ABSTRACT
Agriculture was at the heart of the pre-colonial economy of Venda and, until the 1950s, Venda would have been considered a largely agrarian society, albeit one that was being progressively incorporated into the broader industrial economy of South Africa. Despite the availability of such material, there remain large gaps in the literature on agriculture and related issues in Venda. An additional problem confronted in the study of homeland agriculture is the terminology used in most official and quasi-official sources, which tends to be misleading, inconsistent and ideologically loaded. Scarcity of alternative data sources dictates that much of what follows is based on the official, or conventional, view of agriculture in Venda but it is important to move beyond these narrow categories towards a more objective analytical framework. Most land in Venda is classified as ‘communal’ land, including much of the land used for agricultural projects.
