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The promise of land: undoing a centuryof dispossession in South AfricaEdward Cavanagha

a Trillium Foundation Scholar, Department of History, University ofOttawa, Ottawa, CanadaPublished online: 07 Jul 2014.

To cite this article: Edward Cavanagh (2014): The promise of land: undoing a centuryof dispossession in South Africa, Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies, DOI:10.1080/02533952.2014.932173

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2014.932173

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BOOK REVIEW

The promise of land: undoing a century of dispossession in South Africa, editedby Fred Hendricks, Lungisile Ntsebeza, and Kirk Helliker, Johannesburg, Jacana,2013, 366 pp., R190 (paperback), ISBN 9781431408160

The land question in South Africa is as pressing today as ever. “This book,” itsblurb declares, “examines the many dimensions of this crisis in urban areas andcommunal areas,” and “argues for a fundamental change in approach to movebeyond the impasse in both policy and thinking about land.” Reading this andadmiring its front cover, I expected a co-authored monograph on dispossessionin history and policy in South Africa. Naturally, I was excited; apart from myown study on dispossession in history and policy (Cavanagh 2013), I knew ofno other monographs published in this, the hundredth year since the notorious(though often disproportionally appraised) Natives Land Act (27 of 1913). ButThe Promise of Land is not a monograph. It is a thick collection of essays withmultiple contributors, despite the absence of any mention of “editors” on thefront cover and the blurb. Alas, it therefore struggles, like each of the similarcollections on land reform, to convey any thematic coherence across thecontributions.

This is an important collection nonetheless, one which will need to be consultedby the many scholars working in this lively – and often contentious – field. One ofthe key ambitions of the editors is to reassert, as many scholars and commentatorsalready do, that the replacement of apartheid by democracy has not translated intoa meaningful programme of land reform and redress. Accompanying this is a hand-ful of muted assertions for what might be done instead, and an ample amount ofcriticism for what has already been done. This is a fairly faithful rendering ofwhere most scholars of land reform in South Africa currently sit – in spite of thegreat disagreements among them – and in that sense, the collection is a valuable“state of the field”-type output.

In spite of its title, parts of the book do not relate to South Africa or even tosouthern Africa. In his chapter (“Global Food Regime: Implications for FoodSecurity”), Praveen Jha looks at world food aid and corporations in the post-ColdWar era, presenting many data across his pages to argue for tighter regulation. Jhathen teams up with Surinder S. Jodhka to analyse rural “Indian villages” before andafter independence, and the urgent questions they pose to the developmentalist statethere (“The ‘Agrarian Question’ and the Developmental State: India’s Story ofRural Social Transformation”). Maria Spierenburg and Harry Wels (“DiversificationStrategies in the Netherlands Agricultural Sector”) discuss the consolidation andmodernisation of rural estates to explain a new ambivalence and variety amongfarmers in the Dutch countryside. Scholars with interest in these topics will proba-bly need to consult them individually, though I find it unlikely that their findingswill affect anything touching upon South African land reform or historiography.Offering the book’s only “global perspectives,” these contributions stand out.

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Across other chapters, talk of “the global” is almost always rhetorical; so too, itmust be said, are the brief and unclarified generalisations about “the South” and“Africa” by those prepared to juggle such categories. A more thoughtfully compar-ative approach would have bolstered the editors’ sincerity about what is certainlyan important perspective to adopt with respect to land restitution and reform.

The Promise of Land’s best chapters are those individually contributed by itseditors. Fred Hendricks’s chapter (“Rhetoric and Reality in Restitution and Redistri-bution: Ongoing Land and Agrarian Questions in South Africa”) comes first, andis, I think, the most valuable in the collection. At the same time, his chapter is areview essay of recent literature on land reform and a personal reflection on a vola-tile field. In it, he offers criticism of post-1994 land reform policies, and a condem-natory critique of scholars of land reform whom, he alleges, don’t talk to eachother and refuse to take “colonial land dispossession” seriously. There is muchvenom in his ink, which may be distasteful to some readers, but not to thisreviewer. Lungisile Ntsebeza’s essay (“The More Things Change, the More TheyRemain the Same”), after something of a hodgepodge historical introduction, takesa close look at legal changes which have affected former Bantustans, in particular,recent statutory law relating to traditional courts and communal land. These laws,he argues, have undermined attempts to transform rural power relations, and hethen goes on to pay homage to Mahmood Mamdani’s “prophetic” views in Citizenand Subject (1996) regarding indirect rule and the “bifurcated state.” KirkHelliker’s chapter (“Reproducing White Agriculture”) is an insightful analysis ofthe state’s accommodation of white commercial agriculture during apartheid, duringtransformation, and today. It comes with a number of interesting observations aboutthe continuity of productivist thinking about agriculture and old-school thinkingabout food security, and even suggests that Black Economic Empowerment and theFarm Equity Shares Scheme may in fact serve to “consolidate the power of whitecommercial agriculture though a process of limited de-racialisation” (97).

Bill Martin’s chapter (“Living in a Theoretical Interregnum: Capital Lessonsfrom Southern African Rural History”) is an interesting one, and the only one tooffer some kind of theoretical perspective. It opens with plenty of inverted-commajargon embedded into his dense framing of his “theoretical interregnum,” followedby a rehearsal of mostly well-known arguments about land and labour. Then, hebecomes elaborate and provocative (for instance, when he makes suggestions about“partial” dispossession, and distinguishes between unemployment and thedecommodification of labour). Two other chapters look closely at the WesternCape: Hendricks and Richard Pithouse (“Urban Land Questions in ContemporarySouth Africa: The Case Study of Cape Town”) write about the urban land questionof Cape Town, in contrast to Ntsebeza (“South Africa’s Countryside: Prospects forChange from Below”), who looks at the politics of rural struggles in the WesternCape. Two chapters then make their topics “southern Africa”: Tendai Murisa(“Prospects for Smallholder Agriculture in Southern Africa”) analyses policiesaffecting agricultural smallholding across the region, and Sam Moyo (“Zimbabwe’sFast Track Land Reform: Implications”) plucks from his well-known oeuvre to listthe lessons that South Africa can take away from Zimbabwe’s fast-track landreform.

