Land is one of the most emotive and symbolically powerful issues in Africa. In rural contexts, the collision of history, class, race, gender, time and space has made meaningful efforts to overcome economic inequality complex. In South Africa, the end of slavery and its subsequent creation of 'buffer communities' for military purposes in the 1850s all collided with the stalled emergence of a relatively self-sufficient Black peasantry. The dismantling of this Black agrarian class in the twentieth century involved the incubation of white producers and their favourable positioning within product markets. In a programme of statecraft, that explains our country's prevalent inequality and widespread economic inactivity.
'New' Settler or 'Old' Tenant? explores how this past continues to shape the present. Using a rich body of archival, news, census, legal and primary sources spanning almost two centuries, the book traces the construction and reproduction of racial hierarchies in land, labour and product markets. Across the rural Eastern Cape – from the lands between the Fish and Keiskamma rivers moving further north towards Kat River Valley, Sada (Whittlesea) and the Glen Grey area – this journey reveals the origin stories of enduring rural economic conflicts and the heavy and tormenting legacy these struggles impose on the present.
From the agrarian reforms of the 1830s, designed to secure labour after the end of slavery, to the failed Ciskeian experiments to 'remake' a Black commercial agrarian class as a 'buffer community', and the mass resettlement of people into marginal lands, this book follows the long arc of history. To find multi-generation stories of change. At its heart are labour tenants, so-called 'squatters' and 'relocated' families – historical actors in an over century-long struggle over land and livelihoods. In the democratic era, these communities, once marginalised and displaced, now stand as landholders (or tenants?) and citizens. Who await different futures on the land. In this life. Before heaven.
Ayabonga Cawe challenges us to reckon with how the deep and enduring economic insecurity of rural life in South Africa undermines attempts at redress and the promise of overcoming agrarian duality and inequality.