Elusive equality: Women, property rights and land reform in South Africa

South African Journal on Human Rights

Volumn 25, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 467-490

  Walker, Cherryl ^a  

^a STELLENBOSCH UNIVERSITY   (South Africa)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84864990858     PISSN: 02587203     EISSN: 19962126     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/19962126.2009.11865213     Document Type: Review

References (90)

1. The quotation comes from an interview I conducted with a Department of Land Affairs (DLA) official in 2000: C Walker 'Piety in the Sky? Gender Policy and Land Reform in South Africa' (2003) 3 J of Agrarian Change 113, 127.
2. See, for instance, S Hargreaves & S Meer 'Out of the Margins and into the Centre: Gender and Institutional Change' in B Cousins (ed) At the Crossroads: Land and Agrarian Reform in South Africa into the 21st Century (2000).
3. C Cross & D Hornby 'Opportunities and Obstacles to Women's Land Access in South Africa; A Research Report for the Promoting Women's Access to Land Programme (2002) .
4. Walker (note 1 above).
5. S Tilley 'Gender and Land Reform: A Critical Examination of Women Farm Workers' Access to Land in the Western Cape' (2003) (unpublished report, Centre for Rural Legal Studies).
6. A Claassens & S Ngubane 'Women, Land and Power: The Impact of the Communal Land Rights Act' in A Claassens & B Cousins (eds) Land, Power & Custom; Controversies Generated by South Africa's Communal Land Rights Act (2008).
7. DLA White Paper on South African Land Policy (1997) v.
8. 'For the purposes of this section... property is not limited to land': Constitution s 25(4)(b).
9. CM Hann 'Introduction: The Embeddedness of Property' in CM Hann (ed) Property Relations; Renewing the Anthropological Tradition (1998) 4.
10. B Agarwal A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (1994).
11. B Agarwal 'Gender and Land Rights Revisited: Exploring New Prospects via the State, Family and Market' (2003) 3 J of Agrarian Change 184, 193-7.
12. Agarwal (2003) (note 6 above) 195.
13. Ibid 197.
14. ICRW Property Ownership for Women Enriches, Empowers and Protects; Toward Achieving the Third Millennium Development Goal to Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women (2005) 1.
15. B Agarwal 'Women's Land Rights and the Trap of Neo-Conservatism: A Response to Jackson' (2003) 3 J of Agrarian Change 571, 573.
16. See also C Jackson 'Gender Analysis of Land: Beyond Land Rights for Women?' (2003) 3 J of Agrarian Change 453.
17. Walker (2003) (note 1 above) 143.
18. Jackson (2003) (note 10 above) 453.
19. C Walker 'The Limits to Land Reform: Rethinking "the Land Question"' (2005) 31 J of Southern African Studies 805.
20. C Walker Landmarked: Land Claims and Land Restitution in South Africa (2008).
21. See Statistics South Africa 'Fact Sheet 1. Contribution of the annualised percentage change in seasonally adjusted real value added by industry to the annualised percentage change in seasonally adjusted real GDP' (2009) ; this puts the contribution of agriculture to GDP at 2,3 per cent in late 2009.
22. The 'Freedom Charter' was adopted at the Congress of the People in 1955 and continues to serve as a symbolic reference point for policy debates within the African National Congress (ANC) and its alliance partners.
23. At the start of the 21st century, the percentage of the population classified as urban stood at 58 percent (Statistics South Africa 'Census 2001: Investigation into Appropriate Definitions of Urban and Rural Areas for South Africa' (2003) ).
24. For a breakdown of land area, population distribution and land reform by province see Appendix 2 in Walker (2008) (note 13 above).
25. T Forsyth 'Critical Realism and Political Ecology' in A Stainer & G Lopez (eds) After Postmodernism: Critical Realism? (2001) 2 .
