ABSTRACT
The Transkei is one of South Africa's former homelands, located in the northeastern part of what is now Eastern Cape Province. It remains a poor, densely populated and comparatively undeveloped region of the new South Africa. Government approaches towards improving agriculture to date have been 'top down'. There has been little investment in small-scale subsistence farming, yet as this paper shows, farmers have experimented with a range of local soil and water conservation (SWC) techniques. As pressure on resources increases, these indigenous methods will become more important in developing a sustainable resource base for the Transkei (see photos 28 and 29).
