to enter the field. 208

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Where is King Mtsweni? In another case, an entrepreneur of much humbler origins cloaked himself in the mantle of chiefly authority as a means to legitimate his land-brokering deals in the eyes of his clientele. This was Jack Mtsweni, the Doornkop titleholder who had sold plots, without community permission, to families of tenants who (largely at his invitation) had started settling on the farm. As well as the chiefship, he also drew on other discourses, sometimes contradictorily, for his legitimacy. His ability to act as broker was based variously on his status as title-holder, his intimate acquaintance with the farm’s chiefly family (now discredited in the eyes of title-holders but not their tenants), and his knowledge of the egalitarian spirit of the Constitution of the ‘new South Africa’. In merging divergent cultural styles and social frameworks, but in throwing in a strong dose of ‘tradition’, he was behaving in a manner typical of brokers everywhere (Barber 1987, La Hausse 1993). Mtsweni’s assuming of a chiefly persona was done more on the basis of a borrowed authority than in his own right. He was, he claimed, entitled to allocate plots on Doornkop on behalf of the community’s absentee chief. He had a close association with Seth Ramaube, the youngest in a line descended from the farm’s original leader, and with Seth’s mother Miriam who had stood in as regent when he was a boy. It was Mtsweni’s broadly publicised claim that he ‘had been nominated by the chief to allocate land’ that had attracted so many farm evictees and others to flock to the farm in the first place.15 His chiefly connections, although lending him authority in the eyes of his clientele among the Ndebele rural landless (a constituency well known for its adherence to customary ways), disqualified him amongst the Pedi titleholders to whose ranks he belonged. In this as in many other ‘black spot’ forced removals, the compliance of the then chief in the original resettlement had led to her fellow title-holders’ rejection of her – and of all chiefly – authority (James 1983, Mulaudzi 2002). But these connections had enhanced his stature in the eyes of the Ndebele tenantry who were his chief clientele. Mtsweni’s own account of his connections with the chiefly family contrasted with the typical title-holder discourse by stressing the general appropriateness of chiefly rule over land, as well as emphasising – somewhat contradictorily – its capacity to transcend ethnic discrimination: If land is ruled by ordinary people it will not work. It should be under government or under a chief. . . . It should be the chief who rules here – Seth. . . . I have strong connections with him. He came back here but they said they don’t want that chief. . . . This place should be under either a chief or government because committees are corrupt. When Miriam came here in 2000, she said when she returns to rule this place everyone would be welcome. This is the new Doornkop not

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the old. We cannot live by that tradition anymore. But they chased her away because of that.16 If Doornkop’s title-holders had been predisposed against their chief and her son by her compliance with the 1974 forced removal, her present-day willingness to endorse the taking-in of tenants made their antipathy still stronger. This antipathy extended to Mtsweni, whom his fellow owners likened derisively to ‘an Ndebele chief’ surrounded by his servile and uncritical followers. Although this unauthorised land-selling had led to charges of fraud being laid against Mtsweni by his fellow title-holders in the Doornkop CPA Committee, he had more to fear from his customers/clients than from his coowners or from the police. Despite government plans to settle the problem by providing a new home for them on a former white farm next door to Doornkop, which was being purchased for them by the DLA and would be run by the Siyathuthuka Trust, and although some were willing to surrender their stands on Doornkop in return for the promise of this new home, they felt they were entitled to a refund of the money they had paid Mtsweni. But the rumour was spreading that he had spent the money. The tenants, many of whom who had borrowed at excessive rates of interest to pay him in the first place and were still making repayments, claimed that if he was unable to pay them back they would ‘have to kill him’. Or, as one woman put it: ‘When they evict us, we want our money back. If he does not have it, well he will see whether he lives or dies.’17 Despite his bravado, and his impassioned defence of landless people’s rights and their right not to be oppressed, Mtsweni seemed to be running scared. At the height of the squatter invasion, when he was receiving amounts which started at around R150 but later peaked at R1,300, he was benefiting considerably from his following, not only because of their payments for land but also from their presence as a captive commercial clientele: according to squatter leader Jan Masina, ‘he had a big shop when the squatters were still flooding in’. As a result of title-holder antipathy to his land-selling practices, and various vigilante tactics used by some to discourage these, the influx of tenants had since reduced to a trickle, and ‘now his shop is going downhill’.18 Being worried about the accusations levelled and the charges laid against him, he had become more circumspect about his land-selling practices: He will refuse to sign the receipt, claiming that there is something wrong with his eyes. He gets it signed by someone else – a relative. Some squatters pay in instalments. Mtsweni gives a receipt for the first amount, but avoids giving them one for the second or for any subsequent instalments. Or he just uses an exercise book. After two weeks, he says ‘give me the slip, I need to fix it.’ Then he never gives it back.19 210

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Such tactics, alleged by Mtsweni’s fellow title-holders but never acknowledged by him, represented a way of evading the liability for repayment in the event of the sales being authoritatively judged as illegal. Discourses of chiefship, in his case, served as a cloak for what might otherwise have appeared as naked greed. All newcomers to the farm would be heard to ask: ‘Where is King Mtsweni?’ Most of them think that Mtsweni is responsible for this place. But he is not related in any way to the chief. He is only behaving like a chief because of his boikgokgomoso (love of status/power-mongering).20 But chiefship was not simply an idiom drawn upon to give him greater authority and hence to lend him greater credibility as a legitimate dispenser of land. The disguise and the true identity were hard to distinguish, since at least some of his proceeds were given directly to the chiefly family: ‘Miriam sent a young relative here to collect money from Mtsweni’s group – they had to pay R400.’21 As much as being an entrepreneur in his own right, Mtsweni was assuming the mantle of a headman answerable to a higher authority. Both Mtsweni with his new ‘following’ of displaced farm labourers, and the discredited chief Seth who, within this fluid and disputed post-restitution setting, was attempting a revival of his leadership amongst the rural underclass, were endeavouring to derive credibility from each other’s rhetoric and actions. Both Mtsweni and the Ten Bosch land-sellers, in different ways, blended diverse attributes but made liberal use of a traditionalist idiom. The Ten Bosch Committee responded to the DLA instructions about sidelining chiefs in such a way as to bolster a strongly ethnicised, but modernising and ultimately elitist, vision of patrimonial authority. Excluding chiefs, in this case, might also exclude their poorest subjects from the list of claimants, since they would be unable to pay for a place on it. At the same time, the escalating price of registration would increasingly favour an emerging moneyed and business-oriented class which nonetheless endorsed its position through the terms provided by a neo-ethnic discourse. Using the language of restored rights which the restitution process had fostered, this elite would represent itself as returning to the lands which were rightfully its own. In contrast, the relatively poor and socially disconnected Mtsweni, in the process of pursuing his petty land deals, was seemingly unmindful of DLA directives about the chiefship. He combined the repertoire of custom with discourses of egalitarianism and democracy in the new South Africa. His use of the chiefly idiom was a populist one, pursued as part of an alliance with a chiefly family discredited within the Pedi title-holder group but attempting to rebuild its following among the poor and landless Ndebele. He was doubtless also being used by this family. Charging amounts which escalated over 211

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time – like those for the Ten Bosch claim – with the soaring demand for land, he could be seen as an exploiter of the rural poor and dispossessed. He maintained, however, that he was their protector, a procurer on their behalf of the land rights from which they would otherwise have been excluded on this restitution farm, and a guardian of the non-racial and non-ethnic character of the ‘new South Africa’. Underlying these stories of brokerage is an enduring contrast. On the one hand, is the world of modernity, favouring business and enterprise, consolidating the position of a new African middle class, and promising further increases in wealth to those already relatively well-placed to procure it. This was a social world whose privilege the restitution programme, as mediated by wily brokers, seemed destined to buttress. On the other, is an emphasis on the imperative of protecting the poor and vulnerable who are often excluded from the possible benefits of restored land rights. Straddling the two was the impoverished title-holder Mtsweni, who sold off the assets of the former with the effect of incorporating the latter into the ambit of restored rights. In the manner of all brokers, however philanthropic, he was taking his cut: creaming off a bit along the way. Such a practice reveals a fundamental contradiction in South Africa’s attempted project of social reconstruction. Even in situations where the state endeavours to provide basic rights for all, it often remains the case that access can only be gained to these by going through an intermediary who will derive some benefit in the process.

THE STATE’S DELAY AND THE PLIGHT OF THE BROKER Even where there is awareness of the illicit activities of brokers like those described above, the pursuit of land redistribution through official channels and within the terms of South Africa’s new legislation governing the process opens up a series of gaps. New intermediaries arise from within the ranks of the community of ‘beneficiaries’ themselves, or of those sharing similar origins who have bettered themselves. Acting in response to others’ needs as much as to their own, they help their fellow members of the landless constituency with undeniable altruism, while simultaneously attempting to feather their own nests. At the same time, they become more aware than their fellows of the shortcomings entailed in complex bureaucratic procedures, thus developing an empathy for the predicament both of overworked state personnel and of the consultants who implement state plans. However, such people must remain ever-mindful of the often utopian expectations of their grass-roots constituents. When, as so often, these prove to be unrealisable, threats of retribution akin to those made by Mtsweni’s squatter customers may result. In the process of coming to understand, even sympathise with, the state’s lack of manpower, budgetary weakness 212

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and ineptitude, such intermediaries must always remember the clamorous demands of the landless from whose ranks they have arisen. The proposed solution of Doornkop’s crisis, devised to remedy the chaotic influx of settlers that resulted from Mtsweni’s illegal land sales, led inevitably to new forms of brokerage. The DLA’s purchase of a farm adjoining Doornkop to serve as the squatters’ new home has already been mentioned; as has its elaborate plans to have the farm managed, and run along business lines, by the Siyathuthuka Trust, whose committee would be elected from the squatter community. In the course of negotiations, in which extended communication between state and beneficiaries became necessary, a leader – Amos Mathibela – emerged from among the squatters. His followers voted him in as chair of the Trust. He combined the role of informal leader with that of intermediary and translator for the government’s consultant who was charged to research squatter needs and to arrange for the development of the newly bought farm. Mathibela had the flair, as well as the marginal and indeterminate status, of a typical broker. His charisma was evident in the fact that, despite only recently having finished school, he had since his early teens been acting as a self-styled ‘social worker’ helping to resolve conflicts between local families. He had also developed a keen awareness of political and social matters through his attendance at Middelburg’s town council meetings. His relative marginality lay in his less-than-complete membership of the community of the regional landless from which Doornkop’s squatters were drawn. Although

Figure 8.1 Siyathuthuka Trust Chairman, Amos Mathibela, at home.

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his position as chairman of the Siyathuthuka Trust implied his selfidentification with this social category, the reality was more complex. He had bought a stand from Mtsweni like the other squatters, but was using his shack there as a shop rather than a dwelling-place, meanwhile residing with his parents in their brick-built house on a nearby smallholding where they were employed by a white Afrikaans plot-holder. When Mathibela found himself called into service to help solve the ‘squatter problem’, he relied for advice on an older and better-connected man. This was the Ndebele notable JB Mahlangu, who worked in the office of the Premier of Mpumalanga Province. This senior adviser of his had origins similar to those of Doornkop tenants. His upbringing on a nearby white farm had been swiftly terminated when, as a youth, he had shown a rebellious streak instead of meekly (although unwillingly) accepting the farmer’s instructions. He and his family had been summarily evicted, and had moved to the new homeland of KwaNdebele. He had been to school there. Later, as a member of the new Ndebele elite, he occupied a prominent role within the ethnicised politics of the local ANC. The younger man, Mathibela, despite his youth and his humbler profile, was however no less a natural leader. A combination of helpfulness and charisma had drawn local people to him. His role in arranging meetings, and in translating and facilitating the ubiquitous ‘workshops’ beloved of those in the development field, had won him a part-time job as translator/mediator for the consultant running the project. With some influence from his older mentor, he had won the trust of the squatter constituency for a while. But he was now feeling the negative effects on his credibility of the state’s failure to deliver. When his squatter constituents began to mistrust him, their misgivings were based not solely on state delays in the case of this particular farm. They also derived from a close scrutiny of the reputations of family members. His father Hendrik, who had tried to position himself as a beneficiary of land reform on a different ‘project’, but had so far been disappointed, was criticised for his inability to make progress and had been taken as an exemplar of a broader failure.

Loss of faith in intermediaries That numerous spaces were opened up for, but dangers faced by, local intermediaries, was demonstrated by my discussions with Hendrik. In this case, it was the time-gap that proved crucial. Bureaucratic delays caused a chasm which yawned at least as wide as the disparities in levels of literacy and knowledge which have been more commonly analysed in studies of rural brokerage. Swiftness was of the essence if the brokers of land reform and hence the programme overall were to enjoy any credibility. Only if Doornkop’s squatters could witness timely delivery in a particular case, implied Hendrik, would they have concrete proof of the workable, practical 214

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nature of state-planned solutions in general. Failure to do so would cause disaffection: not only with the government (which in any case appeared as a somewhat remote, abstract entity) but with those individuals within the local community who had taken it upon themselves to become conduits for its plans. To put it more concretely: because of the failure so far of the father, Hendrik’s, attempt to get access to land through the DLA for his project, the squatters were losing faith in the capacity of his son, Amos, the chairman of their committee, to do so: ‘They say “. . . why is the father failing? We can’t trust those people – they have even failed in their own process”.’ Thus were flaws in the system personalised by being transferred from an abstract entity to a visible local presence. Hendrik explained how this loss of faith in both father and son had come about after his own unsuccessful bid to acquire land. Under the old redistribution scheme, he had attempted to recruit a group of co-purchasers whose grants could be pooled to buy a plot. This was the place where the family was currently living, as employees of the white plot owner, who was keen to sell. Encouraged by the range of contacts his son Amos had built up with the local DLA and its consultants, and also by Amos’s apparently effortless grasp of the bureaucratic procedures involved, the father had embarked upon the complicated process of arranging meetings with the proposed co-purchasers and of drawing up business plans. He was informed after endless delays, however, that the government was unwilling to pay the amount expected by his white employer. As a result, his fellow beneficiaries – the ‘crowd’ he had tried to ‘rent’ from among the Ndebele farm-dwelling fraternity – had lost faith in his leadership: ‘Some of them no longer trust me. They told me that I am a liar of four years, and I have been wasting their time to call them to come to meetings to discuss lies.’ It was this mistrust that had spilled over to those of the Doornkop squatters who had placed their trust in Hendrik’s son, Amos, to lead them to land ownership as the head of the new Siyathuthuka Trust: . . . people are confused. They don’t know who is right and who is wrong. They just follow. . . . But it is taking a long time – promising dates and those dates have already passed.22 At the last meeting when Andries Gouws [the government’s consultant] came here, to Doornkop, he told the people that they’ve already got a place . . . But nothing happens. Then when JB, Amos, and Andries Gouws come again to tell people things, the people say, ‘just go – we don’t want to hear about this’. At the end of the time Amos will say, ‘they are calling me a liar’. The solution, Hendrik claimed, would be for the state to decisively and visibly finalise at least one land reform project in the locality, thus providing concrete demonstration to these practical-minded country-dwellers of 215

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the fact that land could and would be delivered to them. Their faith in their leader, he felt, would then be restored. This was important equally for the followers’ future benefit and for the success of their leaders’ plans. If the Doornkop squatters lost the faith they had previously placed in Amos to deliver their land reform project, there was a danger that they might leave in search of greener pastures. Amos would then lack the requisite number of ‘followers’ (or co-beneficiaries) necessary to justify the existence of the squatters’ Siyathuthuka Trust and its ownership of the farm next door. Some people are moving away from here. You see somebody loading his truck and going. We don’t know where he is going. I say, ‘Amos, I saw somebody moving, is he on the list?’ He checks the list and says, ‘Yes, he’s on the list’. Now where is he going? Other commentators on the Doornkop drama echoed the perception that the effect of government delays was to turn these intermediaries into ‘sell-outs’ in the eyes of their constituents. Indeed, they said, one group within the squatter constituency was already switching its allegiance to an alternative leader/broker, Piet Tlou (Chapter 4), who favoured a more radical course of action. He was advising squatters that they should remain on the Doornkop plots they had illicitly bought from Mtsweni. Since the government’s stated policy, he reassured them, was to protect people from summary eviction, they would never be thrown off. More radical strategies of this kind involved searching for solutions within the ANC’s original election promises rather than relying on the bureaucratic procedures it had resorted to once installed in government. Such strategies fed, although they did not necessarily originate within, a groundswell of popular action whose formal face was the Landless People’s Movement (LPM – see Chapter 5). Similar cases abound, where delays between the initiation of land reform projects and their realisation were creating fertile ground for the growth of popular protest. But even here, where patience and compromise appeared to be giving way to direct and radical action, opportunities have opened up for the building of personal fiefdoms.

