Claims from below: platinum and the politics of land in the Bakgatla-ba-Kgafela traditional authority area

Abstract

Drawing on a detailed study of three village-level disputes in the Bakgatla-ba-Kgafela traditional authority area, this article explores how intensifying land struggles on the platinum belt around Rustenburg are being mediated through conflicts over group boundaries and identities, and how this in turn is articulating a potentially new yet contradictory rural class politics. In a context where chiefly authorities are themselves becoming major shareholders in local mining operations, the burning question is whether the ‘tribe’ should be treated as the only legitimate African land-holding unit, or whether the collective ownership of mineralised land should reside in smaller socio-political groups, typically claiming decent from its original buyers. The article finds that while contested constructions of rural ‘community’ are emerging as a significant means of defending or advancing popular claims over landed resources, these corporate forms of organisation are simultaneously riven by gender, generational and other social divisions, and are prone to replicating the tribalist logics they seek to challenge. The attempt to establish private property rights through more exclusionary group definitions may therefore also act as an equally divisive force against those labelled ‘outsiders’, not least migrant mineworkers.

Firms’ approach to mitigating risks in the platinum group metals sector

“…Infuriated, villagers argued that they did not know that Spitskop Mine had been paying royalties. To exacerbate things, it then emerged that the Union had been illegally encroaching on land outside of the parameters of the lease area (Capps and Mnwana 2015 ).…”

Tribal‐Landed Property: The Value of the Chieftaincy in Contemporary Africa

“…It thus seems that a new form of large‐scale landed property is in the process of being crafted that facilitates the access of mining capital to high‐value mineral deposits in the former homelands, both by eliminating the barriers to investment that would arise from the legal recognition of a plethora of small‐group rights, and by locking chiefs into these arrangements as BEE partners with a shared interest in unfettered mine expansion. At the same time, there has been an eruption of small‐group claims to mineralised communal land, which, if successful, hold the promise of an entitlement to a direct share of the mining revenue, suggesting that the logic of ‘tribal‐landed property’ applies not only to recognised structures of tribal authority (Capps and Mnwana ).…”

“…As such, the Bafokeng chieftaincy was set on to a new and highly financialized trajectory of accumulation, ultimately based on its landed property but that aimed to increasingly diversify out of its historical dependence on mining, while at the same time reconstituting itself as a distinctive fraction of the new ‘black economic empowerment’ elite (cf. Capps and Mnwana ).…”

“…Partly under the influence of international donors and partly in response to domestic pressures, African states have increasingly adopted policies that strengthen the role of customary authorities in local rural government and in land administration (Woodhouse et al ; Whitehead and Tsikata ; Cousins ; Grischow ). At the same time, the global commodity boom of the early 2000s saw new waves of investment across communal land, above all by large‐scale agribusiness and mining concerns (Amanor ; Hall ; Negi ; Capps and Mnwana ). These developments are not, of course, unrelated.…”

An inquiry into the economic commonwealth of mineral resources: does ownership matter?

“…During this entire period of colonialism and segregation, two factors worked in favour of land titles being registered in the name of the chief. First the colonial authorities required that any group of six or more "natives" must register land as a member of a "tribe", and second the claim could only be registered in the name of the chief of that 'tribe' (Capps & Mnwana, 2015).…”