In the Shadow of Policy. Robert Ross
knowledge to accommodate their own ideas and experiences. The expert belief that farming should consist solely of cultivation and livestock production is deeply flawed.
In chapter 5, Yves van Leynseele examines the dynamics of project planning in land restitution and explores how land reform beneficiaries contest project viability. An ethnographic study of the different stages of the Makhoba land restitution case provides evidence that land restitution bureaucrats often wish to protect ‘their claimants’ from an unforgiving market. The chapter calls for a critical analysis of the ways in which restitution officials play a brokerage role in the land restitution process, operating as mediators in a field of power in which they occupy an ambivalent position as both local translators of dominant farming models and as engaged bureaucrats. Van Leynseele maintains that state-induced intervention is not implemented by a coherent bureaucracy, nor does it follow a straight road from design through to implementation.
Modise Moseki provides, in chapter 6, an account of everyday life at a land reform farm near Queenstown. Making use of previous studies, his account contrasts starkly with the abstract and quantitative ways in which policymakers and land reform analysts generally evaluate land reform projects. Moseki argues that sweeping policy statements and evaluations based on prescribed outcomes fail to register a lot of what is actually happening on the ground, which hinges on multiple livelihoods. He also points out what the basis is for the new inequalities that have emerged in the South African countryside in the wake of land reform.
Chapter 7, by Harriët Tienstra and Dik Roth, examines cases of market-led land reform in the Western Cape. The cases represent the two dominant forms of land reform in the province: 100 per cent ownership projects and Farmer Worker Equity Share projects. They explore the ongoing dynamics on both kinds of land reform farms from a property rights and relations perspective, and show that when these are transformed on the farms, beneficiaries’ ‘bundles’ of rights and obligations change simultaneously.
Limpho Taoana scrutinises land reform cases in chapter 8 to provide proof that land reform has led to the formation of new social categories in the urban and rural landscapes of South Africa: land reform beneficiaries and non-land reform beneficiaries. These categories are policy-induced categories that only become real in land reform situations. Non-active land reform beneficiaries form a third category, comprised of the disenchanted people that have left a project due to the low performance of the newly acquired farm, or conflict with fellow beneficiaries, or the hard work and exposure to risks involved in participating in a land reform project. Most of them have returned to their previous places of residence.
Malebogo Phetlhu addresses two general but fundamental questions in chapter 9: what is happening on land reform farms, and how do different actors develop strategies to make sense of land reform policies? The chapter provides an everyday life account of the experiences and ideas of those actors who are directly involved with land reform. There is no single answer to the question about how land reform has reshaped people’s lives. Phetlhu builds on the idea that land reform is often a conflictual and ambiguous process, and that it is important to understand that beneficiaries are not a homogeneous group. Indeed, one of the tasks of land and agrarian reform is to deconstruct social categories such as ‘beneficiary’ or ‘extension worker’.
Petunia Khutswane’s chapter 10 concerns the role of youth in land reform. By exploring land reform from a generational point of view, combined with a view of land as a resource, she shows the processes that constrain or inhibit the participation of youth in the South African land reform programme. Little is known about why very few young people engage in land reform projects. The youth dimension of land reform has mainly been associated with mobilisation. The majority of land reform beneficiaries in South Africa are older people whose livelihoods combine land ownership and old age pensions. This raises questions about the future of land reform.
Robert Ross argues in chapter 11 that land restitution is, by definition, about history. Claims to land, and thus to compensation, have to be made on the basis of historical events and not those of a court of law. History, however, has sometimes developed in too complicated a way for the simple assumptions of the Land Claims Commission to be fulfilled. Ross explores the history of land ownership and allocation in the upper Kat River valley in particular, to show the extraordinarily complex nature of land relationships which inform the settlement of restitution claims.
Rosalie Kingwill focuses in chapter 12 on the problems of conjugating customary and common-law notions of ownership. The argument hinges on the complex way in which customary approaches to land ownership articulate with the legal prescripts of ownership in South Africa, the latter derived mainly from common law. Drawing on case material from two Eastern Cape sites, one urban and one rural, she argues that customary practices cannot be reduced to ‘official’ customary law. The chapter charts the lived interpretations of land ownership and identifies how normative practices engage a hybrid of custom and state law, which, for strategic reasons, many scholars, officials and legal practitioners ignore.
In chapter 13, Karin Kleinbooi delivers an account of women’s experiences with exercising their land rights in Namaqualand. She explores the gendered customs and practices surrounding land rights and how women demand, assert or realise their land rights. The chapter shows that women are farming on land allocated for their own use and on land controlled by male relatives, while a few better-off women engage in independent livestock farming. Women gain access to land mainly through relationships of dependency on husbands, fathers and sons. Unmarried and divorced women are extremely vulnerable to loss of land rights and other resources.
Part 3 Competing knowledge regimes in communal area agriculture
Chapters 14–20 in this part draw on empirical research and critically examine the attempts of the state to rejuvenate agriculture and to address food security and well-being in the former homelands of Ciskei and Transkei, now part of the Eastern Cape. The chapters focus on recent policy initiatives such as Siyazondla, the Massive Food Production Programme (MFPP) and Siyakhula, as well as the revitalisation of irrigation and the reintroduction of Nguni cattle. These are taken as examples to address the tensions generated by the policy reforms, which attempt to redesign and modernise communal areas and communal farming, and to assess whether and how this resonates with local conditions. Together these chapters show that land reform occurs in contexts where livelihoods are multiple and practices are embedded in complex and dynamic cultural repertoires.
Chapter 14, by Paul Hebinck and Wim van Averbeke, problematises the notion of ‘agrarian’ in the Eastern Cape. Land and agrarian reform and rural development presupposes an agrarian identity from which to tap. This chapter examines the practical and discursive content and meaning of the terms ‘farming’ and ‘agrarian’ in two settlements in the former Ciskei homeland region of the central Eastern Cape. The analysis draws on ongoing research that started in 1995 in two villages in the central Eastern Cape, and more specifically on data collected in 1996/1997 and 2010/2011.
Klara Jacobson and Zamile Madyibi deal in their respective chapters with the intentions and dynamics of the MFPP, designed to revive agriculture in the former Transkei. Jacobson, in chapter 15, identifies that the programme aims to reduce rural poverty through increasing agricultural output and the environmental sustainability of farming. The MFPP aims to transform subsistence-oriented farming into commercially oriented mechanised agriculture using agrochemical inputs, and hybrid and