A Field of Meaning: Reflections on the Land Question in South Africa

Aaron Gregory Young

Department of City and Regional Planning
University of California, Berkeley
Summer 2015

INTRODUCTION

South Africa is increasingly destabilized by a singular provocation: the land question. This
provocation is most commonly understood through an historic, rural and agrarian lens now
organized by several contemporary components: land reform, redistribution, restitution and tenure
reform. These are generally state-led efforts, but must also be understood as articulated within an
interrelated array of actors and actions including land-based social movements and political
movements, and practices such as land occupations and everyday encroachments. This paper
acknowledges these central actors and actions, yet suggests that the land question is no longer solely
a question of land. Rather, I will argue for an understanding of this provocation as an organizing
nexus now capable of mobilizing an interrelated array of historic and material claims by deploying
the symbolic resonance of land in South Africa past and present.
In this manner, the land question asks for much more than redress for land lost during past
processes and practices of racialized modes of dispossession and discrimination. It materiality
extends beyond the soil and is additionally rooted within a landscape of contemporary concerns
ranging from access, tenure and ownership to also include calls for service delivery, housing, labor
rights and demands, and equitable (re)distribution. It provides a symbolic terrain of politics that
questions the historic and emerging modes of accumulation of power and wealth of a land-based
state, capital mobilities at national and transnational levels, local issues of political representation,
and national aspirations for reconciliation.
The land question continually resists its confinements to rural and agrarian moorings, and is
increasingly posed as an urban land question. It is a social and political inquiry into these rules-ofform and forms-of-rule, asking for equitable access to political, economic and physical geographies
of the post-Apartheid promise, and demanding accountability from a neo-developmental state that
was formed informed by an ongoing legacy of land as both state space and urban space. This paper
will therefore suggest that the land question as originally stated must now be radically rethought in
this contemporary conjuncture. It is written as an exercise to collect some of my thoughts, theories
and reflections concerning my return to Johannesburg this summer, and is in communication with a
few readings and experiences that were simultaneously unsettling and inspiring.

A FIELD OF MEANING

This paper suggests that the land question must be radically repurposed within the shifting
configurations of South Africas current social, political and economic entanglements. It can no
longer be confined to its literal and material translations as a rural and agricultural concern, but
must also be taken seriously as an historic and symbolic landscape of social and political discourse.
This is not to say that its provocations are no longer deeply rooted in these historic and material
concerns. Certainly, land remains a critical source of economic activity and livelihood for many
communities and small-share and commercial agriculture, where improved and restored access to
rural and agrarian land remains fundamental to an ongoing agenda of reform and redistribution. Its
material significance is also crucial to the centrality of the minerals-energy complex (MEC), real
estate and development schemes, eco-tourism and conservation, and its increasing role in the urban
land question. Rather, it is meant to illustrate the manner by which the central significance and
symbolic resonance of the land question has been mobilized within the contemporary terrain of
politics and deployed by an expanded and differentiated array of claims, claimants, claims-making
practices.
To begin, we must pursue an angle of approach that disentangles the land question from its
narrowly defined rural and agrarian moorings. Hart (2002a) was among the first to apprehend the
delinking of the land question its common confinements, calling for its re-articulation with issues
such as the social wage and livelihood concerns. Suggested by this reformulation and those of
others, a delinking of an agrarian provocation is co-constitutive of its relinking to additional and
ancillary concerns that surpass its literal translation. Land is now deployed as a point of entry for
broad-ranging discussions at local, national and transnational levels. It is simultaneously and
relationally rural and urban, insofar as these spatial categories continue to maintain their descriptive
capacity. Its temporal register spans from a legacy of dispossession and discrimination to a range of
current concerns often accentuated by these historic claims. Walker (2005: 805) notes that while
the land question was one of the driving forces of the liberation struggle, it has maintained its
significance despite evidence [that] points to a far greater concern with jobs, housing and the
provision of basic services as immediate priorities in peoples day-to-day lives. One question this
paper asks is: How has land become such a central and organizing nexus capable of embodying its
broad range of meaning beyond its historic and material claims?
An initial suggestion that this paper will make is to consider land as immanent within the broad
terrain of the South African agora. The Greek term agora refers of course to a place of assembly,
an open forum to discuss the politics of the day. It is here that land becomes a physical place of
gathering, a material topic of discussion, and a symbolic nexus wherein a variety of concerns are
channeled and given voice. Du Toit (2013) expands upon this observation by describing land as a
field of meaning available for appropriation by a wide range of different political projects; a
powerful, material metaphor for deeply conflictual political processes extending well beyond the
matters directly addressed [to] land (2013:16-17). Land as agora, and as a field of meaning,
therefore provides an open terrain of political discourse concerning housing, services, capital
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mobilities and accumulation, labor demands and disputes, political representation and
accountability, and an ever-increasing array of contemporary issues.
Although the agora is enabled by an expansionary de/re-linking of the land question, its capacity to
retain the meaning and materiality of land is increasingly subject to debate. It has been argued that
its various invocations are not only unearthed but wholly uprooted from their literal and material
grounding. This position, commonly argued by proponents of rural and agrarian reform, is rightly
concerned with the shifting political and spatial economies of South Africa that continually
attenuate land-based labor and agricultural livelihoods. It is a refrain usually paired with the chorus
of attention given to urbanization and the demographic shifts foretelling of a barren rural and
agrarian future. Given that the land question has been continually sensitive to these concerns, and in
sharp relief with the increasingly symbolic politicization of land, this palpable sense of confusion
and despair can come as no surprise. We are then left to inquire: If the field of meaning given to
land is now detached or unable to adequately represent the materiality of its symbolic deployment,
how then has it become such an enduring terrain of socio-political discourse and mobilization? Has
terra firma been relegated to terra nullius?
We can begin to respond to this question by moving not through the delinking of the land question
to its literal and material concerns, but by re-linking its meaning and materiality through an
exploration of symbolic materialism that I roughly sketch within this paper. The symbolic
significance of land can be approached through its present position not only as a field of meaning,
but more specifically as a signifier deployed to invoke/provoke the coalescing of social, historic,
economic and political discourse. Hall calls attention to the role that land performs [as] an
important symbolic function in the new South Africa as tangible evidence of a nation addressing
historical injustice as part of a wider process of nation-building. (2004: 214) Walker et al. discuss
the politicization of land and its overtly emotional and symbolic appeal in national debate about
inequality [that] resonates powerfully with those living on the margins and due to its role in the
powerful symbolism of state redress for land dispossession (2007: 132-3, 223). MORE
The most interesting manner in which the symbolism of land has been discussed can be found in a
relatively recent article on land reform by Andries Du Toit, wherein he laments that the land
question is hardly ever only about land [and] matters not simply as a resource or material reality,
but also as an empty signifier (2013: 16; emphasis added). In reading this passage several times
over, I found myself troubled by the apparent disconnect Du Toit seems to suggest between
material reality and empty significance. I wondered if such a disconnect really exists, and if not,
how might the material and the symbolic be understood as intimately and inextricably related. As
will become clear, I wholly endorse the notion of land as a signifier, and argue as such within the
following passages, yet I am understandably troubled by its relegation as a signifier emptied of its
ability to signify, particularly given its traction and salience in the contemporary conjuncture. This
paper is, to a large extent, an attempt to argue with/against Du Toit by resituating the significance of

