Political Geography of Land

Main Outcomes

On completion of this module, students should be able to:

• Students will have demonstrated an understanding of South African land issues in a broader regional perspective.
• They will have engaged with some of the complex land tenure issues in the region and debated pressing questions around governance, authority, and women’s access to land in so-called communal areas.
• They will have developed an awareness of the way land has been used as symbolic capital in liberation struggles in the region.
• They will have demonstrated a critical grasp of the South African land reform program and its location within broader processes of agrarian change in the region.

Main Content

• The focus is on land issues in the southern African region. 
• Land is a highly emotive topic, as much about identity and belonging as it is about land-use and production. 
• Colonial and postcolonial histories of land tenure regimes in the region are examined. 
• These are linked to current struggles over private ownership and questions of power and access in so-called communal areas. 
• Political mobilizations around the land issue in the dying years of colonial rule are studied, together with postcolonial outcomes. 
• Lastly, the module pays attention to the successes and failures of South Africa’s land reform programme and its relationship to broader agrarian transformations in the region.