Browsing by Author "Lahiff, E."

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  • "Die man is die hoof en vat voor": Women's attitudes to land and farming in the communal areas of Namaqualand
    Kleinbooi, K.; Lahiff, E. (Academic Press, 2007)
    This article examines female attitudes towards and experiences with agricultural production and land rights in Namaqualand, South Africa. Namaqualand was chosen as the study site because it is home to six different "coloured" reserves or rural areas reserved exclusively for peoples racially defined as "coloured," which have traditionally been held under communal management. Today, a large part of the land is still organized and managed by local officials. Another reason Namaqualand was selected for this research is due to the discrepancy between the lack of independent land rights for women and their important economic contributions. The empirical work in this article was based on 45 in-depth interviews given to women from the reserves and fieldwork conducted in Namaqualand common areas. The participants were recruited using an informal, word-of-mouth technique which lessens the statistical representation of the study group. However, strong efforts were made by the authors to include a diverse group of women taking into account many different characteristics like age and marital status. The research suggests that Namaqualand women typically access land through relationships with male relatives and because of this fact single women find it almost impossible to gain access to land and widowed or divorced women are susceptible to the loss of their land rights. The study shows Namaqualand women are involved in a wide range of agricultural production activities. Most women carry out those activities on land controlled by male relatives; however, a small proportion of women independently administer land. In this study women displayed conservative views on the patriarchal land use system and were unwilling to challenge traditionally gendered land rights. Even so, Namaqualand women expressed a strong desire for secure access to land.
  • Land and livelihoods: The politics of land reform in southern Africa
    Lahiff, E. (Brighton, U.K.: Kensington Press, 2003)
    This article examines the politics of land in southern Africa and, in particular, current processes of land reform in Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe. It argues that, despite the considerable attention given to land issues in the region over the past 20 years, fundamental reform that shifts assets and opportunities in favour of the rural poor have yet to be brought about. Across the region, the legacy of settler colonialism lives on in a dualistic agricultural system that has been perpetuated first by deliberate state policies and, more recently, by the forces of deregulated capitalism. Small-scale agriculture, which provides a precarious living to millions of poor rural households, remains severely neglected by policy-makers in all three countries. Only in Zimbabwe has substantial redistribution of land taken place since independence, but here, as elsewhere in the region, the rights of small-scale landholders remain vulnerable and the conditions for agricultural livelihoods highly unfavourable. Recent seizures of commercial farms and other land activists in South Africa, suggest that demand for radical land reform remains strong among much of the rural population and shows how the land question has the potential to become critical in times of political or economic crisis.