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THE PROMISE OF LAND

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THE PROMISE OF LAND undoing a century of dispossession in south africa

Edited by Fred Hendricks, Lungisile Ntsebeza and Kirk Helliker

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Published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2013 10 Orange Street Sunnyside Auckland Park 2092 South Africa +2711 628 3200 www.jacana.co.za Š Individual contributors, 2013 All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-4314-0816-0 Also available as an ebook dPDF 978-1-4314-0817-7 ePUB 978-1-4314-0818-4 mobi 978-1-4314-0819-1 Cover design by publicide Cover photograph of Promise Land close to Mothibistad in the Northern Cape by Rejoice Mawela Set in Adobe Garamond 10.5/14pt Job no. 0002013 See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za

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c ontents

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

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Author Profiles

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1 lAnd Questions in south AfricA fred hendricks, lungisile ntsebezA And kirk helliker

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PArt 1: structures And struggles of lAnd in south AfricA 2 rhetoric And reAlity in restitution And redistribution: ongoing lAnd And AgrAriAn Questions in south AfricA fred hendricks

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3 the more things chAnge, the more they remAin the sAme: rurAl lAnd tenure And democrAcy in the former bAntustAns lungisile ntsebezA

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4 reProducing white commerciAl Agriculture kirk helliker

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5 urbAn lAnd Questions in contemPorAry south AfricA: the cAse of cAPe town fred hendricks And richArd Pithouse

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6 south AfricA’s countryside: ProsPects for chAnge from below lungisile ntsebezA

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Contents v

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PArt 2: theory, history And Policy 7 living in A theoreticAl interregnum: cAPitAl lessons from southern AfricAn rurAl history bill mArtin

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8 ProsPects for smAllholder Agriculture in southern AfricA tendAi murisA

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9 globAl food regime: imPlicAtions for food security PrAveen JhA

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PArt 3: internAtionAl cAse studies 10 zimbAbwe’s fAst trAck lAnd reform: imPlicAtions for south AfricA sAm moyo

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11 the “AgrAriAn Question” And the develoPmentAl stAte: indiA’s story of rurAl sociAl trAnsformAtion PrAveen JhA And surinder s JodhkA

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12 diversificAtion strAtegies in the netherlAnds AgriculturAl sector mArJA sPierenburg And hArry wels

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PArt 4: conclusion 13 coloniAl PAsts And democrAtic futures in south AfricA fred hendricks, lungisile ntsebezA And kirk helliker

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index

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ACKNOwLEDgEMENTS

this book is bAsed on A research project funded by the South Africa Netherlands Programme on Alternatives in Development (SANPAD). We are grateful for the support, and we would especially like to thank Anshu Padayachee, SANPAD’s CEO, for her guidance and institutional backing. We also thank Mindy Stanford for copy editing and proofreading the manuscript and Ruth Longridge for editing the references. Maggie Davey at Jacana was always an email or phone call away and we thank her for managing the difficult process of dealing with academic authors. We are grateful to Karen Kouari, the Humanities Faculty Officer at Rhodes University, for taking care of all the logistics for the project with her customary efficiency and good humour. We are indebted to the two reviewers of the manuscript.

We responded to their reports by revising certain sections of the book and in our view, it is better for their efforts and we would like to record our thanks.

Acknowledgements vii

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AuTHOR PROFILES

Kirk Helliker has a PhD in Sociology from Rhodes University. He is currently the Head of Department of Sociology at Rhodes and his research interests include: Agrarian reform, civil theory, theories of emancipation, and Zimbabwe.

Fred Hendricks obtained his PhD in Sociology from Uppsala University, Sweden. He is currently the Dean of Humanities at Rhodes University and his research interests include: Land and Agrarian Questions and Pensions and Development.

Praveen Jha, PhD in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India, is currently Professor of Economics with the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, as well as Chairperson of the Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies at JNU. His major areas of research and teaching include: Development Economics, Labour Economics, Agricultural Economics, Natural Resource Economics, Economics of Education, History of Economic Thought and Public Finance.

Surinder Jodhka is Professor of Sociology at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He holds a PhD from Punjabi University and he is currently working on patterns of inequality and their reproduction.

Bill Martin, PhD Binghamton University and Chair, Sociology Department, Binghamton University. Research interests include South Africa and the World Economy, Race State and Nation, and Social Movements.

Author Profiles ix

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Sam Moyo is Executive Director of the African Institute for Agrarian Studies (AIAS). He holds a PhD in Development Studies and Environmental Management from Newcastle, England. His major publications explore the political economy and dynamics of rural transformations, including the nature of social movements and land reform.

Tendai Murisa holds a PhD from Rhodes University and is currently working as a Programme Specialist at the Dakar-based TrustAfrica. His research interests include agrarian and land reform, rural institutions and social organisations, collective action and civil society.

Lungisile Ntsebeza has a PhD from Rhodes University. He is currently the Director and Holder of the AC Jordan Chair in African Studies and the NRF Research Chair in Land Reform and Democracy in South Africa at the Centre for African Studies. His research interests include the role of traditional authorities in democracy.

Richard Pithouse teaches Politics at Rhodes University. He is currently completing a PhD on Social Movements in South Africa and his research interests include: urban studies, Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko.

Marja Spierenburg obtained her PhD degree in Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam in 2003. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Organization Sciences at the VU University Amsterdam, and Scientific Director of the CERES Research School for Resource Studies for Development. Her research focuses on the role of the private sector in nature conservation and land reforms in southern Africa.

Harry Wels (PhD, VU University Amsterdam) is Director of the Research Masters in African Studies at the African Studies Centre in Leiden, the Netherlands, and is Associate Professor at the Department of Organization Sciences at VU University Amsterdam. His research interests focus on organisational structures of cooperation in (private) wildlife conservation in southern Africa.

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L and Q uestions

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s outh a frica

chapter 1

LAND QuESTIONS IN SOuTH AFRICA Fred Hendricks, Lungisile Ntsebeza and Kirk Helliker

“As a nation, we neglect land reform at our peril” – George Devenish, Business Day, 21 January 2013

A century After the 1913 nAtives’ l And Act, there remains a land crisis in South Africa. How are we to understand the many dimensions of this crisis so that we can realistically move beyond the current inertia? For one thing, an engaged scholarship has to seek ways out of the current impasse in both thinking and policy-making. This book is an effort to heed the timely call of George Devenish (who was involved in drafting South Africa’s 1993 Interim Constitution) not to neglect this question. It does this by spatially carving South Africa’s land into three categories: white commercial rural areas, former reserves and urban areas. Besides state and church land, this covers the overwhelming mass of the land surface of the country. While there are clearly discernible dynamics associated with each of the three land types, as will become clear in the individual chapters, there are also broader landrelated problems that affect the country as a whole.

The approach is to highlight pertinent questions within each of the three categories and then to relate these particularities to broader problems associated with historical circumstances. Essentially, the book argues that in South Africa the 1994 transition from apartheid to democracy has not translated into a thoroughgoing process of decolonisation. In fact the very bases of colonialism and apartheid remain intact, since racialised inequalities in both access to and ownership of land persist in the present.

With state-driven attempts at land reform having failed to meet even their own modest targets, a fundamental change in approach is clearly necessary Land Questions in South Africa 1

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for South Africa to move beyond the impasse that prevails between the objectives of the policy and the means for realising these. Moreover, it is necessary to question the targets set for land redistribution: will these really assist in ushering in a changed dispensation for the majority? Even if the state’s current land policy were to be implemented in full, the question remains as to whether this would satisfy calls for greater equality in access to land. As such, a major thrust of this book is that social movements have a critical role to play in charting a new course, both in respect of access to land and in influencing broader policy options. The growing agency being expressed in renewed demands for land, and the increasing legitimacy being given to such demands from all quarters including the state, suggests that something is afoot that needs to be watched and analysed. In sum, the book argues for fundamental changes in policy along with an appreciation of the possibility that further struggles from below, in the vein of those that have surfaced very recently in the Western Cape, are likely to emerge in the new circumstances. Conceptually, the book grapples with the interplay between the oppositional campaigns of various social movements and the state’s policies and responses.

There are differing understandings of the processes that do, or may, animate meaningful land and agrarian change in South Africa and elsewhere.

The dominant understanding, both academically and politically, tends to have a marked state-centric thrust, envisioning the state as the critical axis for genuine agrarian transformation and directing all political efforts in this direction based on a “politics of the demand”. This fixation with the state leads to an infatuation with agrarian and land policies and programmes and to endless discussions and debates about the best policy mix. Land discussions in South Africa are a current manifestation of this. While the state certainly is a centralised locus of power in all modern societies, and invariably is of significance for agrarian change with respect to relevant policies and programmes, the global history of radical agrarian and land relations restructuring highlights the crucial importance of society-centred change and of social movements more specifically. In this sense, the recent example of Zimbabwe simply fits into the broad historical mould.

This brings us to the first real importance of social movements. The global historical lesson arises from the fact that states in large part exercise “powerover” society and exist primarily as a source of stability rather than change.

For states to bring about authentic restructuring, significant forms of pressure need to be placed upon them. The role of social movements, as a form of 2 The Promise of Land

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“power-to” (or power for) change rather than “power-over”, is fundamental in this respect.

While social movements clearly engage with the state and hence involve themselves in a politics of demand, they also pursue a “politics of the act” often independently from the state. This entails mobilising and organising for the purpose of building alternative forms of production, livelihoods and social relations in the here-and-now. This more autonomous form of socialmovement politics is regularly viewed with suspicion by states, but, and this is the second importance of such movements, it may pre-figure the type of democratic post-transformation society that these movements envisage (such as a society based on the food sovereignty model). This form of politics needs to be encouraged.

A third reason for highlighting social movements arises from contemporary social imaginings of the South African nation. Regularly, those who experience socio-economic marginalisation and exclusion (such as urban shack dwellers) remain politically disqualified despite their formal status as citizens. Often they have no authority to speak publically and, if they do speak, their concerns are simply listened to and then ignored, or are drowned out by holders of power, and hence are not heard in any meaningful sense.

For this reason, it is critical that spaces for the voices of social movements to be heard are pried open and that these voices are privileged in the discourses around land and agrarian change. Their experiences, forms of knowledge and reasonings are fundamental to agrarian change in South Africa.

In this context, in what follows we detail contemporary land and agrarian questions pertaining to urban areas, the former bantustans and white commercial farms.

URBAN LAND QUESTIONS The land question in South Africa is as much an urban affair as it is a rural issue. It is often assumed that land and rural or agrarian issues are synonymous. This book questions this assumption by providing an account of the linkages between towns and the countryside and by demonstrating how important land issues are in South Africa’s urban environments. While there are many ways in which the rural and the urban intersect, it is the migrant labour system and the search for durable livelihoods that lie at the heart of this connection.

Segregation and apartheid sought to drive a wedge between the processes of urbanisation and proletarianisation by constraining the movement to Land Questions in South Africa 3

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town of Africans through pass laws and influx control and simultaneously separating the mass of the people from an independent means of subsistence.

Dispossession of land was central to the latter process. In fact the notorious 1913 Natives’ Land Act demarcated only about 7 per cent of the land surface for African reserves. Thus, while the process of proletarianisation or the conversion of independent producers to wage labourers unfolded incrementally, a battery of legislative barriers were placed in the way of African urbanisation. Despite these oppressive constraints, African permanence in the cities has a long history. Similarly, the process of proletarianisation was itself problematic. It was mediated by the migrant labour system and gave rise to levels and types of employment that were invariably precarious.

Urbanisation as well as proletarianisation therefore have to be understood within the context of these specific circumstances and with sensitivity to the many complexities involved when people respond in whatever way possible to the inadequate provision of housing in the cities and to the need for adequate livelihoods. Territorial segregation and the migrant labour system have imposed a particular race-determined form on the processes of urbanisation and proletarianisation in South Africa. The abiding impact of this racism is that the urban and rural remain integrally connected with each other.

The book seeks to demonstrate the significance of the land question in urban areas as an explication of the dynamics of struggle over physical spaces by some people who structurally no longer have access to an independent means of subsistence but are not in formal wage labour. People in this category generally reside in slums, euphemistically referred to as “informal settlements�, and eke out an existence through a variety of survival strategies.

