Livelihoods after land reform in South Africa

Over the past few decades, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa have pursued redistributive land reform as a means to address rural poverty. The Livelihoods after Land Reform (LaLR) study was carried out between 2007 and 2009, to understand the livelihood and poverty reduction outcomes of land reform in each of the three countries. The South African component focused on Limpopo province, and investigated land reform processes, trajectories of change and outcomes in thirteen detailed case studies. This paper summarizes some of the main findings from the South African study, and briefly compares them with findings from Namibia and Zimbabwe. The paper argues that a fundamental problem affecting land reform in both South Africa and Namibia is the uncritical application of the Large-Scale Commercial Farming (LSCF) model, which has led to unworkable project design and/or projects that are irrelevant to the circumstances of the rural poor. Nevertheless, some ‘beneficiaries’ have experienced modest improvements in their livelihoods, often through abandoning or amending official project plans.Web of Scienc

Re-locating memories: transnational and local narratives of Indian South Africans in Cape Town

This article plays on the word re-location to examine the memories of Indians in South Africa through oral histories about relocation as a result of the Group Areas Act, to memories of parents and grandparents relocating to South Africa from India as told to interviewees and to their own memories of journeys to India and back. The narratives of mobilities traverse time and national boundaries and are counter-posed by narratives of local mobilities as well as stasis. The article identifies ways of narrating, themes of narration and the meaning of memories while noting the re-location of memory construction against the backdrop of South Africa’s democratic transition and the 150th commemoration of the arrival of indentured Indians to South Africa. It argues that the local and the national are important in narrations of transnational journeys, thus advancing a particular approach to transnational memory studies

Uniestatistieke oor vyftig jaar

This publication provides a statistical resume of the Union of South Africa's growth and development during the fifty year period from 1910-1960

The Classification of South Africa’s Mixed-Heritage Peoples 1910–2011: A Century of Conflation, Contradiction, Containment, and Contention

Given that South Africa’s first contact with European settlers occurred more than 350 years ago, it is not surprising that the country has large and well-established communities of mixed-heritage peoples. Despite notorious anti-miscegenation legislation—promulgated both before (the Immorality Act No. 5 of 1927) and after (the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act No. 55 of 1949) the introduction of ‘formal’ apartheid—the treatment of mixed-heritage peoples was primarily one of containment involving the classification of all non-European and non-Native individuals into a single category (‘Coloured’), which conflated those of mixed heritage with ostensibly ‘non-mixed’ (sub)groups—such as those of Chinese, Malay, and Indian origin. However, the apartheid state also established mechanisms through which officials, members of the public, and individuals themselves could apply to alter ‘population group’ classifications, which resulted in several thousand ‘reclassifications’, both requested and imposed. Nonetheless, for the vast majority of South Africans, their ‘population group’ classification became an ingrained marker of quasi-racial identity that continues to this day, while the introduction of an ‘Other’ census category and legal disputes concerning the composition of the ‘Coloured’ category reveal that mixed-heritage individuals once again pose a substantive dilemma to census takers and policy makers, and also perhaps to their own sense of place in the ‘Rainbow Nation’