Subjects:

Other Jurisdictions

Contents:

'Rights' or 'Property'? State, society, the law and the landless in South Africa

'A sentimental attachment to the neighbourhood'

Expanding restitution: the question of informal rights

Challenging restitution: African owners, African tenants, and the politics of land reform

'To Take Back the Land': labour tenancy and the Landless Peoples' Movement

Between public and private: new property models

Rights, welfare or the market? the new redistribution

Land, power and people. chiefs, brokers and intermediaries

White power, black redress: the racial politics of land reform

Conclusion

Gaining Ground? Rights and Property in South African Land Reform examines how land reform policy and practice in post-apartheid South Africa have been produced and contested.

Set in the province of Mpumalanga, the book gives an ethnographic account of local initiatives and conflicts, showing how the poorest sectors of the landless have defied the South African state's attempts to privatize land holdings and create a new class of African farmers. They insist that the 'rights-based' rather than the 'market-driven' version of land reform should prevail and that land restitution was intended to benefit all Africans. However their attempts to gain land access often backfire. Despite state assurances that land reform would benefit all, illegal land selling and 'brokering' are pervasive, representing one of the only feasible routes to land access by the poor.

This book shows how human rights lawyers, NGOs and the state, in interaction with local communities, have tried to square these symbolic and economic claims on land.