ABSTRACT
Introduction Scientific communities worldwide grapple with finding the appropriate analytical tools with which to study the impact of land reform on rural livelihoods. In the South African context, analyses consistently focus on the tension between promoting large-scale, commercial agriculture and support for smallholder farmers (cf. Cousins and Scoones 2010; Cousins this volume; Ntsebeza and Hall 2007; van den Brink 2003). A pertinent concern here is the lack of policy options to implement broad-based land reform that would enable previously whiteowned large commercial farms to be dismantled or otherwise reconfigured to fit diverse livelihood options. Flexibility is lacking as policy makers see no merit in revitalizing what some hold to be a dormant or destroyed African peasantry (Bundy 1988; Hebinck and Van Averbeke 2007). The spectre of history appears to haunt South African land reform. Modernization trajectories mirror proto-apartheid notions of the ideal farm economic unit. The inability to restructure the agrarian structure appears evident in a dualist land reform model. On the one hand, this model seeks to maintain the viability of the established large-scale commercial farming sector. New African farmers should be endowed with entrepreneurial skills that match those of the exiting white farmers. On the other hand, separate programmes are developed that aim to support African smallholder producers, who often combine farming with other livelihood pursuits. As Cousins and Scoones (2010: 36) remark, this has encouraged the ‘persistence of agrarian dualism, especially in South Africa and Namibia, and the revitalization of colonial-era modernization narratives that see “viable” small-scale farms as scaled-down versions of large-scale commercial farms’. From this perspective, agrarian reform in South Africa is narrowly directed towards a group of relatively well-to-do rural (and some urban) Africans who can become a new class of full-time commercial farmers (ibid.: 50-1). Policies and grant allocation problematically hinge on the optimization of key production factors such as marketability of land and crops, efficient allocation of labour, commercial farming skills, and access to capital outside government. Redistribution of land remains key to the de-racialization of commercial agriculture, but the conditions for entering state programmes seem ever more biased
against the rural poor. The notion of the need for continuity with commercial farm patterns of land use has led observers to typify post-apartheid agrarian reform as a welfarist, neo-liberal programme that obscures smallholder modes of production (Lahiff this volume; Cousins 2000; Ntsebeza and Hall 2007). This chapter aims to reposition and contextualize the debate about the impact of land reform on livelihoods. We approach the historical trajectory of agrarian reform by comparing two ethnographic case studies, from the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces of South Africa respectively. We explore two ‘community’ claims to land restitution in which the land claimants have successfully regained ownership of land from which they were forcibly removed in terms of racist land policies. The cases represent different eras of land restitution as policy and praxis. The Mandlazini case exemplifies an embryonic stage that preceded the implementation of the 1994 Restitution of Land Rights Act. This period was characterized by a project orientation; land claims were settled on an individual project basis with few linkages to parallel planning processes and state departments (see Turner and Ibsen 2000). The Makhoba restitution settlement, on the other hand, was the flagship project of the Eastern Cape Regional Land Claims Commission. As such, it demonstrates the principles of the new developmental approach that evolved from land restitution agencies after 2002 (van Leynseele 2004). The settlement marked a turning point in state support, with government officials acting as intermediaries to ensure that land restoration was followed by a process of converting the claimants into a new class of African commercial farmers. Map 1 shows the location of these land restitution cases. The claims were however similar in a critical way; both groups expressed the need for physical resettlement. To harmonize the communities’ resettlement demands with expertly defined viable land use, both settlements were planned in accordance with the concept of an agri-village, a close settlement pattern that also featured in apartheid efforts at creating a class of full-time farmers and optimizing agricultural output on limited acreage (see de Wet 1987). In the intermittent years, between dispossession and reclamation, the ancestral lands of both groups had been developed in ways that set limits to the degree that past livelihoods could be imported into the present. The process of ‘reversal’ – i.e. reconstructing historical communities in terms of past notions of communal ownership and the right to self-determination – brought about a struggle over meaning between land claimants and the planning agencies that wanted to mitigate the ‘negative’ impacts of community-led, spontaneous resettlement (see Walker 2008). Notions of scarcity and economic viability entered the argument, as planners contended that the reclaimed land had a limited carrying capacity for cattle and township development (Mandlazini) and was productive commercial farming land (Makhoba). The ontological conflict between centralized ideas of modernization and localized approaches to land use is the analytical entry point adopted by this chapter, as it grapples with the messy processes of accommodation and reworking that accompany land restitution projects in South Africa. Land claimant
groups actively seek linkages to external agencies in order to gain access to land and post-settlement support. In the process, they encounter dominant notions of viability and attempt to reconfigure them. This dynamic is discussed here in terms of the partial adoption of modern developmental notions by communities and their simultaneous attempts at maintaining a measure of autonomy from planning agencies, mentors and investors. We highlight the concept of the ‘peasant condition’, employing it as a metaphor that expresses alternative pathways to dominant modernization paradigms and as a conceptual tool for exploring the tension between developmental paradigms and local needs and perceptions (van der Ploeg 2008). Our approach should not, however, be understood as the sort of reactive response that agitates against market forces and is constitutive of struggles for historical land rights. Rather, we apply the idea of the ‘peasant condition’ in the context of an argument for livelihood diversification and the view that livelihoods are strengthened through engagement in multiple, non-agrarian activities. Natural resources are seen as a composite political, cultural, residential and productive asset, a perspective which allows us to take into account the possibility that the drive for a ‘self-controlled and self-managed resource base’ may in fact include emancipation from full-time farming (ibid.: 23). Processes of de-peasantization and re-peasantization occur over long periods of time, and categories like capitalist farming and peasant farming may become blurred and entangled. It is empirically difficult, therefore, to ascertain whether the peasant condition has or has not successfully been realized in any specific instance. Of particular importance in this regard is the fact that we problematize forms of vertical encompassment by the state and other agencies that intervene in rural land relations. In its application in this chapter, then, the peasant condition becomes a reflexive category that enables us to develop a hypothesis about the relationship between land reform and poverty. We draw on du Toit’s (2004: 1003) assertion that ‘what defines marginality is not exclusion (or even imperfect inclusion!) but the terms and conditions of incorporation’. Well-intended policies of poverty alleviation, geared towards turning land claimants into commercial farmers or salaried farm workers, create new linkages that constitute a field of opportunities and constraints. In this respect, the ever-more stringent conditions attached to land restitution parcels – resulting in the internalization of a productionist approach that is wedded to a linear trajectory that ends with commercial farming – may entail new forms of marginalization. When the loss of agency experienced by land reform beneficiaries and the conditions attached to a commercial farming paradigm are taken into account, it becomes
tempting to argue that what poor people dependent on insecure and poorly paid jobs may require is not more integration, but less – strategies and resources that may help them become more independent of systems and networks in which they have little power.
