book. The themes that emerge from the international debate, and analytical lessons learned from agrarian studies more broadly, appear meaningful for understanding the complexities of South Africa’s land reform practices.
In chapter 2, Paul Hebinck reviews agrarian and rural development policies in South Africa and charts the changes and shifts that have taken place over the years. He summarises over 100 years of rural and agricultural development policy and analyses the ideas and ideologies that shaped these policies. They appear to have many common characteristics even though they have emerged from contrasting political ideologies and governance regimes. These continuities often constrain the dramatic structural changes and transformations that post-apartheid policy-makers would like to achieve.
Ben Cousins’s chapter 3 discusses why and how post-apartheid land and agricultural policies have been uncoupled, partly as a result of the unwillingness of policy-makers to tamper with the perceived strengths of large-scale commercial farming, as well as unexamined assumptions about the nature of ‘modern agriculture’. The chapter assesses the consequences of these policy choices, including, most damagingly, the lack of a coherent strategy to reform the inherited agrarian structure.
Part 2 ‘Mind the gap’: discrepancies between policies and practices in South African land reform
The second part explores how agrarian reform policies are transmitted, implemented and experienced at the grass-roots level of projects and villages. Chapters 4–13 draw heavily on empirical investigations of land and agrarian reform practices after land has been redistributed and/or returned to the original owners and new institutional and property relations come into play. The land tenure reform dimension is addressed specifically, to show how history complicates current reform initiatives. The chapters stress that social inequality embedded in relations of class, gender and generation are important ingredients of land reform practices. In addition, there is ample evidence of new forms of inequality that derive from the social categories the reform discourse has introduced. At the same time, beneficiaries make their own selections from among the opportunities and resources land reform policy has to offer, thus unpacking policy components and repackaging them, as it were, to suit the needs of their everyday practices. All of this happens against a background of multiple livelihood strategies.
Francois Marais explores, in chapter 4, the degree to which land reform beneficiaries rework the expert advice provided by land reform consultants. The case material of two farms in the Western Cape shows that beneficiaries are not passive recipients of expert knowledge. They actively redesign knowledge to accommodate their own ideas and experiences. The expert belief that farming should consist solely of cultivation and livestock production is deeply flawed.
In chapter 5, Yves van Leynseele examines the dynamics of project planning in land restitution and explores how land reform beneficiaries contest project viability. An ethnographic study of the different stages of the Makhoba land restitution case provides evidence that land restitution bureaucrats often wish to protect ‘their claimants’ from an unforgiving market. The chapter calls for a critical analysis of the ways in which restitution officials play a brokerage role in the land restitution process, operating as mediators in a field of power in which they occupy an ambivalent position as both local translators of dominant farming models and as engaged bureaucrats. Van Leynseele maintains that state-induced intervention is not implemented by a coherent bureaucracy, nor does it follow a straight road from design through to implementation.
Modise Moseki provides, in chapter 6, an account of everyday life at a land reform farm near Queenstown. Making use of previous studies, his account contrasts starkly with the abstract and quantitative ways in which policymakers and land reform analysts generally evaluate land reform projects. Moseki argues that sweeping policy statements and evaluations based on prescribed outcomes fail to register a lot of what is actually happening on the ground, which hinges on multiple livelihoods. He also points out what the basis is for the new inequalities that have emerged in the South African countryside in the wake of land reform.
Chapter 7, by Harriët Tienstra and Dik Roth, examines cases of market-led land reform in the Western Cape. The cases represent the two dominant forms of land reform in the province: 100 per cent ownership projects and Farmer Worker Equity Share projects. They explore the ongoing dynamics on both kinds of land reform farms from a property rights and relations perspective, and show that when these are transformed on the farms, beneficiaries’ ‘bundles’ of rights and obligations change simultaneously.
Limpho Taoana scrutinises land reform cases in chapter 8 to provide proof that land reform has led to the formation of new social categories in the urban and rural landscapes of South Africa: land reform beneficiaries and non-land reform beneficiaries. These categories are policy-induced categories that only become real in land reform situations. Non-active land reform beneficiaries form a third category, comprised of the disenchanted people that have left a project due to the low performance of the newly acquired farm, or conflict with fellow beneficiaries, or the hard work and exposure to risks involved in participating in a land reform project. Most of them have returned to their previous places of residence.
Malebogo Phetlhu addresses two general but fundamental questions in chapter 9: what is happening on land reform farms, and how do different actors develop strategies to make sense of land reform policies? The chapter provides an everyday life account of the experiences and ideas of those actors who are directly involved with land reform. There is no single answer to the question about how land reform has reshaped people’s lives. Phetlhu builds on the idea that land reform is often a conflictual and ambiguous process, and that it is important to understand that beneficiaries are not a homogeneous group. Indeed, one of the tasks of land and agrarian reform is to deconstruct social categories such as ‘beneficiary’ or ‘extension worker’.
Petunia Khutswane’s chapter 10 concerns the role of youth in land reform. By exploring land reform from a generational point of view, combined with a view of land as a resource, she shows the processes that constrain or inhibit the participation of youth in the South African land reform programme. Little is known about why very few young people engage in land reform projects. The youth dimension of land reform has mainly been associated with mobilisation. The majority of land reform beneficiaries in South Africa are older people whose livelihoods combine land ownership and old age pensions. This raises questions about the future of land reform.
Robert Ross argues in chapter 11 that land restitution is, by definition, about history. Claims to land, and thus to compensation, have to be made on the basis of historical events and not those of a court of law. History, however, has sometimes developed in too complicated a way for the simple assumptions of the Land Claims Commission to be fulfilled. Ross explores the history of land ownership and allocation in the upper Kat River valley in particular, to show the extraordinarily complex nature of land relationships which inform the settlement of restitution claims.
Rosalie Kingwill focuses in chapter 12 on the problems of conjugating customary and common-law notions of ownership. The argument hinges on the complex way in which customary approaches to land ownership articulate with the legal prescripts
