Land as an Ancestral Archive: The 1913 Natives Land Act and Colonial Geographies of Belonging

Colonial land dispossession in South Africa has been widely examined in terms of its territorial, economic, and political consequences, but less attention has been given to how dispossession disrupted relationships connecting land with ancestry, collective memory, and Indigenous knowledge. This article develops Ancestral Archive Theory (AAT), a conceptual framework that understands land as a living and relational archive constituted through ancestry, memory, and place-based knowledge. Drawing on African land-tenure scholarship, memory studies, and decolonial thought, the article applies AAT to a close reading of the Natives Land Act No. 27 of 1913 alongside Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa. Analysis of the Act’s provisions on acquisition, occupation, territorial classification, mapping, and administrative authority demonstrates how colonial law consolidated a racialised legal geography that privileged legally cognisable interests in land over historically constituted relationships with place. Plaatje’s counter-narrative, however, reveals relationships of home, livelihood, memory, and belonging that exceeded these statutory categories. The article introduces archive dispossession to conceptualise the disruption of relationships among land, ancestry, memory, and knowledge, and archive persistence to explain their continuation through counter-memory despite territorial alienation. AAT consequently shifts analysis from property to relationship, territory to emplacement, and land dispossession to archive dispossession. It argues that while colonial law could restrict territorial access and privilege legally authorised geographies, it could not fully extinguish the ancestral geographies through which communities located memory, knowledge, and belonging.