land as an able signifier a central claim made by this paper, and a foundation for several additional
arguments made shortly thereafter.
Just as there are competing claims to land in South Africa, there are many competing claims made
upon the signifier and its capacity to signify. One such interpretation might situate land as an
empty signifier and the presumed disconnect between the literal and material translation of land
and its symbolic invocation as a question. Here, we might argue that a removal from agrarian and
rural concerns renders it emptied of its meaning and capacity to meaningfully signify the signified
divorced from material reality and removed from the real (Laclau, 1996; Saussure, 2006). By
this formulation, the symbolic resonance of the land question would indeed been dispossessed from
its literal, historic and material meaning.
Another interpretation suggests land as a floating signifier, discussed conceptually by Lvi-Strauss
and noting the semantic function of signifiers that allows for diverse and sometimes contradictory
meaning. Though discussed in the context of race, Stuart Hall (1997: 8) provides an apt description
of the floating signifier:
[Floating] signifiers refer to they systems and concepts of the classification of a culture to its making meaning
practices. And those things gain their meaning, not because of what they contain in their essence, but in the
shifting relations of difference, which they establish with other concepts and ideas in a signifying field. Their
meaning, because it is relational, and not essential, can never be finally fixed, but is subject to the constant
process of redefinition and appropriation.

We can note here in the last sentence of this passage that Du Toits notion of land as a field of
meaning is actually better situated as a floating signifier than an empty signifier, despite his claims
to the latter. Here, some semblance of meaning is salvaged by calling attention to the differentiated
means by which land is given differentiated meaning. This can be refracted through Walkers
observation that the grand unity of the land question fragments into a kaleidoscope of particular,
localised, messy, often conflictual and personality-inflected projects. (2005: 806) An observation
by Ruth Hall also appears to alignment, noting that land is less of a priority than jobs for most
South Africans, yet significant, in the absence of jobs, in contributing to what is now commonly
described as the multiple livelihood strategies of the poor. (Ntsebeza & Hall, 2007: 133) Here,
we find land shifting along a continuum from its pure symbolic value of rural and agrarian
concerns to a symbolic zero value of total disconnect. It is between the two extreme ends of the
valued continuum, and by the displacements of the signifier from the signified, that Laclau (1996,
2000, 2005) finds the place of politics, where multiple and contradictory meanings bridge the valley
of signification connecting the varied and contested terrain of an agonistic agora through a shared
referent. This Derridian freeplay of signifiers, as unfixed to the signified and multiply pointing to
other signifieds, therefore allows for the invocation of land within the a wide variety of social and
political discourse and action.
A final interpretation of land as signifier recalls Lacans conceptualization of the master signifier,
defined as a central reference point and organizing concept around which the differential and
4

floating signifiers are affixed to a common meaning. It is here that I wish to situate land as a central
and organizing signifier of differentiated yet relational signifieds that constitutes a field of meaning,
symbolically and materially rooted to the historic and contemporary terrain of South African
politics. This paper proceeds from this angle of approach, taking seriously the call to move through
and beyond land as the master narrative (Walker, 2005) of rural and agrarian dispossession and
situating it as a defining force that has guided the trajectory of South Africa past and present. By
tracing the contours of its historic, material and symbolic connections, we might very well rescue
the land question from the fatal disconnects implied by the empty or floating signifier, revealing
instead its immanence within this contemporary moment.