THE LAND NGOs AND THE LPM Grassroots-based social action, since it arises out of the needs of ordinary people, has often been proposed as one of the few ‘authentic’ means for addressing the problems of the poor. Much of the literature on social movements stresses their importance for allowing an indigenous definition of the problems of poverty in opposition to those imposed by the development industry (Escobar 1991, 1995; Ferguson 1990). It also suggests that such 216

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movements can provide a means of bypassing intermediaries. But they do not eliminate opportunities for brokerage altogether. To explore this issue in South Africa we must switch our attention from the arena most commonly examined in studies of brokerage and patron– client relations – the ‘gap’ between people and the state – and reconsider the role of the land NGOs first discussed in Chapter 1. Specifically, we must attend to the role played by these organisations in nurturing, and more recently censuring, the LPM. During the forty-odd years of their existence, the activists in South Africa’s land NGOs have become acutely aware that the promise of land offers opportunities for political power and patronage. I first recognised this when, in 1996, I interviewed officers working at TRAC (later TRAC-MP) about their work on restitution. These officers were concerned about the propensity of rural people to elect, as their representatives, the better-educated and better-off, and the resulting division between leadership and the rank-andfile caused them disquiet. Much of NGO activists’ effort has been expended in finding ways to counter this: they were determined to create a direct relationship between ‘the people’ and themselves. In attempting to bypass intermediaries, land activists in the NGOs have tended to overlook how far they themselves are sources of patronage, and that their keenness to bypass other patrons is often matched by these patrons’ equal determination to circumvent the influence of the NGOs. The process of reclaiming land has, of necessity, involved a proliferation of competing brokers, each motivated – in part – by the wish to prevent the undue influence of others (James 2000b). What makes the unease about patronage and representation more palpable is the divergent social origins of the land NGO officers themselves. Especially at the outset, these organisations were run by left- or liberal-leaning white activists drawn from middle-class backgrounds, rather than from the ranks of Africans forcibly relocated during apartheid. But some members of their research or liaison staff were recruited specifically because of their origins within or their close knowledge of communities which had lost land. The organisations thus both bridge and blur the classificatory division drawn in some development literature between NGOs staffed by their own grassroots members and NGOs whose staff aim to support, but are not drawn from, the grass roots (Farrington and Bebbington 1993). Due in part to these diverse social origins, the organisations have swung between a neutral human-rights orientation and a more partisan or overtly political one. In their concern with dispossessed communities, they have attempted in the main to foreground the rights, attitudes and priorities of their land-hungry constituents, but at certain moments they have directed rather than merely represented these attitudes and priorities. The direction followed by these organisations, inasmuch as they were partisan at all, was that of the ‘liberation struggle’, defined in terms which 217

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broadly favoured the ANC or its internal partner, the UDF. After 1994, they soon found themselves apparently outflanked with the formation of the LPM, one among several social movements opposed to the ANC government that have emerged in recent years.23 In one sense this movement seemed like the answer to the prayers of NGO activists. In that it would be able to make vociferous demands on the government about the urgency of land reform, it would lend muscle to NGO efforts. Appearing as an autochthonous grouping able to enunciate its own demands without requiring to be ‘nannied’ by the NGOs, it looked like the organically emerging movement of rural people which had been long anticipated and hoped for. But suspicions began to emerge about the way it had been founded, the origin of its resources and its style of organisation. Worries grew that, instead of being a truly grassroots phenomenon in which democratic and egalitarian principles were foremost, the movement had been brought into being and fostered by a leader/patron from within the land NGO alliance itself. The matter at issue thus had a familiar ring. It concerned the appropriateness or otherwise of allowing intermediaries to provide resources and political direction. In the tussle that followed, each side has justified its own stance by citing the ‘real needs’ of the rural poor and landless. The NGOs accused the LPM of allowing a single individual and his small following to obtain undue influence, thereby failing to ensure democratic forms of representation. Conversely, the LPM accused the NGOs of failing to recognise true grassroots social action, and of attempting – using the excuse of creating representative regional structures – to bring it into line with the ANC’s centralised political agenda.

Andile Mngxitama One of the figures at the centre of the dispute was Andile Mngxitama. He was an employee of the national-level body – the National Land Committee (NLC) – that co-ordinated the land NGOs. He had played a central and vociferous role in encouraging and helping to establish the LPM from its inception in 2001. At the mass meeting held to coincide with Durban’s 2001 UN Conference on Racism (Chapter 1), it was Mngxitama who called out slogans and led the crowd’s responses, and at Johannesburg’s 2002 WSSD (World Summit on Sustainable Development) it was he, together with fellow activist and US citizen Ann Eveleth, who was arrested during a protest march. Mngxitama’s position, shared by some of his colleagues and by the movement he has fostered, has been to encourage the invasion of land and to draw direct parallels with similar tactics in other parts of the world: including Brazil, the Philippines, and – most controversially – Zimbabwe. After heated debate amongst the affiliates (and with some dissenting voices), the land NGOs had voted against sanctioning land invasions. As reported by the press, the conflict hinged on these diverging political 218

Figure 8.2 Landlessness protester confronts policeman at WSSD.

Figure 8.3 Landless people and other anti-globalisation protesters at WSSD.

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stances alone. When some of the land NGOs’ donor funding and resources continued to be channelled to the LPM in support of such invasions, wrath was aroused. These invasions later led to the director of the NGOs’ coordinating body, the National Land Committee, being subjected to a disciplinary hearing and dismissed in July 2003, after having been found guilty of ‘insubordination, misrepresentation and financial mismanagement’.24 As director, it was held, he ought to have brought his subordinate, Mngxitama, into line. He ought to have prevented Mngxitama and others from acting irresponsibly against the wishes and perceived best interests of the affiliated NGOs in the region – and hence, indirectly, of the ‘landless’. He ought, in short, to have curbed the radical calls for ‘land invasions’. Strongly opposing this view, radical land activists saw the disciplinary hearing as an attempt by the ANC to exercise control over the NGOs’ coordinating body, and through it over the LPM. Seen from this perspective, the NGOs were acting as ANC puppets by attempting to silence the genuine voices of the people.25 Adding a more overtly political note, it was thought that the NGOs, voicing ANC concerns, were irked by the prevalence within the National Land Committee of oppositional voices from the Black Consciousness and PAC (Pan African Congress) sectors. (It will be remembered from Chapter 5 that the LPM was dismissively referred to by state agents as a front for the PAC.) But the disputes concerned conflicts over patronage and representation more than matters of party-political alignment. This becomes clear if we shift our attention from the national to the local level. Within the context of Mpumalanga, Mngxitama was alleged to have acted out of turn by making the LPM his own private fiefdom. He had espoused the cause of one small Johannesburg-based group, the Mpumalanga Labour Tenants’ Committee, whose members had been displaced from the farms in Wakkerstroom (see Chapter 5), and had used NGO resources to further their particular cause. Rather than doing this, claimed his opponents in the land NGOs, he should have sought to establish representative regional structures. Of particular concern to the NGOs’ directors was his neglect of the wider range of possible constituents by drawing only selected groups into the ambit of NGO patronage. Through this means he had allowed one small group to regard itself as founder of the LPM and even as synonymous with it, rather than recognising that it was merely one among a multitude of ‘landless’ groups, which ought to be represented equally throughout South Africa’s provinces. Had Mngxitama operated through the land NGOs within each region, it was alleged, this would have served to broaden the movement’s membership by including a variety of otherwise disenfranchised landless people – including, perhaps, the ‘marchers’ from the Middelburg district about whom JB Mahlangu had told me.26 Prior to the meeting of the WSSD (World Summit on Sustainable Development), a move had, in fact, been made to try to integrate the subjects of this ‘fiefdom’ into broader democratic structures 220

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by holding a regional LPM election. (The idea that a social movement ought to hold regional elections might seem overly bureaucratic for a radical movement which is thought to arise out of and organically express the true feelings of ‘the people’. It is a remnant of South Africa’s 1980s civil society ‘committee culture’ with its insistence on structures of accountability.) The ‘fiefs’ however refused to accept the results of the vote and the newly elected office-bearers then resigned in high dudgeon.27 Strenuous efforts were made to cut out the middleman. Mpumalanga’s land NGO, TRAC-MP, made a bid to engage directly with the LPM rather than communicating through Mngxitama. TRAC-MP called a meeting at which it explained some of its own policies and procedures directly to the movement’s members. It pointed out that the NGOs had taken a nationallevel decision to oppose land invasions, and that their objection to having their resources ‘hijacked’ to facilitate such invasions should be understood in the light of this decision. What was more, TRAC-MP was engaged in concerted efforts to disband the white farmer vigilante commandos in Wakkerstroom whose actions had been the original cause of much of the LPM’s disaffection. Such matters, claimed TRAC-MP, had originally been concealed by Mngxitama from his ‘fiefs’.28 He had intentionally, they alleged, obscured the NGO’s modus operandi and intentions from those groupings he had chosen to patronise, thus – in classic broker fashion – deriving power from controlling the flow of information and blocking its free availability to all. Accusations of mediation are equally prominent in the rhetoric of Andile Mngxitama and his supporters. But these are levelled against his critics. He charges the NGOs with wanting to rob the LPM of its independence and force: [they] . . . are now acting as though we should not be promoting this mobilisation: they want to get rid of the radical landless leadership and replace it with something more moderate – perhaps get ANC councillors involved instead. They want the LPM, rather, to demonstrate in favour of the government – to ‘thank the minister’.29 Underlying the NGOs’ determination to direct the movement rather than allow it free rein, he says, is their mistaken commitment to ‘vanguardism’ (Mngxitama 2003). Motivated by a wish for power, they are determined to ‘supervise, and monitor, and be in charge of’ the LPM: They are aware of their role as mediators . . . between the poor and the state. This gives them a feeling of power, plus a nice warm fuzzy feeling that they are doing something, making a difference.30 As he was an employee of the land NGOs’ co-ordinating body, the National Land Committee, all these criticisms were – he was aware – applicable in his own case as much as in that of others in the NGO cohort. Being aware of the 221

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contradictions inherent in taking such a position, he saw his own remarks as having the status of an ‘autocritique’. Underpinning the political stances being taken by the opponents in this quarrel, the accusations and counter-accusations reveal long-standing anxieties about the necessity for the rural poor and landless to represent themselves directly. In this case, as in others discussed in the chapter, state tardiness in delivering on the pledge to restore and redistribute land is what has attracted middlemen. Usually motivated by altruism, but deriving a sense of self-importance as well as material benefits from their leadership of the landless, these individuals compete with each other. One of them rejects another’s vanguardist role while substituting their own in its place. Each is driven in part by a desire to prevent the intervention of the others, and justifies their actions by denigrating their opponents’ intentions, which are alleged to be ideologically less sound.

CONCLUSION Providing land to the landless, in sum, offers fertile grounds for the building up of patronage. Whether in the shape of chiefs, members of the new political elite, individuals who have barely risen above the status of their fellow landless, or members of the NGO fraternity, the need for leadership, brokerage and mediation is as ubiquitous as is the necessity for and availability of a following. Activists in the land sector have worried about this tendency, at the same time as recognising that their own role can be seen as an instance of it. Their ambivalence echoes an unease expressed about an earlier generation of social actors in South Africa. Back as far as the first half of the twentieth century, moral opprobrium was levelled at intermediary figures who, lacking the normal markers of African middle-class respectability, used get-rich-quick schemes to climb the social ladder (La Hausse 1993). In similar vein, debates in the literature about the United Democratic Front (UDF), the broad-based but inchoate social movement which formed during the 1980s as an internal wing of the ANC, reveal several authors’ preoccupation with the gap between the social background of leaders and that of the rank-and-file. Critics point to the essentially middle-class character of the leadership while others repudiate this. What most UDF leaders did share with their followers was, if not their current social status, then their original social position (Seekings 2000:210–11). It was the subsequent exceptionally rapid social mobility with which many such leaders transcended their poor and working-class backgrounds that generated confusion and some dismay amongst analysts of the movement. The emergence of such people is, perhaps, inevitable given the plentiful availability of rank-and-file supporters similarly intent on upward socio-economic mobility but with somewhat less capacity for achieving it. 222

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In cases of attempted land access at the end of the same century, intermediary figures occupy a similar position and play a similar role. Brokers and the landless who rely upon them do not originate from divergent social backgrounds, nor do they find themselves attempting to traverse the intersection between two utterly distinct or irreconcilable worlds. Rather, within a swirl of shifting social positions, intermediaries appear from amongst the ranks of those whom they then represent. As a single individual emerges, so they rely on those one step behind to provide them with a following and – in the case of land sales – with money. Conversely those one step behind rely on the individual to help them obtain access to the resources they have not yet gained the skills to acquire. These brokers’ helpfulness, if that is what it is, comes not from the paternalistic impulses of a middle-class do-gooder but rather from an intimate understanding of the social position of their followers, which they share. Brokerage based in shared origins sounds relatively benign, even if it does appear to militate against the realisation of independent and unmediated land rights. It might be thought inevitable for people to turn to personal relationships if other, less mediated means of gaining access to land are unavailable. But there are dangers when such patronage is linked directly to political power, as it has been in the case of Zimbabwe. Mugabe’s use of land as a reward for the party faithful has been a sinister reminder of the devious political uses to which land can be put. As a tactic, it has been effective. Populist rallying cries, when accompanied by the distribution of resources which cannot be gained through other channels, are likely to be heard. But such a tactic is also dangerous, because those responding to such cries do not take account of the longer-term economic effects for their own and for their country’s future. South Africa’s leaders have insisted that, in contrast to their Zimbabwean counterparts, they will follow the legal route to land reform. It is when the fulfilment of promises is indefinitely delayed that people may, instead, choose the option of full-blown political patronage.

Notes 1 Cousins (2003); ‘Row erupts over land law’, Drew Forrest, Mail & Guardian, 7 August 2002. 2 Philip Mbiba, Restitution Commission, Nelspruit, 30 January and 13 February 2003; ‘ “Land gift” worries SACP’, Mail & Guardian 10 February 2003; ‘A good deal?’ Mail & Guardian, 22 January 2003; ‘Mbeki tackles the chiefs’, 1 November 2002 news24.co.za; ‘Draft Land Bill should be rejected’, Ben Cousins, Mail & Guardian, 27 September 2002. 3 Durkje Gilfillan and Tony Harding, Restitution Commission, 13 June 1996; Philip Mbiba, Restitution Commission, Nelspruit, 30–31 October 2002; Peter Ntshoe, Restitution Commission, Nelspruit, 30 January 2003. 4 Mpumalanga West Consortium/Land Reform Pilot Progamme, ‘Initial Community Surveys and Participatory Planning in the Mpumalanga Pilot Land Reform District’, March 1997, p. 47; see also Marcus et al. (1996:81–4).

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5 Philip Mbiba, Restitution Commission, Nelspruit, 31 October 2002. 6 It also raised fears that the country’s currency would plummet: predictions which appeared to be justified when the Rand dropped by 7.5 cents to reach 8.3250 against the US Dollar. ‘Rand plumbs 8.32/dollar!’, News24.co.za, 11 July 2001. 7 ‘High Noon at Bredell’, News24.co.za, 13 July 2001; ‘Police clear PAC’s field of dreams’, Mail & Guardian, 6 July 2001; ‘Mogoba, de Lille must intervene’, News24.co.za, 5 July 2001; ‘Tshwete forced to flee’, News24.co.za, 5 July 2001; ‘Land grab squatters face the wrecking ball’, Mail & Guardian, 5 July 2001. 8 ‘Squatters, PAC to fight eviction’, Business Day, 13 July 2001. 9 ‘Bredell invader faces fraud charge’, Mahap Msiza, News24.co.za, 30 July 2001; ‘ANC frame me: Bredell man’, News24.co.za, 29 July 2001; ‘Where’s the Bredell cash?’ Mahap Msiza, News24.co.za, 2 July 2001. 10 ‘Great gaps in land and housing’, Geoff Budlender, Financial Mail, 13 July 2001. 11 ‘PAC calls for land summit’, News24.co.za, 8 July 2001; ‘South Africans vow to grab the land: government pulls out the stops to prevent Brazilian-style seizures’, Chris McGreal, The Guardian, 31 July 2001; ‘Tighter laws on land grabs?’, Adrian Lackay, News24.co.za, 26 July 2001. 12 ‘Tighter laws on land grabs?’, Adrian Lackay, News24.co.za, 26 July 2001. See Lodge (2002) for an account of the Bredell invasion based on similar sources. 13 Samson Siwela and Elmon Mkhatswa, Nelspruit, 13 November 2002. 14 Kwape Mmela, Johannesburg, 21 November 2002. 15 Jan Masina, Doornkop, 11 December 2002. 16 Jack Mtsweni, Doornkop, 8 November 2002. 17 Anna Mkhwanazi, Doornkop, 11 December 2002. 18 Jan Masina, Doornkop, 11 December 2002. 19 Magdalena Sehlola, Maria Riba and Lucas Mashabela, Doornkop, 8 November 2002. 20 Eva Mankge, Doornkop, 11 December 2002. 21 Magdalena Sehlola, Maria Riba and Lucas Mashabela, Doornkop, 8 November 2002. 22 Hendrik Mathibela, De Jager’s Doornkop plot, 15 December 2002. Also source for following quotes. 23 ‘Social movements: “ultra-left” or “global citizens”?’, Mail & Guardian, 4 February 2003. 24 ‘Physical fighting threatens land body’, News24.co.za, 11 August 2003; ‘Probe into land committee boss’, Vicki Robinson, Mail & Guardian, 13 January 2003. 25 ‘ANC “seeks control” of land group’, Mail & Guardian, 24 January 2003. 26 Chris Williams, TRAC, Nelspruit, 31 January 2003. 27 Russell Grinker, personal communication. 28 Chris Williams, TRAC, Nelspruit, 31 January 2003; Thomas Ngwenya, TRAC, Nelspruit, 24 January 2003. 29 Andile Mngxitama and Ann Eveleth, NLC, Johannesburg, 25 October 2003. 30 Andile Mngxitama and Ann Eveleth, NLC, Johannesburg, 25 October 2003.

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9 WHITE POWER, BLACK REDRESS The racial politics of land reform

‘If you grow up with the land you also love it, I can understand their feelings’ (white farmer from the Eastern Cape).

INTRODUCTION In the eyes of the South African public – and indeed the international one, inasmuch as it concerns itself with matters in the region – conflicts over land are primarily concerned with race. By the same token, the proposed resolution of such conflicts requires that racial tensions be resolved. This interpretation has been particularly prevalent since public awareness was sharpened by the Zimbabwe land invasions. Media reports and photographs of Zimbabwean white farmer families confronting hostile crowds of armed black land invaders gave a starkly racial view of the conflict, and they depicted the transfer of lands from members of one race group to those of another as inevitably accompanied by violence. Closer to home, Steinberg’s 2002 book gives a gripping account of KwaZulu-Natal ‘farm attacks’ in which equivalent dramas are played out.1 Although motivated by a complex combination of factors, the attacks are depicted in the book as occasioned by race hatred. They also have effects on racial land access. By contesting the frontier of racial power, these attacks have pushed back the physical boundary, apparently so immoveable during the apartheid regime, between communal African land and the white farms. Farm attacks are not – despite the paranoia of some white farmers who fear that a ‘concerted ANC campaign’ underpins these – connected to the official land reform process in South Africa. But they do constitute part of the social context in rural areas where the programme is being implemented. Reading about the high-profile events recounted in the media, one might indeed imagine that all interactions between black and white in rural South Africa are conflict-ridden. Although the existence of such conflicts is undeniable, unexpected collaborations, partnerships and mediations have also been achieved. Although race is not the only or even the most significant 225

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factor in these interactions, whether conflicted or collaborative, the broader political setting has lent itself all too readily to racialised interpretations. Events as divergent as farm attacks, on the one hand, and the re-staffing of the Department of Land Affairs, on the other, appear as analogous in the public mind.

