| | Land reform in southern Africa is a topic of inherent fascination. After so many years of the most blatant discrimination in land legislation, forcing millions of rural African people into a form of structural and institutionalized poverty, there is naturally immense curiosity about how this unfair situation might be addressed by black majority governments. For many, although sadly not all, observers and analysts the moral arguments for transferring some land from white-owned farms back to African peasants are self-evident. However once the questions of how much, and which, land arise, political and economic issues raise their awkward heads. Attempts to balance these against African people's rights to land have now occurred in Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa but the approaches have been very different and so are the realised and potential outcomes. |