PLACE AND PLACELESSNESS

The land question as commonly framed is hardly a recent provocation in South Africa. It can be
dated 350 years in the past, within its history of spatial segregation that defined the rules-of-form
and forms-of-rule. Land as a master signifier finds as its sedimentary bedrock the past and present
weaponization of land as a central instrument of socio-spatial governance, where racialized
territorializations were vigorously defined and enforced, fracturing physical, social, political and
economic landscapes. These processes can be mapped by the settler colonial practices of land-based
appropriation, segregation and discrimination subsequently formalized and normalized under
Apartheid-era policies. An abundance of literature has succeeded in illustrating how the land
question was in fact the central question concerning the engineering of race and space in South
Africa, a question increasingly asked anew as a reverse engineering of past and present injustices
and inequities. Given its common denomination throughout South Africas embattled history, it
comes as no surprise that land is now a salient point of entry for political discourse and discontent.
The following passages will provide a brief overview of the guiding land-based practices and
policies that formed and informed the South African state. This legacy of racial and spatial
administration will illustrate the manner by which the politics of place and placelessness, of
possession and dispossession, removed vast swaths of people from their land, suggesting nay,
demanding that the presumed disconnect between land and the land question is in fact bourne of a
history of disconnections, displacements, dispossessions and removals. From this angle of entry,
land becomes a signifier not only of land-based concerns, but also of landlessness and the various
conditions, concerns and politics that arise from these ongoing processes and practices. I would also
like to suggest that these passages be interpreted less as a list of well-known methods and measures
of Apartheid-era rule, and instead as an autopsy exposing the anatomy of the land-based state in
its past and present iterations. In so doing, I hope to exemplify the significance of the land question
in each of its invocations and provocations as the central means to summon the land-based state into
being and response.

These next paragraphs will read as an autopsy of naming might suggest, like a list of vital organs
that form the anatomy of the state apparatus. There are of course other connective tissues, tendons
and ligaments that hold these organs together that remain outside the scope of this paper. I am also
aware of the dangers in relegating/reducing the meaning of land solely to the organs of state
administration, thus negating and emptying other modes of meaning-making as tissues connecting
to/of non-state dynamics. However, this is an attempt to describe the land question as what I will
later refer to as an interpellation of the land-based state. As such, I refer here only to state-centric
concerns, and will, for the sake of reducing pedantry and tedium, confine this list to the following:
The colonial enterprise is recalled for its deployment of liberalism and Enlightenment theories used
to distinguish the civilized from the barbarian, the sacred from the profane, the clean from the dirty,
those fit to rule and those so unfit as to be ruled. These distinctions were ultimately spatialized,
racialized and gendered through the settler colonial project in South Africa. Here, the
Enlightenment took form as a campaign of terror, enslavement, the burning of communities and a
violent process of dispossession.
By the time the The Native Land Act 27 (1913, also known as the Black Land Act) Africans were
left with only 7 percent of the land, and this act ensured that natives were further restricted from
owning or occupying land. The Native Trust and Land Act 18 of 1936 Act established a South
African Development Trust to resettle an estimated 80 percent of the black population to reserves
comprising 13 percent of total land, while including a provision allowing for state expropriation of
land for public interest (we will return to this notion as its residue can be found in the current
Constitution). Not only could the black population not own or occupy the majority of land, they
were restricted from leaving these territorial assigmnents. The Group Areas Act (1950) introduced
another wave of dispossessions and displacements, further defining territory by race (white, black
and coloured), enforcing strict segregation between these categories. The Group Areas Act 36 of
1966 further defined the 1950 Act, making additional racial distinctions, including provisions for
employment outside of these areas, and endowing the South African Police Force with an
expanded mandate to enter and inspect any area or residence for the purposes of enforcing the
Group Areas Acts. The results of these polices of dispossession and removals displaced an
estimated 3.5 million people into a stark geography of bantustans and reserves, black-spots and
homelands.
During this time, the National Party enriched the Apartheid state through a strict strategy of racebased territorialization, segregation, forced resettlement and exclusion supported by dispossessive
and oppressive land laws. Increasingly, these processes coincided with a forced shift from landbased livelihood to wage labor (signaling the beginning of an agrarian decline that continues to
frame the current land question). Black reserves, for example, reallocated land and labor from its
agricultural roots toward the racialized reproduction and subsidization of a political economy
shifting toward mining, manufacturing and industrialization (Wolpe, 1972). The cumulative results
of these terrors and territorializations transferred the vast majority of land and modes of production