Their struggles are not contained by the discipline of urban labour, and the response of the state to their existence has ranged from denial to open hostility and repression. Their plight is real and we need to provide a theoretical account for the experiences of these masses of people. It is clear that this group of people forms part of a surplus working population, or an industrial reserve army of labour, yet the sheer scale of unemployment suggests that in South Africa something more profound is currently afoot. In any case shacks are not the exclusive domain of the unemployed or partially employed. They also accommodate active workers who for many different reasons do not have access to state-provided housing.

Just like the generalised impasse that exists for land reform in the rural areas, the official response by contemporary authorities to the urban demand for housing has been one of inertia, neglect or intimidation. Since people 4 The Promise of Land

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have been left to fend for themselves, shack settlements have mushroomed all over the country and the question of how to deal with this unplanned urbanisation is a major issue for local governments. However, it is not that the state has done nothing at all: since 1994 many houses have in fact been built throughout the country, but the backlog nonetheless keeps growing. In the face of this indisputable housing shortage, it is particularly problematic that the state tends to assume that people’s self-built homes will somehow vanish and give way to formal housing development schemes.

South African historiography, in concert with analyses elsewhere, has been content to deal in the binaries of peasant and proletarian without accommodating the very many people who reside outside of this broad framework. It is essential to a fuller understanding of our current realities that we conceptualise the spaces and places occupied by the masses of people who exist on the margins of our society. While it is clear that they are marginalised in that their existence is precarious and in that they do not have a sense of permanence as either proletarians or peasants, we cannot reliably conceive of them as existing somehow outside the capitalist system. Instead, they are very much a part of it. The marginal poor in the cities as well as the destitute of the rural areas fall squarely under the overwhelming dominance of the capitalist system. Homelessness in the urban areas mirrors the landlessness of the rural areas and it is vitally important to capture the dynamic of both in their interrelationships. In response to their homelessness, people have set up home for themselves, almost invariably in shacks on municipal land in the cities and peri-urban areas.

Virtually every South African city has a growing population living in shacks and there has recently been a spate of urban land occupations in the country.

Over time the official response to people’s demand for land has varied, from the naked repression of forced removals under apartheid to various forms of so-called “orderly urbanisation”, in other words eviction of homeless people from shacks and other dwellings that they have constructed. In Cape Town, for example, the establishment of the Anti-Land Invasion Unit gives us a glimpse of the difficulties that arise in the absence of a coherent policy or plan for housing the poor. While it is a moot point whether the activities of this unit could be likened to the viciousness of apartheid influx control, on the face of it the recent removals and evictions bear some striking resemblances.

It is therefore important to examine, as this book does, the current housing crisis in Cape Town as a variation on the theme of the national housing crisis and as an example of land struggles in an urban setting.

Land Questions in South Africa 5

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After a protracted struggle in the early 1970s, resistance to forced removal in Cape Town eventually paid dividends when apartheid officialdom grudgingly accepted the permanent settlement of the shack dwellers of Crossroads. The establishment by the state of a “transit camp” (squatter camp) in the mid-1970s was a tacit acceptance that Crossroads and its residents were there to stay. Despite the eventual acceptance of black people’s right to live in the city, the state made no effort to provide housing for black people in Cape Town until 1985 with the establishment of Khayelitsha, and even then what was provided fell far short of the need. These decades of denial and neglect have resulted in the huge housing backlogs we see today and the explosion of squatter settlements across the city.

In response Cape Town’s local government in 2008 established the revealingly named Anti-Land Invasion Unit. Its major task is to prevent or remove unauthorised newly erected housing structures on city or provincial land. The grim reality of forcibly removing people who have constructed some form of shelter for themselves lies awkwardly next to the posh development plans for the housing of city council officials. The City of Cape Town does not have its own policy on land invasions. To evict people or control unlawful settlement on municipal property it relies on national legislation, especially the Prevention of Illegal Eviction from and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act (Act No 19 of 1998), the so-called PIE Act. In many ways the recent forced removals represent continuities with the apartheid past, rather than a rupture in the democratic transition. As mentioned earlier, the implied assumption of the current policy is that the homes of shack dwellers will eventually give way to formal housing, however very few practical plans for realising this have been put in place.

The Anti-Land Invasion Unit is aligned with some of the strategic themes for the City of Cape Town, especially in relation to the provision of sustainable urban infrastructure and services and with respect to human settlements.

Since the city did not have a complete database of all the informal settlements in its environs it was impossible to plan effectively. A survey, with all its flaws and difficulties in a fluid situation, was conducted in 2005 and found that there are 223 informal settlements. According to this survey there are about 450 000 people, or about a quarter of Cape Town’s population, living in these shacks (Hayward 2012). From the point of view of urban planning the steady in-migration of people, almost invariably from the Eastern Cape, has led to an untenable situation. With almost half a million people already living in shacks and more arriving every day, and with about 400 000 6 The Promise of Land

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people on the various waiting lists for houses, the situation is explosive and the city does not have adequate housing plans to address it. Cape Town is not unique in this respect as it is simply a microcosm of the larger problem.

While the democratic government has made some inroads into the housing backlog, much, much more needs to be done to avert the crisis. Put bluntly, the government’s building programme is very far from keeping pace with the ever-growing demand for urban housing. In this respect a comment by Engels (1887) is apt: What is meant today by housing shortage is the peculiar intensification of the bad housing conditions of the workers as the result of the sudden rush of population to the big towns; a colossal increase in rents, a still further aggravation of overcrowding in the individual houses, and, for some, the impossibility of finding a place to live in at all.

In Cape Town there have been some attempts to provide services such as water, toilets and refuse removal, but overall the plans for dealing with the housing situation are woefully inadequate, and it appears that the reality of shacks and shanty towns will be with us for many years to come. The response of the Anti-Land Invasion Unit has been simply to remove people who have illegally constructed homes on municipal land. The situation is complicated by various racialised claims over land. This is exemplified in the case of the land invasion at Delft on the outskirts of Cape Town. Unlike the infamous Bredell invasion in Gauteng in 2001 where people were duped into “buying” vacant plots from bogus owners, in 2007 in the Cape Flats area of Delft, about 1 700 people were encouraged by Cape Town City councillor, Frank Martin, to invade a local housing development.

In many ways the conundrum in Delft and the racialised problems in the city represent older societal configurations, as epitomised in an incident witnessed by Fred Hendricks some years earlier at the Hartleyvale Stadium in Cape Town. The setting was a soccer match between the Cape Town Spurs and the Johannesburg-based Kaizer Chiefs. Support for the two teams was entirely racialised with coloureds behind Spurs and Africans supporting Chiefs. In the inevitable oppositional scuffle, one clearly inebriated coloured supporter of Spurs turned to his African counterpart supporting Kaizer Chiefs and barked, “Wie se Kaap is die?” (Whose Cape is this?). It was a poignant moment, full of the drama of racial tension. There was no comeback to the challenge because of the very basic assumption of the legitimacy of indigeneity Land Questions in South Africa 7

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and the construction of otherness. Assumptions such as this are constant reminders of the abiding connection between the national question and the land question. After centuries of separation and differential treatment, the difficulties of imagining a unitary South African nation are aggravated by the ever-increasing layers of competing claims over land.

In concrete terms we cannot talk about the inequalities in land without talking about race. In many ways race remains the fault-line of South Africa’s democratic order and we ignore it at our peril. While there is clearly a need for us to transcend this obsession if we are to achieve an anti-racist and eventually non-racist future, we have a major conundrum on our hands. How in our analyses are we to take into account the implications of apartheid without reference to race? When coloured residents of the Western Cape assert ownership and legitimacy on the basis of notions of indigenous claims over the land, it raises a host of questions about the South African nation and about the regional and racial dividends of apartheid, which a counter culture has not fully addressed.

In so far as blackness still coincides with poverty, it is constructed as an enduring identity of landlessness and dispossession in contrast to an identity of property and wealth held by whites. This racialised nature of South African identities remains an abiding problem in our attempts to construct a unitary notion of the nation. What’s more, the differential land ownership and access patterns merely confirm that the divisions of the past are still very much with us. While constitutionally the state does not recognise ethnicity – the constitution is prefaced by the slogan, “One Law for One Nation” – there remains a large gulf between the paper reality of “the South African nation” and the very many cleavages and conflicts associated with notions of belonging. There is little doubt that racialised land inequality contributes in no small measure to these enduring divisions and that land reform is therefore imperative for the survival of democracy in this country.

The problems of housing and land in Cape Town are connected directly to the crisis of livelihoods in the former reserves of the Eastern Cape, in the same way as the overall linkages between the bantustans and the towns mark an enduring narrative of territorial segregation in South Africa. Despite a new nine-province geographic dispensation, the former reserves persist in all but name, through both a distinctive form of land tenure and a different type of local government. Understanding these linkages is vital in any attempt to address the overall problems of land and underdevelopment in the country.

Therefore, the following section deals with the role of the former reserves.

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LAND QUESTIONS OF THE FORMER RESERVES Central to any strategy for sustainable rural development in South Africa must be a clear conception of the future of the former bantustans,1 in particular those rural areas that fall under the jurisdiction of chiefs of various sorts, captured in the all-encompassing term “traditional authorities/leaders”. The bantustans were the bedrock upon which the colonial and apartheid strategies of divide and rule rested. They were established for African occupation following massive and often violent eviction and dispossession of indigenous people from the areas claimed for whites only. In the Cape Colony, there were initial attempts within the areas allocated to Africans to promote a small group of African farmers and peasants (Bundy 1988). However, following the discovery of minerals and gold, in particular in the latter part of the nineteenth century, these areas were gradually reduced to being sources of cheap labour for the development of capitalism. Compared to the massive state subsidisation of white-dominated commercial agriculture, very little was invested in the development of agriculture in the bantustans. In fact, active steps were taken to discourage the rise of the class of black farmers that had been emerging in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century bantustans served largely as labour reserves, thus creating the conditions for proletarianisation of the indigenous people. It is against this backdrop that the future of these former “labour reserves” should be considered.

With the conversion for many indigenous people from a land-based livelihood to one of wage earning, so too the focus among liberal and radical scholars in South Africa shifted from rural to urban concerns. Both liberals and radicals took as their departure point the modernisation paradigm, which foresees a tendency towards urbanisation resulting from the collapse of rural social relations and the diminishing role of land in the lives of rural residents (see Wolpe 1972, Bundy 1988, Mafeje 1988). Radical scholars such as Hendricks (1990) who focused on rural areas saw in rural residents in the former bantustans a “displaced proletariat”, while paying scant attention to the role of land in the livelihoods thereof. In the debates of the 1970s and 1980s the radical scholars were so influential that they overshadowed earlier writings by liberation movement intellectuals, such as Govan Mbeki

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The original term that was used during the colonial period up to the advent of apartheid in 1948 was “reserves”. During the apartheid era the name changed to “bantustans” and later “homelands”. Four of the nine former bantustans were granted “independence” by the apartheid regime.

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(1984) and IB Tabata (1974), about conditions in the countryside from the perspective of the most appropriate political programme to follow. From the perspective of these radical scholars, land in its role as a livelihood strategy – going back even as far as the 1920s when the productive capacity of the reserve areas declined – was considered as having diminished in importance.

In their view the focus of both economic and political activity shifted almost entirely to urban areas (see Walker 2008).

Debates about the role or importance of land are not peculiar to South Africa. Scholars across the globe have argued that more and more rural poor people are diversifying their means of livelihood, to the extent that in many countries land-based income-generating activities (mainly agriculture) now contribute only a minor proportion of the income of rural households: a phenomenon that has been referred to as “de-agrarianisation” (Bryceson 1999) and sometimes “depeasantisation” (Bryceson 2002).

While these discussions fall within a larger global thesis of modernisation, industrialisation, urbanisation and proletarianisation, it is high time that we scrutinised their applicability to regions and countries (including South Africa) that fall outside of the Euro-American context. Although still in its initial stages, the work done under the auspices of the National Research Foundation Research Chair in Land Reform and Democracy in South Africa at the University of Cape Town is casting doubt on the utility of an uncritical adherence to the modernisation school of thought. It shows that, in the context of South Africa, notions of peasantry and proletarianisation are not clear-cut. For example, Nkululeko Mabandla (2012) in his awardwinning Masters thesis on the black middle class in Ncambedlana, which is in Mthatha in the Eastern Cape, demonstrates that the success of this group came partly from their ability to combine the meagre income they received as government clerks or teachers with land ownership. Indeed, the ability to combine income with productive use of land is the proverbial red thread that runs through the thesis.

