A farm in South Africa’s Free State province. Courtesy Alex Dyzenhaus More than 30 years after South Africa achieved democracy it remains one of the world’s most unequal countries. The democratic transition has not produced the transfer in wealth and ownership from a white minority to Black majority population that many had hoped for.
Land is at the centre of the debates about this lack of transfer of wealth. During apartheid, because of racist laws around land ownership, Black South Africans could only own land in 13% of the country’s territory even when they made up 80% of the population.
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In 1995, the government set an initial target to redistribute 30% of all white-owned land to Black farmers under a market-based programme, which ensured the white farmers could choose whether to sell their land and did so at or above market value. But only between 12% and 20% of the land has been redistributed so far.
For the last seven years, I have studied the land reform programme as a political scientist, merging my knowledge of political, social and economic forces to better understand why land reform has failed to live up to its initial goals.
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In a recent paper I set out to gain a deeper understanding of how land reform occurred and under what conditions transfers of land from white to Black farmers had taken place. To do this, I looked at both sides of the process.
On the one hand, I examined what motivated existing landholders to transfer land, including economic incentives to keep farms productive and social factors shaped by the legacy of apartheid and segregation. On the other hand, I looked at the forces driving demand for land reform, including land claims and pressure from landless people.
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I held in-depth conversations with established white commercial farmers and Black land reform farmers, asking white farmers why they had sold their farms for the purposes of land reform, or why they had refrained from doing so. I then asked Black farmers about their experiences as emerging farmers in South Africa.
I found that landowners’ decisions were shaped by South Africa’s history of racial segregation. Some white farmers used land redistribution to create a buffer between their farms and neighbouring Black communities. Others, in areas with many Black farmers, used land redistribution to bring Black farmers into their farming businesses.
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My findings show that where land ownership is very unequal, land redistribution doesn’t always reduce old divides. In some cases, it can actually reinforce them.
These findings are important because the powerful US government has recently taken strong action against the South African government, with US president Donald Trump publicly and wrongly accusing the land reform programme of persecuting white farmers, expropriating their land and encouraging violence against them.
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Based on this, Trump withdrew all aid from South Africa and opened up an asylum process for South Africa’s white farmers to come to America as refugees.
But as my research shows, land reform does not unfairly target white farmers. Instead, white farmers find it to be a useful and profitable tool to resolve longstanding problems that they face. This shows that the best way to understand land reform is to look at the evidence rather than the political debate.
I looked at how land reform was going in the Free State province, a part of South Africa with historically stark spatial segregation that led to minimal Black agriculture and high urbanisation. During apartheid, white and Black residents interacted in specific buffer zones between Black towns and white rural areas.
I interviewed 10 white farmers who lived next to the buffer areas. They said they were afraid of livestock theft and land reform had allowed them to sell their land to the state for a good price and move into the rural heartland.
It also meant that stock theft then became the problem of the new group of Black land reform farmers, just as national statistics on farm attacks have shown that Black people make up most of the victims of rural crime.
