Chiefs and the politics of land in contemporary southern Africa
Lungisile Ntsebeza
Professor and Director
Centre for African Studies
University of Cape Town
This paper addresses the vexed question of the role of chiefs in contemporary southern Africa within the context of attempts by various African countries to embark on land reform ostensibly to promote development that would enhance the living standards of residents, particularly the poor. Southern African countries can broadly be categorised between those, such as South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia, commonly referred to as settler colonial states, where colonists not only dispossessed indigenous people of their land, but resolved to settle and claimed legal ownership of significant portions of the land under an imposed freedom title land tenure holding, on the one hand, and those countries, notably Zambia and Malawi, which did not undergo this experience and where the bulk of the land was held under a distorted customary land tenure system. For our purposes, I will focus on two countries, Zambia and South Africa, each as an example that is representative of the two classifications outlined above. Specifically, how these countries dealt and are dealing with the legacy of colonialism and apartheid with respect to land and chiefs will be my main concern.
Land reform in these countries is often put forward as a mechanism to promote rural development. In the context of customary land, that is land that is in areas that are controlled by chiefs, land reform takes the form of tenure reform. The conversion of customary land into either freehold or leasehold is seen as pre-requisite for purposes of attracting foreign investment. Efforts towards this direction gained greater intensity in the 1990s following the advent of multi-party democracy in Africa and the demise of institutionalised apartheid in South Africa. In recent years, following the global financial crisis of 2008, customary land has become the frontier of an aggressive new cycle of accumulation in Africa by both internal and external so-called investors. This aggression often leads to land dispossessions and displacements of rural dwellers in the name of development. In the final analysis, the residents end up not getting the jobs promised and losing their means of surviving, land. Some of the external investors such as China and India are members of BRICS. What about South Africa?
Chiefs, who form the main focus of this paper, are some of the key actors in cases involving customary land. This is particularly the case in Zambia, where most of the land in Zambia is customary land and thus falls under the jurisdiction of chiefs. How they (chiefs) respond to the conversion of customary land into leasehold forms the business of my paper. I argue that they react differently to the seductions of foreign investment. Similar questions are posed of South Africa and, although the two countries seem radically different, I will show, as Mamdani (1996) reminds us that South Africa, though different, is no exception.
