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2
Land and agrarian reform policies
from a historical perspective
Paul Hebinck
The purpose of this chapter is to review land and agrarian development policies in South Africa and to chart the changes that have taken place over the years. This overview spans the period before the native reserves came into being as result of the infamous 1913 Land Act, to the recent post-apartheid land and agrarian reform policies.
A historical analysis of policy structures the chapter. Land and agrarian reform policies are not designed and implemented in a socio-political and historical vacuum. Policies ‘have left their historical traces’ as James (2010: 222) points out and these are still visible and felt to this day. Notably, the residual effects of colonial and apartheid policies constrain the social transformations that post-apartheid policymakers would like to facilitate. An account of policies and their formulation requires a chronology, preferably one which intertwines the nature of state power with advancements in the sciences.
The history of South Africa clearly did not begin in 1652 with the colonisation of a small piece of land near present-day Cape Town by Dutch settlers instigated by the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Our concern is with the role the colonial state and state policies have played since 1654 in the reordering of what is currently South Africa and how this concurred with the interests of the state, white settlers and later those of the mining sector. A common periodisation is one that distinguishes the colonial from the Union era and apartheid from post-apartheid. State policies, acts and degrees do not neatly
