Land Reform and the Quest for Women’s Land Rights in South Africa: A Case of KwaZulu-Natal Province

Author(s):  
Modupe A. Daramola
2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lyne ◽  
Paul Zille ◽  
Douglas Graham

This paper compares the results of public and private land redistribution in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It identifies problems that constrain access to the land market, and describes recent efforts to address the liquidity problem associated with mortgage finance. The Land Reform Credit Facility (LRCF) was launched by government in May 1999 to help alleviate cash flow problems on farms purchased by disadvantaged buyers and financed with mortgage loans from commercial banks. The LRCF does not offer subsidies. Rather it offers loans with deferred or graduated repayment schedules to reputable banks and venture capital investors who finance, on similar terms, equity-share projects and land purchased by aspiring farmers. The paper outlines the LRCF experience and considers reasons for its promising start. The loan target of R15 million (US$2.15 million) set for the first year was reached after only eight months.


Author(s):  
Juanita M. Pienaar

In the geographical areas forming the focus of this contribution, the traditional communal areas in former Bantustan and homeland areas in South Africa, communal ownership flows from the application of customary law, linked to the constitutional right to culture. Living customary law, embedded in communities, entails a dynamic system of land rights which are negotiated in line with particular needs. Recent policy and legislative developments, however, seem to bolster rights of traditional authorities, thereby impacting on land rights and effectively negating spontaneous negotiation. Conceptual clarification in this contribution embodies the complexity linked to communal property, specifically land, in light of the aftermath of apartheid, the commencement of an all-encompassing land reform programme and the operation of a dual legal system comprising customary law and Western-style legal paradigms. The challenges and opportunities for law reform are explored in this context of inter-connectedness of customary law and communal property.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Jill E. Kelly

Abstract Land claims and contests have been central to the construction of political authority across the African continent. South Africa’s post-apartheid land reform program aims to address historical dispossessions, but the program has experienced numerous obstacles and limits—in terms of pace, communal land access, productivity, and rural class divides. Drawing on archival and newspaper sources, Kelly traces how the descendant of a colonially-appointed, landless chief manipulated a claim into a landed chieftaincy and how both the chief and the competing claimants have deployed histories of landlessness and firstcomer accounts in a manner distinct to the KwaZulu-Natal region as part of the land restitution process.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 91
Author(s):  
T. Shabangu ◽  
M. S. C. Ngidi ◽  
T. O. Ojo ◽  
S. C. Babu

Providing appropriate post-settlement support to farmers is crucial for sustainable development of smallholder agriculture in South Africa. In unravelling this, the South Africa’s Recapitalization and Development Programme (RADP) was initiated. Hence, this study analysed the impact of RADP on performance of land reform beneficiary farmers in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. A multistage sampling procedure was used to select (n = 264) respondents for the study. Accounting for endogeneity issues in RADP assessments and its impact on the performance of land reform farmers, an endogenous switching regression model (ESRM) was employed. In the same vein, a doubly-robust inverse probability weighted regression adjustment was used as credible remedy for potentially biased estimates of ATT and POM of endogenous treatment model. The main findings revealed that tax compliance, secondary organization, legal entity, farm potential income at acquisition, farmers receiving third party assistance and strategic partnership were statistically significant in influencing the participation of farmers in RADP. Mentorship remains an extremely challenging element in post-settlement. However, through the strategic partnership of RADP farmers had likelihood to improve the farm and increase farm income. The results of the suggest that the RADP can contribute to a deep process of change and empowerment of farmers. In the same vein, strategic partnership of RADP is likely to improve the farmers’ performance. Therefore, there is a need to strongly improve mentorship and strategic partnership programme to encourage participation of land reform farmers in the support programmes.


2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 391-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thembela Kepe

Abstract In addition to challenges facing South Africa’s overall post-apartheid land reform, group rural land claims have particularly proven difficult to resolve. This paper explores the role that the state plays in shaping the outcomes of rural group land claims. It analyzes policy statements, including from policy documents, guidelines and speeches made by politicians during ceremonies to hand over land rights to rural claimants; seeking to understand the possible motives, factual correctness, as well as impact, of these statements on the trajectory of the settled land claims. The paper concludes that land reform as practiced in South Africa is functionally and discursively disembedded from socio-political histories of dispossession, because land has come to be treated more as a commodity, rather than as something that represents multiple meanings for different segments of society. Like many processes leading up to a resolution of a rural claim, subsequent statements by government concerning particular ‘successful’ land claims convey an assumption that local claimants have received just redress; that there was local consensus on what form of land claim redress people wanted, and that the state’s lead role in suggesting commercial farming or tourism as land use options for the new land rights holders is welcome. The paper shows that previous in-depth research on rural land claims proves that the state’s role in the success or failure of rural land claims is controversial at best.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-300
Author(s):  
Antonádia Borges

Apartheid segregated not only the living, but also the dead. Taking a wedding ritual as its departure point, the article explores the conversations between the living and the dead taking place in a redistributed farm in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Conviviality between the living and the dead challenges the idea of pecuniary compensation as an adequate land reform policy insofar its beneficiary population expands to the infinite, including those now alive, the living who have already died, and those yet to be born. If these ritual conversations suggest that the past and future are experiential moments beyond what is lived today, it would appear our duty to devise alternatives to the linear, flat, and cumulative narratives that currently dominate our academic work and our political practice.


1996 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alastair McIntosh ◽  
Sipho Sibanda ◽  
Anne Vaughan ◽  
Thokozani Xaba

Focaal ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 (61) ◽  
pp. 19-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah James

This article explores the contradictory and contested but closely inter- locking efforts of NGOs and the state in planning for land reform in South Africa. As government policy has come increasingly to favor the better-off who are potential commercial farmers, so NGO efforts have been directed, correspondingly, to safeguarding the interests of those conceptualized as poor and dispossessed. The article explores the claim that planned “tenure reform” is the best way to provide secure land rights, especially for laborers residing on white farms; illustrates the complex disputes over this claim arising between state and NGO sectors; and argues that we need to go beyond the concept of “neoliberal governmentality” to understand the relationship between these sectors.


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