In a similar vein, Ncapayi’s doctoral research, which was awarded in 2013, shows the continued significance of land in the lives of the descendants of quitrent holders in Luphaphasi who were granted land towards the end of the nineteenth century (see Ntsebeza 2006). The descendants, though, were not immune to the rise of capitalism and the growing importance of the cash economy. They would spend their youthful lives in urban areas as migrant workers. But they would then return home to the reserves and take over from and/or assist their parents and embark on a land-based lifestyle. It 10 The Promise of Land

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is by and large this group that reacted militantly against the introduction of conservation measures. They invest(ed) their income in farming equipment and livestock in preparation for their retirement in the countryside, something that might explain the rise of the mansions one sees in the countryside of the former bantustans. For these landholders, land mattered: it was an important, although not the only source of livelihood. In many ways, land still matters for this group.

Ncapayi’s research raises doubts about popular claims that black people are no longer interested in making a living out of land. In his view such claims are based on superficial observations that claim that most land in the former bantustans is lying fallow. What Ncapayi’s research brings to the fore is that these rural areas are experiencing changes in land use from crop production to raising livestock. The overall amount of grazing land has shrunk because large portions have been converted to residential use. This in turn has meant that livestock have encroached on areas that were formerly used for crops.

In addition, the fact that the state has failed to fence off grazing land, and landholders themselves (for a range of reasons) have been unable to fence their fields, has led to a situation where arable fields have become grazing land. Research on livestock in the Eastern Cape conducted in 2000 showed that livestock numbers had not declined significantly since they were first recorded in 1906 despite the fact that the extent of land for grazing had diminished.

Viewed from this perspective, the problem in these former bantustan areas can be understood simply as a shortage of land, rather than non-use or underutilisation thereof. This is the context within which an argument could be made for a radical land redistribution programme that would facilitate the agrarian transformation of the countryside, including the rural areas of the former bantustans.

How should scholars characterise the group of residents that combines income, occupation and land utilisation? Terms such as “peasant” and “proletariat” seem inadequate. These terms derive from a European context where peasants were robbed of ownership of the means of production, including land, and left with one commodity (their labour) to use in order to survive; thus becoming a proletariat. While these concepts may apply to a significant number of South Africans, they are misleading when applied to residents of the former reserves.

The rural areas of the former bantustans remain home not only to the landholders, but also to a number of residents who are unemployed and Land Questions in South Africa 11

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do not have access to land. The notion that the scrapping of influx control regulations would result in massive permanent migration to urban areas is not borne out by the conditions on the ground. According to the Statistics South Africa 1997 rural survey, about 12.7 million people (31.4 per cent) lived in the rural areas of the former bantustans (StatsSA 1999). While the repeal of the influx control laws increased migration to urban areas, evidence shows that ties with the rural have not been entirely severed (Ncapayi, 2013).

This applies even to those who had residence rights in urban areas during the apartheid period and thus could stay with their families. They too have continued to maintain ties with relatives in the former reserves.

An explanation for the continued maintenance of ties with rural areas could be that our democracy inherited an economy that could not, even at its best performance, absorb all of its potential labour force. In conditions of unemployment, lack of proper housing, as well as the cash demands of urban life, rural areas provide home and security to the poor through various forms of social networks. For the middle class, the countryside seems to provide therapy for the stressful urban life, hence their investment in housing in rural areas (see the Netherlands experience in Chapter 12 in this volume).

Thus, important as it is for the state to continue exploring ways in which jobs can be created,2 mainly in the urban sectors, it is equally important to consider land-based livelihoods. This could be achieved by identifying rural residents who have a continued interest in land and providing them with livelihood opportunities. Pronouncements by the Zuma administration since the ANC’s 2007 conference in Polokwane have identified rural development as one of government’s five top priorities. Coupled with the commitment to land redistribution this opens up opportunities for those interested in making a living out of land, including farm workers and dwellers. Missing, though, is a programme of action on the part of the ANC-dominated government.

No discussion of the former bantustans would be complete without reference to the institution of traditional leadership. Traditional authorities became an extended arm of the apartheid state, in particular in the broader scheme of indirect rule of the homelands. Part of the legacy of colonialism and apartheid is that most land in the rural areas of the former bantustans is owned by the state and the Development Trust that was set up in terms of the Natives Trust and Land Act of 1936. This was despite the fact that the 2

See the 2012 National Development Plan (National Planning Commission 2012).

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residents had occupied the land for centuries and were the de facto owners of the land. In terms of administration and management, residents were by and large excluded in favour of apartheid-created Tribal Authorities made up of chiefs of various ranks who were upwardly accountable to their apartheid masters.

With the advent of democracy in 1994, the ANC-led Government of National Unity appeared to be taking active steps towards redressing the legacy of apartheid through its land reform programme. Therefore section 25(6) of the South African Constitution of 1996 prescribes that a person or community with insecure tenure arising from racial domination is entitled to secure tenure or compensation. There were also attempts to extend democracy to rural areas under the authority of chiefs through establishing municipalities made up of elected councillors in the whole of South Africa, including in rural areas under chiefs where municipalities did not exist. The 1998 White Paper on Local Government defined post-1994 local government as developmental, and involving integrated developmental planning that is meant to improve the standard of living and quality of life of previously disadvantaged communities. Additionally, developmental local government requires the active participation of citizens in developmental initiatives in their areas.

A commitment to implementing these policies and laws would indeed mark an important rupture from the apartheid past. However, despite the collaborative role of chiefs under apartheid, the new South African constitution not only recognised the institution of traditional leadership, but also failed to offer any clarity about the role of chiefs in a democratic dispensation. As will be seen in Chapter 3 by Lungisile Ntsebeza, the promised democratic and developmental project is gradually being compromised by the increased powers (administrative, developmental and judicial) that are being given to unelected and unaccountable chiefs through two crucial pieces of legislation: the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Act of 2003 and the current Traditional Courts Bill. A third piece of similarly compromising legislation, the Communal Land Rights Act, was declared null and void in its entirety by the Constitutional Court in 2010. All three pieces of legislation are contentious, and clearly demonstrate continuities rather than a rupture with the apartheid past, especially in so far as the land question is concerned.

The former bantustans remain an abiding reality, contrasting sharply with the market-driven and still predominantly white-owned commercial areas to which we now turn our attention.

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LAND QUESTIONS IN COMMERCIAL AGRICULTURE Questions pertaining to commercial agriculture, specifically white commercial agriculture, continue to dominate the South African rural landscape.

Historically, white farmers were a crucial support base for both segregation and apartheid policies, including being defenders of the bantustans and the migrant labour system for purposes of ensuring a cheap labour supply. Their farms were effectively private spaces in which they constructed their own industrial relations based on a combination of paternalism and repression.

With the end of apartheid has come both a quest for historical redress through for instance land redistribution as well as an intensified process of neo-liberalisation resulting in a number of challenges for this group of agricultural landowners. Nonetheless, nearly 20 years after the end of apartheid, the white commercial farming sector remains for the most part intact. We now look at some of the current features of and influences on this sector.

Increasingly the sector as a whole has become integrated into the global economy of agriculture, both in terms of imports and exports. This entails a marked subordination to an international agro-industrial complex and to global “farm-to-fork� food commodity chains. These chains are dominated by a limited number of major corporations in relation to inputs such as seeds and fertilisers and outputs (through retail giants). Global integration is in many ways part of the outward-looking macro-economic strategy of the South African state.

This macro strategy has a pronounced neo-liberal trajectory, such that it becomes difficult to see South Africa as a developmental state in relation to agriculture: this is so despite pronouncements to the contrary by state officials.

Neo-liberal restructuring in commercial agriculture has involved less direct intervention (and thus less protection) by the state, for example through the undermining of state commodity boards. Simultaneously it has provided the broad conditions and framework for facilitating global integration. The impact on white agriculture has varied, with some sub-sectors blossoming and others finding the going more difficult given the more competitive and less protected environment.

In the light of the neo-liberal approach white farmers remain unthreatened by expropriation or confiscation of land by the state. A pronouncedly market-led land redistribution programme remains in effect, although at times it seems open to review by the state. This is in contrast to Zimbabwe where, in 2000, 20 years after that country’s independence, a significant 14 The Promise of Land

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radicalisation of the state occurred. The result was a more supportive and meaningful response by the state to the nationwide land occupation movement that emerged in that year. No such land movement exists in South Africa, although the likelihood of at least sporadic occupations does seem possible and, as the Zimbabwean case shows, such occurrences are often unpredictable.

While the overall power of white agrarian capital seems unchallenged, the recent strikes in the Western Cape have certainly disturbed the paternalism of the past. Despite the fact there are ongoing public spats between state leaders and commercial agricultural associations over a multiplicity of issues, a solid working relationship between state apparatuses and these associations exists, as is reflected in lobbying and consultation processes. In this respect, there seems to be a common (state-capital) understanding of the significance of economic growth per se in bringing about socio-economic development.

Certainly, white farmers have convinced the state, if it needed any convincing in the first place, that commercial agriculture is central to economic stability and that any major disruption to the sector will undermine the investor confidence for which the state so readily calls.

Historically, the commercial agricultural sector has been an extreme low-wage sector with workers living, normally on the farms themselves, in conditions of grinding poverty. In this regard the working and living conditions of workers have not changed dramatically since the end of apartheid and there are clear processes of casualisation of the agricultural workforce currently taking place. Importantly, relative to other lines of operational agricultural expenditure, the cost of labour on commercial farms has decreased consistently over recent years. Despite this, farmers insist that any significant increase in labour costs will undercut the economic viability of the commercial agricultural sector and that this will have negative knock-on effects for the entire agro-industrial complex and ultimately for farm workers themselves in terms of declining employment prospects.

As a move that seems contrary to neo-liberalism, the South African state has sought to incorporate farm workers into the country’s national labour legislation and this has provided workers with levels of protection that did not exist previously. At the same time, on-the-ground realities – notably power imbalances between farm management and workers – often minimise this protection. This is particularly the case because farm workers are largely unorganised (with the trade union movement having only a limited presence in agriculture). This absence of organisation affects the day-to-day relations Land Questions in South Africa 15

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of workers with farmers and it means that the capacity of farm workers to influence the state, especially in the face of powerful farmers’ associations, remains embryonic. These workers appear to be at the mercy of both capital and the state.

The prospect for any radical restructuring of the South African countryside, notably the undercutting of the dominance of white commercial agriculture, does not seem likely in the foreseeable future. Recent events on farms in the Western Cape, in late 2012 and early 2013, exemplify this.

Considerable research has been undertaken on farms in the Western Cape (Mather & Greenberg 2003, Kritzinger et al. 2004), notably in relation to fruit and wine farms. While having their own local specificities (including in many cases off-farm accommodation of workers in nearby towns), these farms exemplify the power relations between farmer and worker that exist throughout South Africa – for instance the persistence of apartheid-style industrial relations and the socio-economic conditions of workers.

In August 2012 isolated strikes began on farms in the Western Cape which gathered steam in early November. The strikes started in De Doorns, 140 kilometres east of Cape Town, and engulfed the important grape-growing Hex River Valley. Highways were blockaded, vineyards and farm structures were torched, ugly confrontations took place between the striking farmers and police, hundreds of workers were arrested or detained, and at least two workers were killed. Early on, workers demanded a substantial increase in the national minimum wage for agricultural labourers, from R69 to R150 per day. In this respect, a farm worker labouring on a fruit farm in Robertson was quoted as saying in January 2013: “Our living conditions and wages are terrible. We decided to stand up as for many years we have struggled to get by. We can’t wait for the government to make its decisions as our children are suffering.”

Like elsewhere in the country, farm workers in the Western Cape tend to be unorganised and the recent strike was largely self-organised or “organic”.

In this regard, Petrus Brink (from the rural development non-government organisation Surplus People Project) indicated: “If anything, the initial strikes were reminiscent of the first Marikana miners’ strike [earlier in 2012], in the sense that they were a product of workers being gatvol [fed up] of employers, political parties and the major labour unions” (Mail & Guardian, 16 November 2012). Certainly the agricultural affiliate (the Food and Allied Workers’ Union) of the major trade union federation the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) had only a limited presence on the farms.

