South Africa has been engulfed in stormy debates about the ownership of land. The best the ANC government has done for two decades is to oversee a failed neoliberal land reform project. The populist Economic Freedom Fighters appear to be setting the agenda for alternatives in the absence of a principled anti-capitalist agrarian platform. But behind its hollow chants for land nationalisation, leaders of the EFF aspire to be big private land owners. Many ANC politicians form part of a wealthy landholding minority. This land grabbing is rife in former Bantustans territories where poor peasants are starved of land around the scandal-ridden estates of Nkandla and Qunu. It is thus fitting to begin this series on altering land ownership patterns with tough questions about ‘who owns the land in the Bantustans’? Subsequent articles take stock of the political and economic significance of land ownership reforms on government’s agenda such as ceilings on land ownership and mandating a 50% ownership stake for farm workers in farming businesses where they work.
Winnie Madikizela‐Mandela, a veteran politician of the African National Congress, has staked a controversial claim to the land owned by her former late husband, Nelson R. Mandela. But a factor counting against Madikizela-Mandela’s claim on the Qunu property is the fact that she is not mentioned in Mr Mandela’s will. Even so, her landownership bid enjoys the full backing of the infamous tribal autocrat, Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo.
The ANC government and other tribal elites, on the other hand, continually and firmly reject this land claim for reasons that are vague and puzzling. Nevertheless, this landownership debacle is the latest one in which high-profile ANC politicians have become enmeshed and exposes the contradictions in the party’s land and agrarian policies.
The disputed Qunu estate is near Mthatha, Eastern Cape. The property lies in a former Bantustan, territories post-apartheid government officials now label ‘communal land’. How the former Bantustans suddenly changed into ‘communal areas’ is an intriguing mystery. What makes the structure of landholdings and land use in these areas ‘communal’? What economic, social and political relations define ‘communal land’ and separate it from other land tenure regimes?
Communal land literarily means that a community has common control or ownership of a piece of land. But who makes up a ‘community’ and what are its decision-making rules? Moreover, South Africa is a capitalist country which is based on private ownership of productive resources (including land), wage-labour and commodity production. In this context, classifying land as common property is strikingly atypical and inconsistent with hard realities.
Upon closer interrogation of the Mandela land quarrel, even tougher questions arise: how does so-called “land supposedly held in common by the community” end up being the private property of one wealthy family? Curiously, all protagonists in the Mandela land saga are courting factions of tribal authorities in defence of their conflicting claims. This begs yet another question: Why does the tribal autocracy wield so much power over landholding rights and use almost a quarter century after the end of apartheid and despite growing resistance against them?
It is common knowledge that the state owns almost all land in the ex-Bantustans. Peasants occupy meagre plots without any secure tenure; these are pieces of marginal land unfit for any meaningful small-scale farming. They constitute a class of dispossessed peasants. By contrast, tribal kings and chiefs are state functionaries in the countryside, fully protected by the 1996 Constitution, the country’s supreme law. These anachronistic autocrats continue their pre-1994 jobs: henchmen tasked with policing land dispossession and reservoirs of cheap migratory labour.
Promises that post-1994 land and agrarian policies will sweep away the Bantustans (with its land hunger and repressive agrarian relations) have not materialised. Yet the laws that aided the dispossession of the peasants, such as the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts, and became instrumental in bringing into being the Bantustans, were scrapped after 1994. This begs questions about the substance and value of the alternative policies. Are post-1994 agrarian reforms rooted in an anti-capitalist agrarian vision? Has the post-apartheid state implemented an agrarian programme in the interest of the landless majority working and living on the land?
An instructive case in point is to look at the rejection of the ANC government’s communal land tenure law. Rural women marched in the forefront of widespread opposition to the Communal Land Rights Act (CLaRA), adopted in 2002. It is not difficult to understand why this law sparked such bitter resistance in the countryside; protests that eventually sealed the fate of this law. The CLaRA failed because it set out to bolster the land allocation powers of tribal autocrats and at the same time reinforce the landlessness of women. This law was in effect upholding pre-1994 land inequalities and social injustices in the countryside. In 2010, the CLaRA was declared to be unconstitutional, thus forcing the state to rely on a mix of pre-1994 policies to govern land access and use in the former Bantustans, such as the 1941 State Land Disposal Act. Also, the so-called comprehensive policy to resolve the land question, the 2011 Land Reform Green Paper, merely promises the crafting of a communal land tenure law at an indefinite future date.
It is in this context that the family feud around the Qunu land is playing itself out. The scandal showcases the scramble for land among the aspirant black bourgeoisie, including high-profile ANC politicians. This shameless land grabbing is covered with rhetoric about social cohesion, communal land, developmental state and so forth. Like other capitalists, this minority in fact strives to accumulate land at the expense of the landless majority.