Imaginings of collective property ownership in South Africa: Comparing 1910s land-buying syndicates with 1990s land reform Tara Weinberg, Department of History, University of Michigan

Event details

This seminar addresses how ideas of collective forms of property ownership, in the form of 'Community Trusts' and ‘Communal Property Associations’ (CPAs) came about legally, politically and socially in South Africa. These forms were posited as key alternatives to private property and to chiefs' control of land. The seminar discusses how Trusts and CPAs have their roots in the rural political activism of the late-apartheid period and longer traditions of political thought around buying and managing land as a group. I draw upon the example of ANC Founder Pixley ka Seme's Native Farmers Association of South Africa (NFA), one of several collectively run land-buying syndicates which black farmers set up to acquire title deeds in the early 20th century. Seme presented the NFA as a model for an ideal, prosperous, self-sufficient black community, built on a foundation of individual land rights and, somewhat ironically, also respect for traditional leaders. Yet many black farmers who bought into Seme’s scheme contested the vision of community he put forward. My seminar explores how black South African land claimants’ attempts to ‘make’ collective property is strongly intertwined with questions of belonging and identity, during the time of the NFA, and much later in the context of South Africa’s 1990s land reform program.