Abahlali baseMjondolo Hlanganani Branch in Salt Rock in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Province. Photo: Pan Africanism Today.
By Jonis Ghedi-Alasow – Feb 10, 2025
South Africa’s Expropriation Act has provoked debate within the country over the enduring racist land tenure model in the country, and has also sparked a diplomatic row with the United States.
On January 23, 2025, South Africa enacted an Expropriation Act, updating the methods for land expropriation for the first time in fifty years.
The new Act allows for land expropriation for public purposes and interests whilst introducing the possibility of zero compensation for expropriated land. Consequently, the Act’s scope has been broadened since its 1975 version. Land can still be expropriated for public purposes, such as constructing roads, an uncontroversial and universally accepted practice.
The expansion of the scope to include public interest, however, also enables the Act to address a long-standing issue of land reform. In all cases, the “nill compensation” option is available as a last resort. This is unsurprising, considering that 72% of farms and agricultural holdings are owned by white individuals, who make up 7.3% of the population, while black Africans, constituting 81.4% of the population, own only 4% of the land.
This imbalance is a direct consequence of colonialism, apartheid, and a failed land reform process following the democratic breakthrough of 1994. Coupled with the fact that South Africa remains the most unequal country in the world and that the distribution of wealth and opportunities is racially biased – with disproportionate favor extended to the white population – there should be nothing improper or illogical about the decision to remove legal obstacles in the land reform process.
The passing of the Act has also catalyzed tremendous public debate and even a diplomatic row between South Africa and the world’s leading imperialist power: the United States. After years of unsubstantiated claims of “white genocide” made by right-wing Afrikaners, the new Trump administration in the US has lashed out against the South African government.
The US government has added South Africa to the growing list of sanctioned countries. The descendants of colonial settlers, who were the direct beneficiaries of Apartheid, have been afforded refugee status in the US by one of Mr Trump’s many executive orders. It would appear that amidst the chaos initiated by trade wars and the criminalization of migrants, the new administration in the US nevertheless has the capacity for empathy. Sadly, this empathy seems to be exclusively reserved for those who can trace their history to settler colonialism, racism, and the dehumanization of African people.
It is important to emphasize that the US backlash is not due to any actual measures implemented to address South Africa’s unjust land distribution. This new Act is, after all, a symbolic gesture rather than a definitive step towards rectifying the legacy of colonial land theft.
Debates on land reform
Long before the passing of this Act, the issue of land reform was a significant topic of debate in South Africa. There is broad consensus that the post-apartheid state’s inability to address the colonial and apartheid distribution of land poses a serious problem. To date, the approach to rectifying this has been colloquially referred to as the “willing buyer, willing seller” model. This model, in effect, represents a market-led approach to land reform. In a country where the Indigenous population has been systematically impoverished, exploited and oppressed for centuries to support the wealth accumulation of a white minority settler population, any market-led strategy is naturally destined to fail.
Incidentally, this limitation also pertains to the very principle of compensation. Given that the original expropriation occurred at the barrel of a gun, the logic of compensation appears to insult those who were dispossessed. The issue of compensation versus expropriation without compensation has been a contentious topic in South Africa in recent decades. Many argue that, as a matter of principle, there should be no compensation. Those who continue to hold title deeds to large tracts of land and those who seek to appease them—both domestically and internationally—on the other hand, insist that nil compensation would lead to anarchy.
At its core, this debate concerns whether the principle of private property should remain sacrosanct or whether setting it aside in the national interest is appropriate.
The second theme of significant debate has been the periodization of land dispossession. All land reform projects in South Africa to date consider the period between 1913 (when the Natives Land Act proletarianized the African population through mass expropriation of land) and 1994 (when democratic rule was established) as the timeframe that needs rectification.