26. Forsyth argues both that 'biophysical reality is "externally real" to human experience' and that 'all knowledge we have of such reality is partial and socially constructed'. The term 'brute facts', which he derives from an earlier philosophical tradition, refers to 'entities about which there is little debate concerning their existence' ibid 4.
27. AS van Jaarsveld & SL Chown 'Climate Change and its Impacts in South Africa' (2001) 16 Trends in Ecology & Evolution 13.
28. Constitution s 24(b).
29. Walker (2008) (note 13 above) 16.
30. T Kepe et al 'Land' in N Shepherd & S Robins (eds) New South African Keywords (2008) 145.
31. M Aliber et al Assessing the Alignment of South Africa's Land Reform Policy to People's Aspirations and Expectations: A Policy-Oriented Report Based on a Survey In Three Provinces Unpublished report HSRC (2006) 15.
32. Ibid 8.
33. Walker (2008) (note 13 above) 231.
34. On gender as a specific variable, see the discussion of the Nazareth claim near Dundee, KwaZulu-Natal ibid 218-9.
35. D Fay & D James '"Restoring what was Ours": An Introduction' in D Fay & D James (eds) The Rights and Wrongs of Land Restitution; 'Restoring what was Ours' (2009) 1.
36. For a general discussion on these issues, see H Swaminathan et al 'Conceptual Framework and Literature Review' in H Swaminathan et al (eds) Women's Property Rights, HIV and AIDS & Domestic Violence; Research Findings from Two Districts in South Africa and Uganda (2008).
37. C Walker et al 'Research Findings from Amajuba, South Africa' in H Swaminathan et al (2008) (note 27 above) 28, 46.
38. Ibid 20.
39. Ibid 28-9.
40. Ibid 47.
41. Ibid 54. 'Ownership' did not necessarily imply registered title.
42. See, for instance, some of the case studies in M Aliber et al The Impact of HIV/AIDS on Land Rights; Case studies from Kenya (2004) for examples of mothers-in-law being party to evicting their widowed daughters-in-law from their marital homes after the death of these women's husbands.
43. L McCall 'The Complexity of Intersectionality' (2005) 30 Signs: J of Women in Culture and Society 1771.
44. For an example of this solidarity see my account of Cremin, a former black-owned property that was the first claim to be settled in KwaZulu-Natal under the Restitution of Land Rights Act of 1994 in Walker (2008) (note 13 above).
45. For an analysis of this slippage in the DLA, see Walker (2003) (note 1 above).
46. L Manicom 'Constituting "Women" as Citizens: Ambiguities in the Making of Gendered Political Subjects in Post-apartheid South Africa' in A Gouws (ed) (Un)thinking Citizenship; Feminist Debates in Contemporary South Africa (2005) 21, 46.
47. See, for instance, S Baden & AM Goetz 'Who Needs [Sex] When You Can Have [Gender]? Conflicting Discourses on Gender at Beijing' (1997) 56 Feminist Review 3.
48. IM Young 'Lived Body vs Gender: Reflections on Social Structure and Subjectivity' (2002) 15 Ratio 410.
49. For a useful overview of the debate on strategic essentialism see A Stone 'Essentialism and Antiessentialism in Feminist Philosophy' (2004) 1 J of Moral Philosophy 135.
50. B Bozzoli 'Marxism, Feminism and Southern African Studies' (1983) 9 J of Southern African Studies 149.
51. A Gouws 'Introduction' in Gouws (note 37 above) 7.
52. For an overview of gender-based violence see L Vetten 'Violence against Women' in S Buhlungu et al (eds) State of the Nation: South Africa 2007 (2007) 425.
53. Peripheral because despite the symbolic importance that was attached to land in these negotiations, they were not at the centre of the struggle to define the future shape of the state and its powers.
54. Constitution s 25(1).
55. While this provision has been the target of sustained criticism for protecting the status quo, it is worth noting that this provision also secures the newly restored or redistributed property rights of the majority against arbitrary action by the state - including, potentially, threats to take back land from beneficiaries that state officials regard as not using the land appropriately.
