| Abstract: | This article offers an ethnographic cross-section in one provinceof South Africa's new land reform programme. Demandand participation are the rhetorical keywordsof the programme. Demand for land redistribution, however, cannotbe understood in abstraction from the political and economicconditions of its supply. Similarly, participationis a managed process involving many institutional intermediaries.A series of illustrative case-studies is presented, relatingto the allocation of state-owned land; state-facilitated marketaccess to privately-owned land; the reconstruction and partialprivatization of a para-statal development agency, which havebrought into question the viability of a community conservationproject and also exposed the agency to political cross-fire;and, finally, some intricacies of the possibility of land restitutionto people dispossessed under apartheid, which raises the questionof whether the concept of indirect racial discrimination maybe applied in the South African context. Several contradictionsof the process of land redistribution are analysed: for example,the massive financial costs, direct and indirect, of bringingprojects to fruition in the short term, without resolution ofthe need for long-term support; the divergence between nominaland actual beneficiaries; political and institutional conflicts,both inside and outside the state; and routine incompatibilitybetween the diverse aspirations of beneficiaries and the businessplans required by bureaucrats and suppliers of credit. |
