Land Reform
Land reform is perhaps the most contentious issue in Wakkerstroom today. Before apartheid was reversed in 1994, blacks could not own land in the 83 percent of South Africa that was declared "white." They worked for white farm owners, in exchange for being allowed to graze a few cattle and do some subsistence agriculture. In some cases, they received wages as tenant farmers.
But black farm workers were never permitted the security of owning anything other than the land that was "under their shoes." For them, implementation of new land restitution laws is a critical concern.
However, the new land reform laws, plus escalating violence in rural areas, are threatening white farmers' traditional lifestyles. Many of feel vulnerable or angry. Others, like John Pringle, recognize the need for change in South Africa, but feel the slow pace of reform is encouraging unrealistic expectations and is exacerbating tensions.
The government is offering a subsidy of 15,000 Rand (US$2,500) to black households so that they can purchase their own land. But, not surprisingly, white land owners want to maximize the sales price of their land. As a result, it often takes the combined resources of 200 to 400 families – who pool their money – to purchase a single piece of land land.
Often, this land is not capable of supporting so many families using traditional farming methods. The result can be an environmental and economic disaster if too many families crowd onto a piece of land. Wakkerstroom's unemployment rate exceeds 40 percent, so there are insufficient jobs to support the settlers, and destructive land use patterns are likely.
The Department of Land Affairs is pursuing "a fatally flawed, willing buyer, willing seller policy," Kotze said. "This has led to far too many people being settled on far too small pieces of, often, the least desirable land in the area."
The number of cattle owned by small-scale communal grazing farmers in the Wakkerstroom area has increased by more than 400 percent (mostly due to the eviction of farm workers from adjacent farms), so "it is no small achievement that we have managed to maintain the status quo of a reasonably sound environment," Kotze said. "This land hunger, and the need to produce more and more, from less and less land, will be the biggest challenge in the new millenium."
Neighboring white landowners worry that their land may be targeted for squatting, and in any case they now must develop new relationships with potentially hundreds of settlers to resolve land management issues.
"It's not really so much a race issue as an issue of social economics that they fear," Kotze said. "So they don't mind having another neighbor. They have one man that they can relate to – one man that they can talk to about, 'Where do we put the fire breaks?' and those communal issues, and 'We've got to fence this now, and what do we do?' But they don't know what they are going to do if they have 350 families living next door – who do they negotiate with? Who do they talk to about the fire break? For them it's a very new dispensation."
Social tension has increased as the number of rural farm murders has risen in much of South Africa, affecting both blacks and whites. Not all of this violence is race related. While some murders are so-called "revenge killings," economic conditions are triggering most of the crimes against whites and blacks at present.
"I have never been personally threatened," said white farmer John Pringle. "But I do think about it, and when people around you get murdered, and gruesomely murdered at that – and in the middle of the night you are overcome in your own house by people, it does sort of make you think twice – you don't want to die. So, yes there is an amount of fear that comes into the equation."
Farmers and farmworkers are feeling increasingly vulnerable. These changes sadden Pringle, a pragmatic farmer with a deep attachment to the land and good relationships with his farm workers. He had hoped that reforms would occur more quickly in South Africa. His son, Sakkie, is less patient than his father. "What we have here is an underground revolution," Sakkie said – "people stealing land in the name of democracy."
Land-Use Forums
Because the primary threats to the grassland (such as afforestation, coal mining, and changes in land ownership patterns) are due to unwise land use, Kotze has been promoting pro-active land-use planning and integrated land-use management. To ensure success, she pursues a grassroots, democrat process of participation and "buy-in" to the decision-making process by both local inhabitants and affected government agencies. She has tackled this challenge with three initiatives: land-use forums for land areas that are defined by watershed (or river catchment) area, an information support system known as Project Ukuzwana ("harmony"), and a forum for government agencies called GRASS. In addition, there are various economic empowerment programs.
Ten land-use forums have been established. They inventory existing resources and land uses, and consider environmentally sustainable alternatives. They promote sustainable grasslands land-use practices that can attract rare birds and thereby encourage ecotourism. "What we have taught people about land use is that conservation is a legitimate form of land use and can have powerful economic benefits, and that it does not imply that people or their traditional land use is necessarily banned or barred," Kotze said.
A prerequisite for sound land-using planning and management is an inventory of current conditions. Lacking support for development of a cutting-edge computer-based Geographic Information System (GIS), Kotze resorted to what she calls an "oxwagon technology" that consisted of 15 talc overlays for six 1:50,000 topographical maps covering the two watershed areas in which she has concentrated her work (the Uthaka watershed, which includes Wakkerstroom, and the Assegaai watershed on the eastern edge of the Grassland Biosphere Reserve, which includes the Driefontein township and an area of coal mining.) This was augmented by "an immense amount of research on a scale of 1:2000," she said. The result is a powerful tool for land use planning.
Along the way, Kotze has learned some hard lessons about civic participation. First, she found that disadvantaged communities suffer a serious lack of capacity that "encompasses anything from the basics of starting an organization to not having any idea as to formulating issues in such a manner that they could negotiate around them."
Forums will fail if not all interested and affected parties are represented, and therefore effective two-way communication and consultation between the representatives and their constituents is lacking. The forum will be "doomed, usually by the broader community rejecting the initiative – even sabotaging it," she said. "Extreme tensions can and have resulted from these so-called 'consultative processes.'"
During initial attempts to establish land forums, Kotze said she invited "structures within civil society to provide the representation (e.g., common interest groups for women, youths, businesses, etc.). It was a shock to realize that there were very few such structures in existence," and those that did were rendered largely ineffective by internal conflicts. As a result, there were many self-appointed persons who, it turned out, lacked a mandate or adequate constituency, and so failed to communicate back to the community.
To remedy this, Kotze tried allowing only properly constituted organizations to claim representatives – but this left many sectors without representation, and, contrary to expectation, did not result in people organizing themselves. More recently, Kotze has invited communities to hold a mass meeting and elect representatives in order to build a truly consultative forum. This appears to be a way to provide the necessary mandate and incentives for communication between the representatives and the community, she said.
Another lesson: "I soon realized that people will engage with something on a long-term and sustained basis only if they have an issue with something," