LAW, LAND AND CHIEFS: Book review: Apartheid’s pernicious legacy lives on in the former homelands

The political marriage of the ANC and traditional leaders in the former homelands has revived an apartheid project that still disfigures the landscape, both figuratively and literally. Enduring poverty, uncertainties over land tenure as well as conflict and contestation have been the depressing results. Apartheid is over, but the Bantustans live on — and the ANC is milking this for all it’s worth.

“In the apartheid era , the South African state decided to entrench tribal authorities over the whole of the areas demarcated as Bantustans, thus rendering it impossible for the rural poor in the former homelands to have communal tenure without chiefs,” writes Sonwabile Mnwana in a chapter on legal battles over platinum in North West province. “Increasingly, local chiefs in the former homeland areas were assumed to be custodians of communal properties in the rural areas where Africans lived.

“Since the early 2000s, the state has enacted legislation that has not only legitimised the mediation of relationships between mining corporations and communities by traditional leaders, but has also enabled continuities in rural power relations in the areas that fell under chiefs and ‘tribal authorities’ in the homeland era. These laws are often interpreted to facilitate control by chiefs of customary land rights and distribution of mining revenues in rural areas.

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