Social change in the South African countryside? Land and production, poverty and power

Abstract

The article examines land and production, poverty and power, as coordinates of the agrarian question in South Africa, and uses them to sketch the context of the apartheid legacy, to interrogate the discourses of land and agricultural policy reform, and to investigate the paradox of the apparent marginality of reform in the ANC Government's agenda alongside a widespread and dynamic politics of land and farming. In particular, it confronts stereotypical views of large farm and small farm paths of agrarian development in post‐apartheid South Africa, and suggests the importance of recent work by Mamdani [1996] on the colonial state in Africa and its legacy to the politics of agrarian reform and its relationship with national democratic revolution.