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Nonetheless COSATU persistently claimed to speak on behalf of the striking workers, including making calls to end the strike. Independent farm workers’ unions such as Sikhula Sonke exist (White 2010) and these, along with a few non-government organisations, played a significant role in trying to coordinate worker action, which led to the formation of a farm workers’ coalition. Besides focusing on wages, Sikhula Sonke (with about 5 000 members) called for wide-ranging changes to labour conditions on farms including an end to the “externalisation” of the labour force through banning labour broking, something that the state had constantly refused to do.

The Department of Labour promised to immediately review the sectoral determination (for the minimum national wage) for agricultural workers, which had been set for reconsideration. It arranged for public hearings in this regard, although such hearings are rarely attended by farm workers because of the alienating environment. At the same time, on-and-off local negotiations between farmers and farm workers took place from November 2012 to January 2013. Agriculture Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson said that these farm-to-farm pay talks were a stop-gap measure to restore peace and order prior to the sectoral determination review, but many farm workers claimed that farmers were negotiating in bad faith. In addition, acrimonious talks were held at national level between, notably, COSATU and the main commercial farmers association – AgriSA. There was sporadic strike activity until January 2013 in and around the epicentre of the strike activity.

The farmers’ associations condemned outright the strike activity, often claiming that a mysterious “third force” was involved in agitating the workers. Thus the AgriSA Labour Committee chairperson Anton Rabe (The Citizen, 16 November 2012) said: “Lawlessness and criminal activities cannot be tolerated and the culprits must be held accountable via normal prosecution processes.” More importantly, the associations claimed that any significant increase in wages would not simply eat into profits but also undermine commercial agricultural ventures. Thus they spoke about some farmers venturing into less labour-intensive agricultural activities like nut farming or cattle ranching, or moving to other countries in Africa where there were, from their perspective, more favourable labour conditions. Unsurprisingly, these thoughts were echoed by the national deputy minister for Agriculture, Pieter Mulder (The Citizen, 21 November 2012), who argued: “With the increasing prices in electricity, water and fuel, farmers cannot afford the sudden increase in labour costs.” Mulder went on to say that farmers would remain with two choices: bankruptcy or staff cuts. Eventually, in February Land Questions in South Africa 17

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2013, the Department of Labour announced an increase in the minimum wage for farm workers to R127.96 a month, starting in March 2013.

The full story of the farm worker strike in the Western Cape, which is an unusual event in contemporary South Africa, is still to be told and there continues to be considerable confusion about the events that transpired.

But one point is clear: farm workers, as an unorganised sector of the labour force, are in a weak position to bargain with property owners on a day-today basis. Only when struggles move beyond the farm level are they able to meaningfully confront the power of farmers and capture the attention of the state. Although the increase in wages is of great significance and improves, even if only minimally, the socio-economic conditions of farm workers, the end result does not lead to any restructuring of industrial relations on farms and the power of the farmer relative to the farm worker remains intact.

Perhaps more importantly, the strike – explicitly as a labour question – did not directly challenge the land question or the absence of land redistribution in the South African countryside. This is critical because farm workers are landless and land redistribution would presumably have implications for their rural livelihoods, as addressed in the conclusion to this book.

OUTLINE OF THE BOOK The focus of the book is undoubtedly South Africa but there is an overarching recognition that the country does not exist in a vacuum. Instead it is inserted into a complex regional and global structure of social relationships of dominance and subordination. Prospects for resolving South Africa’s land and agrarian questions in order to facilitate rural development have to be understood within this broad context. As such Part 2 covers the theory, history and policy context and Part 3 is a comparative section that looks at land questions in Zimbabwe, India and the Netherlands.

The book commences with a concentrated examination of various dimensions of the land problem in South Africa. There are five chapters in this initial section. In the first instance Fred Hendricks (Chapter 2) provides a critical review of the post-1994 policies of land redistribution and restitution and argues that these policies are singularly inappropriate in the face of the extent of land inequality inherited from colonialism and apartheid. Informed by the ongoing resemblance between contemporary South Africa and its racist past in respect of land issues, the chapter is concerned with the incomplete process of decolonisation.

Following the theme of continuity with apartheid, the third chapter by 18 The Promise of Land

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Lungisile Ntsebeza deals with the persistent reality of the former reserves or bantustans, despite almost two decades of democratic rule. By focusing on three recent pieces of legislation, Ntsebeza discerns a political shift to the right in privileging tradition and custom, specifically via the elevation of unelected traditional authorities. In the process, the rights of citizenship have been undermined and democracy has been compromised.

In the fourth chapter Kirk Helliker provides an account of white commercial agriculture in South Africa by demonstrating the highly differentiated nature of the sector and by paying attention to the paternalism and repression of labour relations on these farms. The chapter provides a historical overview of the supportive role that white agriculture played in relation to successive apartheid regimes. It highlights the interconnectedness of the land and labour questions and shows how global neo-liberal trends are forcefully implemented in contemporary South Africa. Helliker also looks at the implications of the conversion of livestock farms to game farms and how black economic empowerment has fared in the commercial sector. Overall, he examines the efforts to change the sector in democratic South Africa and concludes, like the previous two chapters, that the power of white agricultural capital remains virtually intact through the reproduction of racially based class relations in the countryside.

In contrast to the three previous chapters, which pertain largely to rural areas, Chapter 5 by Fred Hendricks and Richard Pithouse deals with urban land questions. Using Cape Town as a case study, the chapter shows how intimately connected the urban and rural areas are, largely occasioned by the migrant labour system. The chapter shows that land questions have an urban dimension, especially as they relate to the provision of adequate housing. The geographies of apartheid have proven to be enormously durable, especially in the racialised spaces of the cities of South Africa. In Cape Town, local officialdom has made a point of preserving the status quo through the establishment of an Anti-Land Invasion Unit whose main work is to demolish shacks before they become homes.

In the final chapter of Part 1, Lungisile Ntsebeza deals with social movements. Calling into question purely statist efforts at resolving land questions, Chapter 6 is animated by the recent farm-worker struggles in the Western Cape and the prospects these hold for influencing fundamental change from below. Ntsebeza provides a detailed, almost blow-by-blow description of the farm-worker strikes and then relates them to earlier instances of rural resistance, most notably the Mpondoland revolt of 1960. The chapter Land Questions in South Africa 19

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is critical of the role of non-governmental organisations, but it shows that real agency in relation to land issues is emerging amongst committed activists and intellectuals through various coalitions of organisations on the ground.

Part 2 deals with history, theory and policy as vital overarching contexts for understanding the dynamics of and prospects for change in South Africa.

Beginning with Chapter 7, Bill Martin frames the debate on rural development within the broader canvas of evolving capital accumulation, dispossession and capitalist development. Anchoring his discussion in the notorious Natives’ Land Act of 1913, he refers to earlier historiographical debates by questioning the linear approach of conventional wisdom, specifically the contention that primitive accumulation and its concomitant dispossession, temporally preceded capitalist development. Instead, in concert with the previous chapter by Ntsebeza, he seeks to provide an alternative conceptual framework for understanding the challenges to neo-liberalism from below.

This theoretical and historiographical setting provides a fresh approach to situating South Africa within a continental and global context.

Following this, in Chapter 8, Tendai Murisa examines the prospects for small-holder agriculture in southern Africa through a specific focus on the role of policy. This chapter is unambiguously in favour of small-holder agriculture as a means to achieve food security. From this starting point, Murisa seeks ways in which policy interventions might assist small-holders in an environment dominated by large-scale commercial agriculture. He highlights some of the limitations of current policy and provides guidelines for alternatives. Pointing to the diverse experiences of Malawi and Zimbabwe, the chapter raises hopes for the future of food security through innovative land reform programmes and imaginatively bold agricultural policies. It also laments the role of land grabbing as a barrier to local rural development.

There are obvious lessons for South Africa in respect of an appreciation of the regional and continental dimensions as well as in recognition of the problems in fostering food sovereignty associated with the donor community.

Praveen Jha’s Chapter 9 follows Murisa’s very neatly in dealing with the implications of global food regimes for food security in the global South, including South Africa. Jha argues that the agricultural and trade policies of the North clearly influence the prospects for rural development in the South. In particular he emphasises the new politics of food as a marker of continued global inequalities by focusing on the increasing power, wealth and greed of multinational corporations. The chapter paints a picture of increasing monopoly control over food and resources. The consequence is 20 The Promise of Land

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that local solutions are structurally limited by this overarching juggernaut.

Jha focuses on both the state and capital. He reveals the incongruence (and implicit injustice) of massive agricultural subsidies in the North and the virtual withdrawal of state support for agriculture in the South in line with the neo-liberalism of structural adjustment programmes.

Part 3 provides some comparative experiences from Zimbabwe, India and the Netherlands. Sam Moyo’s Chapter 10 on Zimbabwe starts from the premise that the massive transfer of land through the Fast Track Land Reform process represents the only instance of a radical redistribution of land in the world since the end of the Cold War. The chapter shows how marketdriven attempts at land reform met with failure or only halting success until Fast Track changed all of that in a dramatic shift that gave access to land to the majority. Moyo highlights some of the ongoing production problems and points to the relevance of social differentiation in the new circumstances, and he also highlights some direct comparative implications for the South African situation.

In Chapter 11 on India, Praveen Jha and Surinder Jodhka provide an account of the centrality of the notion of the village in Indian history, Indian imagination and Indian nationalism. They go on to analyse the colonial origins of the agrarian question and the manner in which this question was approached by successive post-independence regimes. The chapter focuses on notions of the commercialisation of agriculture and the commodification of land, and suggests that the grinding poverty of the masses resides very much with the unfinished business of land reform in the country. While guardedly applauding India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which guarantees poor households one hundred days of employment per year, the authors lament the fact that the land and agrarian questions have slipped very far down the country’s national list of priorities.

The final comparative chapter on the Netherlands is by Marja Spierenburg and Harry Wels. They trace the history of efforts to modernise agriculture in the Netherlands by highlighting the supposedly necessary trends towards land concentration and mechanisation. The chapter investigates some of the implications of this consolidation of landholdings for the prospects of rural development by focusing on a plurality of activities (including rural tourism) that could be associated with farms. They present an argument for a strategy of diversification – one that propounds farms as representative of an alternative lifestyle, featuring a link between human health and the environment.

Chapter 13 is the concluding chapter by the editors entitled, Colonial Pasts Land Questions in South Africa 21

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and Democratic Futures in South Africa. On the basis of the overwhelming evidence of failure in state attempts at land reform, it calls for an entirely new approach to the problem – one that recognises an important role for struggles from below. The chapter situates the ongoing crises in land in the urban areas, commercial farms and former bantustans within a historical context of colonialism, but simultaneously highlights a vision for a democratic future.

REFERENCES Bryceson DF 2002. “The Scramble in Africa: Reorienting Rural Livelihoods”. World Development. Vol. 30, No. 5.

Bryceson DF 1999. “Sub-Saharan Africa betwixt and between: Rural livelihood practices and policies”. De-Agrarianisation and Rural Employment Network, Afrika-Studiecentrum (ASC) Working Paper No. 43. <www.asc.leidenuniv.nl/general/dare.htm> accessed May 2009.

Bundy C 1988. The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry. David Philip: Cape Town.

Engels F 1887. The Housing Question. <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/ housing-question/index.htm> accessed July 2012.

Hayward S 2012. Unpublished interview with Fred Hendricks at the office of the Anti-Land Invasion Unit, Cape Town, 18 July 2012.

Hendricks F 1990. The Pillars of Apartheid: Land Tenure, Rural Planning and the Chieftaincy.

Uppsala: Acta University, Studia Sociologica Upsaliensa.

Kritzinger A, Barrientos S and Rossouw H 2004. “Global production and flexible employment in South African horticulture: Experiences of contract workers in fruit exports”. European Journal for Rural Sociology. 44:1.

Mabandla N 2012. Lahla Ngubo: The Continuities and Discontinuities of a South African Black Middle Class. Masters thesis, Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town.

Mafeje A 1988. “The agrarian question and food production in Southern Africa” in Kwesi K Prah (ed.), Food Security Issues in Southern Africa. Selected proceedings of the conference on food security issues in Southern Africa, Maseru, 12–14 January 1987. Southern Africa Studies Series No. 4. Maseru: Institute of Southern African Studies, National University of Lesotho.

