ABSTRACT
The demand for land of claimants such as Doornkop’s title-holders was, in essence, a demand for the restoration of lost rights. It might appear from the case of Doornkop, however, that high-minded contestations over conceptualisations of rights were of less interest to claimants themselves than divisive matters of ethnicity, religion, descent, the relative advantages of modernity or the traditional way, and where or where not to plant one’s rows of corn. But surveys conducted in the new province of Mpumalanga as a whole revealed that the restoration of historical rights had an abiding importance, even from the perspective of constituencies beyond former title-holders. The general African public was committed to ‘righting the wrongs of the past, providing . . . security of occupation, and [re-establishing] traditional and cultural ties with the land’ rather than simply to farming or making a living from it.1 Similar attitudes had been expressed by participants in a National Land Conference held in 1994. Compared with the alternative of redistribution, restitution was seen ‘as the more legitimate route . . . people want to “continue where they left off” ’ (Levin 1996:374).