56. For an analysis of this process at the time, see C Walker 'Women, "Tradition" and Reconstruction' (1994) 21 Review of African Political Economy 347.
57. Constitution ss 30 & 31(2).
58. L Chenwi & K McLean '"A Woman's Home is Her Castle?" - Poor Women and Housing Inadequacy in South Africa' (2009) 25 SAJHR 517, 533.
59. A Classens & S Mnisi 'Rural Women Redfining Land Rights in the Context of Living Customary Law' (2009) 25 SAJHR 491.
60. See C Walker 'Women, Gender Policy and Land Reform in South Africa' (2005) 32 Politikon 297.
61. S Hassim 'Voices, Hierarchies and Spaces: Reconfiguring the Women's Movement in Democratic South Africa' (2005) 32 Politikon 175.
62. Walker (2005) (note 49 above) 297, 300.
63. The debate on living customary law, whose content and practice is to be determined within the 'community' whose customs are at issue, raises related concerns.
64. Walker (2005) (note 13 above) 807.
65. Commission on Restitution of Land Rights 'Women on [sic] Agriculture and Rural Development' (2006/7) .
66. In 2009 the former DLA underwent a name change and is now known as the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, signalling a still more sector-specific understanding of its responsibilities.
67. DLA (note 3 above) 12.
68. ANC Reconstruction and Development Programme (1994) 22 .
69. National Treasury Estimates of National Expenditure, Vote 27 (2009) 618 .
70. Information is not readily available on land transfers to black ownership through the market which some analysts have suggested is significant; however, self-evidently, such activity is unlikely to include the rural poor. It is also difficult to compute the total number of direct and indirect beneficiaries of the land redistribution that has taken place to date as official data is not regularly and readily available, while that which is in the public domain is not always consistent nor reliable.
71. This has not been possible in restitution where most rural claims have been lodged on behalf of communities of varying sizes, some of them very large indeed.
72. On this, see B Derman et al 'Strategic Questions About Strategic Partners: Challenges and Pitfalls in South Africa's New Model of Land Restitution' in C Walker et al (eds) Land, Memory, Reconstruction and Justice: Perspectives on Land Claims in South Africa (forthcoming 2010).
73. E Lahiff et al 'Land Redistribution and Poverty Reduction in South Africa: The Livelihood Impacts of Smallholder Agriculture Under Land Reform' (2008) PLAAS Research Report 36 63-4 .
74. E Lahiff 'Land Reform in South Africa: A Status Report 2008' (2008) PLAAS Research Report 38 1 .
75. T Yates 'Area Land Reform Initiative. A Project Initiated by Nkuzi in the Makhado Municipal Area' (PowerPoint presentation, Land Reform from Below? - Decentralised Land Reform in Southern Africa. PLAAS Regional Workshop, Kopanong, 22-23 April 2008) slide 16 .
76. See Walker (2003) (note 1 above).
77. The extent to which these strategies were actually carried out was, however, heavily dependent on the initiative and persistence of gender-sensitive state officials at project level, as achievements in this regard were not what was rewarded within the DLA.
78. See Walker (2003) (note 1 above).
79. DLA 'Strategic Plan 2005 - 2010' (2005) 36 .
80. Hargreaves & Meer (2000) (note 2 above) 270.
81. This is in addition to a general problem of poor and unreliable data in general.
82. Walker (2003) (note 1 above) 120.
83. In June 2000 the database listed a total of 78,758 beneficiaries ibid.
84. Thus while gender-disaggregated figures are available for 2005/06 - when targets for women were exceeded, with over 50 per cent of projects involving women - the DLA's 2006/07 Annual Report does not mention women at all in its table showing 'measurable objectives, outputs, indicators and targets'.
85. DLA Annual Report 2006/07 (2007) 60-7 .
86. Land Claims Commission (note 51 above).
87. Walker (2008) (note 13 above) 205.
88. DLA (note 63 above) 20.
89. Constitution s 25(4).
90. Walker (2008) (note 13 above) 202.