The Reconstruction of Communal Property: Membership and Rights in Limpopo's Restitution Process

Abstract

This article analyses the problem membership in the Communal Property Associations that represent beneficiaries in the South African restitution of farmland. As government intends to change the claims deadline from 1998 to 2018, the issues addressed in this article take on greater salience. The recreation of recipient communities raises important issues about the meaning of rights, the meaning of community, and the power to decide about these meanings. The article shows how material considerations have influenced the choices of the actors involved, from prospective members to central government, in a cluster of rural restitution cases in Limpopo Province. In part, the primacy of material considerations reflects the success of the government in deflecting the focus of the land reform process away from justice and towards economic realities. These considerations have also served to exacerbate problems related to overlapping land claims, multiple membership, the ambiguous role of traditional leaders in land reform, gender discrimination, and – more generally – an uneven distribution of the benefits of land restitution. These problems have emerged in a context where government, under pressure to achieve a lot in a limited amount of time, failed properly to analyse and anticipate the scale and nature of the difficulties associated with communal land claims and the formal recreation of community. The result is a land restitution process that in its attempt to resolve old forms of injustice may end up producing new ones.

Keywords:

• land restitution
• South Africa
• Limpopo
• Communal Property Associations
• membership

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the National Research Foundation of South Africa and the Norwegian Research Council for funding this research. The authors also wish to thank two anonymous referees for constructive comments and suggestions.

Notes on contributors

Espen Sjaastad is a professor at the Department of International Environment and Development Studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. His research has focused on the economics of land rights, rural livelihoods, and conservation.

Bill Derman is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Michigan State University and a Professor Emeritus of International Development and Environment Studies at the Norwegian University of the Life Sciences. His PhD is from the University of Michigan. His research foci include water and land governance, human rights, political ecology, and southern Africa. He has published on land resettlement in the Zambezi Valley, water and land reform in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Tshililo Manenzhe is a PhD fellow at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His research focuses on issues of land reform. He has previously worked with the Nkuzi Development Association, an NGO, in Limpopo.

Notes

¹Transfers from one private entity to another were not seen as compatible with the insistence on expropriation only for public purposes.

²Many CPAs have become arenas for struggles over chieftainship and headmanship. In addition to claiming land, a few of the Levubu CPAs are claiming recognition of their traditional leadership as chiefs rather than headmen. Both are official, paid government positions.

³A trust is a contractual arrangement, whereby the trustee holds or administrates property for the benefit of a beneficiary or for the furtherance of a specified purpose.

⁴The dual role of worker/owner can become problematic vis-à-vis farm managers.

⁵Since the constitution takes precedence in law, challenges to such expropriation would appear to have rested on a solid legal foundation.

⁶Although in interviewing chiefs they all claimed to have been opponents of the apartheid regime.

⁷On the other hand the Tshitwani are profoundly divided internally. Efforts to have them work together have failed and so they have been left to founder.

⁸If a group was resettled among an already existing community in a former homeland then the latter is entitled to compensation for loss of farm land, pasture, and residential properties; but these cases are currently given low priority.