Mather C and Greenberg S 2003. “Market liberalisation in post-apartheid South Africa: The restructuring of citrus exports after ‘de-regulation’”. Journal of Southern African Studies 29: 2.

Mbeki G 1984. South Africa: The Peasants’ Revolt. London: International Defence and Aid Fund.

National Planning Commission 2012. National Development Plan 2030. Pretoria: Republic of South Africa.

Ncapayi F (2013). Land and Changing Social Relations in South Africa’s Former Reserves: The case of Luphaphasi in Sakhisizwe Local Municipality, Eastern Cape. Unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town.

Ntsebeza L 2006. Democracy Compromised: Chiefs and the Politics of Land in South Africa.

Cape Town: HSRC Press. (First edition 2005. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers.)

Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) 1999. 1997 Rural Survey. Pretoria.

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Tabata IB 1974. The Awakening of a People. Nottingham: Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation for Spokesman Books.

Walker C 2008. Landmarked: Land Claims and Land Restitution in South Africa. Johannesburg: Jacana Media.

White F 2010. “Deepening Democracy: A Farm Workers’ Movement in the Western Cape”.

Journal of Southern African Studies. 36: 3.

Wolpe H 1972. “Capitalism and cheap labour power in South Africa: From segregation to apartheid”. Economy and Society. 1(4).

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24 The Promise of Land

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PART 1 STRuCTuRES AND STRuggLES OF LAND IN SOuTH AFRICA

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chapter 2

RHETORIC AND REALITy IN RESTITuTION AND REDISTRIbuTION: ONgOINg LAND AND AgRARIAN QuESTIONS IN SOuTH AFRICA Fred Hendricks

“Broadly speaking, he and I shared an attitude towards South Africa and our continued presence there. Our attitude was that, to put it briefly, our presence was legal but illegitimate. We had an abstract right to be there, a birthright, but the basis of that right was fraudulent. Our presence was grounded in a crime, namely colonial conquest, perpetuated by apartheid. Whatever the opposite is of native or rooted, that was what we felt ourselves to be. We thought of ourselves as sojourners, temporary residents, and to that extent without a home, without a homeland” – JM Coetzee, Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life, 2009

the lAnd And AgrAriAn reAlity of southern Africa was shaken to its roots by the Fast Track Land Reform Programme in Zimbabwe that took place from 2000 to about 2005. It transferred almost 90 per cent of white-claimed agricultural land to black beneficiaries, principally from the communal areas of the country. The programme changed the nature of agrarian relations in the former colony within a very short space of time and effectively deracialised land ownership as well as agricultural production. This massive transfer of land has had a profound impact on approaches to land reform in South Africa. Almost in direct response to the perceived spectre of similar land occupations, policy-makers and politicians in South Africa have been at Rhetoric and Reality in Restitution and Redistribution 27

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pains, at least at the level of rhetoric, to demonstrate their acknowledgement that the willing-buyer-willing-seller model is inappropriate as a method for undoing the racialised distribution of land. Since the current law enshrines the inequalities inherited from the past, there is a palpable shift in the discourse away from a bland acceptance of the rule of law.

It has become commonplace for all and sundry to call for a review of the market-based programme of land reform. These calls reached a pitch at the National Land Summit in mid-2005 where there was a unanimous rejection of the willing-buyer-willing-seller principle articulated by very senior government officials, including the country’s deputy president and the minister of Land Affairs and Agriculture. Calls for a review of the system have continued unabated. The most recent was in President Zuma’s 2012 State of the Nation Address where he indicated that “the process [of land reform] is slow and tedious and there is general agreement that the willing buyer willing seller option has not been the best way to address this question”.

Yet, these powerful sentiments in favour of reconsidering the current policy of land reform combined with a widespread recognition of its failure have not translated into any meaningful change in approach. The talk of rejection of the current system rests awkwardly with the over-arching neoliberalism of official policy. In this respect, the much anticipated Green Paper on Land Reform published in 2011 does not move any closer to onthe-ground reality (Department of Rural Development and Land Reform 2011). It has become clearer by the day that such an acute situation of colonial and racialised inequality in access to land can never be comprehensively dealt with by a voluntary programme dependent on willing sellers. The situation is untenable. Even the modest targets of the stated land reform programme have not been accomplished. Nonetheless, it remains the prevailing policy position.

Why then does the government persist with this palpably inappropriate policy, given the widespread recognition that it does not work? It should be recognised that even if the current policy were to be implemented in full it would not lead to an effective decolonisation of land, since the problems are far more deep-seated and structurally rooted. To sustain South Africa’s democracy there is thus an urgent need to think afresh about these vital issues from the perspective of citizenship in South Africa. This chapter sets out to analyse the structural limitations of the post-1994 land policies of restitution and redistribution when it comes to dealing with the persistent racialised inequalities of colonialism and apartheid.

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CONTROVERSIES ABOUT COLONIAL CONTExTS AND CONSTITUTIONAL CONSTRAINTS Inasmuch as discrepancies and controversies can be discerned in the public domain, there is actually very little direct scholarly debate in the recent historiography of land reform in South Africa. There are muted notions of differences in approach, but these are not articulated in a manner that permits an outline of existing perspectives, such that the advantages and disadvantages of various positions can be considered. Instead, the prevailing reality, albeit with some exceptions, is that different scholars simply advance their arguments without reference to others. This means there is no register of scholarly debate on the issue of land and competing perspectives are not subjected to critical scrutiny. Instead, many scholars simply talk past each other in the hope that their position will somehow prevail. There is a great deal of shadow boxing, but little actual discussion of alternatives or engagement on the merits of or problems with different arguments. Rather than in academic journals or scholarly books, debate about land and its future in South Africa is to be found in the popular press. While coverage in the media is characterised by a wide variety of responses, it is essentially polarised between indigenous claims for land on the one hand and protection of the rule of law on the other. This polarisation represents one of the abiding faultlines of South African democracy, as the racialised inequality inherited from colonialism and apartheid has proven to be very durable indeed.

One notable exception to the lacuna in scholarly debate can be found in Cherryl Walker’s (2008) book on land restitution, Landmarked, Land Claims and Land Restitution in South Africa. She (2008: 42), states that Hendricks and Ntsebeza rely uncritically on a grand narrative of dispossession. Referring to the familiar general account of racialised land inequality, she suggests that “Hendricks’s average white, with his 1 570 hectares, is a rhetorical, ideologically loaded device”. Walker justifies her assertion by reference to the extent of white urban migration, the regionally uneven nature of land inequality and the very many local narratives of dispossession. “As one shifts,” she argues, “to the domain of the specific in the restitution programme – those particular acts of dispossession identified in the many thousands of claim forms... so the coherence of the national narrative becomes even more difficult to maintain” (Walker 2008: 44).

While careful not to question the authenticity and accuracy of land dispossession as a whole, Walker nevertheless suggests that it is deficient as a guide to policy and appropriate action. I disagree. In my view, colonial Rhetoric and Reality in Restitution and Redistribution 29

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dispossession and the various forms it has taken lies at the very heart of the land question in South Africa. It is the failure to deal decisively with this question that allows the ongoing grievances amongst the majority to fester. Stemming from the colonial experience, notions of race and nation are unavoidable in dealing with the land question. Pointing to the diversities in South Africa’s rural history and the complexities involved when the beneficiaries of colonial land dispossession change over time, Walker (2008) arrives at an individualised conclusion informed by the depth of her experiences as a Land Claims Commissioner in KwaZulu-Natal. She is correct to highlight the very many rural variations, as well as the difficulties in deciphering layers of claims over land. However, her emphasis on the minutiae of events tends to de-emphasise the overall legitimacy of land reform as a mechanism for restorative justice. By focusing on the practical difficulties of implementing land restitution, she ends up with an analysis incapable of accommodating fundamental change. Despite protestations to the contrary, the inherent logic of Walker’s analysis is deeply implicated in preserving the status quo of racialised inequality.

As if to confirm this position, at a Colloquium on the Property Clause in the South African Constitution held at the University of Cape Town in February 2011 (Colloquium 2011), Walker introduced her presentation by remarking that she would like to defend the national constitution. The deliberations of the colloquium had confirmed that the constitution was a compromise between the recognition of existing property rights for the minority and the aspirations for access to property by the majority. Thus, in defending the constitution, by simple deduction, Walker was effectively also defending the compromise. It is a compromise that has weighed heavily on the oppressed and dispossessed, since there can be little doubt that concessions to white privilege accumulated under apartheid have had the effect of choking the possibilities for genuine land reform. Walker (2008: 43) sees it differently, she asserts that, “[a]s a social category white commercial farmers can hardly be regarded en masse as the major beneficiaries of apartheid in early 2000”.

The trouble with this analysis is that it seeks to separate the current situation from its historical origins and in doing so it portrays a revisionist perspective on the history of land dispossession. Its effect is to provide a justification for the status quo. After all, if white farmers did not benefit, then who did?

It is very difficult to see the current disparities in land ownership outside of an apartheid and colonial context. Walker’s apparent amnesia about the role of apartheid is reminiscent of the many popular white accounts that 30 The Promise of Land

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wish to forget or deny their complicity in and benefits from an unjust system.

The experience for blacks is very different: apartheid still looms large in their personal lives and they are definitely not its material beneficiaries. How ought we to explain the current racialised inequalities other than within the colonial framework of land dispossession?

In direct contrast to Walker’s claim, a report by the Black Economic Empowerment Commission (2001: 47) states that after 1913 “[t]he following five decades saw the passing of more than 80 acts of parliament aimed at assisting the white commercial farming sector”. The contrast between African peasants and white farmers has been the subject of much historical research.

Lewsen (1982: 171), for example, commenting on the implementation of the Glen Grey Act of 1894, asserts: “It was ignorant and presumptuous to argue that blacks who did not work for whites were lazy. Statistically, black farmers got more from their land than white farmers: yet the bill proposed to force the industrious cultivator to serve white masters.” White farmers were able to commercialise their agriculture through grants, subsidies, transport concessions, favourable credit facilities, tax relief, disaster management and of course, the availability of cheap black labour (Hendricks 1990: 39). It was a state policy of massively protectionist proportions in favour of whites.

Simultaneously, blacks were denied the wherewithal to undertake proper farming: their competitiveness was crushed as they were compelled into wage labour through legislation and other repressive apartheid means.

It is precisely because of the difficulties of unravelling the racialised benefits of apartheid that we have such an enduring land question in the country. Of course, undoing history was never going to be unproblematic, but recognising the injustice of colonial land dispossession is a necessary starting point to any analysis claiming to be in favour of land reform. There is little room for middle ground in this. The precise form taken by this dispossession – the wide variety of regional differences, the ongoing administrative difficulties, the deficiencies in capacity in various government departments, and the many problems of implementation – does not extinguish the simple reality of generalised land dispossession for blacks, and property and privilege for whites.

In a similar vein to Walker, Ruth Hall (2004) questions whether it is the constitution that acts as a brake on land reform, or whether it is in fact the lack of political will that is the major constraint. Reading the text of the constitution, she asserts that the explicit clauses permitting expropriation have been compromised by the political adoption of the market-based policy of willing-buyer-willing-seller. In response to Hall’s critique, Ntsebeza (2007: Rhetoric and Reality in Restitution and Redistribution 31

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122) concedes that we have not appreciated the possibilities for expropriation within the context of the law. In my view, this concession by Ntsebeza is unwarranted as there are conceptual problems with Hall’s differentiation between the legal and the political. She is of the optimistic view that the constitution can somehow transform social relations in society, and that all that is required is political will from above. The reality is very different. The adoption of the willing-buyer-willing-seller model of land reform was not an aberration at all: it rests very comfortably with the constitution, especially with respect to its provisions for compensation. This does not mean that there are no possibilities at all for some changes in land reform via a legal route. However, within the current environment, these possibilities are very circumscribed. There is therefore a need to look more closely at the prospects for expropriation, as envisaged in the constitution, as a mechanism for a more radical approach to land reform.

