LAND AND AGRARIAN REFORM IN SOUTH AFRICA Wellington Didibhuku Thwala 1 1. Introduction In South Africa land is presently not only one of the most defining political and development issues, but also perhaps the most intractable. The continuing racial maldistribution of land will either be resolved through a fundamental restructuring of the government’s land reform programme, or it will be resolved by a fundamental restructuring of property relations by the people themselves. Which direction the country follows depends to a large degree on the urgent and immediate responsiveness of the government to the needs and demands of the country’s 19-million mostly poor, black and landless rural people. The past few years have given some disturbing indications of the government’s intentions in this regard, from the narrowing of the redistribution programme – the main vehicle for reversing the racially-skewed landscape inherited from apartheid – to targeting the creation of a small African commercial farmer elite instead of the large population of poor landless Africans, to the laissez-faire attitude towards the growing demands of landless people and their civil society allies for a Land Summit to address the country’s land crisis. Not only is land reform critical in terms of providing historical redress for centuries of settler dispossession, but is also to resolving the national democratic revolution in South Africa. This is so, because it is through land reform that social and economic relations (embodied in property relations) in rural areas are to be transformed. This is a central to the national democratic struggle to transform the colonial class formation in South Africa that combines capitalist development with national oppression. 1 Research Coordinator, National Land Committee, Johannesburg, South Africa. Contact at Wellington@nlc.co.za 1