CONFLICTS BETWEEN FARMERS AND THE STATE: NATIONAL POLITICKING One of the most obvious arenas of dispute has been the relationship between present farm owners and future beneficiaries. At least at the formal level, this has been mediated by the government’s Department of Land Affairs (DLA). The policy of the DLA is to transfer white-owned farmland into African ownership, using a ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ model. The ANC initially toyed with more interventionist approaches such as nationalising land, but later abandoned this to pursue more moderate options such as taxing and limiting land ownership, using indebted or misused land, or reallocating that land which was already owned by the state (SAIRR 1992–1993:384). In the event, all these were relinquished: nationalising land came to be seen as incompatible with maintaining a stable economy. Most state land, it turned out, was in any case already informally occupied or belonged to other state departments which were reluctant to transfer it.2 The market-driven model prevailed, with ‘willing sellers’ transacting to sell their land to ‘willing buyers’ with state assistance and some state funding. The market-driven approach has been criticised from both sides of the political spectrum. While activists condemn it for being costly, slow and ultimately incapable of achieving the redistributive aims of land reform, white farmers denounce it for undermining the health of the agricultural economy and threatening their own livelihoods. Notwithstanding the benevolence in 1999 of Gauteng landowner Roger Roman who offered half his land to a number of resident black families, calling it a ‘moral and pragmatic response’, or KwaZulu-Natal farmer Robin Folwer who facilitated his workers’ eventual ownership of their village, white farmers’ more typical reaction to land reform was suspicion and resistance. An opening broadside in the battle of words was delivered when white Mpumalanga farmers affiliated to the right-wing Transvaal Agricultural Union resolved in early 2000 to ‘band together to fight land claims’.3 After this, the debate proceeded in circular motion: starting with government threats which were countered, argued about, and later reissued as threats when no progress appeared to have been made. Looming in the background, and frequently invoked, has been the spectre of expropriation by the state. Soon after the new Minister Thoko Didiza took office, she renewed the pledge to transfer 30 per cent of agricultural 226

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land to black South Africans within five years: a percentage which had initially been laid down at the ‘Options’ conference involving the World Bank in the early 1990s (World Bank 1993:38–39, 74). As she and other government officials became increasingly aware of the high cost of land bought on the open market, and of delays involved in purchasing such land when in competition with other buyers, they asked later in 2000 if there were any reason why they should not use ‘legal instruments at our disposal to resolve some of the problems we face in land reform’.4 In short, they threatened expropriation. Backing down from this stance in the face of widespread opposition, the state then switched to a strategy of appealing for co-operation. In 2001, it adopted an approach of advertising in national and provincial newspapers, asking farmers to sell the land it needed to ‘kick-start’ its new version of the redistribution programme, LRAD (Land Reform for Agricultural Development). When a number of white farmers – many from the more progressive association Agri-SA – responded to these pleas by offering to sell land and to help by ‘transferring vital skills and expertise to small and emerging farmers’, they were praised as ‘true patriots’ and their ‘newfound enthusiasm to co-operate’ was commended. At the same time, the threat of expropriation for those less willing to co-operate was repeated by the Deputy DirectorGeneral of Land Affairs, Gilingwe Mayende: To say our process is based on a willing seller, willing buyer is actually a fallacy. . . . It is based on a proactive land acquisition strategy, which starts with a negotiated process and can culminate with expropriation.5 This threat was eventually carried out in 2005 after a white farmer had demanded an inordinately high price for his land. But expropriation, like the original proposal to nationalise land, has been recognised as both potentially disruptive to the economy and problematic in that it might lead to prolonged legal battles (Weideman 2003:166). Its irreconcilability with a market-driven approach has meant that it has remained more a threat – a stick to be waved at recalcitrant farmers – than a viable mechanism for procuring farmland. Such debates at the national political level and reported in the press have seldom centred overtly on matters of race. Racial conflict over land becomes potentially greater at the local level, where dispossessed Africans attempt to claim restitution or become beneficiaries of old- or new-style redistribution, and where specific white farmers try to resist the pressure to sell or hold out for a better price. It is also at the local level, however, that restitution officers, consultants and other go-betweens have achieved unexpected success in mediating between the two and in defusing the explosiveness of racial dispute. These individuals’ negotiation skills, backed by an astute awareness of 227

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the economics of modern-day farming, have achieved what expropriation could never do.

INTER-RACIAL MEDIATORS IN AND BEYOND THE GOVERNMENT To understand how mediation has been brought to bear in order to solve racial conflicts over land, we must briefly revisit the disputes that occurred within the DLA itself, recounted in Chapter 1. When the newly-elected Thabo Mbeki reshuffled his cabinet in 1999 and replaced the Mandelaappointed Minister of Land Affairs, Derek Hanekom, with Thoko Didiza, a range of other state employees, from the Director-General downwards, were dismissed or sidelined. These events were glossed at the time by Helena Dolny, Director of the Land Bank, who was likewise shifted out of her post, as being an instance of ‘ethnic cleansing’: a sentiment and choice of words which she later claims to have regretted (Dolny 2001). In confirmation of her change of heart, others have corroborated the idea that the dismissals were underpinned more by conflicts of ideology and by the complex politics of social networking and institutional change than by overtly racial motivations.6 But these events unfolded against the backdrop of a post-1999 political dispensation in which ‘race’ had become a storehouse of rhetorical weaponry. Whatever the true nature of the contestations over policy and dismissals of staff which occurred around the 1999 elections, the net result was a more solidly African staff quota at various levels within the department. This did not necessarily mean, however, that there were fewer whites involved in the land reform process overall: merely that fewer of these were directly employed by the government. Both those white former state employees who returned to work in the legal or land NGOs and those who moved into the world of consultancy have continued to a greater or lesser extent to do the work of government and to be paid by it. By those continuing to interpret these matters in such terms, this outsourcing is racially motivated. It is seen as an imperative of ‘black empowerment’ that the state replace the predominantly white employees of the apartheid era with African ones. Those opposed to this practice complain that it results in a lack of experience and capacity within the state, and that it is this lack of capacity which has necessitated the outsourcing of government functions to white consultants, in restitution, redistribution, and tenure reform. But many such consultants state that they prefer to work as contractors rather than be subject to tedious bureaucratic procedures. Being contractors has also given them a way to dodge the fallout from the racialising of government employment: and even – though with some difficulty – from the encroachment of ‘black empowerment’ into the hiring of consultants in turn. 228

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One white consultant, for example, had gathered considerable experience while working for a land NGO before beginning to freelance for the DLA. Soon after the restaffing of the DLA around the time of the 1999 elections, her position was threatened when word went out of a tendering process that would favour black consultants. It was only as a result of complex manoeuvrings – using provincial rather than national funding and thus dodging the centralised chain of command – that her services were retained. She was still managing to get work, but only on smaller, ‘fringe’ jobs: I have been marginalised from the bigger projects . . . The District Council is now very powerful and influential, and it likes to give all its jobs to members of the African middle class.7

A policy of openness Despite being a white-skinned contractor, her role in negotiating land purchase for land redistribution projects had positioned her no less uneasily on the racial frontier than her black state-employed equivalents. While white farm owners behaved towards her with suspicion, personifying her as the embodiment of a hostile black government’s aims, African community leaders telephoned her daily to castigate her for the slowness with which farm purchases were proceeding. But her position as intermediary allowed her gradually to gain the trust of those on either side, and hence to persuade each party that the other’s intentions were benign rather than malevolent. This, in turn, led her to adopt a policy of openness towards white farmers, via discussions with their Farmers’ Associations. Particularly where purchase of land for substantial groups of African occupiers was proposed, as in the dying days of the old redistribution programme with its ‘rent-a-crowd’ approach, she resolved to inform the district’s white farmers about this rather than be secretive in her approach: . . . in the case I now have, there are workers from 35 farms. Their leader is an entrepreneur who formed a group. There were far too many of them, and they wanted me to sneak through their purchase in the middle of a commercial white farming area. I was not prepared to be sneaky about it, and rather declared my intention to work openly, revealing to the white farmers what was going on. So I have had to walk a tightrope – it’s been a political hot potato. The strategy of communicating forthrightly in a situation of potential mistrust was similarly adopted by Philip Mbiba: a black project officer in the Restitution Commission charged with purchasing land for return to its owners. He too had often found himself being reviled by those on either side of the racial divide. On one occasion, some beneficiaries frustrated by the 229

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slowness of their claim’s progress were sent to kill him, ‘but when they got to my office, they said, “No, he’s a nice guy”, and thought better of it’.8 He felt that the best way to counter such situations was to speak frankly to both farmers and beneficiaries alike. Over the five years he had been approaching white farmers to sell their farms for restitution, he had witnessed a change – from diehard to conciliatory – in their attitudes, largely resulting from his intermediary position. When white farmers arrived in the Commission’s offices in a state of anger because of claims on their farms, Mbiba allayed their fears, assuring them that purchase rather than forced expropriation was the government’s approach. He favoured speaking to them in private. Where a white farming couple agreeing in full view of their peers to sell their farm would be deemed to be committing an act of betrayal, their doing so in negotiations with an individual officer would be less problematic: ‘Nowadays my strategy is to approach the farmers individually, and then they usually agree to sell. . . . Then others round about will be agreeable to sell.’9 Such a tactic suggests the well-known ‘bundle of sticks’ metaphor: snap each stick individually, one at a time, and the entire bundle will easily and swiftly be broken. It also indicates, as discussed below, that many white farmers became not merely ‘willing’ but positively determined to leave the countryside. Their keenness – once out of the public eye – was prompted by a complex mixture of motivations. The economic insecurity of farming in the post-subsidy era was at least as important as prejudice against black neighbours or fear of ‘farm attacks’. This keenness became evident even in cases of the most committed recalcitrance. During the first few years of the restitution process, officers arrived in the Wakkerstroom area, site of the white farmer vigilantism discussed in Chapter 5, to discuss the purchase of claimed farms. After initial threats of physical violence by members of the right-wing TAU (Transvaal Agricultural Union), attitudes changed as a result of negotiations with the Commission’s officers. Since the time when one of our officers was chased away by members of the TAU, things have changed. I and others went along and held workshops. This softened up the farmers, who claimed that they had not had a good understanding of the Restitution Act. This was partly the fault of the Minister, who tends to politicise all her restitution celebrations – making out that these are victories against Afrikaner farmers. She has to play to the gallery, appeal to her constituents, so as to win votes. But this does not help the process of land restitution, which relies on building an understanding between the various parties.10 The initial antagonism had been replaced by eagerness to sell. 230

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Whether employed by the state in an official capacity or performing its activities on a consultancy basis, it is these individuals ‘at the coalface’ who carry the responsibility for implementing its policies. Far more than those higher up the chain of command, they find themselves mediating racial disputes between the whites who currently own the land and the blacks who aspire to gain access to or settle on it. They provide nodal points for race tension: it flares up but can also be resolved in the course of their interactions with black beneficiaries and white farmers alike. These two sets of actors partly owe their racially differentiated current positions – in government employ (if black), or in private consultancies (if white) – to the playing out of racial tensions within the realms of the DLA. But it is they who are charged with resolving or redefining racial tensions over the transfer of land.

WHITE FARMERS’ ‘ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST’: DEBT, PROFIT OR PATERNALISM? To see land reform as entailing a stark battle between the races is to ignore the original equivalence between black and white country-dwellers in South Africa. Although increasingly divided by the fact of titled land ownership, by state protection for white farmers, and by the gradual encroachment of racist legislation, members of these two constituencies started out farming on very similar terms. Deriving from their earlier interaction, people have strong memories of relationships on the land: trust and paternalism merged or alternated with domination, hatred and violence to produce an amalgam of conflicting sentiments (see van Onselen 1996). A further reason to seek for more complex explanations than those offered by the image of a focused racial battle over land lies in the increasingly differentiated nature of the white farming population over the course of the twentieth century (Schirmer 1994). Large numbers of white farmers, particularly poorer ones, have experienced a crisis as a result of the removal of state loans, subsidies and support – via such measures as the dismantling of produce marketing boards – during the 1990s (Bernstein 2003; Francis and Williams 1993; van Zyl et al. 1996a). The present-day ‘willingness’ of whites to sell farmland to the government in fact encompasses widely divergent strategies, employed by farmers in different areas whose farming operations have enjoyed varying levels of success or failure. Although state officers or consultants may have felt satisfaction about their skill in negotiating land sales by such farmers, such successes nonetheless beg the question: where farming is no longer viable in its current form, can land be any more successfully farmed by blacks than whites? As one study put it, ‘the impulses of poverty pay little regard to race’ (Marcus et al. 1996: 34). 231

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It is in the light of these considerations that we must, in part, understand the unexpected glimmers of goodwill which have illuminated some negotiations between farmers and prospective beneficiaries. As we shall see later, such benevolence extends beyond the mere sale of land to offers of training and day-to-day co-operation. It was for these acts of paternalism in its best sense that certain white Afrikaner farmers were described as ‘patriots’ and praised in the press. But there is more than a hint of self-interest in such farmers’ increased readiness to sell their land to the government. Indebtedness, the knowledge of which has been skilfully manipulated by intermediaries, has been one factor giving state employees the upper hand when negotiating with white farmers. When officer Kwape Mmela was charged with persuading the owner to sell his farm Boomplaats near Lydenburg for restitution to its African owners who had been forcibly removed from it during the 1970s, his awareness of the farmer’s debt gave him an advantage: It turned out that he owed a lot of money to the Land Bank. He did not tell us this at first. We always ask farmers, ‘Do you have any debts in relation to the property?’ He didn’t tell us, but we picked it up through the deeds office. When I asked him why he had concealed this, he said ‘I was going to give all the money you paid me to the Land Bank to settle my debts. . . . I wanted to be able to buy another farm.’11 The case proceeded through much confrontation, with expropriation threatened, attempted and later abandoned as a strategy.12 In the ensuing negotiations, the rapport which Mmela eventually established with farmer Willem Pretorius led to his being able to advise him about the purchase of an alternative farm which – crucially – was not encumbered with restitution claims by former African occupants. Negotiation in the light of economic circumstances had here proved more effective than state intrusion in producing a result. But this short-term success in achieving a transfer of farmland across the racial frontier still seemed likely to result in the long-term failure of agricultural enterprise. Both Willem Pretorius on his new land and the owners of Boomplaats, joyfully celebrating the ‘return’ of their farm, may well be dogged in future by the problems which beset small- to mediumscale farmers in the country as a whole (Hart 2002:227–8).

Poorer farmers and the racial frontier It is not only poorer white farmers with high levels of debt who have proved to be willing – albeit after some persuasion – to sell their land. Geographical location, combined in some cases with relative poverty, also plays a part. Several ‘willing sellers’ have emerged in frontier areas close to the communal 232

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lands of the former homelands, as Middelburg farmer Kallie Erichson pointed out: . . . close to these old homelands, there are farms lying open that you cannot farm on because of crime, snares, theft, tax, and wood and grass and fences being pulled out. . . . If you take the Middelburg area as it is, how many people have stopped farming sheep because of crime? Hendrina, Carolina, Machadodorp – those places were major sheep-producing areas in the country. There’s hardly any sheep there now. Is that because they are so easy to steal? Yes. The guys originally changed to cattle farming. But theft has now also affected cattle farming. Now the guys are going to game farming. So the whole thing is rolling over. What is happening to the economy? Look at what the price of sheep is, look at what the price of wool is – because there aren’t any animals left. When are we going to stop this?13 Such frontier farms, when put up for sale, generally find no buyers other than the state purchasing land for restitution or redistribution, or African farmers using LRAD (Chapter 7). African owners move in, and the ‘racial frontier’ advances. Certain white farmers have purposefully acted to hasten the encroaching of the racial frontier. When the old system of redistribution was still in place, with its grants given to individuals who then pooled these to buy communally-owned farms, specific white farmers took advantage of the situation by encouraging ‘land invasions’ onto their own farms. They would tactically invite tenants or squatters to settle, later offering the land for sale to them via the government programme, in the certain knowledge that no white buyer would compete to buy the land.14 While some bought farms elsewhere it was most likely that they would then abandon farming altogether: . . . farming . . . is at this stage very difficult. . . . People are going out of business at an alarming rate. . . . A person selling his farm here is most likely not going into farming in another area because it’s just not economical and viable anymore.15 Even in less explicitly borderland zones, white farmers were beginning to feel insecure and to offer their farms for sale to the state: particularly in areas where restitution had been implemented and where a new Africanisation of farmland was now proceeding apace. Restoring African farms like Doornkop to their former owners was creating a sense of insecurity among neighbouring white farmers. This was especially the case where – as with Doornkop – bordering farms were either the object of multiple land claims 233

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based on the informal rights of former labour tenants or being purchased for redistribution projects. The effect – seen from white farmers’ point of view – has been to recreate, and to extend, the ‘black spots’ which had existed in such areas several decades previously. White farmers have a sense of uncertainty about the future. For the poorer white farmers living nearby, the chance to sell their land to the state for land reform and thereby to escape from the embattled farming enterprise can be a welcome one. Two such cases as I was told by a better-off farmer were those of the landowner whose land was being planned as a venue to receive Doornkop’s squatters under the Siyathuthuka Trust (Chapter 4 – see I on the map on p. xvi) and his next-door neighbour: If you look at de Jager and Linnenkamp, they are not very good farmers. De Jager is old and very poor. Linnenkamp is one of the laziest people I’ve ever met. They were very lucky that the government offered to buy their farms from them.16 For such farmers, advancing age and lack of financial success combined with other less material factors to create a complex mixture of altruism and acquisitiveness. In the case of another of Doornkop’s immediate neighbours, the white employer of Hendrik Mathibela mentioned in Chapter 8, the sale of land to the state (in this case attempted but not successful) was prompted by its white owner’s sense of insecurity about living on the land in what was fast becoming an African area. It was also underpinned by his wish to profit inordinately from the sale of his land. This motivation mingled in complex ways with his desire to ensure the future well-being of his black servant of many years. The servant was Hendrik Mathibela, chief among the proposed redistribution ‘beneficiaries’ who aimed to buy his employer’s plot. His unsuccessful attempt to become a land reform beneficiary has already been described (see Chapter 8). The land was a small plot owned by his employer, a failed Afrikaner farmer who was now making a precarious living by subcontracting for the municipality, using a truck driven by Hendrik.17 The plot-owner (also confusingly called de Jager) had suggested that Hendrik recruit a number of ‘co-beneficiaries’ and apply to the DLA to approve their purchase of the land. His suggestion was made in the light of his imminent retirement, and his mindfulness of the need both to provide for his former servant and to get a good price for his land in order to provide for himself in old age. Hendrik explained these dual motives: There are two things. One is, de Jager is trying to help me secure this farm. The other is, he is feeling insecure because of all the farm killings – he would like to go to a safer place. He says, ‘I am getting too old, I cannot get jobs any more.’ He finds me doing things, doing 234