Many have rejected this periodization and argue that the land dispossession before 1913 should also be rectified. Again, this is a convincing argument. The arrival of Jan van Riebeeck in 1652, during a period reminiscent of the early history of the United States, initiated a time of genocide, land dispossession, and slavery that served as the foundation for colonial expansion in the decades and centuries that followed. Similarly, nine frontier wars between 1779 and 1879 were ultimately fought between the expansionist Cape Colony and the anti-colonial sentiment among South Africa’s Indigenous population.
Those demanding that the entire colonial and apartheid period be reviewed in our efforts to overcome the legacy of injustice and build a prosperous country are thus making a compelling argument.
Agrarian reform: a political struggle
Despite their merits, these debates are limited to seeking legislative frameworks to resolve a political issue. While compensation or the periodization of land expropriation by the settler colonial project that characterized recent centuries in South Africa are important, they are not the key question. The key consideration is not how best to evaluate the past but rather how best to construct a future.
This question of South Africa’s future is not merely an academic exercise but a political struggle. It is a fight to bring prosperity to the people. The demographics of land and wealth distribution outlined earlier are unsustainable. It is also essential to rid ourselves of the belief that white-owned land is productive. Much of the land privately owned by the descendants of settlers is fallow. Agriculture contributes 2.62% to South Africa’s GDP, which is less than one-third of what it was during apartheid when the Afrikaner Nationalist state heavily subsidized this sector.
The land owned by the white minority primarily serves speculative purposes. It is mortgaged in exchange for participation in other, more lucrative areas of the South African economy, such as financial services and industry. In South Africa, the land neither contributes to achieving food sovereignty nor economic growth. Instead, it appears to be held hostage by a small segment of the population, who seem more committed to the MAGA project in the US than to the patriotic development of South Africa.
The crisis surrounding land reform in South Africa reflects the country’s broader agrarian crisis. As youth unemployment approaches 75%, hunger is widespread, and the nation’s ability to produce food for itself is being hampered by unproductive landowners and a reluctance among those in power to move beyond the legislative debates on land reform.
Any serious attempt to resolve the agrarian crises related to land in South Africa must take the principle of ‘national interest’ introduced in the new Act to its logical conclusion. A state by and for the people of the country should own all land and make it available to those willing and able to use it for the social reproduction of our communities. Land, in both urban and rural areas, must provide homes for families and food for a hungry nation. In this context, land must be regarded as a social good, not a commodity that allows speculators to create artificial scarcities and maintain economic dominance by perpetuating historical injustices.
It is not coincidental that Algeria and Ethiopia are two African countries that have taken this path. In Algeria, the anti-colonial struggle took the form of a brutal war of national liberation. The liberation forces entered negotiations for independence in a position of strength after winning a war, which meant they could correct the injustice of colonial land expropriation and set the tone for land use in constructing a new Algeria.
Similarly, Ethiopia remains one of the two countries on the African continent that have never been colonized. This has allowed for an expression of sovereignty over the land and agrarian questions, which countries like Tanzania were able to achieve only through the decisive political leadership of Julius Nyerere when he introduced the Arusha Declaration. In contrast, countries like Zimbabwe only realized this through a popular uprising among the landless workers and peasants in the early 2000s. South Africa has yet to achieve this cardinal expression of national sovereignty, which comes with articulating a national project that resolves the land and agrarian questions in the interests of its population.
The foundation of settler colonialism – from the US to South Africa – was land dispossession, exploitation, genocide, and oppression. The status quo was established with extreme brutality. It is not a foregone conclusion that the full liberation of South Africa must be similarly brutal; it does, however, need to be decisive.
Building a country where the vision of the 1955 Freedom Charter, that “South Africa belongs to all those who live in it, black and white,” is a struggle that continues to unfold. This goal has yet to be achieved, and it will be through decisive land and agrarian reform that such a noble dream can be fulfilled.
Repetitive legislative reframing of fundamental questions will have no material impact. Our hope lies in the domestic and international backlash to these legislative acrobatics, reviving a political struggle for a new South Africa that reflects the aspirations of its people over the narrow interests of its erstwhile colonizers.
Jonis Ghedi Alasow is the coordinator of Pan Africanism Today.