The impediments to expropriation remain formidable. In Walking Towards Justice: Democratization in Rural Life (Bell & Hendricks (eds) 2003: 196), I wrote a chapter called, “Land Inequality in a Democratic South Africa” where I stated: “The property clause in the constitution together with the so-called limitations clause (section 36 provides for limits to the rights in the constitution) makes expropriation an extremely complex and litigious option under the current circumstances.” To illustrate the problems in this respect I referred to the case of the Dinkwanye community in Lydenburg, Mpumalanga, where the first expropriation order of the democratic government was issued on Willem Pretorius for his farm Boomplaats. Briefly, the Dinkwanye community had bought the farm in 1906 with contributions from community members. The land was subsequently declared a “black spot” by the apartheid regime and in 1961 they were forcibly removed without any compensation. After letting the farm to white farmers for two decades, the apartheid government sold it to Pretorius at below the market value on very easy credit terms. The members of the Dinkwanye community, by this time scattered all over the country, were now claiming their land back under the restitution programme of the democratic government.

As the law prescribes, the negotiations, based on valuations between Pretorius and the Land Restitution Commission, were protracted. They were also highly problematic since the valuations themselves were faulty and based on inadequate evidence. When the negotiating parties failed to reach an agreement about the value and price of the farm, the state issued an expropriation order. It then promptly withdrew the order under legal 32 The Promise of Land

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pressure from Pretorius, who flatly refused to agree to the price offered by the government. Predictably, the withdrawal by the democratic government of its first expropriation notice received polarised reactions from blacks and whites.

Much was made of the fact that the state lawyers had bungled the case, but that is beside the point here.

The unambiguous lesson from this case is that the constitution entitles the existing landowners to defend their private property against the government.

The right to private property, understood as an exclusive domain, is firmly entrenched both in the constitution and in the general legislative framework of the state. Consequently, the constitution protects the almost exclusive private ownership of land by whites in the rural areas and, in safeguarding these privileges, it is necessarily a major constraint to the attainment of the material equality of the majority of South Africans.

Speaking at the launch of the Comprehensive Rural Development Programme in Giyani, President Jacob Zuma (2009b) made the following comment: [L]and is linked to development in rural areas. We have recognised that in order to move forward decisively with the land redistribution programme, significant changes will have to be made to the willing-buyer-willingseller model of land redistribution... The general view is that the willingbuyer-willing-seller model does not work. We will be seeking a much more pragmatic formula to land redistribution.

Generally speaking, the South African governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Rural Development strategy since 1994 has been animated by tension between neo-liberalism and developmentalism. This is especially so in agricultural policy, with neo-liberal measures such as deregulation (including removing government control over imports and exports, lowering of tariffs, disbanding national marketing boards and so on) as opposed to the developmentalist focus on land reform to address the historical injustices. Through the Comprehensive Rural Development Programme, the ANC government appears to recognise the need for a thrust towards a more developmental state if rural inequality and poverty are to be addressed at all. Even if this is reflected only at the level of rhetoric, it sends a powerful message attesting to the ongoing moral incoherence and continuing injustices of inequality in land.

However, these gestures towards land reform are curiously quixotic in the face of overwhelming constitutionally protected inequality. It is not surprising Rhetoric and Reality in Restitution and Redistribution 33

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that calls for the expropriation of land have come from a very wide spectrum of black people. At the one end of the scale are those keen to undo the white stranglehold over commercial agriculture, such as Motsepe Matlala, deputy president of the National African Farmers Union, who explicitly advocated the use of expropriation to compel reluctant white farmers to sell their land.

In a statement under the title â&#x20AC;&#x153;Willingness of white farmers to participateâ&#x20AC;?, Matlala argues, NAFU believes that expropriation powers vested in the minister is the only effective way to counter destructive practices by opponents of land reform who have openly admitted their intention to use lengthy and protracted court actions to minimise governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chances of successfully concluding land restitution (Matlala 2003).

Commenting on the shelved Expropriation Bill, he furthermore has said that it is, the first serious attempt at moving the constitutional provisions forward. In South Africa the idea of a negotiated, planned and orderly land redistribution programme based primarily on market-related land purchases, does not deliver on land reform. State power and force via the proposed Expropriation Bill are critical for the negotiation of the land acquisition process (Matlala 2008).

Similarly, Cyril Ramaphosa, chairperson of the BEE Commission (and as of December 2012 ANC deputy president), urged the government to use the constitutional provision that a fair price, not necessarily market related, should be provided as compensation for expropriated land (BEE Commission 2001: 52).

President Jacob Zuma has recently made statements about the failure of the willing-buyer-willing-seller model, and successive ministers of Agriculture and Land Affairs have made promises about expropriation. Lulu xingwana, who held the position from 2006 to 2009, made explicit calls for greater powers of expropriation. Similarly her predecessor, Thoko Didiza, in her subsequent position as minister of Public Works from 2006 to 2008, became the major promoter of the Expropriation Bill. By contrast, the current minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, Gugile Nkwinti, has been much more circumspect in his approach to the issue. At the other end of 34 The Promise of Land

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this spectrum, the Landless People’s Movement praised Robert Mugabe’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme in Zimbabwe as a model for South Africa. Similarly, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) claimed that the Expropriation Bill was “long overdue... We strongly believe that expropriation is the only meaningful intervention that the government may use to fast-track the land reform process” (COSATU 2008:2).

Opinions on expropriation are almost entirely racialised. While there is widespread support among black people for corrective measures against land inequalities, in general, whites are in favour of maintaining the status quo. Thus, submissions to the Portfolio Committee for Public Works on the Expropriation Bill differ widely, ranging from a sustained rejection by AgriSA (which represents white commercial agriculture) and the FW de Klerk Foundation’s Centre for Constitutional Rights to a warm reception by the Landless People’s Movement and the Congress of South African Trade Unions. As if to confirm this discrepancy, James Gibson’s survey (2009: 31) asked respondents whether they agree or disagree with the statement: “Most land in South Africa was taken unfairly by white settlers, and therefore they have no right to the land today.” Only 8 per cent of the white respondents agreed, in contrast to a massive 85 per cent of blacks. Despite the evidence of overwhelming support for expropriation amongst blacks, the Portfolio Committee on Public Works withdrew the cabinet-approved Expropriation Bill in 2008. In response, the Department of Public Works (2008) issued a press statement reiterating its ongoing support for the Bill.

So a government department tries to get the Bill through parliament, but a portfolio committee withdraws it. This emergence of dissent about how South Africa should approach land reform within governing structures is interesting. While within government there is recognition in some quarters that fundamental land reform is a necessity, there are many who equate it with the perceived economic implosion of Zimbabwe. The withdrawal of this Bill further demonstrates just how closely the legal and the political are intertwined and it reveals the limits of a purely legalistic emphasis in land reform. This is especially so in an environment where the weight of official opinion is against fundamental change, notwithstanding the rhetoric about redistribution. In this context, Ben Cousins is quoted in Business Day (21 August 2009) making the following statement: “Government knows largescale expropriation isn’t feasible, even if they pass the Expropriation Bill later this year. They realise that if you expropriate you’ll end up in the courts, so it won’t be cheaper or faster anyway.”

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While the South African constitution has been hailed as one of the most progressive in the world, it merely represents the balance of forces at the time of transition. It was a compromise, not without its costs for the majority.

One of the compelling questions confronting contemporary South Africa is whether fundamental land reform can in fact take place within the context of the rule of law, or whether we require a land revolution rather than just land reform. But clearly such a land revolution will not be without costs to society at large. The question relates broadly to the legitimacy of the state and the construction of a unitary imagination of the South African nation.

There is no doubt that the unequal division of land along racial lines fractures the nation into opposing identities of white wealth and property and black dispossession and poverty. In this sense unequal access to land acts as a spatial barrier to a unitary imagination of the South African nation.

In so far as land remains a crucial marker of inequality and an abiding metaphor of dispossession, there is an urgent necessity to deal with it much more decisively than the current willing-buyer-willing-seller arrangement permits. In this regard there is an ongoing debate about the role of the constitution in either constraining or facilitating land reform. The relevant property clause (section 25) in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution is clear: 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 a law of general application â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a) for public purposes or in the public interest; and b) subject to compensation, the amount, timing and manner of which must be agreed, 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 (RSA Constitution 1996).

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One of the major bones of contention is how compensation ought to be calculated. Here the controversy rages over the appropriate role for the market in the determination of prices to be paid for property targeted for expropriation for the purposes of redistribution. In a landmark judgement in the Land Claims Court, J Gilderhuys (2000) offered the following interpretation of the constitution: In my view the equitable balance required by the Constitution for the determination of just and equitable compensation will in most cases best be achieved by first determining the market value of the property and thereafter by subtracting from or adding to the amount of the market value, as other relevant circumstances may require. Therefore I will start off in this case by determining the market value of the dispossessed erven. Thereafter I will consider whether, on the evidence or in law, that amount must be adjusted upwards or downwards in order to determine just and equitable compensation.

Thus the so-called two-step approach to the determination of price was introduced, one that gave market value a central role over and above the other four factors prescribed by the constitution. This interpretation yet again demonstrates just how complex and problematic the constitutional route to land reform is in a context of colonial dispossession.

Commenting on the land proposal of Tiberius Gracchus of early Rome, historian Plutarch poignantly said: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Never did any law appear more moderate and mild, especially in view of such great injustice and avarice.â&#x20AC;? The same can be said about the South African constitution and its circumscribed provisions for the redistribution of land in South Africa. The compelling question to be asked in relation to the constitution and land reform is whether the property clause entrenches existing inequalities in land or whether it opens up possibilities for these inequalities to be diminished. It is true that the property clause represents a compromise between the quest for land reform and the protection of the existing property holders in their land rights. But all compromises have costs, especially where the contending positions are mutually exclusive. Land is a finite resource. Therefore, in so far as the constitution protects property rights in land, it effectively negates claims to that land by others. Irrespective of its initial intentions, the ensuing results of the land reform policy flowing from the constitution have confirmed that the costs of the compromise will, in general, be borne by the formerly Rhetoric and Reality in Restitution and Redistribution 37

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disenfranchised blacks. This is not to deny that some black people have benefited enormously from the new circumstances, including from land reform, but overall the dismal performance of the land reform programmes (tenure reform, land restitution and land redistribution) indicates that we have reached an impasse. This calls for far-reaching changes in approach and greater political will in implementation. But just how far are we prepared to go? When we talk about land reform, are we satisfied with the modest target of 30 per cent? Answers to this question tend to polarise positions.

It all depends on what we mean by land reform. For some it implies a mere gesture towards blacks for the violence of colonial land dispossession, for others it is mechanism for social justice. If land reform means merely tinkering with the inequalities of our society, then the constitution is no constraint. On the other hand, if it means a fundamental reorganisation of social relations, then the property clause is necessarily a constraint. The constitution as it pertains to land rights is a reflection of the conflict between the full citizenship of blacks and the preserved privileges of whites, or between the political equality of citizenship and the economic inequality of class. Such differences in class can only be overcome in a context of greater material equality, but given South Africaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s status as the most unequal country in the world, there are no realistic prospects for this within the current context.

A more equitable material distribution is imperative but this would imply a direct intrusion on white privilege. What are the chances of this actually happening? The constitution empowers the government to institute land reform measures. However, land redistribution, through which blacks are to be provided with access to land, is merely a policy. As such it is wide open to problems of implementation, with different effects on different people and constrained in very real ways by fiscal limitations. On the other hand, there is no such ambiguity in the constitutionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s property clause, which has the full force of the law behind it.

It would take an enormous amount of political will to change things in a sufficiently meaningful way to alter the current distribution of land within the rule of law. It is too easy to lay the blame for government inertia on the neo-liberal slant of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution framework.

Instead, there needs to be a coherent explanation for the dismally slow pace of material delivery in respect of land redistribution. Besides subjecting the policies themselves to critical scrutiny, there are a number of further questions which need to be asked: What practical instruments and measures have been put in place to implement restitution and redistribution? What are 38 The Promise of Land

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the constraints in this regard? How does the capacity of the Department of Land Affairs affect delivery? And how have various communities responded to the policy?

The history of land reform in democratic South Africa is a history of failure. Explanations for this failure tend to bifurcate scholars between those who see it as a result of poor management and implementation and those who attribute it to structural causes located in the country’s colonially inherited skewed distribution of land. There is no Chinese wall between these two lines of causality. However, it remains vitally important that the interconnection between policy and implementation is understood against the background of colonial dispossession.

