The Western Cape leg of the public consultation about the Restitution of Land Rights Amendment Bill started in Cape Town on June 4th. This is only 10 days after the bill was introduced. People are scrambling to make sense of the implications of the bill, and the reasons for its sudden introduction. At face value, the bill seems a generous proposal. It will re-open the window for land claims, allowing people dispossessed of their land to put in claims until 2018. Continue reading

Mobilisation against the Traditional Courts Bill brought together women living in often remote rural areas around the country. In sharing their experiences with one another in meetings and workshops, what repeatedly emerged was how precarious their rights to land are. Here we tell the stories of Dudu Xaba and Cazile Hadebe, two women whose land tenure insecurity threatens their very existence. Their stories, two among many, show what is at stake when Parliament fails to meet its constitutional mandate to redress the land crisis created by the Bantustan system, and at the same time passes laws that bolster chiefly power.

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One of the earliest lessons I learned as a student of history is that there is no singular history. Instead, multiple histories are produced and exist alongside and intersect with each other, representing different perspectives and accounts of events. Similarly, there is no one version of identity, knowledge or culture – there are knowledges, cultures and identities. Each reflects different relationships to, and expressions of, power.

These tensions around singular and plural versions of identity are made visible in current and proposed legislation on customary law, both in the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Act (TLGFA) of 2003 and the Traditional Courts Bill (TCB), currently before parliament. The TLGFA asserts the exact boundaries used to make up the Bantustans under the 1951 Black Authorities Act. The TCB, if adopted, would centralise power in traditional leaders, allowing them to be the sole interpreters of customary law and denying people within the TLGFA boundaries the right of opting out of traditional courts to use state courts.The boundaries related to these two pieces of legislation have drawn wide criticism, especially from people who would live within them. This is because these boundaries limit localised, diverse expressions of identity and community to impose standardised structures that are often inconsistent with groups’ histories and current forms of self-identification.

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