SOUTH AFRICAN LAND REFORM: CASE-STUDIES IN 'DEMAND' AND 'PARTICIPATION' IN THE FREE STATE

Abstract

This article offers an ethnographic cross-section in one province of South Africa's new land reform programme. 'Demand' and 'participation' are the rhetorical keywords of the programme. Demand for land redistribution, however, cannot be understood in abstraction from the political and economic conditions of its supply. Similarly, 'participation' is a managed process involving many institutional intermediaries. A series of illustrative case-studies is presented, relating to the allocation of stateowned land; state-facilitated 'market' access to privately-owned land; the reconstruction and partial privatization of a para-statal development agency, which have brought into question the viability of a 'community conservation' project and also exposed the agency to political cross-fire; and, finally, some intricacies of the possibility of land restitution to people dispossessed under apartheid, which raises the question of whether the concept of indirect racial discrimination may be applied in the South African context. Several contradictions of the process of land redistribution are analysed: for example, the massive financial costs, direct and indirect, of bringing projects to fruition in the short term, without resolution of the need for long-term support; the divergence between nominal and actual beneficiaries; political and institutional conflicts, both inside and outside the state; and routine incompatibility between the diverse aspirations of beneficiaries and the 'business plans' required by bureaucrats and suppliers of credit. THE SOUTH AFRICAN GOVERNMENT is committed to a strategy of land reform that is 'demand-led' and places an emphasis on the active 'participation' of individuals and communities in decision-making. There are three principal elements of the emerging programme: the restitution of land to those who were dispossessed under apartheid laws; the redistribution of land to those who need it; and tenure reform, intended to achieve security of tenure for people holding land under diverse forms of tenure.1 The literature on the topic, both from official and unofficial sources, is already large.2 In a recent review of the politics of land reform, Richard Levin and Dan Weiner distinguished between an 'elite-pacted' process of transition, Colin Murray is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. 1. Department of Land Affairs (DLA), Green Paper on South African Land Policy (Pretoria, 1996); C. Murray, 'Land reform in the eastern Free State: Policy dilemmas and political conflicts', 3fournal of Peasant Studies, 23, 2/3 January/April 1996), pp. 209-244. 2. For references see H. Bernstein (ed.), The Agrarian Question in South Africa, special issue of 3tournal of Peasant Studies, 23, 2/3 January/April 1996).