The land clearances at Pilgrim's rest

Abstract

Despite the volume of material dealing with forced removals in South Africa, there remain some obvious lacunae in the literature. I Among the removals which have been lost from sight in the publicity over dramatic, ideologically-based demolitions of urban group areas and rural black spots are the innumerable relocations of people from company-owned land in the Transvaal. So little is known about social conditions in these vast areas of the province over the past century that a daunting research task lies ahead. The relationship between the history of rural communities and the events of their removal remains largely unexplored, as do the subsequent forms which relocated communities have taken. 2 With masterful understatement, the Surplus People Project noted that 'little primary work has been done' on the abolition of labour tenancy and squatting on farms in the Transvaal. Still less documented is the role of private landowners in the origins and demise of 'squatting' and labour tenancy, despite the extent to which corporate land ownership has played a role in shaping the history of the country, particularly the Transvaal, for over a century. It is partly due to the lack of such studies that the state has been portrayed as the key actor in South African population relocation. Of course there are areas in which that assessment seems largely correct; black spot removals are a case in point. But even there, accumulation and impoverishment, as Beinart and Delius put it in a