mainly from common law. Drawing on case material from two Eastern Cape sites, one urban and one rural, she argues that customary practices cannot be reduced to ‘official’ customary law. The chapter charts the lived interpretations of land ownership and identifies how normative practices engage a hybrid of custom and state law, which, for strategic reasons, many scholars, officials and legal practitioners ignore.
In chapter 13, Karin Kleinbooi delivers an account of women’s experiences with exercising their land rights in Namaqualand. She explores the gendered customs and practices surrounding land rights and how women demand, assert or realise their land rights. The chapter shows that women are farming on land allocated for their own use and on land controlled by male relatives, while a few better-off women engage in independent livestock farming. Women gain access to land mainly through relationships of dependency on husbands, fathers and sons. Unmarried and divorced women are extremely vulnerable to loss of land rights and other resources.
Part 3 Competing knowledge regimes in communal area agriculture
Chapters 14–20 in this part draw on empirical research and critically examine the attempts of the state to rejuvenate agriculture and to address food security and well-being in the former homelands of Ciskei and Transkei, now part of the Eastern Cape. The chapters focus on recent policy initiatives such as Siyazondla, the Massive Food Production Programme (MFPP) and Siyakhula, as well as the revitalisation of irrigation and the reintroduction of Nguni cattle. These are taken as examples to address the tensions generated by the policy reforms, which attempt to redesign and modernise communal areas and communal farming, and to assess whether and how this resonates with local conditions. Together these chapters show that land reform occurs in contexts where livelihoods are multiple and practices are embedded in complex and dynamic cultural repertoires.
Chapter 14, by Paul Hebinck and Wim van Averbeke, problematises the notion of ‘agrarian’ in the Eastern Cape. Land and agrarian reform and rural development presupposes an agrarian identity from which to tap. This chapter examines the practical and discursive content and meaning of the terms ‘farming’ and ‘agrarian’ in two settlements in the former Ciskei homeland region of the central Eastern Cape. The analysis draws on ongoing research that started in 1995 in two villages in the central Eastern Cape, and more specifically on data collected in 1996/1997 and 2010/2011.
Klara Jacobson and Zamile Madyibi deal in their respective chapters with the intentions and dynamics of the MFPP, designed to revive agriculture in the former Transkei. Jacobson, in chapter 15, identifies that the programme aims to reduce rural poverty through increasing agricultural output and the environmental sustainability of farming. The MFPP aims to transform subsistence-oriented farming into commercially oriented mechanised agriculture using agrochemical inputs, and hybrid and genetically modified maize seeds Conditional grants are provided to financially assist smallholders. The MFPP’s record, Klara Jacobson argues, is meagre and she offers an explanation based on an analysis of how policymakers perceive and understand smallholder or communal agriculture. She unpacks the MFPP discourse by making use of MFPP documents and interviews with policymakers. Case material from three villages provides background data on smallholder agriculture and how the MFPP plan works in practice.
Chapter 16, by Zamile Madyibi, elaborates the MFPP as a planned development intervention which strongly reminds one of the homeland policies. He considers the theoretical assumptions that underpin the MFPP. The chapter explores the multiple realities of the rural Eastern Cape province to show the different ways in which beneficiaries have accommodated the MFPP in their agricultural activities. Three selected cases reflect the different labour patterns and land tenure systems that prevail in the province. The analysis shows the MFPP as rigidly adhering to ideas connected with economies of scale and the pursuit of state-driven green-revolution-style strategies. The MFPP has largely strengthened the trend set in motion in the 1930s, whereby a few elites manage to combine wage income with cultivating more land and obtaining high(er) yields.
Henning de Klerk describes, in chapter 17, the implementation of the Siyazondla Homestead Food Production Programme in Mbhashe. He takes the experiences of women’s groups, who see themselves as prospective participants and beneficiaries, as a starting point to analyse Siyazondla. De Klerk convincingly argues that unfulfilled expectations and experiences of exclusion have a major impact on social relationships among homestead food producers at village level and on the relationships between homestead food producers and local Department of Agriculture (DOA) officials. This needs to be taken into account in debates about governance and development interventions at local municipal level, particularly when these aim at outcomes that are sustainable in the long run.
Derick Fay’s chapter 18 offers another perspective on the dynamics of Siyazondla, by including the Child Support Grant (CSG). Since 1998, CSG has expanded to reach nearly two-thirds of the households in Hobeni, while Siyazondla began to assist households in southern Hobeni in 2007, with production inputs and training. Fay engages in this way with two debates: the potential of direct cash transfers and the potential of subsidised inputs for smallholders to serve as strategies for rural development and poverty alleviation. Fay’s analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork and points at both recent change – a sharp decline in the cultivation of remote fields since 1998 – and long-term continuities – the expansion and intensification of cultivation in homestead gardens. Concurrently, the contribution of formal employment to livelihoods has declined considerably, while the contribution of welfare has expanded.
Chapter 19, by Wim van Averbeke and Jonathan Denison, provides an insightful overview of smallholder irrigation in South Africa, with a particular focus on the Cape provinces, and shows clearly that irrigation cannot be disconnected from years of racial segregation policies. They explore the factors that play a role in the success of smallholder irrigation. These include a range of interventions driven by conflicting objectives, the limited role of agriculture in rural people’s livelihoods, and the legacy of apartheid that continues to cause exclusion from input and output markets. These factors are critical but often ignored.
The last chapter, by Ntombekhaya Faku and Paul Hebinck, explores the tensions and dynamics generated by the reintroduction of Nguni cattle in the Eastern Cape. Nguni projects are meant to address some of the colonial and apartheid legacies and to transform communal area livestock farming. Laudable as this goal might be, a critical examination of the Nguni project reveals that planners fail to take into account the fact that communal farmers’ view of cattle stems from experience and knowledge that has been accumulated over long periods of time. These include the experience of past state efforts to ‘upgrade’ their herds. In contrast to rural realities, projects like the Nguni projects work within a fixed time frame of about eight years and draw their knowledge from a mixture of scientific and idealistic, even romantic, views.
Themes, points of departure and synthesis
The themes and pertinent issues that emerge from the chapters together present a vivid picture of contemporary land reform dynamics experienced in South Africa. These themes can be recapped and synthesised as follows:
•there is a considerable discrepancy between policy discourse and practices;
•next to discontinuities, continuities in official thinking remain a predominant feature of institutional repertoires and intervention practices;
•processes of social
