Thirty years after the end of apartheid, South Africa remains a troubled country with glaring racial disparities in income, employment, and access to everything from adequate housing to drinking water and electricity. But the abundant challenges that continue to face the country belie strenuous efforts at restitution and racial reconciliation—efforts that, in South Africa, have often focused on land.
The country’s ongoing reallocation of land has become a symbol of the government’s commitment to justice and reparation—and of that commitment’s inevitable incompleteness and ambiguity. The efforts suggest the country’s history of dispossession can’t simply be reversed, but rather that progress unavoidably occurs against the background of injustice’s legacy. South Africa’s land reallocation cuts to the heart of the very meaning of racial hierarchy, marginalization, and material and symbolic reparations.
Thirty years after the end of apartheid, South Africa remains a troubled country with glaring racial disparities in income, employment, and access to everything from adequate housing to drinking water and electricity. But the abundant challenges that continue to face the country belie strenuous efforts at restitution and racial reconciliation—efforts that, in South Africa, have often focused on land.
The country’s ongoing reallocation of land has become a symbol of the government’s commitment to justice and reparation—and of that commitment’s inevitable incompleteness and ambiguity. The efforts suggest the country’s history of dispossession can’t simply be reversed, but rather that progress unavoidably occurs against the background of injustice’s legacy. South Africa’s land reallocation cuts to the heart of the very meaning of racial hierarchy, marginalization, and material and symbolic reparations.
South Africa’s racialized system of dispossession and domination culminated in the white minority, comprising 11 percent of the population, holding 86 percent of all farmland in the country. Meanwhile, 13 million Blacks, many of whose forebears had been dispossessed through racially discriminatory practices, were packed into cramped areas of poor-quality land.
As apartheid gave way, South Africa’s new democracy embarked on one of the most ambitious attempts ever to use land as a tool for deconstructing racial hierarchy. The inauguration of one major example of this ongoing transformation occurred in a northeastern region called Nkomazi. On June 19, 2007, Black residents from nearby communities, white businesspeople, and government functionaries gathered at the typically quiet Tenbosch sugarcane farm across the Crocodile River from Kruger National Park. South Africa’s minister for agriculture and land affairs, Lulama Xingwana, addressed the crowd, telling them that “the African National Congress-led government is committed to [ensuring] that the wrongs of the past are corrected, and that there is redress for the victims of racially motivated land dispossessions.”
One year later, the government had already settled claims transferring over 150,000 acres of land in the region to seven Black communities with more than 20,000 beneficiaries. These communities had been forced off their land during the country’s racially discriminatory apartheid era.
The main episode of removal occurred in late 1954. Government trucks arrived and forcibly removed people from their land. The communities lost nearly everything they owned during the removal. It occurred just before the maize harvest and happened so quickly that people could not bring their animals or possessions. There was no infrastructure, housing, or on-site water access where the government trucks dumped them. “We were thrown into the bush where there was nothing,” the current chief of the Ngomane Lugedlane, one of the tribal communities that historically inhabited the land, explained to me.
An agribusiness company called TSB had already begun buying up land in the Tenbosch area at this point and continued doing so in the ensuing years. After apartheid ended, however, the company began cooperatively working with the government and communities on restitution and eventually sold the government over 90 percent of its land—for nearly half a billion dollars—for reallocation to Black communities. It also helped to bring along other white commercial sugarcane farmers to participate in land restitution.
The land restitution shifted sugarcane production in the region away from white commercial growers and toward Black communities. But after decades of marginalization away from their ancestral land, most beneficiaries of the land claim were poor and had little knowledge of commercial farming. They decided to forge an unusual arrangement: to work directly with TSB.
TSB wanted to remain in the lucrative sugar industry and stepped up to work with the Nkomazi communities. The company’s director of agricultural operations, Dawie van Rooy, told me the company made the judgment that “if we want a stable community, we don’t have an option. We have to sell this land. And we have to implement a … [community] partnership … that ensures sustainable cane supply.”
