In the Shadow of Policy. Robert Ross

      2

      Land and agrarian reform policies

       from a historical perspective

       Paul Hebinck

      The purpose of this chapter is to review land and agrarian development policies in South Africa and to chart the changes that have taken place over the years. This overview spans the period before the native reserves came into being as result of the infamous 1913 Land Act, to the recent post-apartheid land and agrarian reform policies.

      A historical analysis of policy structures the chapter. Land and agrarian reform policies are not designed and implemented in a socio-political and historical vacuum. Policies ‘have left their historical traces’ as James (2010: 222) points out and these are still visible and felt to this day. Notably, the residual effects of colonial and apartheid policies constrain the social transformations that post-apartheid policymakers would like to facilitate. An account of policies and their formulation requires a chronology, preferably one which intertwines the nature of state power with advancements in the sciences.

      The history of South Africa clearly did not begin in 1652 with the colonisation of a small piece of land near present-day Cape Town by Dutch settlers instigated by the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Our concern is with the role the colonial state and state policies have played since 1654 in the reordering of what is currently South Africa and how this concurred with the interests of the state, white settlers and later those of the mining sector. A common periodisation is one that distinguishes the colonial from the Union era and apartheid from post-apartheid. State policies, acts and degrees do not neatly fit these four periods, but they nevertheless have some degree of distinctiveness. During the colonial period policies were implemented to expand and control the frontier and that laid the foundation for racial segregation. The second period roughly covers the Union years (1910–1948) during which key land, labour and land-use legislation was passed that exclusively favoured white land ownership and large-scale farming. The apartheid period (1948–1994) hinged on a continuation of betterment and the implementation of homeland policies and a fine-tuning of discriminatory laws. In the post-apartheid era, all discriminatory laws, acts and decrees previously passed to limit the mobility of black people and their access to land have been repealed, and reform policies have been initiated.

      The increasing ability of the state to master the social and natural environment, however, is not only attributable to its political and military power to extend its frontiers and enforce rules and regulations. It is also shaped by the advancement in (notably agrarian) sciences and technology and the gradual formation and expansion of an associated expert system (Beinart 2003; Scott 1998). The technological advances progressing over time that assisted the state in its attempts to reorder (rural) society, with a view to intensifying agricultural and rural production, are significant. Laws that regulated use of and access to land came into being after a series of state-appointed special commissions, consisting of known experts (notably reputable scientists) in their field, had advised the state on why and how to deal with matters that reduced environmental risks (erosion, insects and pests) and enhanced productivity of land, cattle and crops. The commissions were always known by the names of their chairmen (see Cross 1988 for more details). The Beaumont Commission, for example, delivered its report about the actual delimitation of land for black people in 1916, while the Tomlinson Commission of 1955 rejected the one-man-one-plot principle and argued instead for a move towards large(r)-scale farming. The Swart Report of 1983 advocated moving all the black people in the Ciskei to urban areas, arguing that the rural areas were unable to sustain their present populations. This would also have opened the way for large-scale farming. The knowledge and institutional culture of each generation of experts has laid the foundations for the next. In this way, expert practice and knowledge has been reproduced in its own image (Hebinck et al. 2011). Some of these experts are non–South Africans by birth and training (see chapter 3, this volume).

      Tracing the policy histories serves to show that over the years, apart from changes and shifts (that is, discontinuities), the policies retained many common characteristics (that is, continuities in design and the knowledge repertoires that underlie them) even though they emerged from contrasting political ideologies and governance regimes. This chapter argues that the degree of continuity between past and present policy is surprisingly large, and significant to an understanding of current land and agrarian reform dynamics. The chapter draws attention to three important continuities: (i) The state, whether colonial, apartheid or post-apartheid, has taken the lead in agrarian development and coordinating agrarian transformation; (ii) In doing so, the state always relied heavily on expert discourses for the design of its planned interventions; (iii) State-led and expert-designed agrarian development discourses uncritically embraced linear, neo-liberal views of development, consistently relying on a paradigm of modernisation to define what constitutes resources, even though lip service has been paid to the value of indigenous knowledge systems.

      The colonial and Union eras

      During the early years of the colony, the state alienated the original inhabitants from their land. Its geographical reach was rather limited then. The early Dutch colonial state was preoccupied with extending its control over the immediate social and physical environment so that it could procure meat. Penn (2005: 30 ff) uses the term ‘policy’ to describe the creation and expansion of the frontier into the Cape interior. The search for meat for the VOC was supported by commando raids that ‘encouraged’ the Khoi and San to barter for meat. The granting of farms and issuing of grazing licences (in the form of loan farms) to Dutch settlers had a tremendous effect on pastoral production in the region but guaranteed the supply of meat to the Cape Town market. The advent of the loan farm system institutionalised a form of land tenure which provided cheap and easy access to vast tracts of precious grasslands for the semi-nomadic, cattle-keeping trekboers in the early eighteenth century. Trekboers lived, like the Khoi and the San, by harvesting wild resources. The intensification of land use that gradually emerged facilitated the cultivation of crops, sedentary cattle farming and capitalist accumulation. This was accompanied by the establishment of a vivid rural Afrikaner culture and the dispossession of the land of the Khoi, the San and, much later, also African peoples. Sending missionaries into the Cape hinterland was part of a deliberate policy to pacify the region and achieve political closure (Penn 1986: 67). The Khoi and the San were left with little choice but to hunt illegally for cattle and game on the land that had once been theirs.

      The reach of the colonial state also expanded dramatically towards the east. Around 1770 the trekboers encountered the Xhosa, who had crossed the Kei River and were moving south. The Xhosa and the trekboers soon competed for the same resources (pasture, labour and cattle); both relied heavily on pastoral cattle farming (Mostert 1992; Penn 2005). Although their co-existence was relatively peaceful initially, it was always inherently unstable. In contrast to the northern frontier during the early eighteenth century (Penn 2005), where the Khoi and the San were brutally subjugated and absorbed as labourers, the Xhosa were, after an initial period of resistance during the 1820–1889 border wars, defeated, settled and incorporated as migrant labourers into the colonial economy.

      The mindful and coordinated efforts of the state during the colonial period clearly aimed not just to establish control over land and labour but also to facilitate early forms of agricultural commodity production. Legislation, such as the Fencing Acts of 1883 and 1910, enabled measures to be taken to increase the productivity of pasture and livestock and in turn laid the ideological foundations for private property and commoditisation in the countryside (Van Sittert 2002). The state’s mindset in favour of agriculture is a response to its being the backbone of wealth production in the country, which has expanded to become the chief source of commodities for national and global markets. Even when diamonds