Funding Rural Development in Post-Apartheid South Africa's Land Reform Programme

Introduction And Background To This Chapter

The context of this chapter is the discipline of Development Studies. Theoretically, the chapter refers to an African perspective. The issue addressed is funding the land redistribution programs in post-apartheid South Africa. The chapter begins its discourse from the assertion Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2012) expressed on Development-orientated studies. In his inaugural speech as Full Professor at the University of South Africa, Professor Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni had this to say “When History meets Development Studies, the encounter of the two disciplines invokes an inquiry into the past, a critical reflection on the murky present, and a forecasting into the mysterious future” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2012). Nevertheless, the disclaimer is that unlike Professor Ndlovu-Gatsheni who is an outright historian and a student of development, the author of this chapter is not a historian, and neither comes from the discipline of History but is an outright development academic with solid background in development planning and administration while being a student of history. In addition, the author is a practicing administrator of the land redistribution process in South Africa attached to the Ministry of Rural Development which has a government mandate to facilitate the redistribution of land in South Africa. Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s (2012) assertion is relevant for this study merely on the fact that it is difficult to study a historical event without borrowing from history. The question of land, and in particular its funding is something historical in the land debate in (South) Africa. Apart from South Africa, this murky program has also happened before in countries such as Zimbabwe post-liberation. What is currently happening with regard to the land question in post-apartheid South Africa already has a historical context in other African countries such as Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe, land reform funding failed to materialize, and collapsed the entire land reform program, and that led to the famous “fast tracked” land redistribution or “land grab” which Zimbabwe experienced during Robert Mugabe’s presidency approximately 2000-2003 (Moyo, 2014). These historical accounts elsewhere in Africa influence the current status of the same in South Africa. Therefore, this chapter, like the Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2012) cited assertion, is constructed from a historical perspective because land in Africa dates back into African’s land dispossession history. In other words, the Development part of this particular study would not be possible without reflections made into the historicity of land in (South) Africa. Doing so manufactures that meeting of the discipline of Development Studies and History, and this meeting necessitates that this study be approached from that historical inquiry Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2012) mentions. This chapter analyses the issue on funding of land redistribution in South Africa from its history which could be traced as far as the early arrivals of the settler European colonizers in Africa to, even the famous Berlin conference of 1884 in Germany. This chapter also recognizes the fact that difficulties in land reform initiatives were not only for Africa, but elsewhere around the world where this crucial issue is being tackled. Confirming this, Moyo (2014) cites the issue in Australia for example.

Although dispossession of land by the settler Europeans from indigenous Africans had started much earlier, they were instead consolidated in Berlin, Germany in 1884 at that convened meeting of European super power countries including the United States (Craven, 2015). It was in Berlin that these countries met to plot the way forward with regard European consolidation in the takeover of Africa both politically and physically. According to Craven (2015), these countries met in Berlin “to ‘manage’ the ongoing process of colonization in Africa so as to avoid the outbreak of armed conflict between rival colonial powers” Figure 1 shows the European countries which colonized Africa, and the colonized countries in Africa.

Figure 1.

Map showing European colonizers of Africa, and the countries they colonized

European countries such as France, England, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Belgium ‘owned’ Africa through its colonization. These European countries which were already colonizing Africa were having clashes over ‘ownership’ of certain portions of Africa which they had invaded and occupied for the agenda of Africa’s colonization. These clashes had to be resolved, and hence the Berlin conference.