ABSTRACT
Introduction From the time that Jan van Riebeeck landed in the Cape in 1652 to the postliberation era, the occupation, ownership and control of land have been racially contested in South Africa. Through Dutch and British colonization and the era of apartheid, black South Africans were dispossessed of their ancestral land by conquest, force and the passage of laws that restricted the right to own use and occupy land. The 1913 Land Act was enacted to ensure that Black South Africans were denied economic and social access to all but 7 per cent land of the country’s land. This was the foundational act of white supremacy after the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910. The Native Land Act scheduled 7 per cent of the country as ‘native reserves’, thereby nullifying or rendering tenuous African land rights outside these areas. The Native Land and Trust Act of 1936 increased the reserves to approximately 13 per cent of the total area of South Africa; these fragments of land became the basis for the apartheid state’s Bantustan policy after 1948. The 1913 Natives’ Land Act codified the right of the state and private actors to drive black South Africans from their land – declaring them trespassers in the land of their birth. The result was an escalation in the dispossession of land and livestock which condemned many to lives of virtual slavery. People were forced to either capitulate to the demands to turn over their livestock, to stop cultivating for their own benefit and to work for meagre wages for the white settlers, or take their chance roaming the countryside in search of new homes where they could graze their cattle and sheep and cultivate land. This legislation also set the stage for the creation of the nominally independent homelands. They were the ultimate goal of grand apartheid and would finally strip all black South Africans of their citizenship. Under this vision of South Africa, blacks would be assigned citizenship of a specific homeland based on their ethnic identity. Ultimately 11 homelands were established, with four (Venda, Bhophutatswana, Ciskei and Transkei) claiming independence before the fall of apartheid. When the Nationalist Party rose to power in 1948, the apartheid state, in its push to completely dispossess black South Africans of all claim to citizenship,
pushed through policy and legislation that eliminated any vestiges of rights to land held by blacks. The tenacity of the state in this regard paid off to such an extent that, between 1964 and 1984, 3.5 million black South Africans were forcibly removed from their land. Of these, 1.1 million were evicted from farms, representing the largest single category of removals. The history of forced removals and the resultant unequal access to land has been well documented. Important contributions to this history include Plaatje (1916), Platzky and Walker (1985), van Onselen (1996) and Wegerif et al. (2005).