RESCUING RESTITUTION In his opening remarks at the recent National Restitution Consultative Conference, Minister Gugile Nkwinti (2011) offered the following apology: I acknowledge that we have not done well in managing the Restitution programme, as government, causing strain, pain and frustration. It has been 10 to 16 years of waiting. Some of the people who were expected to have benefited from the restitution programme have even passed on. On behalf of government, I apologise. Let us rise in their honour.

All apologies are disarming and this one no less so. And what could be more disarming than honouring the dead who missed out on the benefits of restitution because of the tardiness of the government’s implementation of the programme? When a government minister says “I’m sorry” it is extraordinarily difficult to continue to criticise. Yet, a critique is still imperative and an apology, however genuine it might be, cannot absolve a government from its responsibilities. An apology, even by a well-meaning if ineffectual minister, should not be permitted to paper over the cracks of injustices.

Of the three pillars of the South Africa Land Reform programme – tenure reform, land redistribution and land restitution – land restitution has attracted the most scholarly attention. There are good reasons for this. On the face of it, restitution has been the most successful of these programmes, even though the overwhelming majority of settled claims have been in urban areas.

Monty Roodt defines restitution in relation to the restoration of land

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rights lost through the direct application of apartheid laws (Roodt 2001).1 He also highlights the efforts towards reconciliation that are apparently inherent in the programme. Arguing for an approach that integrates restitution with development, Roodt reiterated the views of an earlier book Land Restitution in South Africa: A Long Way Home, which he co-authored in 1998.2 More than simply providing a conceptual outline of restitution, Roodt shows how the claims process actually unfolded, premised on his experience as an employee of the Land Claims Commission.

In 2006, Mark Everingham and Crystal Jannecke published an influential article in the Journal of Southern African Studies called “Land Restitution and Democratic Citizenship in South Africa”, in which they provide a persuasive argument that the communal form of property rights on restituted land reinforces particular conceptions of community, which in turn has implications for notions of citizenship. Using an interesting set of case studies to back up their argument, they also rely on Deborah James’s 2007 book, appropriately called Gaining Ground: Rights and Property in South African Land Reform. Although James’s book examines issues of property rights, it also provides an inordinate amount of detail on the Landless People’s Movement which, with the wisdom of hindsight, given the demise of the movement, now appears out of touch with current realities. Nevertheless, the book raises important questions about the form of property in South Africa and its racialised history.

Most recently, the 2010 collection, Land, Memory, Reconstruction and Justice: Perspectives on Land Claims in South Africa,3 attempts a comprehensive assessment of the restitution programme. While rich in empirical detail, in taking stock of land restitution, this collection fails to contextualise the problem within a broader colonial context. The book glosses over the significance of Wegerif’s (2010) chapter as a case study of direct land occupation in South Africa. In this chapter he tells the story of ordinary people taking control over their own lives through hard work on land they believe to be their own. Wegerif (2010: 113) makes the point very forcefully:

1

2 3

“Land Restitution in South Africa: An overview”, chapter by Monty Roodt in Development: Theory Policy and Practice co-edited in 2001 with Jan Coetzee, Johann Graff, Fred Hendricks and Geoffrey Wood.

Land Restitution in South Africa: A Long Way Home, co-authored by Marj Brown, Justin Erasmus, Rosalie Kingwill, Colin Murray and Monty Roodt (1999).

Edited by Cherryl Walker, Anna Bohlin, Ruth Hall and Thembele Kepe.

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We have been too good at convincing people of technicalities, such as there being a difference between the restitution of a right to land and restoration of the land itself. We can continue to subvert people’s desire for land into the bureaucratic malaise of the complex restitution of land rights procedures or channel it into campaigns and direct actions to get land.

The ongoing problems related to the restitution of land in Salem in the Eastern Cape provide a telling commentary on the power of Wegerif’s analysis and approach. This is an example of exactly how land reform ought not to happen. On 25 November 2010, the Eastern Cape High Court in Grahamstown terminated the Amabhoxo Development Trust in Salem in the Lower Albany Region. The court ruled that all its assets should vest in the minister of Land Reform and Rural Development pending the establishment of a legitimate community structure, possibly a Communal Property Association. The decision of the court was the culmination of a convoluted process of internal bickering and community strife.

Salem is located 20 kilometres from Grahamstown in an area of the Eastern Cape known as Lower Albany. The colonisation of the area via actual settlement inevitably resulted in the dispossession of the indigenous occupants. Historically, Salem is remembered for the role played by Richard Gush during the Sixth War of Dispossession (1834–1835) in pacifying the indigenous population in a situation of intense conflict.

The claim for the restitution of the Salem Commonage was lodged in March 2002 by Mtutuzeli Madinda on behalf of the Salem Land Claimants Committee. There was significant support for the claim from people who had been scattered all over the Eastern Cape and further afield. The basis of the claim was the dispossession of the community in 1947 of about six and a half thousand hectares covering 38 farms or properties. The Commission of Restitution of Land Rights decided to settle the claim in two phases. The first phase involved five farms worth about R5.9 million covering a total area of about 450 hectares and the second phase would involve the remaining 33 properties.

Mindful of the challenges that lay ahead, Madinda made the following comment on receiving the news that their claim had been partially settled: “It is a challenge because all the eyes in South Africa will be on us to see what we will do with the land.” Inasmuch as the claim for the restitution of their land galvanised the community into a cohesive force, almost as soon as the land was transferred into the caretakership of the community, rifts and cleavages Rhetoric and Reality in Restitution and Redistribution 41

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emerged. These ultimately led to the High Court decision to terminate the trust, which had been set up with the specific purpose of acquiring and holding â&#x20AC;&#x153;the land on behalf of and for the benefit of the communityâ&#x20AC;?.4 The trust had hardly had time to settle down to its role when 11 of the 15 trustees chosen to represent the 117 beneficiaries effectively withdrew in order to continue attending meetings of the Salem Land Claimants Committee. The fact that this committee continued to exist side by side with the trust was a fatal mistake in the planning and implementation process of settling the claim.

Initially, restitution had a very specific purpose: to correct the wrongs of apartheid in respect of those people who had lost land as a result of the direct application of segregationist laws and practices. The purpose was circumscribed, but in the context of enduring land inequalities and minimal opportunities, its meaning has mutated, as beneficiaries saw it as an answer to their multifarious problems.

LAND AND AGRARIAN QUESTIONS The land question concerns ways in which inequalities in the distribution of land ownership and access might be overcome. The agrarian question is broader in application, referring to a multiplicity of meanings related to the development of capitalism in the countryside. At the simplest level, colonialism gave rise to the land question and capitalism underlies the agrarian question. The two questions are intimately connected just as colonialism and capitalism are two sides of the same coin in South Africa. For instance, the widespread colonial dispossession of indigenous land was necessary for the supply of labour to white farms, mines and emerging capitalist factories.

While the central focus of this chapter is the question of land, it also refers to some aspects of the agrarian question in so far as there are real limits to resolving land inequalities outside a framework of understanding agrarian social relations in capitalist South Africa. Put bluntly, any plan for the revival of black agriculture cannot ignore the land question. Similarly, any notion of a democratic citizenship outside of a fundamental transformation of land relations is necessarily restricted. In contrast to all other African countries, the overwhelming extent of white settlement and control over land in South Africa suggests a qualitative difference in the nature of colonialism and hence 4

Deed of Trust. Amabhoxo Development Trust. Signed by the founder, the Honourable Regional Land Claims Commissioner: Eastern Cape, Linda Faleni.

26 July 2007.

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a difference in how to deal with its consequences.

Despite South Africa’s different experience of colonialism, it is important to understand this country’s land relations in the context of landholding in Africa as a whole. Across the continent there are many varieties of overlapping rights of clans, lineages and households in relation to land that defy neat description as property. The fact that these rights are usually associated with affiliation by kinship has profound implications for the manner in which claims for land may be structured, including attempts by traditional authorities to ensure that they monopolise ownership of the community’s land under their individual title deeds. An understanding of the peculiarities of these social relations of ownership and control and of how they are connected with production, reproduction and domination is vital for any discussion on the agrarian question in South Africa. Archie Mafeje’s (2003: 2) depiction is particularly pertinent: it is important to point out that the concepts that were used to characterise African land tenure systems were derived from European jurisprudence. This led to a series of misconceptions. Among these may be mentioned the notion of “ownership” over land and land as “property”... Regarding the concept of ownership of land in black Africa, after many years of legal artifice it is agreed that the concept is alien to African customary law. African jurisprudence recognised rights of possession determined by prior settlement and membership in given social groups... For that matter, there was a separation in African social thought between the soil and its possible manifestations such as crops and vegetation.

In the settler societies of southern Africa, colonialism ushered in an entirely different conception of property – one of exclusive domain. In order to protect the private property of the settlers against the natives, they would be prosecuted if they trespassed on or invaded the expropriated land. This conception obviously contradicted the pre-existing customary forms of land tenure where the very notion of ownership over land as individual property did not exist. South Africa falls into the group of countries where settler occupation of land and the expropriation of the indigenous population proceeded apace, with more than 90 per cent of the land surface of the country appropriated.

The massive transfer of land under the Fast Track Land Reform Programme in Zimbabwe and, more broadly, the failures of neo-liberalism to Rhetoric and Reality in Restitution and Redistribution 43

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deal with the ongoing problems of rural poverty have together propelled land redistribution and agrarian reform firmly back onto the global agenda for development, after a hiatus of about 20 years. The experience of Zimbabwe (discussed in detail in Chapter 10) should not be under-estimated. Despite that country’s problems – corruption, the manner in which the farm labourers were dealt with, the abiding problems of citizenship, ongoing state repression of and severe limitations on civil society, persistent and severe resource constraints, and above all, the grinding poverty of the masses – the Fast Track Land Reform has introduced a different set of agrarian relations.

These wide-ranging changes in Zimbabwe provoked polarised responses in South Africa. The Landless People’s Movement issued a press statement in which it resolved to “support the gallant actions of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to return stolen land to the people of Africa” (Hendricks 2003a: 199). On the other hand, the official response tried to allay the anxieties of the propertied classes. Following the occupation of land in Kempton Park, on the outskirts of Johannesburg, Thabo Mbeki, the then president of the country, gave the following assurance, “land occupations will not happen in South Africa” (cited in Hendricks 2003a: 199). The minister of Land Affairs at the time, Thoko Didiza, reiterated that “land invasions are not and will not be tolerated”. And the ANC spokesperson at the time was even more pointed in his response, indicating that “the ANC condemns in the strongest possible terms the illegal, corrupt and parasitic practice by the Pan African Congress members in exploiting the plight of the homeless people... by selling them land they do not own.” The Pan African Congress’s justification echoed very similar statements by Robert Mugabe, with the then PAC secretary-general arguing: “This is the land of the African people, being held in trust for us by the government. How can they accuse us of invading land which belongs to us” (cited in Hendricks 2003a: 200).

The changes in Zimbabwe are a metaphor for the possibilities for land reform in South Africa. But there are some obvious differences. The land occupations in South Africa have by and large taken place in urban environments, while those in Zimbabwe in the main happened on farms.

This striking difference is a telling comment on the nature of both the agrarian and the land question in each of these countries. But inasmuch as there are differences between South Africa and Zimbabwe, there are also powerful parallels: the most notable is colonial settler land dispossession, albeit with variations in terms of the extent of dispossession and the associated commoditisation of the economy. While both Zimbabwe and South Africa 44 The Promise of Land

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form part of Samir Amin’s typology “Africa of the Labour Reserves”,5 the extent of the expropriation in South Africa and the consequent large-scale separation of the people from their independent means of subsistence calls for an entirely different approach to the agrarian question: one that has to recognise the essentially proletarian character of the mass of the population.

The extent of dispossession and the consequent destruction of indigenous agriculture have had profound implications for the agrarian question in South Africa. Despite the fact that the mass of South Africa’s people have effectively had their land expropriated, they have not been absorbed into gainful employment in industry. This is the core of the issue. If indeed the reserve army of labour is essential for capital accumulation, then the question to be asked is an empirical one related to the size of this surplus working population. As a late industrialising country, South Africa did not have colonies to which it could export its surplus population. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin (1977: 225) cites Cecil John Rhodes in these baldly revealing terms: I was in the East End of London (a working class quarter) yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for “Bread! Bread!” and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism... My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and the mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.