to a small, white minority while enriching and empowering the Apartheid state. These historicospatial conditions reveal state strategy as inextricable from racialized land strategies.
It therefore comes as no surprise that the land question provided the historic, material and symbolic
grounds for the dismantling of Apartheid. In the wake of the aforementioned history, land was
promoted as the material basis for South Africas integration into the global economy through its
agricultural and extractive industries, while simultaneously intended to address national and local
issues of food security, rural development, and land-based employment opportunities for the poor
(Williams 1996; Hall 2010; DuToit, 2013). This strategy was encouraged and facilitated through the
World Banks 1993 Options for Land Reform and Rural Restructuring (in cooperation with the
ANC) and its promotion of market-based strategies of land policy still rooted in agrarian and
extractive modes of production and reproduction, while simultaneously recommending the transfer
of land to an emerging class of black elites under the auspices of assuaging social and political
unrest. Embedded within this two-fold strategy is the manner by which land was acknowledged as
more than the material basis for a post-Apartheid political economy, but as a symbol of transitional
reconciliation.
During this pivotal moment, land therefore emerged as an historic and symbolic place of political
formation and mobilization. Hall describes the land question as a central factor in the negotiations
that led to political transition (2004: 214), an issue around which social and political movements
coalesced. In the early stages of transition, the ANC placed on its agenda the dissolution of the
Natives Land Act of 1913, and as Walker (2005) recalls, Joe Slovo proclaimed that the
redistribution of the land is the absolute imperative in our conditions, the fundamental national
demand. During a speech at the first meeting of the ANC in 1994, Minister of Land Affairs Derek
Hanekom attested that the resolution of the land question... lies at the heart of our quest for
liberation from political oppression, rural poverty and under-development. As a political project
guiding the transformation, land was continually mobilized to provide the grounds upon which
national reconciliation, deracialized spatializations, restoriative justice, reparations and human
rights would be addressed (DuToit, 2013). These examples recall Fanons discussion of land as the
primary purpose of decolonization, noting that, for a colonized people, the most essential value,
because it is the most meaningful, is first and foremost the land (1963, 1994: 9). This was
restated (though not without certain controversy) with Mugabes claim that the land question was
the last colonial question. What remains a pivotal point in Fanons, however, is in which ways
land is given meaning and how it gains traction as a meaningful place of social and political
galvanization.
The history recalled above is at once an account of actual dispossession and displacement, as well
as a living history that summoned the post-Apartheid state into being. The political transition was,
from the beginning, greatly influenced by the formation and the reinstatement of political parties
and policies organized around issues of reform, redistribution and restitution. Its symbolic
resonance became a defining agenda for national politics, pursued by state and non-state actors such
7

as the ANC, the National Party (NP), and among the proliferation of land activists oriented toward
the notion of reconciliation and redress. These notions were institutionalized within the Ministry of
Land Affairs (MLA) and the Department of Land Affairs (DLA), tasked to restore and stabilize land
tenure and land rights to those once dispossessed by colonial and Apartheid-era segregation and
displacement, initiating redistribution programs intended to deracialize land ownership structures
(DLA, 1997a). A similar agenda was rendered into policy within the Restitution of Land Rights Act
(1994) and the DLAs White Paper on land reform (DLA, 1997), anticipated to provide the
groundwork for transitional justice.
Mandates for land restitution were also enshrined in Act 200 of the Interim Constitution of the
Republic of South Africa (1993), in Act 22 of the Restitution of Land Rights Act (LRA, 1994), and
in Act 108 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996) as as an exceptional
measure, placing the state under a duty to redress land dispossessions as a result of past racially
discriminatory laws or practice. (Zenker, 2011: 2) A Commission on the Restitution of Land
Rights (CRLR) was established by the LRA to assist claimants to make their claims, to investigate
claims and prepare them for adjudication by a specially constituted Land Claims Court (LCC). The
CRLR and LCC have been discussed as analogous to truth and reconciliation commissions and war
crime tribunals as instruments of transitional justice (Teitel 2000, 2003; Shaw et al. 2010; Zenker,
2011), providing institutional mechanisms to address a history of human rights violations embodied
by violent dispossessions and exploitation.
The land question was further enshrined within the Reconstruction and Development Programme
(RDP; 1994), a seminal policy package intended to set the tone and agenda of post-Apartheid
reform. Here, land was framed to address past dispossessions and injustice through provisions for
land including land redistribution, reform, restitution and tenure (echoed by the 1997 White Paper
on Land Policy). Included within these central tenets was the stated target of transferring 30 percent
of agricultural land back to black South Africans, with a particular focus on the restitution and
restoration of land to those dispossessed by Apartheid-era segregation and discrimination. This
proved to be a substantial undertaking requiring massive infrastructural and budgetary
contributions, particularly given the subsequent willing buyer, willing seller policy introduced
shortly after Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) was introduced in 1996. Here,
GEARs market-led and neoliberal policy package shifted the restitutional priorities of RDP toward
government-financed and market-led redistribution. The Faustian bargain made between RDP and
GEAR was echoed by the revisions made between the interim and final draft of the constitution,
wherein the constitutional provision for land restitution was ultimately subordinated to the
protection of private property rights. Hendricks and Ntsebeza (2000) note that in effect, colonial
land theft is now preserved by constitutional sanction. Ultimately, these reflected a series of
seismic shifts by which land-based politics focused on matters of redress and reconciliation were
subordinated to the adoption of neoliberal macroeconomic policies (Fine et al., 2010). As we will
see, this would have profound implications for a post-Apartheid state that was both formed and
informed by the land question.
8

