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Social Dynamics: A journal of African

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The promise of land: undoing a century

of dispossession in South Africa
Edward Cavanagh

Trillium Foundation Scholar, Department of History, University of

Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
Published online: 07 Jul 2014.

To cite this article: Edward Cavanagh (2014): The promise of land: undoing a century
of 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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Social Dynamics, 2014

BOOK REVIEW

Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 07:49 29 October 2014

The promise of land: undoing a century of dispossession in South Africa, edited

by 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, its
blurb declares, examines the many dimensions of this crisis in urban areas and
communal areas, and argues for a fundamental change in approach to move
beyond the impasse in both policy and thinking about land. Reading this and
admiring its front cover, I expected a co-authored monograph on dispossession
in history and policy in South Africa. Naturally, I was excited; apart from my
own study on dispossession in history and policy (Cavanagh 2013), I knew of
no other monographs published in this, the hundredth year since the notorious
(though often disproportionally appraised) Natives Land Act (27 of 1913). But
The Promise of Land is not a monograph. It is a thick collection of essays with
multiple contributors, despite the absence of any mention of editors on the
front cover and the blurb. Alas, it therefore struggles, like each of the similar
collections on land reform, to convey any thematic coherence across the
contributions.
This is an important collection nonetheless, one which will need to be consulted
by the many scholars working in this lively and often contentious eld. One of
the key ambitions of the editors is to reassert, as many scholars and commentators
already do, that the replacement of apartheid by democracy has not translated into
a meaningful programme of land reform and redress. Accompanying this is a handful of muted assertions for what might be done instead, and an ample amount of
criticism for what has already been done. This is a fairly faithful rendering of
where most scholars of land reform in South Africa currently sit in spite of the
great disagreements among them and in that sense, the collection is a valuable
state of the eld-type output.
In spite of its title, parts of the book do not relate to South Africa or even to
southern Africa. In his chapter (Global Food Regime: Implications for Food
Security), Praveen Jha looks at world food aid and corporations in the post-Cold
War era, presenting many data across his pages to argue for tighter regulation. Jha
then teams up with Surinder S. Jodhka to analyse rural Indian villages before and
after independence, and the urgent questions they pose to the developmentalist state
there (The Agrarian Question and the Developmental State: Indias Story of
Rural Social Transformation). Maria Spierenburg and Harry Wels (Diversication
Strategies in the Netherlands Agricultural Sector) discuss the consolidation and
modernisation of rural estates to explain a new ambivalence and variety among
farmers in the Dutch countryside. Scholars with interest in these topics will probably need to consult them individually, though I nd it unlikely that their ndings
will affect anything touching upon South African land reform or historiography.
Offering the books only global perspectives, these contributions stand out.

Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 07:49 29 October 2014

Book review

Across other chapters, talk of the global is almost always rhetorical; so too, it
must be said, are the brief and unclaried generalisations about the South and
Africa by those prepared to juggle such categories. A more thoughtfully comparative approach would have bolstered the editors sincerity about what is certainly
an important perspective to adopt with respect to land restitution and reform.
The Promise of Lands best chapters are those individually contributed by its
editors. Fred Hendrickss chapter (Rhetoric and Reality in Restitution and Redistribution: Ongoing Land and Agrarian Questions in South Africa) comes rst, and
is, I think, the most valuable in the collection. At the same time, his chapter is a
review essay of recent literature on land reform and a personal reection on a volatile eld. In it, he offers criticism of post-1994 land reform policies, and a condemnatory critique of scholars of land reform whom, he alleges, dont talk to each
other and refuse to take colonial land dispossession seriously. There is much
venom in his ink, which may be distasteful to some readers, but not to this
reviewer. Lungisile Ntsebezas essay (The More Things Change, the More They
Remain the Same), after something of a hodgepodge historical introduction, takes
a 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 he
then goes on to pay homage to Mahmood Mamdanis prophetic views in Citizen
and Subject (1996) regarding indirect rule and the bifurcated state. Kirk
Hellikers chapter (Reproducing White Agriculture) is an insightful analysis of
the states accommodation of white commercial agriculture during apartheid, during
transformation, and today. It comes with a number of interesting observations about
the continuity of productivist thinking about agriculture and old-school thinking
about food security, and even suggests that Black Economic Empowerment and the
Farm Equity Shares Scheme may in fact serve to consolidate the power of white
commercial agriculture though a process of limited de-racialisation (97).
Bill Martins chapter (Living in a Theoretical Interregnum: Capital Lessons
from Southern African Rural History) is an interesting one, and the only one to
offer some kind of theoretical perspective. It opens with plenty of inverted-comma
jargon embedded into his dense framing of his theoretical interregnum, followed
by a rehearsal of mostly well-known arguments about land and labour. Then, he
becomes elaborate and provocative (for instance, when he makes suggestions about
partial dispossession, and distinguishes between unemployment and the
decommodication of labour). Two other chapters look closely at the Western
Cape: Hendricks and Richard Pithouse (Urban Land Questions in Contemporary
South Africa: The Case Study of Cape Town) write about the urban land question
of Cape Town, in contrast to Ntsebeza (South Africas Countryside: Prospects for
Change from Below), who looks at the politics of rural struggles in the Western
Cape. Two chapters then make their topics southern Africa: Tendai Murisa
(Prospects for Smallholder Agriculture in Southern Africa) analyses policies
affecting agricultural smallholding across the region, and Sam Moyo (Zimbabwes
Fast Track Land Reform: Implications) plucks from his well-known oeuvre to list
the lessons that South Africa can take away from Zimbabwes fast-track land
reform.
Moyo is the leading scholar on this topic. Either this has made him a touch
complacent, or it has scared the editors from intervening, because the chapter he
submits shows a clear contempt for evidence: he cites himself on no less than

