scholarly journals Possession and Precedence: Juxtaposing Customary and Legal Events to Establish Land Authority

Land ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (8) ◽  
pp. 126
Author(s):  
Laura S. Meitzner Yoder ◽  
Sandra F. Joireman
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Land Claims ◽  
Land Law ◽  
Property Theory ◽  
Entry Points ◽  
Timor Leste ◽  
Previous Claim ◽  
Original Acquisition ◽  
Land Restitution

Land restitution carries implicit recognition of some previous claim to ownership, but when are first claims recognized? The concepts of first possession and original acquisition have long been used as entry points to Western concepts of property. For Austronesia, the concept of precedence is used in customary systems to justify and describe land claims and Indigenous authority. Conflict and political change in Timor-Leste have highlighted the co-existence of multiple understandings of land claims and their legitimacy. Considering customary principles of precedence brings into relief important elements of first possession important in land restitution processes. This paper juxtaposes the concept of original acquisition in property theory to two different examples of original claims from Timor-Leste: a two-part customary origin narrative from Oecusse and the development of a national land law for the new state. In these three narratives, we identify three different establishment events from which land authority develops. The article then uses this idea of the establishment event to explore five points of customary-statutory intersection evident from the land restitution process: (1) legitimate sources of land authority; (2) arbitrary establishment dates; (3) privileging of social order; (4) recognition of spiritual ties to land; and (5) the possibility for reversal.

scholarly journals Burial Sites, Informal Rights and Lost Kingdoms: Contesting Land Claims in Mpumalanga, South Africa

Africa ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 228-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah James
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Order ◽  
New South ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Land Claims ◽  
Cultural Experience ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Political Demand ◽  
Land Restitution ◽  
Different Levels

In the new South Africa, the promise of land restitution raised millennial-style expectations amongst dispossessed and dispersed former landholders. Partly prompted by emerging policy discourses, iconic tropes of localized cultural experience such as grave sites, initiation lodges and cattle byres acquired new significance. Because they proved what the Land Claims Commission calls ‘informal rights’ to land, they became verifiable evidence of effective possession, and thus grounds on which to claim the restoration of such land. The meaning of land, the nature of ownership and the legitimacy of its restoration were all matters contested between claimants, policy makers and human rights lawyers. They were also contested by those at different levels in the hierarchical social order of the new South Africa. Members of the African nationalist political elite, in dialogue with lawyers, cherished one set of understandings, while ordinary migrant/country-dwellers tended to hold to another. Both, however, were mediated through the new discourse on informal rights. It is neither purely through the activities of cosmopolitan elites with their ‘political demand for land’ nor through the unmediated localist experience of less sophisticated country-dwellers with more practical orientations that the significance of land becomes evident, but in the interaction between the two. Based on local understandings, transformed in the course of thirty years of ‘land back’ struggles, and finally negotiated over the course of the last ten years, a new diasporic consensus on what ‘the land’ signifies has been established.

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.

The role of education in land restitution, redistribution and restrictions as individual, group and national empowerment through land reform

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Clementine Sibongile Yeni
Keyword(s):  
Land Reform ◽  
Best Interests ◽  
Land Claims ◽  
Land Reforms ◽  
Life Orientation ◽  
Agricultural Sciences ◽  
Just Society ◽  
Democratic Elections ◽  
Land Restitution

This study is focused on the role of education to improve awareness of two critically important aspects of the South African situation 19 years after the first democratic elections in 1994. In the first instance, the study aims to augment the grades 10-12 Life Orientation curriculum to promote understanding and appreciation of land rights as human rights for every citizen in South Africa to address the social injustices of the past. In the second instance, the study focuses on grades 10-12 Agricultural Sciences curriculum to ensure that every learner who leaves school is in a position to care for land responsibly, and to use land productively for his or her own benefit and the benefit of others in the future. These foci have been informed by numerous interactions with people in four small communities on the Southern KwaZulu-Natal coast, who have been victims of landless as a result of the Group Areas act of 1960, and are claiming restitution for the land lost, and are required by law to make the restituted land productive. The study records first hand stories told about land ownership, landless, land claims, land restitution, and land (ab)use stories, in the form of narratives, such as autobiographies, auto-ethnographies, accounts of action research and self study. My research participants and I are the authors of our land stories. We tell our stories as a way of making the private public in the interests of a fair and just society. The forms of presentation include narratives, dialogues, playlets, literary references and critical reflections. The perspectives used include the native worldview, rurality as a dynamic, generative and variable milieu, the orality-literacy interface, the effect of oppression, and values and beliefs, customs and mores which (in)form a civil and civilised society. During the course of the study, the role of stories to reveal what is happening in the lives of those people most affected by unjust laws, and to empower them to take action in their own best interests became evident. The major role of education in land reforms cannot be overemphasized, which is why I have used what I have discovered from the many interactions with many people to inform two grades 10-12 school curricula: the grades 10-12 Life Orientation curriculum and the grades 10-12 Agricultural Sciences curriculum.

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