We return here, for a moment, to the second, equally important aspect of the agora. In addition to
providing an assembly for the play of politics, these forums typically took place within the market.
Our working concept of land as agora therefore reveals the imbrication of reform, redistribution,
and restitution within market forces. Increasingly, the land question in South Africa has skewed
toward the latter, as the RDP agenda was slowly subsumed by GEAR, and as private property rights
were prioritized over reform (Act 200 in the Constitution), redistribution and restitution. With the
gradual ANC shift toward conservative politics and macroeconomic restructuring, it was the NP and
its allies in agricultural and urban stakeholders that maintained focus on property rights to protect
existing landholdings against the radical politics calling for the nationalization and redistribution
of land. Constitutional provisions allowing for the expropriation of land for the public good and
collective interests (Clause 28) became firmly couched in macro-economic terms stressing stability
and growth rather than disruptive restructuring.
However, the restructuring of a neoliberal agenda ultimately proved to be disruptive to the stated
aims of post-Apartheid reform. At a time when land redistribution was projected to require massive
state funding for infrastructure, staffing and budgeting (an estimated R17.5 billion to transfer 30 per
cent of agricultural land, for example), tightened fiscal controls, reduced budgetary and
decentralization undercut these imperatives. The funding for the Ministry and Department of Land
Affairs were negligible in terms of overall GDP. The Commission on the Restitution of Land Rights
(CRLR) was similarly underfunded, leading to a largely unsuccessful process of restitutional land
claims. Moreover, the CRLR and Land Claims Court (LCC) have continually opted to settle claims
and disputes through a market-based negotiations. Hall (2004) reports that a single claim had been
settled during the first two years of the process, increasing to 41 claims by 1999, a year after the end
of the window to file claims in 1998. Land reform efforts were expected to redistribute 30 percent
of productive land, yet succeeded in transferring a mere 3.5 percent during the programs first ten
years. Land redistribution under the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD)
was similarly disappointing. Post-transfer support for successfully redistributed land was nearly
nonexistent. Land tenure reform under the Communal Land Rights Act allocated land not to
vulnerable communities or populations, but to an increasingly empowered group of traditional
authorities and local elites.
In the wake of these failed efforts, an estimated 70 percent of the land is still largely owned by a
white minority population, a group of traditional and local elites, and a handful of powerful
corporate (and increasingly transnational) interests. Walker calls our attention to these shortcomings
not as inherent limitations on redistribution per se, but with the limitations of particular state
policies and practices with a failure of political will. (2005: 821) The overall consensus
regarding the manner by which a literally interpreted land question was answered illustrates to a
failure to deliver by a shrinking state. However, these characterizations stand to reason only
when the land question remains confined to a question of land.


INTERPELLATIONS OF THE STATE

The above passages have illustrated the ways in which the South African state was formed and
informed by the land question. However, state presence must now be understood differently than
when viewed through the lens of colonial and Apartheid rule as a repressive apparatus, and as an
authoritarian and/or totalitarian (a distinction argued extensively elsewhere) form of active and
land-based governance. Beginning with the transition-era and into the contemporary conjuncture,
the state has taken on a new form, a flickering of state presence and absence a selective and
increasingly liberalized mode of neo-developmental governance that vastly differs from historic
form of centralized dominance.
The state in its state of absence can be understood through Halls (2004) discussion of the
shrinking state limited by fiscal and institutional constraints. By this formulation, the land
question is placed to a narrative of inadequate state capacity. However, we must augment this
argument by recalling South Africas voluntarily pursuit of homegrown neoliberal agenda (Bond,
2005: 6) supported by constitutional decree, in comparison with the imposition of similar
macroeconomic packages elsewhere. In this manner, self-imposed reformations skewed the state
toward structural adjustments including privatization, decentralization, limited state intervention, an
increased role played by market forces and the private sector, deregulation, the removal of tariff
barriers, transnational alignments, and fiscal restraints (rather than constraints). Further unsettling
this assumption of state incapacity, land redistribution efforts have consistently and effectively
transferred large holdings of rural and urban land to large commercial holdings and developers,
while land reform at the turn of the century began to markedly favor a small class of black elites and
private-sector partnerships. By these examples, we must situate the shrinking state as one that
actively pursues an agenda of selective presence and absence.
Perhaps more importantly, we can view state capacity through a lens explored most recently by
Fergusons controversial text Give a Man a Fish, wherein he notes the massive (re)distributions
allocated by the South African neo-developmentalist state, comprising an estimated 3.4 percent of
the nations GDP directly to the poor via non-market cash payments that are now received by
more than 30 percent of the entire population (2015: 5). Here, we might note the manner by which
the maintained colonial and Apartheid-order systems of land-based economic activity the elite,
white and transnational holdings involved with the minerals-energy complex, commercial
agriculture, eco-tourism, real estate, and urban land development are continually relied upon for
such programs as basic income grants (BIG) and other big ideas. Of course, we could (and should)
question the manner by which these structures are maintained and therefore be relied upon for these
new politics of redistribution. However, the importance here is two-fold: The first point here is to
note the selective capacity and presence of the South African state, whereupon land can be invoked
as a provocation of accountability, representativeness and of the democratic and economic ideals
suggested politically and constitutionally in the post-Apartheid era. The second point notes the
10