Moyo is the leading scholar on this topic. Either this has made him a touchcomplacent, or it has scared the editors from intervening, because the chapter hesubmits shows a clear contempt for evidence: he cites himself on no less than

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45 occasions (including an “unpublished paper” from 1992); he cites a discussiondocument released by the African National Congress in 2007 to support hispersonal definition of “land reform” (meaning, basically, “security of tenure forall”); he cites “personal correspondence” with another scholar to support his claimthat people in South Africa see the “land question” as an urban issue. This is badform. Still, those inclined to caricature post-2000 land policy in Zimbabwe willgive pause after reading Moyo’s contribution.

While an edited collection such as this cannot be expected to convey a coherentmessage across it, it should, I think, avoid inconsistency of language, particularlywhere authors infer general principles from within and across case studies. Myqualms with iterations of “global,” “African,” and “South–South,” which I thinkcould be justified more strongly throughout, I want to reiterate. Further, though, Iwant to draw attention here to the language of colonialism. As it does in the widerscholarship on land reform, along with policy documents and variously colouredANC “papers” on land reform, talk of “colonialism” and “dispossession” (etc.)emerges so oddly and inconsistently in this book as to fail in conveying to thereader any analytical or historical specificity. A more serious shortfall, this inconsis-tency will render the collection less valuable to social scientists who take seriouslythe historical specificity of social structures and regime change. A few exampleswill suffice to illustrate my point: we are told to remember and redress “colonialland dispossession,” although that is never defined, and in the complete absence ofdiscussion of any elements of pre-nineteenth-century history, we might assume thatthe editors mean “dispossession of land during British crown administration”; wesee “colonialism and apartheid” coupled often, and even “colonial and apartheidstrategies,” and “colonial and apartheid legacy,” which are coupled, one can onlyassume, to imply that the latter superseded the former, though neither are explicitlydefined; we are told to hope for “an effective decolonisation of land,” albeit evenin a “postcolonial” African state; we are told that “colonialists,” even “colonialistsand the architects of apartheid” fluttered across nineteenth and twentieth centuries,who, we are left to wonder, were either settlers, London officials, local administra-tors or some terrifying hybrid born in late-colonial Natal (seriously); we are toldabout “the settler–colonial state” and its specific land reform dilemmas, albeit notto incorporate Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States of Americainto the framework (states which are all entirely absent from the “global”approach), but to distinguish between certain sub-Zambezi African states from therest of the continent; and one author (whom I do not name out of politeness) evendemands we make the contrast between how things were “in the colonial days”with how they are amid “a new kind of colonialism” today because of “globalimperialism,” neither temporally nor geographically distinguishing between what itis these terms convey beyond some kind a disjuncture taking place sometimebetween the nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century!

If I seem overly perplexed here, it is because the last two decades havewitnessed an increasing scholarly concern with our analytical frameworks on thesephenomena, highlighting, in particular, how important it is to distinguish betweencolonialism and settler colonialism. This school of thought, which transcendshemispheres, implicates, among other things, a more robust comparative methodol-ogy. Readers coming from a perspective which recognises the global nature ofsettler colonialism may consider it bizarre to pigeonhole South Africa within thesouthern African region, or the “South,” given that similar dispossessions have

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inspired similar statutory- and litigation-based mechanisms for redress in bothhemispheres. In fairness, direct engagement with these debates is hardly necessaryfor a collection of this type, but the clarification of terminology and justification ofgrand categorisations, partially achievable by sending the contributors a universalglossary beforehand, is surely more so.

Maybe this is too harsh. After all, diverse collections like these are seldom assatisfying cover-to-cover as monographs. On second thought, then, perhaps theomission of the words “Edited by” from the cover was genius on the part of JacanaMedia (who, to be fair, deserve sincere congratulations for marketing this book forless than R200; or otherwise the editors deserve more praise for subsidising thepublication). Perhaps, this field is now mature enough for some good coherentmonographs, however. We have seen many conference papers, dissertation extractsand angry reflective pieces reworked into articles and book chapters published bysympathetic editors; this is surely among the best of them, but it cannot pretend tobe a compelling synthesis with so many of this debate’s participants conspicuouslyabsent. While the field is full of incredible thinkers, the absence of solid books toemerge from it in five years or more is remarkable, and its causes must no longergo unexamined. Opinions today are articulated in problematic ways. “Instead, manyscholars simply talk past each other in the hope that their position will somehowprevail,” as Fred Hendricks notes in the standout chapter of this very book. “Thereis a great deal of shadow boxing, but little actual discussion of alternatives orengagement on the merits of or problems with different arguments” (29). Hopefully,the second century following the Natives Land Act sees us reach some empiricalconsensus on this incredibly important issue.

ReferencesCavanagh, E. 2013. Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa: Possession and

Dispossession on the Orange River. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Mamdani, M. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late

Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Edward CavanaghTrillium Foundation Scholar, Department of History

University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canadaedwardcav@gmail.com

© 2014, Edward Cavanaghhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2014.932173

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