ABSTRACT
Displaced communities living under conditions of land scarcity and poverty in South Africa have used land restitution policies as a means of historical redress. In mediating resettlement of their ancestral land, community representatives deploy discursive strategies that refer to cultural discontinuity suffered at the hands of apartheid’s architects. The consequent reconstitution of claimant groups along traditionalist lines however becomes problematic when development agencies enter local arenas using an agenda of rural development that aims to create a new class of African farming entrepreneurs. This ‘shifting articulation’ of land as development object provokes a set of responses that unfold as multiple modernities. Through interaction between agencies and beneficiary communities, development parcels may be subject to disintegration and selective appropriation. Fragmentation occurs: intended broad-based reforms are essentially aggregate outcomes of hundreds of micro-level interfaces between programme beneficiaries and agencies of reform.
