| | From the 1930s onwards, the South African government sought to introduce schemes of 'betterment' to 'improve' the lives of rural black people. In the apartheid years, this policy had the effect of moving people from dispersed homesteads into concentrated villages, neatly lined up in rows, and encouraging 'commercial' agriculture on the rest of the land. The ideology of betterment was based on the conviction that poverty in the African reserves was primarily due to 'bad farming' on the part of peasant farmers. It was associated with rigid official planning of land use and with the compulsory culling of livestock. |
