Women, gender policy and land reform in South Africa

This article examines the gender policy of the Department of Land Affairs (DLA) and progress since 1994 in giving content to women's land rights in practice in two major sub-programmes of land reform: land redistribution and communal tenure reform. The article reviews, the constitutional negotiations around gender equality and cultural rights between 1993 and 1996. It then summarizes the extent to which the DLA's land redistribution programme has formally targeted women since 1994. It further examines the effectiveness of the DLA's formal Gender Policy in practice, using the KwaZulu Natal provincial office and three of its land redistribution projects as case studies, and considers the treatment of women's land rights in the struggle around the enactment of the Communal Land Rights Act in 2004. Although serious shortcomings in the management and conceptualization of the DLA's Gender Policy are evident, alongside a lack of consensus in society more broadly on the content of gender equality in social policy, it concludes that comparing the current conjuncture to that prevailing in 1993/94 illuminates certain gains. Significant here is the consolidation of the legitimacy of the principle of gender equality, which is not without effect on social relations on the ground.