ABSTRACT
Since the arrival of European settlers in 1652, segregation and unequal development has characterized South African society. Segregationist policies resulted in black South Africans being dispossessed from their land and moved into overcrowded and impoverished reserves, homelands and townships. From the 1940s, systematic and radical forms of segregationist policies emerged, which became known as apartheid. These racially based land policies were a cause of landlessness amongst black people. Dispossession and forced removal resulted not only in the physical separation of people along racial lines, but extreme land shortages and insecurity of tenure (Lahiff, 2001, 2003). It also resulted in inefficient urban and rural land use patterns and a fragmented system of land administration (Aliber and Mokoena, 2003).