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Social Dynamics

45 occasions (including an unpublished paper from 1992); he cites a discussion

document released by the African National Congress in 2007 to support his
personal denition of land reform (meaning, basically, security of tenure for
all); he cites personal correspondence with another scholar to support his claim
that people in South Africa see the land question as an urban issue. This is bad
form. Still, those inclined to caricature post-2000 land policy in Zimbabwe will
give pause after reading Moyos contribution.
While an edited collection such as this cannot be expected to convey a coherent
message across it, it should, I think, avoid inconsistency of language, particularly
where authors infer general principles from within and across case studies. My
qualms with iterations of global, African, and SouthSouth, which I think
could be justied more strongly throughout, I want to reiterate. Further, though, I
want to draw attention here to the language of colonialism. As it does in the wider
scholarship on land reform, along with policy documents and variously coloured
ANC papers on land reform, talk of colonialism and dispossession (etc.)
emerges so oddly and inconsistently in this book as to fail in conveying to the
reader any analytical or historical specicity. A more serious shortfall, this inconsistency will render the collection less valuable to social scientists who take seriously
the historical specicity of social structures and regime change. A few examples
will sufce to illustrate my point: we are told to remember and redress colonial
land dispossession, although that is never dened, and in the complete absence of
discussion of any elements of pre-nineteenth-century history, we might assume that
the editors mean dispossession of land during British crown administration; we
see colonialism and apartheid coupled often, and even colonial and apartheid
strategies, and colonial and apartheid legacy, which are coupled, one can only
assume, to imply that the latter superseded the former, though neither are explicitly
dened; we are told to hope for an effective decolonisation of land, albeit even
in a postcolonial African state; we are told that colonialists, even colonialists
and the architects of apartheid uttered across nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
who, we are left to wonder, were either settlers, London ofcials, local administrators or some terrifying hybrid born in late-colonial Natal (seriously); we are told
about the settlercolonial state and its specic land reform dilemmas, albeit not
to incorporate Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States of America
into the framework (states which are all entirely absent from the global
approach), but to distinguish between certain sub-Zambezi African states from the
rest of the continent; and one author (whom I do not name out of politeness) even
demands 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 global
imperialism, neither temporally nor geographically distinguishing between what it
is these terms convey beyond some kind a disjuncture taking place sometime
between the nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century!
If I seem overly perplexed here, it is because the last two decades have
witnessed an increasing scholarly concern with our analytical frameworks on these
phenomena, highlighting, in particular, how important it is to distinguish between
colonialism and settler colonialism. This school of thought, which transcends
hemispheres, implicates, among other things, a more robust comparative methodology. Readers coming from a perspective which recognises the global nature of
settler colonialism may consider it bizarre to pigeonhole South Africa within the
southern African region, or the South, given that similar dispossessions have

Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 07:49 29 October 2014

Book review

inspired similar statutory- and litigation-based mechanisms for redress in both

hemispheres. In fairness, direct engagement with these debates is hardly necessary
for a collection of this type, but the clarication of terminology and justication of
grand categorisations, partially achievable by sending the contributors a universal
glossary beforehand, is surely more so.
Maybe this is too harsh. After all, diverse collections like these are seldom as
satisfying cover-to-cover as monographs. On second thought, then, perhaps the
omission of the words Edited by from the cover was genius on the part of Jacana
Media (who, to be fair, deserve sincere congratulations for marketing this book for
less than R200; or otherwise the editors deserve more praise for subsidising the
publication). Perhaps, this eld is now mature enough for some good coherent
monographs, however. We have seen many conference papers, dissertation extracts
and angry reective pieces reworked into articles and book chapters published by
sympathetic editors; this is surely among the best of them, but it cannot pretend to
be a compelling synthesis with so many of this debates participants conspicuously
absent. While the eld is full of incredible thinkers, the absence of solid books to
emerge from it in ve years or more is remarkable, and its causes must no longer
go unexamined. Opinions today are articulated in problematic ways. Instead, many
scholars simply talk past each other in the hope that their position will somehow
prevail, as Fred Hendricks notes in the standout chapter of this very book. There
is a great deal of shadow boxing, but little actual discussion of alternatives or
engagement on the merits of or problems with different arguments (29). Hopefully,
the second century following the Natives Land Act sees us reach some empirical
consensus on this incredibly important issue.
References
Cavanagh, 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 Cavanagh
Trillium Foundation Scholar, Department of History
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
edwardcav@gmail.com
2014, Edward Cavanagh
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2014.932173