Piety in the Sky? Gender Policy and Land Reform in South Africa

Abstract

This article examines the disjuncture between high-level commitments to gender equity and practice in South Africa's land reform programme. Weaknesses in implementing the gender policy of the Department of Land Affairs stem largely from limitations within the broader programme, compounded by the inadequate conceptualization and management of the task and an absence of political accountability around women's land rights by the Department and Ministry. The low political priority accorded gender policy is itself a reflection of weak levels of organization among rural women. However, rural women show an interest in strengthening their rights in land and the small number of women whose households have secured land through the programme regard this as a positive achievement.

Pro-Poor Land Reform : A Critique

“…Another type is regime transition after a socialist revolution, such as the land reforms in China (Shillinglaw, 1974;Saith, 1985;Bramall, 2004), Cuba (Deere, 2000), Nicaragua (Collins, Lappé and Allen, 1982;Fitzgerald, 1985), and Mozambique (O'Laughlin, 1995(O'Laughlin, , 1996. Yet another type is the transition ending a colonial regime, such as in many countries in Africa (Moyo, 2000;Gasper, 1990;Bratton, 1990;Worby, 2001;Palmer, 2000a;Berry, 2002) and in post-apartheid South Africa (Levin and Weiner, 1997;Cousins, 1997;Bernstein, 1998;Adams and Howell, 2001;Lahiff and Scoones, 2000;Ntsebeza, 2006;Ntsebeza and Hall, 2006;Walker, 2003). Consolidation of an electoral victory of radical groups paving the way for a new regime type is another example, such as the case during the Allende presidency in Chile in the early 1970s (Kay and Silva, 1992;Kay, 1992aKay, , 1992bLoveman, 1976;Thiesenhusen, 1971), the 1957 communist electoral victory in Kerala (Herring, 1983(Herring, , 1990, and the 1977 communist victory in West Bengal (Lieten, 1996;Baruah, 1990;Harriss, 1993).…”

“…6 This latter has been perhaps even more infl uential for the land reform policy resurrection (World Bank, 2003;Deininger and Binswanger, 1999;de Soto, 2000; but see Stiglitz, 2002: 80-81;Manji, 2006). Combined, these two factors Continuing, and has seen unprecedented degree of technological sophistication (e.g., satellite/digital mapping, computerized data-banking) i) Post-confl ict democratic construction and consolidation, e.g., post-apartheid South Africa, post-civil war El Salvador (de Bremond, 2006;Pearce, 1998;Foley, 1997), Colombia (Ross, 2003(Ross, , 2007 48 | Pro-poor Land Reform ii) Advancement of knowledge about the distinct rights of indigenous peoples (e.g., Yashar, 1999;Hirtz, 2003;Korovkin, 2000;Assies, van der Haar and Hoekma, 1998) iii) Advancement of knowledge about gender and rights issues, see, e.g., Razavi (2003); Agarwal (1994), Kabeer (1999); Deere (1985), and Deere and León (2001), Resurreccion (2006);Walker (2003); Whitehead and Tsikata (2003) iv) Greater concern about the environment (see, e.g., Herring, 2002;Holt-Gimenez, 2006) v) Persistence and resurgence of violence including that related to drugs and ethnic issues (see, e.g., Pons-Vignon and Lecomte, 2004;Peluso, 2007;Borras and Ross, 2007;Bush, 2002;Cramer, 2003) vi) Emerging "[human] rights-based approaches" to development (see, e.g., Molyneux andRazavi (2002) Patel, Balakrishna andNarayan, 2007;…”

Men’s experiences of state sponsored housing in South Africa: emerging issues and key questions

“…This was, and still is, compounded by historic and persistent 'socio-cultural practices [which] often prevent rural women from holding land titles ' (FAO, 2015) evident in former homelands where customary land tenure is variably applied in terms of women's rights to land (FAO, 2015). Despite commitments to gender equity in processes of land reform, actual transformations in gendered access (by black women) to, and control over land in post-apartheid South Africa, have been hampered by a multitude of factors, including the low priority of land reform initiatives to the national state, the wider focus on racial inequality rather than gender inequality and a lack of local capacity to support beneficiaries who lack other resources (Walker, 2003). More generally, high rates of female unemployment and poverty circumscribe housing affordability, and a high prevalence of female-headed households in very poor settlements with tenure insecurity is common alongside poor living conditions and minimal asset accumulation.…”

Geography and Land Reform

“…Unfortunately, at least as I see it, there is somewhat of a dearth of geographical studies of land reform that take issues of subject formation or the politics of difference as seriously as material issues. Yet Goebel's work, which emphasizes the impact of land reform on gender relationships and vice versa (2005; see also Walker 2003), indicates the potential for research that examines how landreform processes interact with other politics of difference, including issues of identity and subject formation. Outside geography, moreover, interrelationships among land, land reform, and subject formation have been a persistent theme (for a recent example, see James 2007).…”