The Communal Land Rights Act and women: Does the Act remedy or entrench discrimination and the distortion of the customary?

This paper discusses the likely impact of the Communal Land Rights Act (CLRA) of 2004 on the land rights of rural women. It asks whether the Act is likely to enhance or undermine tenure security, not only for women, but for rural people in general. In the context of declining rates of marriage it focuses particularly on the problems facing single women. It examines two inter-related issues. The first is the content and substance of land rights, including the question of where rights vest. The second relates to power over land, particularly control over the allocation and management of land rights. It begins with an account of the parliamentary process and the last minute changes to previous drafts. The Bill was opposed by all sectors of civil society with the singular exception of traditional leaders. The most vehement opposition came from rural women and women’s organisations who argued that the Bill undermined the principle of equality in favour of an alliance with traditional leaders. By contrast, traditional leaders welcomed the Act as a triumph of tradition and African custom

The Communal Land Rights Bill

Tenure legislation is urgently necessary. There are serious problem in the communal areas in the ex-homeland provinces. These areas are characterised by severe poverty, overcrowding and isolation from economic growth and opportunity. One of the issues that inhibits development, is the lack of clarity about the status of land rights in communal areas. Who has what rights? Who must agree to changes? Who has the legal authority to transact land? One of the consequences of this confusion is that the people who actually use and occupy the land are often pushed aside and dispossessed when development and land transactions do take place. Others, purporting to act on their behalf, take the money and run. The underlying confusion about the status of land rights, has been exacerbated by the breakdown of the land administration system in the ex-homeland provinces. In most provinces nobody has the legal power to allocate land rights, and there is no budget or staff to survey sites, maintain grazing camps, enforce dipping regimes or control the plunder of common property resources such as medicinal herbs and forests. Double and disputed land allocations are the order of the day, illegal and informal land sales are increasingly common and stock theft has reached alarming proportions. There is a serious and deepening crisis concerning land rights and land allocations in communal areas, which is impacting negatively on rural poverty. One of the inevitable results is that investors and formal and financial institutions avoid these areas. Local people find it almost impossible to raise loans for businesses, or to access housing subsidies

[En]gendering the norms of customary inheritance in Botswana and South Africa

The article responds to the article by Weinberg in this issue. She traces the trajectory of court hearings concerning the contested inheritance of land in Botswana, which, after several prior judgements eventually resulted in a positive outcome for the woman litigants. I acknowledge the author’s key argument, which concerns the impact of power relations on the construction of customary law and the reproduction of knowledge in the courts. Certain versions of “custom” were promoted and others stilled to the disadvantage of women. I argue that the normative patterns of landholding are indeed gendered, but do not result in a binary structure of men and women. “Gender” should be disaggregated to take into account a range of status criteria within and across the categories of male and female in order to understand the differential impact of social relations on the outcomes of property struggles. The normative lines of property transmission frequently follow a logic of “family property” that allows for qualifying women to rights of property. Family property has vastly different social and legal consequences to private, individualised property rights. The corollary is that it is misleading to speak of the processes of succession to rights of access to, and control of customary property in terms of one-to-one “inheritance” of land. The concept of “living law” inadequately reflects these social dynamics.IBS

Securing land and resource rights in Africa: Pan-African perspectives

Across the African continent the land and resource rights of the rural poor are threatened by inappropriate policies and institutions (including global treaties); unequal social, political and economic relations; the actions of powerful vested interests (wealthy national or local elites, international aid organisations, multinational corporations); and the weakness of grassroots organisations. It is against this background that the Pan-African Programme on Land and Resource Rights (PAPLRR) Network’s initiative to analyse, understand and engage with these issues was conceptualised by four African centres of excellence that subsequently developed the programme in 2001. The unique contributions Africa can make are seldom taken seriously in international natural resource policymaking debates. One reason could be that the African voice on land and resource rights is perhaps not as strong in international forums as it should be. By coming together in forums such as PAPLRR, Africans are able to share their concerns and develop capacity to articulate their opinions and influence outcomes in the international arena. Defining an agenda for advocacy and strategic engagement with governments, and building links across divides between scholars, practitioners and advocacy groups, is an emphasis of PAPLRR into the future. A key focus of the programme is the role of land and resource rights in the struggle against poverty, exploitation and oppression as well as their contribution in solving real world problems of African people, not as academic objects to be studied, but as key components of the struggle

Resurgence of tribal levies: Double taxation for the rural poor

People in the former homelands waged a successful battle against the imposition of 'tribal levies' during the anti-apartheid struggle. Recently, however, there has been a resurgence of traditional authorities demanding annual levies. Those who refuse to pay cannot access government grants and identity books. This article argues that recent laws bolstering the powers of traditional leaders have contributed to this resurgence. It argues that the laws undermine the citizenship rights of the poorest South Africans as well as their ability to hold traditional leaders to account. It suggests that the laws have been ambiguously worded in an attempt to disguise the fact that they are inconsistent with the Constitution. It rebuts the argument that annual tribal levies are consistent with and justified by customary law, by describing their colonial and apartheid genesis