wealth and productivity of land as channeled by/through the selectively present state in the form of
redistributions (monetary, service-oriented and otherwise). In this manner, the land question can be
seen as a question posed to the land-based state a question posed not only in the name of historical
redress, but of its contemporaneous presence and absence regarding the regulation and organization
of land (and landlessness).
This paper suggests that the land question now provides the grounds upon which the state is
summoned into presence from its selective absence. It is a means to hail a state formed and
informed by land-based strategies, by bringing to the fore a history of dispossession and
discrimination while simultaneously attempting to hold it accountable for recanting and often
relegating to market forces its post-Apartheid promises of reformation, redistribution, restitution
and national reconciliation. Many have noted that these failed land programs failed not only to
unmap Apartheid-era geographies, but are seen by Walker and others as a failure to transform the
very nature of society, to address black claims to full citizenship through land ownership, and to
make amends for the insults to human dignity that black people have suffered as a collectivity
through dispossession in the past (2005: 806). We can juxtapose this narrative of state failure with
Halls (2004) attention to land-based claims and movements seen to force the hand of an
otherwise hands-off state, and with the manner by which these promises have often been delegated
to the invisible hand of the market in an advertent campaign of elite consolidation (even while
engaged in the act of redistribution). As a recursive thread woven through the past and present
formation of the state and its local and transnational nodes of influence and accumulation, land
becomes a powerful means to provoke the state from what Hart describes as a process of
denationalization/renationalization (2013) and from absence to presence.
Current and variform invocations of land can now be seen to interpellate an array of state response
creating a variety of state subjectivities. Recently, the land question has been responded to by the
recently re-opened claims process initiated by the Restitution of Land Rights Amendment Act of
2014. Here, the politicized is proceduralized by the bureaucratic state, where claims are rendered
valid or invalid, and claimants are rendered as legitimate or illegitimate.1 Validity or legitimacy is
conferred not only to those with adequate means to navigate this process, but also to individuals or
groups deemed by this process to be representative of a collective history of dispossession, often
granted to tribal leaders and local elites rather than the communities they ostensibly represent.
Alternately, illegitimate claimants and claims-making processes such as land occupations are
increasingly criminalized by the repressive state. Here, occupations (often of public and
government-owned land) are translated as invasions and subject to violent and militarized
response to by Anti-Land Invasion Units comprised of law enforcement agents that destroy built
settlements and forcefully remove residents. This criminalization operates from an extra-legal
position that often violates the 1998 Prevention of Illegal Eviction From and Unlawful Occupation
1

While visiting the Mobile Claims Units this summer, claims officers spoke to me of valid claims, a term I am using
here to problematize the notions of validity and invalidity. It has been suggested that I consider/distinguish these
concepts with those of legitimacy and illegitimacy.
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of Land Act of 1998 (PIE). The salience of the land question has also led to the rise of political
parties such as the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) now led by former ANC Youth League
leader Joseph Malema, gaining influence and support through a platform calling for the
expropriation without compensation of national land. Political movements of this sort are
continually dismissed or discredited by the entrenched state clinging to a tenuous hegemony.
When combined, the modes of claims-making practices interpellate an array of state subjectivities
within an integrated apparatus (to upend Althussers formulation) that responds variously by
rendering claims and claim-smaking practices as valid or invalid, legitimate or illegitimate, legal or
illegal, or politically acceptable or politically deviant when placed on a grid of normativity.
It is equally important to note that these modes of claims-making include yet exceed their material
and symbolic calls for land. The restitution claims process validates tribal leaders and local elites
not only as representative of a collective history of dispossession, but as part of an ongoing strategy
to decentralize national governance to local nodes of power, accumulation and influence. Land
occupations are claims not only for land, but for access to public services and labor organization (as
increasingly seen with the Marikana occupations). The EFFs call for the nationalization of land is
commonly understood as a means to redistribute not only land, but to deconsolidate the
accumulation of power and wealth from a local, national and transnational elite. As a political
project, the land question continues to provide the material and symbolic grounds upon which a
variety of claims and claims-making practices are gaining ground.
Of course, the question remains: How do these arguably symbolic acts find material purchase, and
does their invocation of land function as an empty signifier? We can circle back to Du Toit and his
characterization of land-based claims-making practices as a metaphorical act, relating to
struggles and antagonisms that extend well beyond its literal and material consequences and a
symbolic drama wherein the injustices suffered by specific claimants come to stand for the
violence of Apartheid itself; in which claimants come to represent Apartheids victims as such; and
in which the redress of particular wrongs serves as metaphorical healing for the nation as a whole.
(DuToit, 2013:18) Here, this symbolic drama of the land question is a provocation of the land-based
state, as well as a question of the nation as a land of post-Apartheid promise and potential. Pithouse
notes for example that when land occupations are presented as simple acts of criminality, popular
protest as about nothing but service delivery and evictions as a simple matter of enforcing the rule
of law, the curtain is drawn on this on-going drama. (2014: 1) It is here that the metaphorical acts
and ongoing drama of land-based claims-making processes can be viewed through the lens of
symbolic materialism, a concept suggesting that the contemporary South African conjuncture is
shaped not only by material conditions and their basis in historico-spatial struggle, but by the
profoundly symbolic meaning of this history that continues to inform these material conditions as a
recursive thread woven throughout the social and political terrain. Land is therefore a signifier
firmly situated in its historic and ongoing materiality while also representing the social, political and
economic forces that have emerged concurrently. It is immanent within the agora as a field of
meaning, rather than transcendent of its origins.
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THE URBAN LAND QUESTION

