The Land Question in South Africa 1 Professor Lungisile Ntsebeza

1. Democratisation in the countryside
This course will provide an overview of land reform in South Africa. It will address four main themes. First it will concentrate on the meaning of democracy for people living in the rural areas that fall under the jurisdiction of traditional leaders who are not elected. Next the land reform programme will be discussed, focusing on what beneficiaries of land do with it when they get it. The third lecture will look at food sovereignty and struggles against the use of environmentally harmful products in food production. The final lecture will examine social movements in the land sector with a specific focus on the struggle of farm workers and farm dwellers, on the one hand, and those in the rural areas of the former bantustans on the other.

[@thembanimgenu190]

Am impressed when South African problems are discussed and dissected by no one but us South Africans.

[@mziwandilendlovu3895]

Enriching insights

[@adriaanvandermerwe4252]

Thank you - Land question? What land question? Our black people have land - The government has purchased more than 4000 farms which they can't get transferred to their prospective owners because of internal disputes among the intended recipients - Furthermore, there are about 17-million hectares of land in the old "homelands" which the ANC had nationalized when they came into power - In other words, our black people have land - They just don't own it and so they are born in poverty and so they die in poverty - In fact there are more black people living on farmland in South Africa than the entire white and coloured population put together - If all this land was transferred to the black people where they are living in the homelands, they will be richer in land than the majority of white and coloured South Africans - And if they owned their respective plots in the homelands, they would be able to leverage wealth through property ownership and have the capital to send their children to the best universities in the country, but instead they have to sell their labour as domestic workers and petrol attendants - And please bear in mind that none of this land is bonded - And so to resolve the land question in South Africa, all the government has to do is to grant them title of their lands - But no it is much easier for the government to expropriate farmers' land - What is the point in taking a black person who is living as a subsistence farmer in Transkei and putting him on a white farm in the Karroo? How will this make his life any better? Would it not have been better to have given him or her title to the land and a free education for the kids? And as far as affirmative question is concerned - Affirmative action can only work if there are more whites than blacks.