The conditions for capitalist industrialisation have subsequently undergone profound changes. Colonialism was a very real outlet for Western Europeans who had been dispossessed by primitive accumulation. As people were separated from their independent means of subsistence, they either became fully-fledged proletarians or, if they did not find employment in the emerging industries, they moved to the colonies. In the nineteenth century 50 million 5

This refers to Samir Amin’s tripartite division of Africa, where Africans from Algeria, Kenya and much of southern Africa were expected to provide labour for European colonial enterprises.

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Europeans moved to North America, not out of choice but because they were pushed out by the inability of their rapidly changing societies to absorb them into employment in the growing urban areas. There is no such outlet for the unemployed millions in the global South and certainly not for South Africa.

David Harvey’s (2003) notion of “accumulation by dispossession” has some resonance here, but he also questions Marx’s presumption that the process of primitive accumulation is a precursor to fully-fledged capitalist industrialisation. Harvey insists that the separation of people from an independent means of subsistence is an ongoing process that does not suddenly stop with the advancement of capitalism. Instead, it coexists and intersects with expanding commodity-based production and the commodification of labour. This formulation is vitally important from the point of view of the appropriate politics for the dispossessed in South Africa in particular and in the global South more generally. If “accumulation by dispossession” proceeds apace then the social movements and other organs of civil society that are committed to reclaiming lost land will necessarily assume relevance. In contrast, as expanded reproduction and generalised commoditisation have assumed hegemony across the entire country, the forms of struggle take on a proletarian character. Put differently, while on one hand the extreme inequality in racialised land access, ownership and control remains an abiding impediment for the oppressed, on the other, the trade unions and other organs of urban civil society continue to struggle within the confines of the capitalist system.

Both these struggles are intended to be redistributive. Just as expanded reproduction does not exist as entirely separate from “accumulation by dispossession”, the struggles are not disconnected. In the South African context they are necessarily integrated by the prevailing consequences of migratory labour as the predominant form that the process of proletarianisation initially took for black people. While the land and agrarian questions might be back on the global agenda, and while there has been a great deal of rhetoric in South Africa about this issue, largely in response to land redistribution in Zimbabwe, the signs of any real sense of agency in relation to the land question have been sporadic and isolated. Land is certainly in the public domain as an issue, but the talk has not translated into concerted campaigns on the part of civil society, nor has it resulted in any definitive policy on the part of the state. From the point of view of the state, according to Lodge (2002: 845): “Politically, land reform has been assigned a low-priority status by successive ANC governments. ANC leaders suggest that this neglect accords with 46 The Promise of Land

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public perception; while ‘the issue of land was important for local people’, the ‘central issue’ for most people is job creation.” Hart (2002: 82–85) reiterates the difficulties encountered by the liberation movements in accommodating a consistent politics around the agrarian question.

In southern Africa the extent of colonial occupation of land varied widely.

In Tanzania white settlers alienated about 1 per cent of the land surface, in Zambia about 3 per cent, in Namibia 44 per cent and 50 per cent in Zimbabwe. By contrast, in South Africa they seized, claimed, owned and controlled more than 90 per cent of the country. Consequently the vast majority of the indigenous population was dispossessed of land and confined to reserves in the remaining agriculturally marginal areas. The 1913 Natives’ Land Act was central to this process. It smothered any real possibility for an independent African surplus-producing peasantry and instead pushed the majority into various forms of wage labour for their survival. Territorial segregation had the effect of mediating the process of proletarianisation by ensuring that the indigenous population would have no prospects for political participation in the central institutions of the state. Thus they were disenfranchised as well as dispossessed. The struggle for liberation in South Africa tended to neglect their dispossession while focusing almost exclusively on winning the vote for the majority.

BEYOND THE IMPASSE What should be done to correct the racist injustices of the colonial past in respect of land ownership and access? While virtually everybody in South Africa agrees that land reform is a necessity for the long-term legitimacy of the state, few agree on how this should be done. There are five main points of disagreement: (i) the extent of land reform, in other words, how much land should be transferred to black people, (ii) the pace of land reform, in other words how quickly this should be done, (iii) whether land reform should be via the market-based system of willing buyers and willing sellers or whether land should be expropriated, (iv) whether expropriation should be with or without compensation, and, if the former (v) how this compensation should be determined.

In his State of the Nation Address in June 2009 (Zuma 2009a), the then newly elected President Jacob Zuma promised to develop and implement a Comprehensive Rural Development Strategy designed to link land and agrarian reform with food security in an effort to deal more decisively with the legacies of apartheid. Zuma’s ambitious rhetoric is in sharp contrast with Rhetoric and Reality in Restitution and Redistribution 47

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two recent statements by Gugile Nkwinti, the minister of the newly formed Department of Rural Development and Land Reform. Firstly, Minister Nkwinti announced that 90 per cent of the restituted or redistributed farms have collapsed as going concerns and are no longer productive. Secondly, in response to opposition from white farmers to a leaked version of the Green Paper’s proposals for abandoning the willing-buyer-willing-seller principle and for placing a ceiling on land ownership, Nkwinti (2011) announced that “Rural Development” would be split from “Land Reform” in order to accommodate greater consultation with commercial farmers There is a huge gap between the policy rhetoric and the multifarious problems that continue to be experienced in practice, especially in relation to the budgetary allocations for programmes and technical capacity at various levels within government departments. Apart from this disparity there are fundamental contradictions within the policies themselves because of the aforementioned anomalous reliance on both neo-liberal and developmental state initiatives. Following Minister Nkwinti’s tentative approach, the muchanticipated Green Paper on Land Reform disagrees with the Comprehensive Rural Development Programme on the fundamental principle of linking land reform and rural development. This disagreement is a reflection of the compromise between accommodating the demand for land by people who were previously dispossessed and recognising the land rights of existing property holders, which is inherent to the South African constitution.

The ongoing rhetoric in favour of redistribution does, in complex ways, serve the purpose of legitimating alternatives to the current untenable situation. Increasingly, therefore, the discourse about land reform affirms its necessity. It has become clear that it is no longer enough simply to point out how desperately slow land reform has been in South Africa. The country needs to seek a way out of the impasse by demonstrating in the first instance that the problems being faced are not necessarily unique to South Africa. Moreover, the manner in which we have chosen to deal with these problems is wholly ineffectual. The Reconstruction and Development Programme promised in 1994 to redistribute 30 per cent of agricultural land within the first five years of democracy. Close on two decades after that promise was made, there is still little hope of the 30 per cent target being met. The budgetary allocation to land reform remains woefully inadequate, the administrative backlogs persist and the inefficiencies in dealing with restitution and redistribution continue to bedevil the process. In fact, since 1994, South Africa’s government has redistributed only 6 per cent of white-owned land, and the target date has 48 The Promise of Land

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now been shifted to 2014. The longer the delays remain, the more urgent the abiding problem of racialised inequality in access to and ownership of land becomes.

Quite clearly the willing-buyer-willing-seller land reform programme embarked upon by the new democratic government requires substantial revision. Despite the massive scale of land dispossession that took place in South Africa and the severity of the consequences, land and agrarian issues played only a small part in South Africaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s struggle for liberation. The battle against apartheid was essentially an urban affair structured around the attainment of the franchise. Why South Africans should be concerned about land and agrarian issues, or about rural development, in the current period remains a burning question. The contribution of agriculture to the gross domestic product is merely 2.5 per cent; the overwhelming mass of the population has been dispossessed and effectively proletarianised; the extent of dependence on rural/peasant labour for subsistence has diminished; and the majority of the rural population depends very heavily on transfers from the state in the form of pensions and other grants or on remittances from the urban areas, and the youth in general appear to prefer the urban areas.

The extent of dispossession of the mass of the people and their concomitant levels of urbanisation suggest that a singular reliance on agrarian solutions for problems of poverty is inadequate. Instead a multi-pronged approach that includes opening up possibilities for land-based livelihoods is clearly what is required.

The evidence, in so far as it exists, points to a low level of independent agricultural production. This is to be expected given the extent of dispossession and the manner in which commodity relations in land have penetrated the rural areas. Individual ownership of land based on freehold title and previously reserved for whites remains the dominant form of tenure in the country. The material basis for the formation of a proletarian class is that the mass of the population is effectively separated from an independent means of existence and thrust into wage labour. Dispossession is therefore the starting point, but the process does not end there. Despite the high and increasing levels of urbanisation and proletarianisation and the arguments against expending too much energy on land and agrarian issues in South Africa, it is these very issues that are vital in the struggle for livelihoods, sovereignty and full citizenship.

As mentioned earlier, the really telling issue is that, while people have en masse been dispossessed and disconnected from the land, a huge proportion Rhetoric and Reality in Restitution and Redistribution 49

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have not been absorbed into gainful employment in urban (or rural) areas.

They are trapped in inactivity and unemployment largely because territorial segregation was part of the process of primitive accumulation. Put differently, the violence of colonialism and apartheid facilitated capital accumulation by dispossession, but it simultaneously also engendered a crisis of accumulation by expanded reproduction. For Moyo and Yeros (2005: 8) this implies that the process of proletarianisation has been the natural consequence of the transition to capitalism worldwide, its truncated nature has been the result of a historically specific type of transition to capitalism, characterised by the absence, or incompleteness, of industrial transformation of the periphery – that is, resolution of the agrarian question.

While it is true that land is the major source of income and subsistence for the mass of the population in sub-Saharan Africa, this is simply not the case in South Africa. Any estimation of the political relevance of the agrarian question in South Africa has to take this abiding material reality into account.

This is not an argument for South African exceptionalism. Instead, it implies recognition of the empirical differences and the variations that exist between African countries, including between the settler colonies in the south.

At the same time, the extent of racialised inequality in land is untenable from the point of view of the long-term sustainability of democracy (Hendricks 2003b: 28). There is a clear necessity for land reform to correct the colonially inherited distribution of land in order to contribute to reductions in inequality and to ensure social justice. Yet the patrialisation of land, or its return to indigenous ownership, has been highly contentious and deeply problematic (Lipton 2009: 180). Attitudes to land are deeply racialised as Gibson (2009: 119) concludes on the basis of a wide-ranging survey: “How one feels about the land issue depends to considerable degree on whether past injustices are deemed relevant. A basic fact of land politics is that whites do not want to address the past; blacks do.” Alden and Anseeuw (2009: 29–32) concur that attitudes to the land question are racialised: they delineate three discourses in the white settler narrative in post-colonial Africa, namely loss, fear and privilege. In contrast, the liberation narrative revolves around the discourses of solidarity, national identity and symbolic restitution.

The question of how to deal with the problem of mass unemployment and its resultant poverty thus arises. It is in this context that the agrarian question is posed. Put bluntly, can re-peasantisation of the population assist in 50 The Promise of Land

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dealing with these problems? In one of the last pieces he wrote, Archie Mafeje (2003: 30) calls on African governments to “think of other ways of financing industrialisation, which is fast becoming the sine qua non for the future of the continent.” This is in direct response to the challenge facing the mass of unemployed youth, which is much worse in South Africa than in the rest of the continent, precisely because of the extent of dispossession. Thus, when Moyo and Yeros (2005:2) ask the question, “How can we reconcile the posited ‘disappearance’ of the peasantry with the fact that the most progressive and militant movements in the world today are based in the countryside?”, they are clearly not thinking of South Africa as a reference point. In fact, the one chapter on South Africa in their book, Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America, deals with urban land struggles rather than the countryside. Their book bears testimony to the richness of rural struggles and how the “nucleus of anti-imperialist politics today... is to be found in the countryside of the periphery.” Pertinent as this statement may be for the global South, it rests very awkwardly next to a sustained analysis of the rural and urban realities of South Africa. For example, a recent report on the demographics of the Eastern Cape, which concludes that “the province has the most intensive out-migration history in South Africa” (Makiwane & Chimera-Dan 2010: 110), seems to suggest the ongoing relevance to South Africa of Marx’s (1977: 669) description of primitive accumulation: “Those moments when large masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and ‘unattached’ proletarians on the labour market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant from the soil, is the basis of the entire process.”

There is an urgent necessity to move beyond the colonial and apartheid imposed spatial divisions and an equal urgency to ensure a more equitable distribution of land in the country. Both the state and social movements have roles to play in endeavours to move beyond the impasse in thinking and acting about land. The ongoing separation of land and citizenship remains an abiding question for all South Africans and it is imperative that grandiose statements of agrarian and land reform are translated into plans and practice.

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