The More Things Change: Legacies of Race and Segregation in South Africa's Land Reform

abstract: How does land reform occur and under what conditions do land transfers take place? The author argues that to understand contemporary market-driven land reform outcomes, one must examine the supply-side incentives of existing landholders in addition to demand-side explanations. Interviews and descriptive geospatial data from two provinces in South Africa show that landholders made land reform work for them and in doing so the redistribution of land reinforced past forms of segregation. These landholders' strategies were shaped by place-specific historical legacies of racial segregation: Some white farmers—in places in which spatial segregation fell on a rural-urban axis and economic segregation excluded black people from agriculture—used land redistribution to buffer their farms against predominantly black settlements. Other white farmers—in rural areas with dispersed spatial segregation and a large, but different, black farming sector—incorporated black farmers into the commercial value chain via land redistribution. The author's findings have implications for studies of redistribution in highly unequal contexts—that is, market-based redistribution can reinforce historical spatial and economic segregation.