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farming and so on. And he says, ‘I see you can live, and you can live on this farm.’ He says, ‘I will go to live in the suburbs – it will be better for me and better for you.’ He says, ‘Some people move from a farm to the location [African township], others move from the location to the farm. If you move to the location you will lose many things – better stay in this place – you will be all right.’18 In this case the sale fell through since de Jager’s philanthropy was outweighed by his self-interest. The state, I heard from the white consultant who was handling the case, assessed the land at a far lower value than the price this landowner was asking. I found similar statements of altruism in places as far afield as the remote and stony Steelpoort River valley and the lush farms of the Lowveld near Nelspruit, where white farmers have stated their wish, if their land does have to be sold to the state for restitution or redistribution to black owners, that it be sold to those who once worked there and who might be thought to have some links – and some sense of entitlement – to it.19 Where indebtedness and the insecurity of the farming enterprise outweighed other factors, considerations of paternalism have had less sway. In such cases, white farmers have simply been dispossessed, as in the case of Doringboom which adjoins Doornkop on the other side: It belonged to JA de Beer, but he went bankrupt, and the farm was repossessed by the Land Bank. It was offered for sale, but no one was interested. There is a claim on that farm. Now squatters have moved on to the farm.20 That the farm was occupied by squatters well in advance of any possible state plans to buy it for redistribution is testimony to the speed with which such information spreads among informal networks. Even without the catalyst of white farmers engineering land invasions so as to advance the prospects of selling their land for redistribution, the regional landless have proved to be ever-watchful in their quest to find a resting place. In the case of smaller and/or poorer farmers or landowners, then, the selling of land to the state for land reform may be a necessity as much as a choice. Faced with a situation where proliferating land claims create a sense of fear and uncertainty, but also driven by a degree of paternalism, they have two choices. They either actively encourage invasions so as to ensure a captive group of on-the-spot buyers using government grants, or they escape from their debt and are relieved of their land through the less underhand method of sale to ‘willing buyers’ orchestrated through the state bureaucracy. Once a single farm has been restored or sold to communal African ownership, others follow suit as their white farmers hasten to leave the area. Some state officials then take advantage of this tendency for racial clustering 235

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in their bid to acquire more land for redistribution. In such ways, the racial frontier gradually encroaches on formerly white-owned land.

Better-off farmers In areas like those surrounding Doornkop, where restitution and its associated processes have caused the frontier’s advance, better-off farmers have also offered their farms for sale. Such farmers have been buttressed against the vicissitudes of indebtedness or sudden repossession by deriving income from other sources, most typically government employment or political office in the former apartheid regime. While sanguine about the prospects of benefiting from the sale of their farms to the state for redistribution, they are simultaneously heartsore about having to do so. One such farmer, Steve Miller, is a man whose past, present and future have been fatefully linked with that of Doornkop. When in 1974 he arrived in Middelburg to take up the position of Chief Magistrate, he became responsible for overseeing the removal of the last wave of Doornkop’s former occupants and its Ndebele and some Swazi tenants, during the farm’s ‘black spot’ forced removal. He later became Bantu Commissioner – one of apartheid’s all-purpose governors of the local African population – in the area. Some decades later, a farm neighbouring Doornkop, repossessed by the Land Bank from its indebted former owner, was auctioned. Miller and his wife bought the farm, Mooiwater (III on the map on p. xvi), at a moment when he was well-established in his government career. They began farming on the strength of his wife’s extensive knowledge of agricultural matters. They developed the farm into a dairy and maize business, investing ‘every cent’ until it became ‘one of the most profitable farms in the area’. But the return of the neighbouring farm, Doornkop, to its title-holders, some 20 years after the initial forced removal, and the subsequent influx of illegal squatters signalled to him the end of the farm’s viability: Unfortunately it is turning into a black squatter camp again. . . . There were TAU meetings, with people shouting, ‘don’t allow them to come and squat here, it is a profitable farming area, we cannot afford to have a squatting problem’. These sentiments were conveyed to the Minister, and to various other government officials. But the Department just went ahead and returned the farm to its original owners.21 As he feared, he claims, the arrival of squatters on the farm has led to uncontrolled theft: We came home at 10 o’clock one night, and saw a bakkie (truck) in the maize lands, stealing mealies from our farm. . . . Since the return 236

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of the people to Doornkop, 43 to 46 head of cattle have been stolen from Mooiwater. Three weeks ago, three fully registered heifers in calf were stolen. Echoing accounts of similar crime in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands (Steinberg 2002), although reported to the police, the thefts were never investigated: . . . no one was ever caught. It was reported to the police, and to the stock theft unit. But nobody phoned me, no one investigated. . . . We put up a security system around the houses at Mooiwater. It cost nearly R15,000 – locks, gates, dogs, etc. Is this secure? No, no security is adequate. At the time when I spoke to him, Miller had offered to sell Mooiwater to the DLA: consultants had recommended its purchase in order to provide expanded farming opportunities to the inhabitants of Doornkop, thus rescuing it from ‘squatter camp’ status by making the farm a viable economic enterprise. But restitution, having already (as he saw it) scuppered his agricultural enterprise by facilitating the return of Doornkop to its owners and their illegal tenants, was now additionally threatening his plans to sell the farm to the government. Further restitution claims, as many as 23 of them on his farm Mooiwater itself and several on neighbouring farms, had led to a stalemate in negotiations. In such cases, a moratorium on land sales, pending the investigation of these claims, applies. This is so even where the prospective buyer is the state attempting to secure the viability of other restitutionbased enterprises. The snail’s pace at which restitution was proceeding meant that the matter was unlikely to be resolved with any speed. Being able neither to pursue his farming enterprise with ‘security’, nor to sell the farm to the state or any other buyer, Miller and his wife found themselves intolerably trapped. Given how Miller, in his earlier guise as an apartheid state functionary, had played a central role in clearing the farm of its black occupants and their tenants, his present problems with them as neighbours – in the guise of a white farmer – may seem akin to a kind of fateful retribution. Such considerations aside, what the case primarily illustrates is the advance of the racial frontier: not only forwards from the former homelands but also outwards from areas in white South Africa formerly occupied by Africans and now reclaimed by them. The ‘black spots’ have returned and are becoming consolidated, but in a manner rather less controlled than that envisaged by the architects of land reform. The case also shows how the fears of crime and of ‘farm attacks’ interlink with other factors to make the transfer of land across the racial divide – despite the best efforts of the cross-race intermediaries described earlier – a fraught and tense affair, even in the absence of 237

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the ‘sinister ANC plot’ to orchestrate farm attacks which some white farmers fear. More importantly, how the case dovetails with my present theme is in its demonstration of revived white farmer paternalism. But it is a paternalism of a special type. In his keenness to get shot of the farm, mingled with what sounded like a genuine commitment to its profitable future under new management, Miller had offered help to whichever group would end up owning the farm: The claimants . . . said, ‘please don’t sell the cows’. I said ‘we will help you, while you start out. We will come out and assist you, morning and evening.’ They are glad that that is my attitude. I am not hostile. I just want to get a reasonable price for the farm. . . . But there is no certainty. His enthusiasm about ensuring the farm’s future was inextricably mingled with his fear of attack and his desperate urgency to leave the area. In this combination of motives lies the enlightened self-interest which serves to mediate – or complicate – overtly racial tensions over the transfer of land.

MANAGEMENT SCHEMES

‘They are going to rob us’ As Miller’s case shows, paternalism takes other forms besides a stated eagerness to sell land for the benefit of African farmers. It also encompasses expressed white intentions to help make a success of these new agricultural enterprises. But proposals of continuing help, because they appear to mask an unseen and undeclared motive, tend to be viewed with greater suspicion than are offers to sell land. On a number of farms which have been or are destined to be transferred under land reform, whites have offered their services as managers or co-ordinators, or – in the case of very large-scale and commercially successful operations – have been asked by the state to remain on the land and continue with their existing enterprises. Such proposals for co-operation are generally portrayed, especially by those on either side of the racial fence who have a joint interest in pursuing them, as examples of interracial co-operation. These include state officials whose prospects of promotion depend upon the number of projects they have finalised, or claims they have negotiated. But the proposed forms of altruism and co-operation may just as easily arouse suspicion. Here again the interlocking of roles – between people ‘on the ground’ who require or offer assistance, and the officers or consultants who, from higher up the hierarchy, negotiate such assistance – produces a 238

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complex politics of racial interaction. Landless people seeking to benefit from land reform are often suspicious of the opportunism of whites proposing managerial assistance. They assume the motivation to be greed, or, worse, a reluctance to ‘let go’ of control over the land, where their black equivalents are presumed to be motivated by more genuine altruism. Beneficiaries, here, allow race to be their means for divining the presence of opportunism. This use of race to discriminate between the greed of white prospective managers and the helpfulness of black ones is, in turn, often suggested by those in the latter category: black functionaries or consultants. Their opposition to the hiring of white managers can be attributed to the fierce competition between the two for valuable contract work. The hiring of professional managers to run land reform projects has been an official strategy. With varying levels of success, it has been pursued both by the state and by NGOs. In at least one case, plans to launch a management and mentorship scheme under the aegis of the state were frustrated during the chaotic transfer of power from Minister Derek Hanekom to his successor Thoko Didiza. The architect of the scheme, Chris Williams, was finally able to implement it only after transferring from the state to the NGO sector where, as director of TRAC-MP, he secured funding from elsewhere.22 The acquiring of managers has also, however, been proposed through less formal channels. One such case was that of the Sizanani CPA which – with government redistribution grants – had bought the farm Mooiplaas, not far from Doornkop (II on the map on p. xvi, see Chapter 6). Here, local Ndebele notable JB Mahlangu, realising that the communal owners were not inclined to recognise internally generated managerial authority or skill, asked the farm’s former white owner to provide support.23 But it was clear from discussions with the youthful secretary of the owners’ committee, Driver Ntuli, that the group of mostly illiterate Ndebele farm workers who were the farm’s joint purchasers felt somewhat vulnerable in the face of this (and other) offers of ‘help’. From his description, the competing ‘helpers’ sounded like bees buzzing around the proverbial honey pot. His account portrays the former farm owner as one of ‘three white people’ who, already tied together by existing alliances and rivalries, spent more time arguing with each other over the destiny of the farm than consulting its new African owners. Their interest, however enthusiastic, was short-lived. One was Elizabeth, from Pietersburg, who deals with agriculture, tourism and culture. She told us she has information about how to develop this farm. Another one was Thys Snyman who said he knows this farm inside out and he can help us. The last one was Louw, who comes from the farm opposite. He wanted to be the manager of the farm on a six-year basis. . . . He wanted us to pay him R3,000 per month. But we told him that we could not afford to pay him. 239

Figure 9.1 Driver Ntuli in the kgoro (meeting place).

Figure 9.2 Driver Ntuli’s family’s house at Sizanani.

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. . . We called all of them into a meeting. Louw came with a plan on farming, specifying the number of people to be employed, how to look after cattle, and so on. Elizabeth told Louw that this place was good for tourism. But Louw responded that there are many game reserves here and that it is an over-used idea. Thys and Elizabeth know each other, and are in fact cousins. Elizabeth kept interrupting Louw whenever he was speaking, until he decided to leave. During all this time of the disagreement between Elizabeth and Louw, Thys was quiet because he was together with Elizabeth. Elizabeth said she was going to go overseas to request donations to develop this place. People were happy with that idea. She left for two months. She gave me a call asking when the next meeting was and I told her about the date. At the meeting she told us that she had raised R50,000. So from this R50,000 she demanded that she be paid for travelling from Pietersburg to here. People agreed to pay her. She told us that she was going to use one of the houses as an office. Since she left that day she’s never been back. Thys kept coming. He once came with a contract which he wanted us to sign. . . . One of the terms Thys wrote was a payment of R2,500, plus that he would be given the farmhouse for his family. We agreed but told him that we would turn one of the rooms into an office. He refused to have us running an office there. . . .24 Even when the management fee was later reduced, this did not improve matters. Whatever the terms set by these would-be managers, the owners’ committee felt anxious about agreeing to them since its members had at present no agricultural enterprise of any sort and would be hard-pressed to meet any promises to pay managers’ salaries. At least initially their anxiety was no less intense, and their scepticism no less pronounced, when they were approached by black would-be managerial consultants with similar intentions: Different people came from several companies to enquire about the farm. They came in different expensive cars. Some would just drive to the [former white] farmhouse without stopping to talk to us. . . . Some people came from the housing department and stayed here for weeks. These people never did their work. They just used the money. The owners’ committee felt more positive, however, when they were approached by black employees from the development foundation run by Eskom, the electricity parastatal. Since Eskom offered to put up the money to pay for training and infrastructure, the committee’s greater enthusiasm was understandable. But the offer of funding merely exacerbated rather than eliminated the farm’s attractiveness for entrepreneurs and consultants. 241

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Although Eskom would be putting up money for the farm’s development, it would be outsourcing the actual work to other ‘service providers’: in this case black ones. The bees continued buzzing, but again lost interest before long: Some came in a Pajero, wanting to be noticed. When the meeting began they did not come in, they waited until the meeting was halfway through. . . . After everyone had introduced themselves, it was suggested that they all apply to Eskom, which will decide who is suitable for the job. These companies’ strategy was that they were going to help us and later would provide a statement of how much money they have used. After they finished introducing themselves, they were asked if they had any questions. The guys in the Pajero wanted to have a meeting with the committee and thereafter they left. Since then they have never called again. In the face of this bewildering array of personnel, the farm’s owners were inclined to follow the advice of George, the black Eskom official. They trusted his judgement in hiring consultants and heeded his warning about the suspect intentions of whites who claimed altruism as a motive: Thys acted like Elizabeth. He made a promise that he never fulfilled. George told us not to work with any white people, because they are going to rob us and later dispossess us of our farm. Whites are the ones who make us suffer. If one bears in mind the disadvantaged position from which these committee members were negotiating, it is perhaps not surprising that they were inclined to follow the black official’s advice. Suspicion of the triumvirate of white would-be managers was particularly acute given their existing knowledge of the farm, links to other nearby white farmers, and suspected commitment to consolidating white control in the area overall. In this case, the suspicion was fuelled by generalised fears that the racial frontier, having been momentarily pushed back with the successful purchase of the farm Mooiplaas, might be reasserted. If white managers took over the farm they would reverse the gains of land reform for this particular community and for Africans in the district overall.25

‘A win-win deal for all’ Less open to overt competition between consultants are cases in which the state’s officers are charged with ensuring a viable agricultural outcome: an increasingly important aim since the stated switch from a welfarist to an economically-driven state strategy in 1999. The sustained commercial 242

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viability of farm enterprises has become a key criterion for both restitution and redistribution in its new guise as LRAD. Since the new Minister’s ascendancy, there has been an insistence that restitution claims should not interfere with the productivity of existing agricultural enterprises. To attain this end, partnerships have been established between restitution claimants and the white farmers who currently own the land. Such partnerships vary in scale as well as in the level at which they are negotiated. Some involve deals between lower-level officers and single white farmers, while others take place between senior bureaucrats and wealthy businessmen. Smaller-scale partnerships often rely on the initiative of project officers wary of restoring land to groups of claimants who lack the resources or agricultural skills to continue its existing use. On the farm Kromkrans, given back to claimants during 2002, the officer in question recognised that they constituted ‘a fragmented group – scattered all over’ who would be unlikely to organise themselves in time to plough the land for the coming season. He took it upon himself to arrange on behalf of the new black owners for the former white landowner to continue ploughing on a lease.26 At the opposite end of the scale, the restitution claim by members of the Mdluli clan on parts of the massive fruit farm owned by the company HL Hall and Sons, near Nelspruit, has involved negotiations at the highest of levels. It has been the first to be concluded of a number of similar deals being planned in the region. The rationale as put forward by the company’s chief executive, Rob Snaddon, had the familiar ring of altruism tinged with enlightened self-interest: he described it as ‘a win-win deal for all and a positive step for the South African land reform process that is essential if we are to redress the inequalities of the past and have a stable political future’. The claimants’ representative, Terry Mdluli, spoke of a ‘spirit of co-operation continuing into the future as neighbours’. It was clear that hard-nosed financial arrangements underpinned these heady sentiments. As Snaddon continued: The new owners have no funding for working capital or equipment and no managerial capacity. We have permanent tree crops on this farm which cannot wait for people to organise themselves. The simplest way to provide management through the transition is to lease [back] the land. That will ensure that the beneficiaries get money out of the scheme and that the assets are properly looked after.27 One of the project officers involved in this deal spoke of the Restitution Commission’s aim to broker a number of similar arrangements in the Lowveld area. Several white farmers whose land was subject to restitution claims cherished visions of a future pursued elsewhere, he pointed out. The government’s major challenge would be to persuade them, by one means or another, to share some of their expertise and contacts before leaving: 243