When the land question is reduced to a question of the countryside, or to agrarian questions, the urban land
question can also be occluded. And when the urban question is reduced to the housing question, which in turn is
reduced to a matter of the number of houses that have been built, without regard for where they have been built,
or what form they take, the urban land question is also silenced. (Pithouse, 2014)

An angle of approach that I am distinctly interested in exploring the shifting ground upon which the
land question is increasingly displaced from its rural and agricultural moorings and resituated within
the urban. It can in fact be argued that the land question is increasingly an urban provocation that
is significantly reshaping the contours of the social and political landscape, expanding it field of
meaning as a fertile terrain of contemporary politics. If we are to take the suggestions of Walker and
Pithouse seriously, we are left to ask: How does the land question inform the urban question, and
what does it ask in an urban context? I suspect that it is within the urban context that the historic
reality of land and landlessness is imbricated within a new and symbolic materiality. I am curious to
articulate the apparent disconnects instead as places of connection.
The categorical distinction of the urban as differentiated from the rural is a productive point of entry
for this line of inquiry. These spatial distinctions, as well as the urban register, are hardly a
contemporary concern in South Africa. The urban has long been a contested terrain, where the
politics of place and placelessness witnessed ongoing attempts to expel black populations from the
metropolis. Segregational territorializations and the departure of industry did not remove black
South Africans from the urban, but created new urban emplacements that blurred the distinctions
between the rural-urban binary. Hart (2002) notes the spatial and racial engineering that displaced
people to bantustans, townships and industrial estates with urban-like conditions and conventions,
citing Murrays (1988) notion of displaced urbanization meant to describe large, dense settlements
removed from city centers of white privilege. Strategies of urban and industrial decentralization2
were unsuccessful in their attempts, as industry returned to the spatial economies and
agglomerations of metropolitan areas, followed by populations of labors and dispossessed
populations accreting around yet rarely interpenetrating city peripheries. At the same time, many
areas of displaced urbanization remained as established towns and cities.
Urban struggles and social movements for services and space arose in these areas to foment early
struggles against Apartheid. During the transition, an unexpected surge of urban land struggles and
claims emerged repositioned realigned many land-based programs of reform, redistribution, and
restitution (see the Land Claims Working Group reports) while applying pressure on both policy
2

See also the The Physical Planning and Utilization of Resources Act of 1967, the Good Hope Plan and the Regional
Industrial Development Program (RIDP) as instruments of industrial decentralization as a mode of spatial and racial
engineering.
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and political restructuring. A hollowing out of many rural and agrarian areas continues due to recent
reform and redistribution programs that favor the consolidation of land by local and tranditional
elites as well as large commercial holdings. This is witnessed in part by the new wave of land
restitution claims that are disproportionately urban, as former bantustans are increasingly urbanized,
and as urban populations continue to rise in inverse proportion to employment, services and
security.
Within this historic context and present-day concentrations, the land question must be seen as
continually interconnected with the urban, and the urban question. Though Castells question
described the urban as a spatial unit of production, social and labor-power reproduction, and a
landscape upon which urban social movements formed and performed, it failed to note urban
materiality as an active site and strategy of dispossession and accumulation. A new urban question
in South Africa must also note how the urban symbolic informs present-day politics and praxis as
an historic and material force. It is not so much the statistical or demographic instantiations of
urbanization that give contour to an urban land question as Wirth (1938) suspected, or even the
planetarity of the urban as Lefebvre (1970, 2003) rightly predicted, but a question of the urban as a
translation of the land question in this contemporary moment a provocation of the politics and
practices of the neo-developmental and post-Apartheid state.
The urban might also resituate the frustration and folly of the land question in all of its invocations
and provocations when anchored to rural and agrarian concerns. Land reform cannot re-form the
land-based livelihoods that were decimated through displacements. The restoration of land rights
cannot restore the loss of dignity more than the loss of land as argued in Bernadette Atuahenes
new book, We Want Whats Ours: Learning from South Africas Land Restitution Program. Land
reclamation cannot reclaim the present from its history of racial and spatial practices of
discrimination and dispossession. Land reparations cannot repair the ongoing practices and
processes of a spatialized and racialized neo-Apartheid, and national reconciliation cannot be relied
upon to reconcile the broken promises of the post-Apartheid state. Walker suggests as much when
discussing the serious mismatch between the political aspirations and popular expectations that
surround the land question on the one hand and the transformative potential of land reform itself
on the other. (2005: 806) Her astute argument illustrates the error of conflation between the land
question and its confinement to a particular land policy or programme as a question of land. In
fact, we must begin to recognize the empty signification of these efforts in achieving their central
intentions to fulfill South Africas aspirations toward social, political, economic, racial and spatial
justice.
It is perhaps the urban land question that now is now positioned to channel these claims and
critiques into a collective array of provocations untethered to the specificities of rural and agrarian
concerns (while also inclusive of, and internconnected with these concerns). The urban, in relational
communication with the rural and agrarian, is the arena wherein the material and symbolic are in
confluence with Harveys (1973, 2009) description of first and second circuits of capital, and with
14