TSB spent years planning a smooth handover to local communities and ways to form an enduring partnership. TSB forged 50-50 joint venture agreements with several communities and began leasing sugarcane farmland from the community trusts and associations, which in turn also pay a share of profits to communities. It gave the joint ventures technical and operational support and provided members training and skills development as well as jobs. That included a scholarship program to train and educate community members for operational and strategic management, in effect grooming them for leadership positions. And it invested in Black small-scale sugarcane growers who farmed lands they had been forcibly moved to decades prior, helping establish and capitalize their enterprises and similarly forging a joint venture agreement with them as a group to foster sustainable production.
Within several years, the partnership that TSB—now RCL—forged with restituted communities became a model for land restitution and reallocation elsewhere in the country. The communities who received land and formed joint ventures with RCL have sustained high levels of productivity. Community members now serve as farm managers and officers, work in large numbers at the sugar mills, and have contract labor with the joint ventures. Small-scale Black sugar farmers have also seen rising incomes and many could afford improved housing, vehicles, and to pay for better education for their children.
There has also been growth in mid-sized Black-owned farms and the development of a Black professional and managerial class within the sugar industry. That stems from a second track of South Africa’s land reallocation, one in which the government purchases voluntarily offered private farmland at market value rates and then gives grants to individual Black applicants or groups of applicants to enable them to purchase land.
Some of the new Black professional class, like Edward Ndlovu, are beneficiaries of the restituted communities who now work with RCL as joint venture managers, straddling what was previously a stark and impenetrable divide. “You have to have two characters,” he said to me, “one as a [joint venture] employee with RCL and another as a beneficiary. … It’s so challenging, but it’s so exciting, to work in that place knowing that you are giving something back to the community that raised you.”
The episode of land restitution in Nkomazi is one of thousands being used to dismantle South Africa’s racial hierarchy that began with white colonial settlement and reached its apex during apartheid with mass forced removal of Black Indigenous communities from their land. There are plenty of other cases like this. The Makuleke community reclaimed ownership of part of the renowned Kruger National Park and now leases it to the park while jointly managing its conservation and profiting from its commercial use for tourism. The Giba community reclaimed its ancestral land from white farmers in Mpumalanga province and turned to growing high-value crops while employing women and starting a program to train young people in farming. And while urban land restitution is complicated by population pressure and high real estate prices, there are some successes there too, like in Gqeberha (formerly Port Elizabeth).
It should come as no surprise given the monumental scale of racially motivated land dispossession and rights violations and the messy nature of a new democracy that land reallocation has also suffered many failures and disappointments. Some high-profile restitution projects have collapsed, like Elandskloof in the Western Cape and the initially successful Zebedelia citrus farm in Limpopo. Others have underdelivered and faced long delays, like the resettlement of the District Six area of Cape Town that the apartheid government bulldozed to the ground.
Restitution and reparations in South Africa remain incomplete. While the government has transferred about 34 million acres to Black farmers since the end of apartheid, this is still only half of what it promised to complete by 1999. The government has pushed back the deadline to finish land transfers several times and is now aiming for 2030. Even that remains a pipe dream. Meanwhile, urban restitution has been truncated.
Part of the reason that restitution and reparations have been difficult, slow, and messy is because Black South Africans are not a monolithic, undifferentiated group. The reality is that these different communities, and the people within them, require tailored treatment in restitution and reparations. Furthermore, restitution entails grappling with what are often poorly documented histories and addressing inevitable conflicts between landowners and claimants, between claimants and the state, and even between different claimants to the same land. These issues are complicated by factors like advancing urbanization and generational change that shift interests, memories, and opportunities. This is commonplace in restitution and not unique to South Africa.
The African National Congress’ own oversights, corruption, and crude political calculations have contributed to the setbacks to restitution. The land restitution commission originally viewed its role as simply transferring plots of land and its job complete once it handed over a farm to a claimant. That narrow focus led to failure among many early land recipients. Beneficiaries need comprehensive and sustained support from both national and local-level government in order to begin to more holistic restoration and to thrive in the longer term as they build a new life in the modern economy. Those receiving commercial farms also need partnerships with existing commercial farmers to more quickly gain access to capital, markets, and expertise. The government has learned this lesson and has turned some floundering projects around and set other recent ones off on better footing.
It is easy to focus on the growing pains and shortfalls of South Africa’s land reallocation and to miss the progress. While flawed and incomplete, it has also restored dignity, a sense of justice, and even economic opportunity to many Black South Africans. The project is an evolving model of how land can be put to the service of racial justice and reconciliation.
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