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Many of these are ‘cheque book farmers’ living in Sandton [near Johannesburg]: their commitment is not to the land, but only to the business. Some of them want to go and settle in Australia, do sheep farming, etc. . . . But the problem is, they have the expertise, the contacts, the connections with export markets in Japan . . ., the shipping arrangements, and so on. It would be good if we could tap into the skills of these farmers, and somehow arrange a sort of partnership with some of them. They pass their skills on from father to son. The whites have the expertise, so even when the blacks become owners they still remain dependent on the white farmers for this, and for their connections.28 Such transactions, negotiated with people whose commitment is ‘not to the land’, point to a globalisation of conflicts over property. Some Lowveld owners are absentee landlords living in other countries (in one case, a Malaysian millionaire). The tension between present and future landowners in such cases is more diffuse, and less overtly racial, than in the case of former white farm owners, like the cousins Thys and Elizabeth, who were seen as trying to retain control over their land. In these large-scale land deals, the globalisation of ownership has removed conflict between the landed and the landless from the localised battlefield of race politics, placing it more squarely within the arena of global capitalism. But even where the connection between present and future owners is a tenuous one (how might one track the links between an absentee Malaysian farm owner and Mpumalanga Africans claiming his land in restitution?), there is still a racial edge to the transaction. In such cases, negotiations over valuation and purchase are played out between black government officials and white legal representatives acting on behalf of farm owners. Racially generated suspicions are in evidence at this level. At a meeting I attended between officers of the Restitution Commission and a group of white lawyers arranging to have their clients’ Lowveld farms, east of Nelspruit, evaluated for sale to the state, matters were handled with professional courtesy. An initial sense of great tension in such negotiations, I was informed by one officer, had recently been replaced by a more constructive atmosphere. But another officer later complained to me. He was annoyed at having always to rely on these white lawyers’ verbal assurances about the prices for which their clients would be prepared to settle. The prices invariably escalated dramatically over a matter of days, leaving government negotiatiors fuming in frustration at the delay. He also criticised such lawyers for advising their clients to stall or obstruct claims, thus making more money for themselves. Such lawyers, he said, can derive huge benefits from strategising to represent jointly an optimum number of farm owners in a region rather than doing so on a case-by-case basis: ‘they want to own the whole area’.29 Despite the use of a metaphor which combined overtones of territory and property, his complaint 244

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was not that white owners were unwilling to sell their land. It was that white lawyers were monopolising the business opportunities arising from such sales. Nonetheless, his remark sounded uncannily like the fear expressed by Sizanani’s black owners – that whites were trying to reassert or refusing to relinquish control over the land itself. Deals like the Mdluli–Hall one have been criticised by land rights activists for their lack of cost-effectiveness. The price paid for going agricultural concerns, they say, is so great – R60 million in this case – that it would take the entire restitution budget for 2003–2004 to purchase only 14 such pieces of land, leaving hundreds of other claimants unsatisfied. Other criticisms of the deal point more squarely to the need for redress, by drawing attention to the fact that: white farmers were given land by the apartheid government and then [received] huge subsidies and support systems. That should be taken into account and deducted from the current value of the land.30 According to such arguments levelled by NGO activists, the benefits formerly enjoyed by white farmers should have been factored into the valuation of their lands, thus refracting considerations of the ‘open market’.31 Another possible objection, given the undue influence of new ethnic elites over the restitution process (Chapters 3 and 8), is that the ‘empowerment’ benefits represented by such deals will remain in the hands of the middle classes rather than filtering down to the ‘rural poor’, who were the intended targets of land reform as originally conceived. Many such transactions, undertaken in the name of restitution, look set to take the form of sophisticated negotiations of ownership and leasing between members of elites, rather than delivering what activists have described as ‘meaningful land reform’ aimed at regenerating rural incomes for poor people.

RESTITUTION: A TRUTH COMMISSION OF THE COUNTRYSIDE This points to one last consideration in my discussion of the racial politics of land reform. In doing so, it returns us to the questions of restored citizenship and rights. The land reform programme in South Africa, from the outset, has contained two separate emphases: on restored rights and sovereignty, on the one hand; and on economic benefits deriving from secure ownership and use of agricultural property, on the other. Although subsequent policy making has tended to privilege the latter over the former, the two themes were presumed to be reconcilable. This is a presumption which many people continue to make. It is thus often asserted that the purpose of restitution, especially in rural areas, is not only to restore the violated property or tenure rights of 245

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country-dwellers, but also to take them back to their land and enable them to make a good living there. Where urban claims have mostly been settled through compensatory payments, given the unviability of restoring whole suburbs-full of people to their earlier homes by evicting the present occupiers, rural ones are still assumed to have the purpose of reviving viable family farming, even of re-establishing an earlier age of cultivator self-sufficiency. In view of this, there is some confusion surrounding business deals such as the Hall–Mdluli one. When these and other similar settlements are announced, it is usually stressed that this is being done on behalf of a large group of claimants: ‘1,100’ in the case of Mdluli, a much more impressive ‘9,000’ for Ten Bosch. And despite the efforts of the Commission to limit and verify claimant numbers, illicit land-selling practices often allow the lists to continue growing. Leaving aside the question of illicit additions to the list, many of the genuine claimants in these and other cases are under the impression that they will return to their ancestral seats to farm the land, as was evocatively described by Roodewal claimant Mr Mthethwa (Chapter 3). Equally, however, many feel that they are settled in their present circumstances and that uprooting their families to return to a past way of life, often lived in remote geographical locations, would be less than desirable. If claimant intentions are as widely varied as this suggests, and if few intend to return to their lands, there must be some deeper reason why scores of ordinary people clamour to register their names for restitution. If this is so, it is uncertain whether their aspirations are likely to be realised by big-business transactions such as that finalised between Mdluli and Hall. For some African former landholders, affixing their names to land claims was motivated at least as strongly by a sense of wanting redress for past wrongs at the hands of farmers as by a present wish to reoccupy their land. They require a public acknowledgement of and compensation for the indignities done to them during the years they worked on the farms or during the process of resettlement. Registering their names seemed to offer such a possibility, as was made clear during a conversation with Petrus Maloma, one of those listed as a claimant at Kalkfontein. The restoration of the farm alone would not afford sufficient compensation, he insisted, since this was their automatic right and their due. Something more was needed by way of redress for the terrible indignity of having their houses destroyed by soldiers: The reason my name is there is because they did bad damage to us. We were treated badly, we are supposed to be getting some compensation. Our land will not be compensation – it is ours by rights (ke ditsˇwanelo tsˇa rena) and we are supposed to get it. They broke our houses, when you got to the new place you had to start by building a house. So there should be something given back to us.32 246

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Such a case demonstrates that for some claimants at least, the process of restitution is seen as performing something like the same functions as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Beinart 2001; Wilson 2001). Even for those who are driven by a burning desire to go back to their land and farm it, the simple return of the land would not be enough. Added to the generalised feeling among many African country-dwellers that the election promised to give them an equivalence with white people – ‘I voted for a better life and progress . . . My expectation is to live like the farmers and whites did under apartheid.’33 – there is a specific grievance about having been politically suppressed during their years living on the white farms, before being unceremoniously evicted. Numerous small incidents of subordination, accumulating gradually, were experienced as deeply humiliating; these have now been resurrected in people’s minds, sharpened by the promise of land returned. For them, the record will only be set straight once they can take their rightful place, supplanting the white farmers who once ordered them around.34 If memories of humiliation feed a generalised desire for compensation, memories of the prosperous ways in which white farmers lived on the land nurture a more specific aspiration to replicate these farmers’ lifestyles in the future. Claimants like the Chegos have been driven by a sense that they deserve to have the land back so that they can farm it as the whites once did: ‘We want to do what the whites were doing: making a profit, ploughing.’35 Such words were echoed by many other people, not all of them official claimants under the Restitution Act. Piet Tlou, the Ndebele former farm worker and ANC councillor who was now providing political leadership for the Doornkop squatters, for example, announced his intentions as a farmer: ‘After the elections I ceased working in Johannesburg. I told myself that I want to live like the boers [white farmers] on the farms. I want to . . . have many cattle.’36 Such ambitions, although they may sound far-fetched, are not founded upon ignorance of the political conditions which allowed white farming to thrive. There is a sound awareness that the state subvented the life which white farmers enjoyed. ‘Whites got subsidies,’ said Petrus Chego, ‘now we want subsidies: we can then utilise our land effectively.’37 Compensation, seen in this light, requires more than the simple return of people’s land for use in small-scale family farming. It is inextricably entangled with the knowledge of what was done with their land in the interim, and of the lost opportunities this represents. Despite all the talk of grave sites and ancestral land, claimants and others do not frame their aspirations in purely historical terms. They do not hanker simply after the land they lost, nor do they long merely for the kind of life they might have lived there had whites never usurped them. What drives them, rather, is their recognition of having lost the chance to use the land in technologically 247

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sophisticated ways to feed a modern lifestyle, and the desire now to follow such a lifestyle in their turn. Such a desire to obtain redress by entering the domains of white privilege differs markedly from the more traditionalist discourse. It seems worlds away from the terms in which chiefs frame their restitution claims by referring to ‘royal land’ (Chapter 3), and from those used by the LPM when it opposes private property as an un-African practice. If we remember the assertion, mentioned earlier, that ‘the great divide in South Africa is between modernisers and traditionalists’,38 this emphasis on emulating the success of the white farming sector seems to fall squarely into the former camp. In some ways, such aspirations to gain redress by following a business model dovetail neatly with the restitution–owner transactions, such as the Hall–Mdluli one, being brokered in the Lowveld. They are phrased in the same forwardlooking terms. Nonetheless, the general feasibility of such ambitions seems limited in the light of the removal of subsidies from the commercial farming sector. What also makes them unrealisable is the generally agreed weakness of the state’s agricultural support, the lack of capacity in the Department of Agriculture and the ineffectiveness of extension services. While certain large-scale operations, like that of Hall and Sons, will certainly thrive, many smaller ones seem doomed to go out of business. Millennial expectations, like those of the Chegos to live ‘as whites once did’, are unlikely to be realised. Ironically, restitution aroused political aspirations to citizenship and its benefits at precisely the moment when these were least likely, in economic terms at least, to be delivered. Even if other sources of racial conflict over land are diffused by the interventions of skilful intermediaries, the expectations of redress aroused by memories of race-based exploitation will remain a basis for tension across the colour line.

CONCLUSION From the early post-apartheid years when a white Afrikaner, relatively powerless within the ranks of the ANC, was appointed as Minister of Land Affairs, through to his later replacement by a black female member of Mbeki’s inner circle accompanied by the alleged ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Department of Land Affairs, land reform’s institutional frameworks have been plagued by racial politics. But despite the racial restructuring of the DLA, the interlocking of state and NGOs, and the increasingly frequent outsourcing of state functions to mostly white-run consultancies signal the strengthening of close interdependencies between black and white. The role of individual brokers has been crucial in mediating racial conflict. More often than members of the Cabinet, it is project officers or consultants who have played such a role. The site where these negotiations are performed 248

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is at the often fraught interface between present farm owners and future beneficiaries. Mediators become responsible, by default, for selling state policies to threatened farmers and frustrated land claimants alike, and it is they who are blamed, by both sides, when problems arise. But whatever successes are enjoyed should be chalked up to them. The chapter has demonstrated some of the uncertainties that plague interactions between white farmers and black claimants, and that form the background to the efforts of these intermediaries. It has also shown how differentiations within the white farming population generate various responses to the land reform programme. Where poorer white farmers sell marginal and mortgaged land and move out of farming altogether, and as their farms are officially or unofficially added to the corpus of black-owned land, so a phantom border between black and white South Africa advances gradually into the formerly white areas. Richer farmers, although beset by anxieties, are better placed to hold out against such pressures or to sell their land on more favourable terms, while huge agricultural businesses, ‘returning land’ in name only, look set to continue their land-based operations virtually uninterrupted. Among farmers who occupy these diverse sectors, a variety of interests and motivations has been masked by a uniform public discourse of altruism. Although this has earned some farmers the label of ‘patriot’, their publicspiritedness is usually tinged with self-interest. Specific land reform beneficiaries’ perception of this has led them to suspect a white conspiracy to ‘rob’ them, once again, of their land. Despite such suspicion, however, people have found themselves yoked together in co-operation across the racial divide to a far greater extent than might have been expected, given the broader backdrop of ‘farm attacks’ against which land reform policies have been pursued. Whatever conflicts ensue – or are avoided through skilful negotiation – in the course of procuring land for future farmers, the simple ‘delivery’ of hectares to their aspirant owners may not address a deeper-seated source of grievance and antagonism. This relates to a century-long interrelation between owners and their workers/tenants on the farms, marked by relationships of violence which have been occasionally mediated by less negative sentiments. People’s memories of the past are thus deeply personalised. Their demands for redress and compensation are often equally personalised: in millenarian fashion, they expect nothing less than to be able to live the very lives enjoyed by the racially defined victors in this long battle. But evocative remembrances of a past lived on the land have not been the exclusive preserve of black country-dwellers. The moment when restitution claims became a political reality crystallised memories for those on either side of the racial divide. These memories, although often bitter, centre on a common feeling for the land. Expressing what may have been bogus empathy, the remark made by an Eastern Cape farmer on whose land a restitution 249

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claim was soon to be finalised is nonetheless poignant: ‘if you grow up with the land you also love it, I can understand their feelings’.39

Notes 1 See also Christopher Hope, ‘Under Siege’, The Guardian, 1 August 2001; RW Johnson, ‘A Dangerous Occupation’, London Review of Books, 1 June 2000. 2 Durkje Gilfillan, LRC, Johannesburg, 19 January 2001; Chris Mulaudzi, DLA, Pretoria, 18 January 2001; Derek Hanekom, Johannesburg, 22 January 2001; Andries Gouws, Pretoria, 13 December 2002. The taxation option has not been abandoned completely, but has been left to regional authorities to decide, incurring much opposition from white farmers: ‘Farmers slam land tax’, News24.com, 8 August 2002. 3 ‘Campaign to give land away gathers’, Belinda Beresford, Mail & Guardian, 29 January 1999; ‘How white is our valley’, Margie Pretorius, The Witness, 17 November 2005; ‘Farmers band together against land claims’, Sizwe Samayende, Mail & Guardian, 15 February 2000. 4 ‘Farmland expropriation threat denounced’, Barry Streek, Mail & Guardian, 23 October 2000. 5 ‘Farmers offer to sell land’, News24.com, 15 August 2001; ‘Afrikaner patriots praised’, Sharon Hammond, News24.com, 15 February 2002; ‘Farmers back state land reform plan’, Quentin Wray, busrep.co.za, 16 September 2002; ‘New land move sparks outcry’, Ainsley Moos, News24.com, 18 September 2002. 6 Christopher Mulaudzi and Cherryl Walker (personal communications); ‘Class, not race, behind Dolny’s departure’, Howard Barrell, Mail & Guardian, 7 January 2000. 7 Rosalie Kingwill, Grahamstown, 24 January 2001: other points come both from this discussion and from conversations held in Oxford during June 2000. 8 Philip Mbiba and Witness Phiri, Nelspruit, 13 November 2002. 9 Philip Mbiba, Nelspruit, 30–31 October 2002. 10 Philip Mbiba, Nelspruit, 30–31 October 2002. 11 Kwape Mmela, Johannesburg, 21 November 2002. 12 ‘White farmers denounce ANC “land grab” ’, Chris McGreal, The Guardian, 17 March 2001; ‘Pretorius’ neighbour moves out’, News24.com, 10 April 2001; ‘Farmer determined to fight for his land’, Sunday Times, 18 February 2001; for Boomplaats history and the story of the Dinkwanyane community’s land claim, see Mulaudzi (2002). 13 Kallie Erichson, Keerom, 27 January 2003. A similar ‘frontier’ case is described in Steinberg’s book on KwaZulu-Natal (2002), see also Beinart (1998) for the Eastern Cape. 14 George Fraser, DLA, Pretoria, 3 December 2002; Steyn (2002). 15 Kallie Erichson, Keerom, 27 January 2003. 16 Steve Miller, Middelburg, 29 January 2003. 17 These plots, like others elsewhere in South Africa, were subdivided as part of a government scheme to put mostly impoverished whites on the land during the 1930s. The culture of Afrikaner plot holders has been evocatively documented by David Goldblatt (1975). 18 Hendrik Mathibela, de Jager’s Doornkop plot, 15 December 2002. 19 Philip Mbiba, Nelspruit, 12 February 2002; Frans Tshehla, Ga Masha (Apiesboom), 10 February 2002. 20 Steve Miller, Middelburg, 29 January 2003.

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21 Steve Miller, Middelburg, 29 January 2003. 22 Chris Williams, TRAC, Nelspruit, 15 January 2001; Chris Williams, TRAC, Nelspruit, 31 January 2003. 23 JB Mahlangu, KwaMhlanga, 25 November 2002. 24 Driver Ntuli, Mooiplaas, 28 January 2003. 25 In other cases, like that of the Mamatola in Limpopo Province whose land was restored under restitution, this suspicion was sufficient to influence them from the outset against accepting help (Tony Harding and Tiny Mankge, Johannesburg, 8 February 2003). 26 Philip Mbiba and Witness Phiri, Nelspruit, 13 November 2002. 27 ‘The story of a R60m African farm’, Fikile Ntsikelelo Moya, Mail & Guardian, 23 May 2003. 28 Philip Mbiba, Nelspruit, 30–31 October 2002. 29 William Moeng, Nelspruit, 31 January 2003. 30 ‘The story of a R60m African farm’, Fikile Ntsikelelo Moya, Mail & Guardian, 23 May 2003. 31 ‘The story of a R60m African farm’, Fikile Ntsikelelo Moya, Mail & Guardian, 23 May 2003. 32 Petrus and Letty Maloma, Ga Masha (Apiesboom), 9–10 February 2003. 33 David Masemola, Doornkop, 10 December 2002. 34 Jan Sebotswa Maimela, Apiesboom, 10 February 2003; Philemon and Joel Maimela, Apiesboom, 10 February 2003. 35 Meeting of Chegos, Magukubyana, 15 December 2002. 36 Piet Tlou, Middelburg, 27 January 2003. 37 Petrus Chego, Magukubyana, 18 December 2003. 38 Theunis Roux, CALS, Johannesburg, 22 November 2002. 39 ‘Tsitsikama: the Amamfengu return’, New Ground, Winter 1993, p. 3.

