Burial sites, informal rights and lost kingdoms: contesting land claims in Mpumalanga, South Africa

Africa, Spring, 2009 by Deborah James

What gave land its significance as a symbol of citizenship over the course of the twentieth century was the gradual, but ultimately systematic, exclusion of Africans from the right to own it. Mamdani's influential account, according to which a system of customary land tenure in separate 'ethnic' territories made rural Africans politically dependent upon chiefs (1996: 21-2; see also Ashforth 1990: 158), fails to acknowledge the uneven and disputed character of African land occupation over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Delius and Cope 2007; Mulaudzi and Schirmer 2007: 353-4), and thus overemphasizes the monolithic character of Apartheid's project. But it is nonetheless accurate to say that, overall, the Apartheid state both created an inexorably divided sense of territory and in the process denied citizenship or assigned it on a second-class basis. Undoing Apartheid thus required that a unity of territory and government be created where previously there had been division.

Since space and territory had been of key importance in Apartheid's plans, resistance to the implementation of these plans was likewise spatial and territorial in character (Bozzoli 2004). Land and rights became indissolubly connected in the public mind, partly because of clashes-increasingly tierce towards the end of the 1980s--between the state and the people whose property, land and citizenship rights it was undermining (Delius 1996; Seekings 2000; van Kessel 2000). The drafters of South Africa's new constitution, seeing land as central in defining the rights that had formerly been denied, proposed to restore land rights--and with them the sovereignty and full citizenship of the African population (Ramutsindela 1998).

While LPM members and some politicians signalled support for the 'fast-track' approach of Zimbabwe, the South African government was determined to structure and organize land transfer, carefully designing policies and laws to achieve the ambitious target of transferring 30 per cent of farm land across the racial frontier. (3) Rather than expropriation, the 'market' was proposed as a means to acquire such land, which--with the mediation of state officials--would be bought from 'willing sellers' by 'willing buyers'. This approach generated much criticism (Hall and Williams 2003).

Several branches of the programme were designed: restitution, redistribution and tenure reform. The ANC's 'political demand for land' (Dolny 2001:100) arose from the experience of titled landowners, the group from which much of the emerging African political elite was drawn and which had lost much of its property in 'black spot' forced removals. Restitution based primarily on past entitlement and rights was thus bound to be the guiding principle of South African land reform, and the Restitution Act of 1994 was controversially phrased so as to render more far-reaching (or more vaguely defined) claims, or those which dated from before 1913, illegitimate. The inclusion of 'informal rights' as a basis for restitution was, however, intended to enable at least some of these claims dating from an earlier period to be included. But those Africans who had never had secure--or any--claims on landed property would not be excluded. The policy arm known as redistribution would enable them to group together and purchase farms with the aid of a government grant. Finally, the rights of those residing on land but depending on others for their occupation of it--those continuing to live on white farms, or under chiefs in the homelands would be assured through tenure reform.