the selective presences and absences of the landed state that relies upon these circuits to shortcircuit equitable access and opportunity. It is within urban space that Walker (2005) locates state
space, where the majority of the population and the greatest concentration of wealth are found, as
well as all state-owned public land such as national and provincial parks, military bases and other
public-purpose properties. Greenberg (2011) assists in our location of state space and its urban
concentrations by observing the the contested terrain of state, where the actually existing state is
skewed by its landed (both urban and otherwise) interests that favor state actors through networks of
corruption and systems of patronage, and influenced by capitalist economic development both
corporate and individual.
Here, we must attend to the collusion between the state and the market as often two sides of the
same coin accumulated by urban land developments of inclusion and exclusion. Pithouse notes that
the urban order under construction by the state and the market is actively reinscribing organised
forms of inequality and class segregation, both profoundly inflected by race, into the concrete
materiality of our cities. In the zones of exclusion and social dishonour, usually out on the urban
peripheries, we have new townships made up of rows of tiny and poorly constructed RDP houses,
not to mention the even more horrific transit camps. In the zones of inclusion and social honour we
have gated communities, schools and hospitals and shopping malls pass for public space. (2014: 1)
Of interest is the manner by which the public and private are often blurred or even inverted, where
what actually constitutes land ownership is often at odds with the public and private distinctions
enscribed within the Constitution. These zones of inversion are not only representative of a material
urban reality mapped by the land-based state, but are symbols of an ongoing history of socio-spatial
inequity that the post-Apartheid era has actively reproduced.
Urban space as state space is therefore the necessary space of heterogeneous yet interrelated claims
and conflagrations. A majority of land occupations take place on state land in urban and peri-urban
settings. These land-based movements have, as Hall (2004) suggests, provided a voice to the
voiceless, erected a platform for land-adjacent claims, forged linkages between rural and urban
struggles and, continues to impact the national political landscape. In his recent text, The New
Urban Question, Merrifield situates the urban agora in a slightly different manner than Du Toits
field of meaning, referring to a common field in which:
the passivity of the world of corporate things, of the built financial landscape, of the spectacular practicoinert, is rendered active and affective, doing so because it is filled with ordinary people who, united by
common notions, create a function rather than respond to one (2014: 10)

As efforts toward reform, redistribution and tenure continually reinforce the structural forms of
power and accumulation, the multi-modal assemblage of claims-making practices organized around
the land question becomes an inquiry concerning the manner by which such structures have been
left unquestioned. Land therefore becomes a common field of meaning wherein structural
conditions are contested by demands for housing, services, invectives against capital mobilities and
disproportionate accumulation, labor demands and disputes, demands for political representation
15

and accountability, and an increasing array of provocations that coalesce around an increasingly
urban land question as the terrain of politics as an agora of agonism.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Translated through its sedimentation within the strata of South Africas colonial and Apartheid past,
the land question is a new provocation in this contemporary conjuncture. The recent confluence of
various land-base claims-making processes continually unearth these histories while indicating a
present predicament. How can we understand the recent significance given to the land question
within this negative moment of national crisis (Hart, 2013) that is now reshaping its social,
political and physical terrain? If the land question is no longer solely a question of land, what can be
said of this moment that places land not as a central, self-contained project, but as a component of
a much more encompassing but also more constrained process of political and socio-economic
change in South African society as a whole (Du Toit, 2013)? Lastly, how does the urban land
question reinvigorate yet reinscribe a fundamental agenda once grounded by rural and agrarian
concerns?
These questions arise within the liminal space of connections and disconnects. To what extent and
manner do the symbolic claims to land intersect with material conditions and interests? How do
contemporary claims and claimants to land also claim a certain narrative of history? By what logic
can individual or group claimants seek to represent a collective history? How do divergent
narratives of this shared history result in contested and/or overlapping claims and making of
meaning? In which ways does a shared yet differently interpreted history of dispossession and
displacement facilitate a variform array of land-based social and political modes of action? To what
extent does the notion of spatial scale, at the local, metropolitan, national and transnational level
confer connectivity or disconnection between these movements? To what extent can an urban land
question adequately translate the myriad of associated provocations that include yet extend beyond
a historic and agrarian concerns, and how might this inquiry implicate and interpellate the landbased state?
I am looking to explore these broad topics through the lens of the recently re-opened land restitution
claims process, with a focus on Gauteng province. Although the first opening of the claims process
was made legible and explicit in the context of a historic post-Apartheid moment, this second wave
has been under-explained and insufficiently analyzed. As such, I am interested in identifying this
social and political moment that called this reopened claims process into being. In this manner,
and under the assumption that land restitution process seeks to restore much more than land to a
set of claims and claimants, I hope to problematize the underlying intentions of this process as a
response to this moment. I refer here to the role of state bureaucracy and proceduralization as a
normalizing mode of claims-making that legitimizes a certain set of claims and claimants. This
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should assist in articulating the context of alternate claims, claimants and modes of claims-making
that, by being excluded from bureaucratic and institutional channels, are rendered illegitimate.
Lastly, I am interested in how these processes shape social, political and physical space, particularly
given the increasing number of urban claims and modes claims-making that are now collectivizing a
shared question.

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