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CONCLUSION Land and restored citizenship in South Africa

Land reform in South Africa has been an enterprise riddled with contradictions. Grand ambitions were laid out but few have so far been realised. Since those to whom land was given back or newly transferred were often those with least motivation or ability to use it, much of it has lain fallow. Worse still, where funds have been, almost literally, ‘ploughed’ into the land, these have failed to yield any harvest other than disappointment and frustration. As the state’s ambitious ‘targets’, whether measured in hectares or percentages, remain unmet, pressure mounts for the ‘speeding up’ of land reform. Failures are generally taken as further indications of the urgent need to accelerate the process, rather than of its perhaps being misconceived in the first place. To many commentators, both inside and outside the country, it has appeared obvious that land must be transferred from white into black ownership. This conviction about the correctness of land reform is deeply felt. It is self-evident; it requires no justification. But why was the fair distribution of land, rather than any other approach, the correct means to install an egalitarian order? Was it assumed that the processes of socio-economic differentiation which attend on so many other forms of ownership and economic enterprise would not be equally prevalent in the case of land? Those puzzled by such questions sometimes frame them in terms of material well-being alone. But the land question in South Africa ‘is not only about livelihood’, stresses Gillian Hart, it is ‘also about histories and memories of racialised dispossession’ (2002:227–8). If, as this suggests, past injustices must be overcome, there are also future-oriented political considerations. Stressing the need to counteract racialised political and economic domination in the countryside, political scientist Tom Lodge points to the potentially stabilising effect of dismantling ‘racial monopolies in agriculture’ and of making land ownership more racially diversified (2002:84). In general, the ‘unfinished business’ of national democracy would seem to demand a fairer distribution of land across the racial divide (Bernstein 2003: 214; 220). These considerations beyond the economic have not been ignored. Trying to redress infringements of civil liberties and restore citizenship as well as 252

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assuring economic well-being, South Africa’s land reform has positioned itself between the arena of justice and ‘rights’, on the one hand, and the market-related arena of ‘property’ ownership, on the other. It represents an attempt seamlessly to combine political priorities with material ones. Citizenship has often been modelled on pre-existing social forms of identification, whether these be lineage, gender or allegiance to tribal-style authorities. In the Middle East, for example, kinship loyalties, tribal affiliation and religion play a part in mediating the relationship between the state and its subjects (Joseph 2000, Longva 2000). Even in a society such as the US, where patrimonial and other kinds of primordial loyalties might be thought to be less important, citizenship has been shown to be modelled on the existing gender/race axes of identity which were laid down in an earlier era (Ong 1996). In South Africa, the most immediate symbol of citizenship initially lost and thereafter to be restored, along with its egalitarian associations, was that of land. Where citizenship had been actively denied to people in the past, they now sought to gain access to a common national identity and sovereignty, with all it entails. With the dawn of South Africa’s liberation from apartheid it seemed possible that restoring land to its former occupiers would be a way to give them back their national citizenship as well. The connection between land and citizenship may seem an obvious one. Surely it is self-evident that a sense of national belonging should be built upon the basis of the importance of territory or place? But it is often only in situations of extreme flux and under conditions of rapid transition that land comes to be invested with particular emotional and political significance. In Eastern Europe, for example, it was the ‘enhanced flows of capital’ across national borders after the end of socialism that had the apparently contradictory effect of increasing people’s interest, as citizens, in ‘particular places’ (Verdery 1998:298). In South Africa, the combination of deprivation in the past and the threat of new kinds of land loss in the future has made land a powerful metaphor of citizenship. The stratified and differentiated nature of the population yielded complex, sometimes conflicting, idealisations of landholding, which have shifted over time. Models of property have evolved, building upon those which preceded them. Although these models – such as the communal property hybrid which interwove liberal law with custom – expressed the interests of particular classes, they also contained the promise of transcending specific social settings. When the land reform programme was initially conceptualised, enabling the particularities of ‘property’ to be subsumed under the broader inclusivity of ‘rights’, such utopian visions presumed that land access could be restored to all. If former property owners initially seemed more favourably positioned, loopholes would be found enabling those who had held informal rights to take their place on the land alongside them. Both would be able to turn back the clock and start again at the moment when apartheid’s 253

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harsh laws had dispossessed them of land and citizenship. Others, turning the clock forward, would take advantage of redistributive approaches. All would put the land to good use. As time passed, however, visions gave way to pragmatic political realities and to a new emphasis on market forces. From the point of view of the state, acquiring or requiring land began to be envisaged as a bureaucratic matter of administration rather than as something concerning fundamental tenets of justice. Earlier hybrid discourses on ownership were pared down to yield more streamlined procedures based more squarely on the realities of the market for restoring, transferring, acquiring and managing property. Such processes increasingly appeared to exclude large swathes of people from entitlements they felt they had been promised or had enjoyed to some extent under the old order. The idea of inalienable rights was a reaction against this. It combined the ideologies of global movements with pre-colonial African precedents and apartheid versions of ‘customary’ land tenure under chiefs. The connection between land and citizenship has thus begun to unravel, since the former no longer promises a source of unity on which the latter can be based. This book began with a question which has preoccupied activists, government officials and lawyers, concerning the true character and parameters of ‘the landless’. If landlessness originally served as a rallying-cry to unite many divergent groupings and socio-economic categories, can the demand for land still provide a unifying focus for concerted social and political action? Or is it inevitable that the actual delivery of land, under pressure from the market, must favour a few select groups from within this mass? Although there is evidence of increasing socio-economic stratification in South Africa, it seems unlikely that specific classes will split off from the broader constituency of ‘beneficiaries’ to constitute groups acting in their own narrowly defined interests or demanding land to satisfy these. Neither has this broader constituency, despite its use of emotive slogans about the land, been successful in mobilising politically. When the LPM was founded and when it attempted to generate support, it did so on the basis that landlessness is an elastic category allowing ‘people who do not have a historical link to the land to be defined as “landless” – because they want to establish a new link to the land’.1 But the movement proved unable effectively either to specify or to marshal its potential membership along these inclusive lines. It has been the intention of this book to show that there is no easily-defined social grouping – no category of specifically ‘rural’ people, whether the ‘landless poor’ or ‘small farmers’ – which is in a position thus to act on its own behalf in order to demand land access from the state. Regrets expressed by land activists, lawyers and analysts about the ANC’s failure to attend to its landless constituents, or the failure of the landless to organise on their own behalf (Bernstein 1996; Levin 1996:364–5), are thus somewhat misguided. Is it then the case that ‘landlessness’ presents a chimerical identity which 254

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does not stand up to a more sustained material analysis? Does the cry of ‘landlessness’ merely disguise an inexorable process whereby the middle classes or new regional elites are destined eventually to gain land access at the expense of the poorer tenantry? The answer is complex, and cannot be sought on either material or political levels alone. In the same way that the land reform programme attempted to reconcile the economic and the political, both must be borne in mind when trying to analyse and assess the programme’s impact. One must also recognise that policy initiatives and planned social change are often productive of new social, cultural and political identities rather than simply acting upon pre-existing ones. Thus, however much land reform promises to transcend socio-economic categories, classes or identities – or alternatively, however much it appears destined to reconstitute or strengthen these – it also mediates and transforms them in the very process of coming into being. It is certainly possible in purely material terms to identify broad trends of differentiation in which land plays a part. There is, in other words, an increasingly sharp division in South Africa between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ to which interpenetrating rural and urban sources of income contribute and which they help to constitute. But the promise of imminent delivery of land has served to create new divisions. Spurred on by the presence of the older, landed political elite, by its newly-emerging arriviste counterpart, and by the officers charged with verifying land rights, a new interest in land arose. It set against each other people who might earlier have been united. Restitution put in place potential conflicts even between those with structurally similar livelihoods, positions and interests; between family members and in-laws, or the subjects of related chiefs who had formerly been on friendly terms. As new sources of differentiation became evident, it also seemed that older boundaries might blur. The division between title-holders and tenants was not inexorable, and not all former landowners were well-off. Farm-owning African communities had long been split between blue-collar labour migrants and educated teachers or members of the civil service, with many finer gradations of status and wealth between the two. It was from amongst the ranks of the poorer ones, with fewest alternatives for rural or urban livelihoods, that illegal land-letters or land-sellers were drawn. Closer socio-economically to their clients than to their own counterparts, they were also most likely to come into conflict with these clients. They exposed their dependants to multiple uncertainties, given that the land was not, in fact, strictly theirs to let or sell. That such brokers’ interests were not the same as those of their fellow landowners should warn us against any attempt to draw simple boundaries of class or category. There are various ways in which existing lines of social cleavage and stratification have been blurred and mediated through the policies, promises and processes of changing land access. Some of these are overtly political. When restitution threatened to entrench or create new material divisions between 255

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the middle class and the poorest landless people, the landless reacted strongly. To challenge the way restitution had been mobilised in defence of exclusive ownership, they enunciated a discourse which combined the original ‘rights-based’ version of land reform with notions of redistributive justice. Their views were not being dismissed out of hand. Rather than blankly denying this egalitarian vision of citizenship, the ANC was accommodating it by pandering to ethnically defined regional majorities of the landless. These majorities, in turn, have reshaped the party as their defender. There is similar evidence of mediatory processes in the way property and citizenship are linked through forms of brokerage. At the moment of South Africa’s transition it had been a matter of speculation whether land claimants would attempt to assert their rights and make claims upon the state as individuals. Or would their vision of citizenship be a more communal one which combined ‘demands of individual entitlement [with] attachment to a particular community’ (Kymlicka and Norman 1994:352), thus allowing for the continued pledging of allegiance to chiefs or for its new pledging to leaders or brokers? There is certainly a line of thought in post-apartheid South Africa, as in post-revolutionary situations such as Mexico, that people should own land without being reliant on the state in order to establish their rights as independent citizens (Lomnitz 1999). Concurring with this, some people contend that private property rights are the foundation of society’s economic and civil order. Others fiercely contest such a claim, arguing that property must be secured for the ‘public good’. Disputes like this, shows anthropologist Chris Hann, replay a debate in Western thought of several centuries’ standing (1998:13). All societies manifest a range of property types, from alienable to inalienable, but if land becomes alienated from large numbers of the populace, there may be fears about the future of its public and hence morally accountable use (Hann 1998:33). In the new South Africa, given the increasing unlikelihood that inequities of ownership will be redressed effectively through impersonal mechanisms of redistributive justice, people have had recourse to alternative modes of landholding. Chiefs and land-sellers, NGOs and restitution officers, consultants and brokers, can all in different ways give access to land. They provide a means through which the landless can assert their entitlement to remain resident upon public land or seek out new tenancies on African farms. They can hence provide the basis for citizenship, albeit only temporarily and only of a ‘second class’ kind. But there are ‘limits to negotiability’ in African landholding (Peters 2002). Nor does mediation preclude conflict. Disputes over land were, from the very first days of the programme’s design, foreseen by those in the human rights law community. The statement that ‘property is, ultimately, about mediation’ showed human rights lawyers’ acute awareness of this. Given that such lawyers, with their roots in South Africa’s contradictorily ‘liberal social and 256

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legal culture’ (Chanock 2001:20), were key players in conceptualising land reform and designing the legislation that would facilitate it, but given that their more redistributive aims have proved difficult to achieve, how do they retain a role in defending the landless and in solving conflicts between different groupings within their ranks? Or will the South African state be strong enough to establish and unequivocally defend title to land for the ‘small farmers’ whom it now favours? If so, will land be placed beyond the sphere of negotiation and positioned more firmly as ‘property’? If some of the new land reform legislation was so vague as to allow for disputes, its designers in the human rights legal fraternity have certainly remained vigilant about the need to solve these. But their capacity to do so is limited. Some conflicts are left to be self-solved by the members of Communal Property Associations; property-holding bodies separate from the public realm in whose affairs the state is reluctant to intervene. The government’s failure to protect the rights of such property owners may also be explained by its unwillingness to be seen as an evicter of squatters and therefore as having similarities to the apartheid government. This is particularly true if doing so would alienate the political support of the landless majority. Other conflicts, between white farmers and the tenants or workers whom they mistreat and/or evict, seem unsolvable despite the legislation intended to eliminate them. This is both because of the farms’ character as ‘little republics’ and because of the inadequacies of the Legal Aid Board on which poor people in remote areas must rely if they seek the protection of the law. One result of this failure to intervene definitively in favour of farm-dwellers’ rights may eventually be the progressive ‘whitening’ of parts of the countryside. A recent account by a visitor to the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands suggests that the gradual displacing of black farm workers is proceeding apace, and thus that rural ‘white South Africa’ is getting ‘whiter’.2 On the other hand, a lack of intervention to protect white farmers’ property rights, combined with other factors, has elsewhere resulted in quite the opposite tendency. In areas such as the Mpumalanga–Limpopo borderland, the racial frontier has been pushed back, making formerly ‘white’ areas ‘blacker’. Many complain that these are matters of law and order over which the government should hold sway. But in practice the only state personnel who become aware of such localised disputes are those employed by the Department of Land Affairs. They intervene, usually with the help and support of the NGO officers who do much of the Department’s work, or by outsourcing the task to dedicated and skilful mediators. The result, as several observers point out, has been to redefine matters of law, order and justice for African migrants/country-dwellers as being a concern separate from the main stream. In parallel with the distinct African system of landowning provided by the CPA, those resident on the land have remained recipients of a distinct system of justice rather than having been drawn into the net of a unifying legal system. ‘Land Affairs’ is thus little different from what was once called 257

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‘Native Affairs’. Accompanying a bifurcation of property types, there is a bifurcation of law. Does this growing divergence substantiate the observation that a new rift is growing between a ‘modern’ and a ‘traditional’ sector? Or is the perception of this rift merely a bias – albeit a self-fulfilling one – on the part of activists and policy makers (Robins 2001)? Does it suggest an irreconcilable division between two ways of thinking and living: ‘one based on a liberal ethos of universal human rights, of free, autonomous citizenship, of individual entitlement; the other assertive of group rights, of ethnic sovereignty, or primordial cultural connection’ (JL Comaroff 1998:346)? If divergence and division are inevitable, this paints a gloomy picture for those convinced that the way forward for South Africa lies in racial integration. If Africans living on the land are recipients of distinct systems of justice, it seems less likely that memories of racialised dispossession will be eradicated, a more even racial distribution of farmland property be achieved, or a national democracy be attained (Bernstein 2003:214, 220; Hart 2002:227–8; Lodge 2002:84). But between the races, just as between other groups depicted in this book, mediation has played a key role. The tone of interactions between black and white in the process of land reform is not predominantly one of conflict. While there have been power struggles and bitter accusations between the races, unpredicted collaboration and forms of co-existence have also emerged. Race is not the only or the most significant factor, but merely one amongst many sources of identity which have been moulded and refracted in the process of South Africa’s land reform.

Notes 1 2

Andile Mngxitama, NLC, Johannesburg, 25 October 2002. See Margie Pretorius, ‘How white is our valley’, The Witness, 17 November 2005.

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269

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ACLA (Advisory Committee on Land Allocations) 58 activists 58, 89, 119, 145, 155–7, 174, 205, 217–8, 222, 245, 254–5, 258 Adler, Josie 142 ‘administrative approach’ 60, 102, 216, 254 Afrikaner Nationalist Government 86, 93, 108 African nationalism 22, 52, 54, 101, 103 Afrikaners 39–40, 91, 109, 113, 123, 230, 232, 234, 248 Afrikaners, DLA employees 40–1 age-groups (dithaka) 65 ‘agrarian question’ 182 agriculture 14, 107, 157, 165, 180, 183–4, 198, 243, 252 commercial, see farms, commercial white, see farming, white agri-villages 47, 146–7 altruism 234–5, 238–9, 242–3, 249 ANC 3, 19–22, 30–31, 34, 39, 52, 57–8, 72, 86, 88, 91, 97, 102, 105–9, 119–27, 134, 142, 145, 148, 182, 204–6, 208, 214, 216, 218, 220–2, 224–6, 238, 247–8, 250, 255–6 Land Commission 58, 145 relationship to constituents 105–6, 119, 124, 256 urban bias, alleged 31, 51, 182, 255 ancestors 61–2, 88, 97–8, 135, 247 anthropologists/anthropology 94, 98, 181, 200, 256 anti-apartheid struggle 30, 34, 92, 150, 152, 182, 203, 217, 253

apartheid 76, 98, 113, 121, 123, 155, 180–1, 183, 202, 236–7, 245, 247, 254 continuities with 39, 71, 75, 113, 123, 145–6, 165, 175, 180–1, 198, 202–3, 257 government 69, 245 legislation abolishing labour tenancy 138 1913 Natives Land Act 3, 6, 58, 63, 105 1936 Natives Trust and Land Act 81–2, 107, 141 1951 Bantu Authorities Act 4 Proclamation 84 of 1951, 93 1956 Native Administration Act 94 state 12, 17, 37 Apiesboom 86, 97, 104, 141, 153, 192–6, 199, 250–1 archives 91, 94 National 88, 92–3 autonomy 74, 76–7, 86, 155; see also independence AZAPO (Azanian People’s Organisation) 72, 149 Badplaas 90 balance, between wages, land and cattle 139, 142–4, 151, 192 of different property principles 119, 130, 155–6 Bapedi Lutheran Church 63 balkanisation 127 beneficiaries, of land reform 2–3, 7–11, 17, 24, 28, 32, 40, 49, 81, 102, 117, 159, 162, 164, 167, 169, 171–4, 177, 184–6, 201, 206,

