South African land reform: Case-studies in 'demand' and 'participation' in the free state

This article offers an ethnographic cross-section in one province of South Africa's new land reform programme. 'Demand' and 'participation' are the rhetorical keywords of the programme. Demand for land redistribution, however, cannot be understood in abstraction from the political and economic conditions of its supply. Similarly, 'participation' is a managed process involving many institutional intermediaries. A series of illustrative case-studies is presented, relating to the allocation of state-owned land; state-facilitated 'market' access to privately-owned land; the reconstruction and partial privatization of a para-statal development agency, which have brought into question the viability of a 'community conservation' project and also exposed the agency to political cross-fire; and, finally, some intricacies of the possibility of land restitution to people dispossessed under apartheid, which raises the question of whether the concept of indirect racial discrimination may be applied in the South African context. Several contradict-ions of the process of land redistribution are analysed: for example, the massive financial costs, direct and indirect, of bringing projects to fruition in the short term, without resolution of the need for long-term support; the divergence between nominal and actual beneficiaries; political and institutional conflicts, both inside and outside the state; and routine incompatibility between the diverse aspirations of beneficiaries and the 'business plans' required by bureaucrats and suppliers of credit.