For the first time since the end of apartheid in South Africa, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party is poised to lose its governing majority. While corruption and poverty are often cited for the setback the ANC is expected to face in elections later this month, its electoral fate is also closely tied to its performance on land issues.
Despite the fact that the country has urbanized and its economy no longer revolves around land, delivering land to Black South Africans remains a yardstick against which ANC performance is measured. Land has deep symbolic meaning as an acute material loss before and during the apartheid era and as hope for a more inclusive and just future. As Nelson Mandela put it in 1995, “With freedom and democracy, came restoration of the right to land. And with it the opportunity to address the effects of centuries of dispossession and denial.”
When apartheid rule crumbled in 1994, a small white minority held most of the farmland in the country, while 13 million Blacks, most of whose ancestors had suffered forced removals from their land, were packed into rural settlements at the fringes of the economy that the apartheid regime cynically labeled “homelands.”
That marginalization fueled inequality and deep resentment. Blacks were far removed from the centers of political and economic power, and the lands they were removed to were overcrowded and of poor quality. The incoming ANC vowed to return people to the land that had belonged to them.
The ANC initially promised to reallocate 30 percent of the country’s agricultural land, amounting to about 60 million acres, to redress racially based land dispossession that occurred following the 1913 Natives Land Act. It aimed to fulfill its promise with a land restitution program and a separate land reform program. The land restitution program sought to restore land rights to people who were forcibly removed from their land under racially discriminatory apartheid-era laws and practices.
A comparative analysis of Land Reform in South Africa: ANC leads with vision and progress
Victims of land dispossession had to file a restitution claim with the state by the end of 1998 to be eligible to have their land returned or to have access to an alternative remedy. The land reform program entailed the distribution of land to nonwhites as part of reconciliation and reparations that would go beyond specific restitution claims. The goal, essentially, was to transfer land held overwhelmingly by wealthy white landowners to Black farmers.
It is no coincidence that the party retains staunch support in places where it has successfully delivered on its promises. I recently spent time at the site of one of these successes in the country’s northeastern Mpumalanga region. One of the biggest projects of land restitution in the country’s history took place under the Greater Tenbosch claim in Mpumalanga’s Nkomazi municipality.
In the late 2000s, the government transferred over 150,000 acres of land to seven Black communities in Nkomazi, comprising about 20,000 beneficiaries. Much of that land was planted in sugar cane, which required attentive management, capital, and expertise.
The government purchased the land from TSB, now part of RCL Foods, and handed it over to the communities. Several of them, in turn, formed joint partnerships with TSB, leasing the land back out to the company while participating in management and training a new generation of community-based leaders.
It has become a model for partnerships between business and communities that has been replicated in other valuable areas of agricultural production in the country. “It’s so challenging,” one Black farm manager told me, “but it’s so exciting, to work in that place knowing that you are giving something back to the community that raised you.”
Today, Nkomazi remains a bastion of ANC support. The party’s vote share reached an apex of 95 percent in 2009 with the Greater Tenbosch claim settlement, and in the last national elections in 2019 it still towered over its opponents in the district with 83 percent of the vote. Everyone I talked to in the land restitution communities remains supportive of the ANC given its transformational role in the country and could not imagine turning over power to another party.