271

INDEX

212–6, 226–7, 229–234, 243, 249, 254 Berlin Mission Society 2, 63, 76, 112 Berry, Sara 202 Bethal 141 betterment 4, 181, 198 Bible, the/ biblical imagery 54, 61–2, 64, 76–7 ‘black spots’ 61, 142, 159, 234, 237 ‘black spot’ removals, see removals, ‘black spot’ Boomplaats 232 borders, farm 100 homeland 14, 140 international 89–90, 138, 253 Bothashoek 66, 112, 144 Botsˇhabelo 73, 76, 112 Brakfontein 204 BRC 35 Bredell 29, 49, 137, 206–7; see also land invasions bride price 134, 139, 144 brokers 73, 200–2, 209, 211–223, 248, 256 Budlender, Geoff 36–7, 46, 58, 207 Buffelshoek 99 Buffelskloof 83 Bundy, Colin 157 bureaucracy 80, 82, 87, 102, 155, 159, 181, 197, 200, 212, 214–5, 216, 221, 228, 235 business/businessmen 179, 189, 208, 211, 243, 245, 248 business plans 103, 168, 170, 215 Buthelezi, Mangosuthu 134 capacity, lack of 50, 162, 164, 174, 222, 228, 243, 248, 257 capital, cultural 87 economic 48 flows of 253 political 123 social 48 capitalism 14, 106, 138, 244 Carolina 233 cash 14, 143–5, 169, 173, 187, 194 cattle 1, 4, 21–3, 44–7, 81–9, 94–5, 98, 101, 114–5, 118, 121, 131, 134, 136–9, 140–8, 167, 169, 188, 193, 233, 237, 241, 247 sale of to buy land 140–2 byres 87–8, 94, 114, 121 Chego 140, 143 see also claim, Chego

change, institutional 228 social 36, 179–80, 201, 255, see also transition chiefdoms 6, 88 chiefly authority 91, 162–3, 203, 205, 209, 211 chiefly family/chief, Pedi 6, 53, 62, 69, 83 chiefs 1, 4, 6, 11, 14, 21, 24, 33, 39, 42, 89–90, 93, 118, 131, 141, 143, 155, 162–3, 171, 200–5, 207–212, 254, 256 and control of land 69, 203–5, 208 and restitution 205 at Doornkop 68–70, 76, 209–211 chiefship 52, 61, 70, 99, 162, 202–4, 207–212 children, aspirations for 53, 60, 79, 95, 140, 143, 191 paternity of 144–5 Christians 17, 62, 65, 67, 69–70, 113, 173 Christian faith 61, 67 rituals 65 Christianity 6, 61, 77 African independent 88 churches, African independent 63, 84 circumcision 88 citizens 5, 11, 22, 24, 50, 69, 76, 103, 202, 224, 253, 256 legitimate claims of 75 citizenship 102, 126, 161, 169, 177, 180, 202, 245, 248, 252–3, 256–8 civic associations/civics movement 89, 108, 203, 206 civil/public servants 1, 84, 88, 103, 117; see also post-apartheid, civil service and NGOs claim, Chego 81–5, 87–8, 90, 96–8, 101–2, 139, 184, 247 Maimela 99–100 Masha 81, 85–7, 90, 94, 97, 100, 102, 184, 193 Mashego 89, 94, 96, 184 Mdluli 243, 245 Mojapelo 182 Mthethwa 94–6, 139, 246 Tau 99 claimant verification, see claims, verification of claims 59, 246 as inducing insecurity 90, 233–5, 237 by farm-dwellers 147, 233–4 incorporative 100

272

INDEX

knock-on effects of 90 rival 85, 87, 98–9 urban 8, 59, 102, 178, 246 verification of 80–1, 85–6, 88, 94, 97 white anxiety about/resistance to 96, 226 class 33, 127, 183, 201 boundaries 256 socio-economic differences 66–7, 72–3, 106–7, 127, 160, 211–2, 231–8, 249, 252–6 under- 118 middle (African) 52, 62, 73, 107, 142, 172–4, 179, 212, 223, 226, 245 middle (white) 73, 157, 217, 223 proletarians 222 reconstitution of 105, 127 client-style relationships 149, 152, 200, 220 Commission, Tomlinson, see Tomlinson Commission Commissioner, Bantu 236 Native 78, 93, 130 Commissions, Government 180–2 committee, leadership by 71–3, 162–3, 187, 209 commons 154, 168–9 communal ownership 77, 127, 130, 235; see also landholding, communal community 65, 67, 69, 73, 100–1, 110, 127, 154–9, 190, 202, 213, 229, 256 compensation 24, 50–1, 58–9, 81, 111–2, 153, 246–7, 249 ‘consent’, ‘manufacturing’ 107, 119, 127 constitution, of CPA; see CPA of Doornkop 57, 113 of South Africa 4–5, 32, 44, 105, 111, 179, 209 consultants 21, 37–8, 40, 49, 81, 85, 87, 94, 119, 127, 155, 168, 171, 174, 208, 213, 215, 227–9, 231, 235, 238, 241–2, 248 continuities with apartheid; see apartheid, continuities with contradictions 22, 53–4, 146, 212, 222, 252 control, white, reassertion of 242, 244–5 corruption 126, 148, 193, 209 councillors, ward 122, 127, 208

CPA (Communal Property Association), see legal entities, CPA; legislation, CPA Act credit 172, 194–5 crime 20, 22, 150, 233, 237 crop theft 196, 236–7 culture 101, 137, 201, 258 institutional migrant 183, 198 of committees 221 popular 201 custom 13, 17, 48, 68–70, 76, 87, 121, 205, 254 Christian ambivalence about 70, 76 Daggakraal 108, 110 Daveyton 66 Debeile, David 75 debt 24, 155, 172–4, 186–7, 195–7, 232, 236 de Jager 234 delays 30–1, 48–9, 56, 59–60, 85, 102, 114, 118, 202, 207, 212, 214–6, 223, 244 democracy/democratic principles 121, 165, 171, 202, 205, 208, 211, 218, 252, 258 Department of Agriculture 166–7, 172, 248 Democratic Alliance (DA) 122–4 dependence 131, 139–42, 146, 166, 171, 174, 181, 183, 202 descent 53, 73, 79, 89, 99–100, 204 de Soto 148, 195 development 73–74, 113, 118, 123, 127, 155, 157, 163, 168, 171, 179, 184, 197, 213–4, 216, 241–2 paradigms, South African 57, 171, 180 diaspora, 159, 190 see also farms, white, diaspora from Didiza, Thoko 37, 39–40, 51, 59, 226, 228, 239 discarded people 92 dispossession 68, 87, 99, 156, 177, 217, 252 disputes adjudication/resolution of 127 after land restoration 64, 67–71 between claimants 67, 85, 98, 101 between CPA members 161, 190 between families 213 between historians 138

273

INDEX

elections, democratic, first (1994) 75, 101, 120–2, 127, 134–5, 148, 171, 216, 247 democratic, second (1999) 101, 154, 172, 178, 228 in LPM 221 elite 126, 182–3, 207–8 absentee 73, 160, 163 /commoner contrast 88, 91, 101–2 Ndebele 126, 214 new ethnic 245 political 80, 91, 119 regional 207–8, empowerment 74, 101, 197–8, 245 black 23, 179, 228–9 entrepreneurs 156, 164, 168, 171–2, 190, 195, 209–211, 241 Erichson, Kallie 233 Eskom 165–7, 241–2 ESTA (Extension of Security of Tenure Act), see legislation, ESTA ethnic cleansing 228, 248 ethnicity 91–2, 113, 118, 120, 122, 125–7, 202–4, 208–9, 211–2, 256, 258 ethnicised politics 91, 125–6, Eveleth, Ann 218 eviction, from white farms 4, 7, 19–21, 33, 43–6, 48, 105, 109–10, 112, 117, 120, 122, 135–6, 145, 164, 168 of squatters 126, 210, 216, 257 exile, ANC in 31, 39, 57 exile, from the land 27, 54, 61, 67, 133–4, 146, 151 expectations 2, 21–2, 46, 61, 74, 82, 87, 130–1, 212, 248 expropriation, of white farms 226–7, 232

between men and women 143 between owners and tenants 106, 108, 118, 127 between races 225–7, 231, 239, 244 between white farmers and tenants 226, 257 in DLA 40–1, 228, 248 over chiefship 202 over effects of legislation 145 over land invasions 132, 160, 206, 218–220 over patronage and representation 74–5, 220–2 over private ownership 154, 174 over use or jurisdiction 204 dissatisfaction 2, 22, 31, 45, 49, 82, 207 District Six 68, 102, 112 Department of Agriculture 185 Department of Land Affairs (DLA) 32, 36, 39–41, 45, 51, 58–9, 119, 147, 149, 153, 177, 185–6, 199, 205, 210–1, 213, 215, 226, 228–9, 231, 234, 237, 248, 250, 262 Dlamini, Princess 90 Dolny, Helena 80, 179, 189, 192, 228 Doornkop 18, 22, 53–83, 87, 97, 105–9, 111–8, 121–3, 126–30, 135, 142, 156, 159–60, 162, 164, 168, 175, 183–5, 187–8, 191, 199, 209–10, 213–6, 224, 233–7, 239, 247, 250–1, 264 Doornkop, Management Committee 71, 187 Doringboom 235 Driefontein 142 ‘dumping’/dumping grounds 7, 20, 61, 66, 145, 148 Eastern Cape 35, 59, 104, 109, 203, 207, 250, 259–60, 269 economic aspects of land reform 10, 11, 245; see also farming, livelihoods economic downturn 10, 14, 173, 183, 193 economics, neo-classical 179; see also neo-liberal framework economy 7, 10–1, 139, 143–4, 178–81, 226, 233 egalitarianism 106, 119, 157, 165, 171, 179, 202, 204, 211, 218, 252–3, 256 ELCSA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of South Africa) 63

failure 10, 15, 28, 39, 119, 147, 163–4, 167–8, 170–1, 190, 231 family, see kinship farm attacks 2, 18, 20, 146, 225–6, 230, 237–8, 249 farm-dwellers/labourers 3, 8–9, 18–9, 22, 43, 45–6, 96, 109–110, 116–7, 123, 126–7, 131, 135, 138–9, 145–7, 150, 164, 166, 168, 172, 184, 257 farmers, African 109, 179, 181, 183–4, 187–199, 231, 238 commercial 33, 40, 41, 119, 164–5, 169–70, 178–9, 182–3, 186, 190

274

INDEX

small 50, 196, 235, 255, 257; see also family farms white 3, 7, 18–21, 24, 29, 39, 45–6, 77, 123, 133–5, 137–42, 146, 148–9, 165, 167, 178–9, 193, 198, 229–243, 247 white, anxiety of 123, 146, 226, 229–30, 233–4 white, attacks on; see farm attacks white, poorer and richer 232–8 white, readiness to sell 230–38 farming 114, 121, 165, 167, 183, 228 aspirations 95, 109, 115–6, 118, 150, 178, 246–8 commercial; see farmers, commercial removal of state subsidy for 11, 180, 231–2, 248 white 7, 83, 178, 183, 194, 196, 198, 229–32, 248–9; see also farmers, white farms African-owned 107–110, 142, 144, 173, 233 see also tenants on Africanowned farms African-owned, movement off into homelands 108, 143 confusion over ownership of 148 eviction from; see eviction family 179, 195 labour on 141, 166–8, 195–6; see also farm–dwellers purchase of by Africans 63, 67, 69, 90–1, 141–2, 164, 185, 193–4, 214–5, 229 white 3–8, 18–24, 28, 33, 42, 81, 121, 131, 148, 155, 193 white, African claims on 82–103, 237–8, 243 white, diaspora from 84, 95, 143 white, life on 95, 121, 137–9 white, youths’ refusal to work on 143 feudalism 6, 42, 138 ‘fiefs’ 152, 216, 220–1 First, Ruth 86 Fraser, George 185, 192, 194, 197 Freedom Charter 31 Free State 35, 173, 186 Free State Farming Community 132 Friedman, Stephen 151 funding, of land reform 45, 168, 171, 220, 226, 229, 239, 241, 243, 252; see also grants, government

funds, public 45 future-orientation/forward-looking approach 57, 70, 152, 154, 163–4, 171, 248, 252 Gauteng 152, 186, 226 Gilfillan, Durkje 60, 78–9, 80, 100, 103–4, 110, 119, 129, 157, 223, 250 Goedehoop 86, 140–1 Gouws, Andries 195, 215, government 121, 200, 215, 228–9, 231, 236 grants, government 127, 133, 164, 170, 178, 185–6, 193, 235 SLAG (Settlement Land acquisition grant) 110, 193, 197 graves 87–8, 94, 96–8, 247 ‘grass roots’ 216–8 grazing 45–7, 139, 169 greed 201, 211, 239 Groblersdal 85, 118, 204 Groothoek 83 Groot Vlakfontein 132 Hall and Sons 243 Hanekom, Derek 36, 39, 51, 54, 59, 80, 145, 228, 239, 250 Hann, Chris 256 harvest, maize, sale of 140 hegemony 92, 119 Hendrina 115, 233 historical context 6–7, 31, 52–3, 62–3 historical entitlement/precedent for land occupation 79–103, 115–8, 131, 151, 163–4, 208, 247, 254 history 88, 91–2, 126, 137, 138, 144, 173, 181, 252 homelands 3–8, 12, 14, 20, 33, 42, 53, 61, 69, 71, 93, 108, 113, 116, 131, 138–144, 170, 180–1, 202, 233, 237 hostels, Denver and Jeppe 133 housing 75, 113–6, 116, 160, 170, 180, 197, 207, 241 ‘matchbox’ 145–6, 148 human rights; see lawyers, human rights human rights violations 60, 64 ICU (Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union) 1, 86, 131, 150

275

INDEX

identity 15, 62, 65, 76, 152, 173, 177, 187, 253, 255, 258 inalienability, ethic of, see land, ethic of inalienability independence 54, 62, 64, 68–9, 74, 76, 86, 146, 161, 166–7, 174, 192, 203 ‘indigenous’ 16–17, 130, 216 individual assets/ownership 168, 171, 173–4, 194 enterprise 168–9 individuals 33–4, 51, 100, 154–5, 186, 215, 256 indebtedness, see debt interface, of cultural worlds 13, 130, 249 initiation 88, 94, 136–7, 146 intermediaries 73, 174, 232, 237, 248; see also brokers internet sources 91 invasions, see land, invasions Jock of the Bushveld 92 Johannesburg 8, 15, 18, 29, 49, 56, 59, 83, 132–3, 137, 142, 177, 184, 186, 190, 194, 196, 206, 218, 220, 244, 247 justice 21–2, 32, 58–61, 101–3, 132, 148, 163, 174, 205, 253–4, 256, 258 Kafferskraal 118 Kalkfontein 97, 193, see also claim, Masha Kalushi, Kalushi William 74 Ka-Ngwane 124 Kenya 99, 157 kinship 65, 67, 97, 99, 116, 185, 191, 194, 211, 214; see also relationships Kromkrans 111, 173, 243 Kruger, Paul 62–3 KwaNdebele 53, 112, 116–7, 214 Kwa-Ngema 110, 120 KwaZulu-Natal 21, 24, 89, 107–8, 132–3, 225–6 labour migration 7, 14, 18, 66, 84, 86, 94, 107, 133–4, 138–9, 142–3, 157, 173, 181–5, 190, 192–3; see also wage labour labour tenancy/labour tenants 4, 19, 22, 39, 67, 131–150, 184–5, 220, 234 labour unions 19, 86, 89, 102, 151; see also ICU

La Hausse 173 Land Access Movement of South Africa (LAMoSA) 61, 73 Land and Agricultural Policy Centre (LAPC) 182 land as basis for credit 107, 195 as basis for unity 54, 62, 72, 254 as economic/motional security 14–5, 181, 186, 190, 193 as inalienable 14, 131, 139, 146–7, 150, 175, 254, 256 as source of identity 89, 126 Bank 173, 178, 184–9, 192–4, 196, 198, 228, 232, 235–6 cost/value of 227, 235, 244–5 Claims Court 4, 47, 58–60, 85, 102 in Africa 14, 98, 103, 201 invasions 132, 137, 203, 206–7, 218–21, 225, 233, 235 loss 172–3 political demand for 34, 57, 59, 64, 80, 101, 103 purchase of; see farms, purchase of reform 237, 245 agricultural 183 economic effects of 197 legislation; see legislation, land reform Pilot Programmes 182 programme 1, 5, 7, 11, 13, 18–22, 31–2, 35–7, 40–4, 52–3, 58, 101, 109, 145, 154, 172, 183, 201, 206–7, 245, 249, 253, 255, 264, 267 policy subdivisions 3, 7–9, 32–3, 177, 185, 192–3; see also restitution, redistribution, tenure reform policy subdivisions, confusion about 8, 33–4, 91, 147–8, 177, 179, 184–6, 192 for Agricultural Development 178, 185–9, 192–9, 243 Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on 114 rights 67, 138 significance of 88, 94–5, 126 state 33, 131, 171, 226 struggle for 30, 81, 134, 147 land tenure 12, 76, 157, 254 land, who’s? 103, 109, 112

276

INDEX

landholding, communal 69–70, 120–1, 154–7, 161–4, 169–171, 193–4, 199, 235 customary trusteeship 8, 11, 22–3, 76, 121, 141, 155–6, 162, 170, 175 models of 10, 13–4, 22–3, 40–1, 121, 130, 154–75, 253, 257 on behalf of the poor 139 private/communal hybrid model of 13, 17, 130, 156–7, 161, 169, 171, 174, 253–4 landless, the 24–49 landlessness, globalisation of 30, 131, 150, 149–50 = Racism meeting 24–52, 60–1, 130, 133, 152, 77, 206, 218 land-selling 230–8 illegal 120, 122, 160, 168, 189, 207–210, 246, 255 unacceptability of 150, 154, 175 law 3–5, 7, 9, 12–3, 16, 22, 36–7, 43, 58, 82, 103, 110–1, 119–20, 123, 146–7, 156, 179, 202, 206, 257 and order 127, 257–8 bifurcation of 258 customary 12 human rights 103; see lawyers, human rights rule of 19, 49, 200 laws, apartheid; see apartheid; legislation lawyers 103, 244 human rights 9, 12, 22, 32, 34, 35, 70, 80, 86, 100, 109, 110, 119, 155, 161, 174, 255, 257 leadership 70–1, 160, 162–3, 68–90, 203–5, 209, 213–4, 216–223, 229 legal aid 20, 147, 257 apparatus 3, 155 battles 227 entities 110, 159 entities, CPA (Communal Property Association) 123, 159–162, 165–8, 172–3, 199, 210, 239, 257 entities, Trust 159, 168–72, 193–4, 213 legislation, land reform 1994 Restitution Act 58, 81, 99, 147, 230, 247 1996 CPA (Communal Properties Association Act) 4, 156, 1997 ESTA (Extension of Security of Tenure Act)

