Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2016

Publication Title

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

First Page

275

Last Page

292

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-3603343

Abstract

Contemporary postapartheid South African land struggles are haunted by the long shadow of historical dispossession. While apartheid-era forced removals are justifiably infamous, these traumatic events were moments in the more extended, less frequently referenced, and more expansive process that fundamentally shaped the South African terrain well before 1948. The South African Republic's mid-nineteenth-century assertion of ownership of all land north of the Vaal River and south of the Limpopo marked the start of a long process of racialized dispossession that rendered black people's residence in putatively white areas highly contingent and insecure throughout the former Transvaal. This article analyzes the connections between past dispossession and contemporary rural land and natural resource struggles in the Limpopo and North West provinces, contending that addressing South Africa's vexed present requires a fuller reckoning with its past.

Rights

This is a post-print version of an article originally published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2016, Volume 36, Issue 2.

The version of record is available through: Duke University Press.

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