Cherryl Walker. Land-Marked: Land Claims and Land Restitution in South Africa. Johannesburg: Jacana Media; Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. xii + 292 pp. Abbreviations. Maps. Photographs. Tables. Appendixes. Endnotes. Bibliography. Index. $26.95. Paper. - Aninka Claassens and Ben Cousins, eds. Land, Power and Custom: Controversies Generated by South Africa's Communal Land Rights Act. Published for the Legal Resources Centre. Cape Town: UCT Press; Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. xv + 392 pp. DVD. Maps. Abbreviations. Contributors. Notes. Tables. References. Index. $34.95. Paper.

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-193
Author(s):  
Lionel Cliffe
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Land Rights ◽  
Ohio University ◽  
Land Claims ◽  
Communal Land ◽  
Land Restitution

scholarly journals Land Reform for a Landless Chief in South Africa: History and Land Restitution in KwaZulu-Natal

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Jill E. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Land Claims ◽  
Land Access ◽  
Reform Program ◽  
Kwazulu Natal ◽  
Communal Land ◽  
Land Restitution

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.

Land and Justice in South Africa: Exploring the Ambiguous Role of the State in the Land Claims Process

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 391-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thembela Kepe
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Land Rights ◽  
The State ◽  
Land Claims ◽  
Rural Land ◽  
Commercial Farming ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Policy Statements

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.

scholarly journals Struggles with activism: NGO engagements with land tenure reform in post-apartheid South Africa

2010 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Fortin
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
Land Rights ◽  
African National Congress ◽  
Tenure Reform ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Internal Politics ◽  
Communal Land ◽  
National Congress ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship

ABSTRACTIn 2004, a long-awaited piece of post-apartheid legislation, the Communal Land Rights Act – to reform the land tenure of those living in the former ‘homelands’ of South Africa – was passed into law unanimously by parliament. This unanimity, however, conceals the extent to which the process towards this moment was deeply contested. Exploring the efforts by land sector NGOs to secure legitimacy in their engagements with this process reveals the extent to which wider power relations and contestations have determined their positioning. Those within the non-governmental land sector who opposed the legislation pitted themselves against African National Congress politicians and high-profile traditional leaders. However, the adoption of a Mamdani-inspired discourse to contest such politics and oppose the proposed legislation contributed to reinscribing narrow readings of knowledge considered to be legitimate. Their engagements were also shaped by changes in the NGO sector. Reduced funding for land sector NGOs and an increasingly ambivalent relationship between them and government contributed to contestations between NGOs and among people working within them. Their strategic engagements in such wider and internal politics influenced both the frames within which such policy change could be debated and the ways in which individuals working for NGOs consequently positioned themselves in relation to their constituents.

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