1996 LTA (Labour Tenants Act) 145–7, 185 2004 Communal Land Rights Act legislation, racially discriminatory 58, 81, 94, 231 Levin, Richard 182, 204–5 life cycle 139 Linnenkamp 234 livelihoods 131, 138, 183, 198, 246, 252 livelihoods, multiple 95–6, 180–1, 184, 192, 198 loans 90, 155, 172–3, 178, 186, 188–9, 194 LRC (Legal Resources Centre) 35, 51, 77–78, 80, 104, 152–3, 161, 175, 250, 266 LTA (Labour Tenants Act), see legislation, LTA Luiperdshoek 83 Lund, Christian 202 Lutherans 53–4, 62–5, 126 Lydenburg 92, 139, 232 Mabuza, Enos 125 Machadodorp 233 Macleantown 59 Magukubyana 82, 84 Mahlangu, James 125 Mahlangu, J B 135, 214, 220, 239 Mahlangu, Ndaweni 126 Mahlangu, Rose 116–7 Maine, Kas 140 Makwetla, Thabang 126 Malan, DF 86, 93 Maleoskop 204 Maloma, Abey 73 Maloma, Petrus 246 Malooth Park 92 management, farm 165, 169–70, 199, 238–42 Mandela, Nelson Maphosa, Toki 46–7 Mapulana 89 Masha 140–1; see also claim, Masha marches, by farm-dwellers 135–7, 150, 220 market, the 3, 10, 52, 106, 110, 179, 184, 186, 200, 203, 244–5, 253–4 market-driven approach 23, 33, 133, 164, 179–80, 183, 197, 199, 226–7 Maroga, Elizabeth 64, 66–7, 73 marriage 65, 83, 85, 99, 116–7, 137, 145

277

INDEX

Masina, Jan 123–4, 210 Matentje, Obed 187–90, 193 Mathibela, Amos 213–5 Mathibela, Hendrik 213–5, 234 Matjembene 91 Mayende, Gilingwe 227 Mbeki, Thabo 30, 39–40, 59, 101, 150, 152, 179, 223, 228, 248, 265 Mbiba, Philip 89–90, 172, 205, 229 Mdluli, Terry 243; see also claim, Mdluli mediation 81, 100, 119, 228, 256–8 men/women, differential effects of removals on 183 Merensky, Alexander 62 Mexico 256 Mgoqi, Wallace 92 Middelburg 18, 66, 78, 112, 115–8, 123, 126, 129, 135–7, 139, 146, 213, 220, 233, 236, 250–1 Miller, Steve 236–8 mission converts 6, 12, 17, 22, 28, 52, 55, 61–4 discourses 61, 113 Mkhize, Saul 142 Mkombothi, Sipho 148 MLTC (Mpumalanga Labour Tenants Committee) 132–5, 138–9, 145, 147, 149, 153, 184 Mmela, Kwape 208, 232 modernity vs traditionalism 70–1, 74, 130, 154–6, 159, 174, 202, 248, 258 modernity 69, 171, 190, 248 Mohlala 121 Mokaungoe, Eva 67 Monsterlus 64, 66 Mooiplaas 239, 242 Mooiwater 236 moral obligations of white farmers; see paternalism morality 116, 120–1, 131, 157, 222, 226 Motswege, Star 149 Mngxitama, Andile 149, 151, 218, 220–1 Mpumalanga, Provincial Government 125, 114 MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra) 3, 150, 218 Mswati 90 Mtsweni, Jack 120, 209–16 Mulaudzi, Chris 186–7 Murray, Colin 103, 173

nation building 106, 126–7 Native Farmers’ Association of South Africa Limited 142 Ndebele 53, 56, 113–118, 121, 122, 124–5, 135–37, 209–210, 214–5, 236, 239, 241 Ndebele, tenants at Doornkop 67, 69, 112–118, 121–6, 130, 209–211 negotiation/s 16, 21, 43, 46, 57, 187, 201, 213, 227, 232, 243, 245, 248–9, 257 Nelspruit 43, 46–7, 90–1, 95, 174, 235, 243–4 neo-liberal framework 10–1, 32, 183 networks, and DLA 40–1, 228 of activists 31 of exiles 39 of land claimants 48, 86–7, 102–3, 211 of landless 14, 235 of migrants 133 of NGOs 41, 44 of white farmers 242 new South Africa 200, 211, 256 Ngobe, Matthews 185 Ngomane, Siphiwe 149 Ngomanes 91, 93 NGOs 3, 9, 13, 15, 28–30, 33, 35, 37, 40–49, 51–4, 60–1, 70, 72–4, 77–8, 109–110, 114, 133, 142, 145–9, 151, 153, 156–7, 159, 170, 172, 182, 217–8, 220–2, 229, 239, 245, 258, 262; see also BRC, LRC, Nkuzi, TRAC-MP Nguni 126 Ngwenya, Thomas 147 Nkomazi 93 Nkuzi 35, 46 NLC 35, 44, 218, 220 Northern Cape 35, 132, 172, Ntuli, Driver 165, 239–40 Olifants River 89 openness, policy of 229–30 opportunism 12, 21, 89, 149, 206, 239 ‘Options’ conference 227 origins, shared or divergent 49, 142, 157, 177, 201, 212, 214, 217, 222–3 ownership 130, 156–7, 160–3, 167–9, 171–4, 194–5, 201, 244–5; see also communal ownership; property, private; landholding co-operative 169

278

INDEX

owner-tenant relationships 107–8, 111–123, 207, 255; see also tenants on African-owned farms/land; tenants on Doornkop PAC (Pan Africanist Congress) 72, 149, 206 participatory approach 73–5, 165, 171, partnerships 243–6 passivity 74, 170 past 57, 137, 152, 154, 174, 243, 249 as basis for present actions 137, 171; see also historical entitlement/precedent for land occupation intensification of interest in 88–92, 94 pastoralism 140 paternalism 67, 76, 100, 131, 135, 137, 146, 148, 151, 231–2, 234–5, 238 patronage 202, 205–7, 217–223 patron/client relations 217; see also client-style relationships Pedi 6, 53, 62, 65, 69, 77, 78, 83, 98, 113, 122–3, 125, 130, 209, 211, 262 pensions, state 90, 181, 187–9, 191–2 Pentecostal Holiness Church 63 Phasha, Othniel 73 Phosa, Matthews 126 Piet Retief 132 planning 70–1, 114, 118, 121, 127, 155, 164, 168, 170–1, 179–80, 187, 191, 202 ploughing 64, 84, 88, 138, 193, 195–6, 243, 247 police 86, 89, 96, 132, 134, 136–7, 142, 208 policy 146, 174, 177, 180, 182, 190, 192, 197–8, 216, 258; see also research, influence on policy political connections 87 organisations 86, 149 parties 72, 74, 106–7, 127, 149, 220 see also ANC, DA, Progressive Party/Progressive Federal Party, PAC, AZAPO. agendas, remoulding of 106 patronage, see patronage representation 70–4; see also leadership politics 122, 135, 149–50, 181, 213, 217, 220–2, 223, 239, 245

poor, the 8, 10, 14, 22, 34, 40–1, 76, 100–1, 122, 127, 148, 163–4, 173–4, 178, 186, 198, 200–2, 206, 208, 211–2, 216, 218 221, 259 the black/African 14, 18, 23, 108, 131, 135, 139 empowerment of 101 rural 41, 151, 156, 172, 212, 218, 222, 245 population movement 5, 37, 49, 99, 140, 180, 203–4; see also removals, forced rural 8, 49 post-apartheid 6, 10, 15, 24, 35, 37, 127, 152, 248, 256 civil service and NGOs 80; see also civil servants poverty 5, 11, 21, 23, 31, 59, 106, 109, 111, 115, 144, 150–1, 167, 183, 197, 205, 216, 231–2 power 88, 223 powerful, the 14, 29, 151, 200–1, 208 pragmatism 22, 42, 179 Pretoria 39, 93, 170 Pretorius, Willem 232 privilege 40, 74, 121, 212 Progressive Party, later Progressive Federal Party 54, 72–3 proof/evidence, of land occupancy 22, 80–1, 86–7, 92–6, 99, 102 property; see also rights/property relationship; landholding alienation of 172, 256 as ‘bundle of rights’ 161, 164 clause 111 communal; see landholding, communal; landholding, private/communal hybrid model private 110–111, 120–1, 123, 130, 154–9, 168–174, 194, 248, 256; see also individual assets private, relationship to communal ownership 156–9, 170, 174 /citizenship 13, 31, 109 protest 15, 22, 29–30, 49, 132–9, 149–50, 216–9 provinces 4, 5, 18, 35, 108, 220; see also individual province names public good 13–4, 106, 154, 256 institutions 162 /private relationship 22–3, 154–175

279

INDEX

race 41, 111–113, 127, 203, 212, 225–8, 237–8, 244, 248–9, 252–3, 258 race and territory 37–8, 180; see also racial frontier racial frontier 3, 17–18, 20–1, 229, 232–3, 236–7, 242, 249, 257 racism 40 Landlessness =, Meeting 15, 27–30, 48–9, 218 Ramaube, Miriam and Seth 69, 209, 211 Ramaube, Rebone 64, 187 Ratau, Lekwetsˇe 120, 122 redistribution 3, 7–8, 18, 23, 32–3, 40–1, 49–50, 57, 79, 91, 109–110, 112, 117, 127, 151, 159, 164, 168, 171, 177–9, 183–6, 192–3, 197–9, 208, 212, 214–6, 227–9, 233–6, 239, 243, 262 redress for past wrongs 2, 4–5, 11, 17, 31–2, 109, 127, 225, 243, 245–6, 248–9, 253, 256 relationships, social 21–4, 29, 46, 64–7, 76, 92, 98–9, 102, 110, 127, 131, 134, 162, 181, 200, 223, 231; see also kinship; client-style relationships; paternalism; owner/tenant relationships between generations 60, 64, 181, 191, see also kinship; marriage; removals and ‘golden age’ nostalgia 95, 157 ‘black spot’ 7–8, 12, 28, 35, 53, 64, 69, 83, 108–9, 112, 117, 142, 209, 236 forced 44, 58, 66, 69, 86, 90, 93–4, 99, 144, 157, 161, 203, 209, 217 of white farm occupants; see evictions resistance against or collaboration with 69, 108–9, 122, 142 rent 6, 29, 39, 66, 93–4, 105–8, 112–3, 115–7, 136, 143–4, 169, 174, 188, 191–2, 206 -a-crowd 164, 173, 178, 215, 229 representation, 100, 174, 217, 220 see also political representation research, influence on policy 182 responsibilities 50–1, 127, 154–5, 164, 167–8, 171 restitution 1, 3–5, 7–8, 13, 16, 18, 22, 24, 28, 30, 32, 34, 39, 48–9, 52–3, 57–62, 64, 68, 73–4, 77, 79–81, 85–2, 94, 100–3, 105, 109, 111, 117–9, 122, 127, 130, 139, 145,

147–8, 151, 159, 162, 164, 171, 173, 178–9, 182, 184–7, 192–3, 204–8, 211–2, 217, 227–8, 230, 232–3, 235–7, 243–9, 251, 256, 262, 269; see also claim/claims; legislation and chiefs 205, 207; see also chiefs, on Doornkop Act; see legislation, Restitution Act Commission (also Commission on Restitution of Land Rights) 22, 38, 54, 58, 80–104, 172, 176, 223–4, 229, 243–4 Commissioners, relationship to claimants 92, 101 return, failure to 67–71, 246 right, land as 130, 133, 139, 246 rights 10, 12, 16–7, 23–4, 32, 119, 161–2, 178, 202, 211, 212, 245, 257–8 -based approach 36–7, 57, 102, 185, 217, 256 informal 4, 8–9, 12–5, 22, 33, 39, 41, 46, 48, 79–88, 91–2, 94, 98, 103, 109, 111, 234, 254 legal, establishment of 101, 119 lesser 110, 114 multiple and overlapping 98–9 /property interplay 32–4, 42–8, 60, 103, 110, 120–1, 124, 145, 148, 185, 253 securing of 43–8, 146, 148, 161–2 talk 32, 119 verification of 80–1, 103 waiving of 185 rituals 95, 144, see also Christian rituals; initiation Roman, Roger 226 Roodewal 89, 184, 246 rural people, need to organise 182, 218, 254–5 rural/urban interplay 180–4, 190, 198, 207 Sango village 117 San, Khomani 172 Schirmer, Stefan 81 Sebushane, Martinus 63 segregationist regime, South African 76, 86, 93 Sehlola, Magdalena 68, 74 Sekhukhune, Chief 6, 62, 69, 83 self-interest 193, 231–2, 235, 238, 243

280

INDEX

Seremane, Joe 54, 76, 92, 130 services, payment for 118, 143, 145, 169, 171, 191–2 provision of 76, 167, 191 Setoaba, Naape 72, 124–5 settlers, white 86 shacks 1, 74, 113–4, 117, 121, 173, 206 Siyathuthuka Trust 213–6, 234–5; see also legal entities, Trust Siyabuswa 117 Sizanani 164–8, 171, 238–42; see also legal entities, Trust Smuts, Jan 93 social movements 3, 9, 22, 30, 32, 34, 43, 49, 149, 151–2, 216, 222 socio-economic differentiation, see class, differences in status Sophiatown 59 South African Defence Force (SADF, later SANDF) 112, 114 South African Native Congress(SANC) 142 Seme, Pixley 142 Snaddon, Rob 243 social mobility 107, 222; see also class South African peasantry 107, 157 sovereignty 6, 24, 32–3, 49, 58, 64, 76, 90, 245, 253, 258 Soweto 66 spirit medium rituals 97–8 squatters 6, 8, 17, 30, 39–41, 49, 80–2, 106, 114–8, 121, 124, 127, 171, 212, 233, 235, 257 squatters, on Doornkop 114–8, 121, 185, 210, 212–6, 236 Standdrift 83 state, the 1–2, 7, 10–3, 19–20, 22, 28–31, 33–5, 37, 40–2, 44–5, 47–8, 50–1, 70, 76, 81, 88, 93, 99–100, 103, 106–8, 111–2, 118, 127, 131, 133, 138, 144, 148, 153–5, 161–2, 167–172, 174–6, 183, 197, 200, 202–3, 206–7, 212, 214–5, 217, 221, 226–8, 231, 233–9, 242, 244, 247–8, 252–7, 262, 265–8; see also landholding, customary trusteeship; landholding, on behalf of the poor budgetary weakness 31, 39, 109, 212, 213 /NGO relationship 34–51 /market relationship 177–9, 183–4

/society relationship 27–51 support 154–5, 162, 170, 174 welfare 10, 35, 50–1, 75, 106, 168 Steelpoort River 6, 17, 81, 83–4, 86, 192, 235 Steinberg, Jonny 21, 144, 225 stratification, see class, socio-economic differences struggle; see anti-apartheid struggle surplus people 7, 60–1, 99 Suzman, Helen 54, 72–3 Swazi 6, 89–92, 124–5, 204, 236 Swaziland 89 Tafelkop 66 targeting 179, 184, 197, 245, 252 tenants, labour; see labour tenants on African-owned farms/land 105, 107–112, 116, 144, 207 on Doornkop 105–122, 135, 154, 168–70, 184–5, 209–210, 236 on white farms 94, 134, 184, 233, 249; see also labour tenants, labour tenancy -owner relationships; see owner-tenant relationships Ten Bosch 90, 207–8, 211, 246 tenure reform 3, 7–8, 18–9, 32–3, 37, 41–7, 109, 147, 179, 184, 228, 261 territory/place 11–12, 16, 18, 253 Tigerhoek 82 title 38, 57, 85, 157, 173, 187, 201–2, 257 deeds 82, 141, 149 legal 46, 80, 99 -holders, African 76, 84, 92, 109, 114, 120, 123, 130, 147, 157, 183, 189, 191–2, 209–212, 236 Tlou, Piet 122, 208, 216, 247 Transvaal Land Restoration Committee (TLRC) 61 Tomlinson Commission 180–3, 191, 198 township 190, 235 TRAC/TRAC MP 35, 43–45, 51, 54, 70, 110, 147, 217, 221, 239 tradition 13, 47, 56, 68–70, 76, 79, 88, 94, 101, 156, 171, 202, 210 traditionalism 62, 101; see also modernity vs traditionalism; custom; chiefs transformation 2, 11, 24, 33, 201

281

INDEX

transition 2–3, 11–12, 21, 35, 41, 58, 106, 109, 144, 152, 174, 203, 243, 253, 256 Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU) 226, 230, 236 tribes 33, 89 trust 24, 64, 73–4, 168, 185, 214–6, 231 Trust; see legal entities farms 6, 95 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 24, 247 Tseki, Thabo 173, 186–7 Tshehla, Frans and Refilwe 192 Tubatse 84, 90, 97, 140 Tubatse River 62

violence 20–1, 24, 92, 225, 230–1, 249 volkstaat 113, 123 Vryburg 93

UDF (United Democratic Front) 218, 222 UN, Racism Conference 218 uncertainty 161–3, 190, 249; see also farmers, white, anxiety of unemployment 14, 15, 21, 95 urban; see labour migration bias; see ANC, urban bias, alleged; peri-, land invasions 137, see also Bredell quasi- 143 /rural interplay, see rural/urban interplay

wage labour 14, 52, 66, 95, 118, 139, 142; see also labour migration wages 139, 142, 183–4, 186, 198 Wakkerstroom 18, 90, 108, 110, 132–8, 142, 144, 146, 149, 220–1, 230 Weiner, Daniel 182 welfare 168–9, 171, 177, 242 white left 39–41, 157, 217, 228 whites 115, 144, 167, 173, 198, 215, 228–230, 239, 242, 247, 248, 257; see also farmers, white suspicions of by blacks 165, 242 the place of (makgoweng) 167 White paper 32 ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ approach 3, 226–7, 231, 235; see also marketdriven approach Witbank 66, 93 women 143–4; see also men/women age-groups 65 workshops 29–30, 43–8, 157, 159, 170–1, 214, 230 World Bank 10–1, 32, 50, 56, 157, 168, 187, 227 Wotshela, Luvuyo 203, 207

Vaal River 89 vanguardism 221–2 vigilantism 3, 18–21, 118, 134, 138, 146–7, 210, 221, 230

ZAR (Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek) 62–3 Zimbabwe 2–3, 15, 19–20, 22, 29.30, 49, 132, 165, 206, 218, 223, 225 Zulu 126, 133

282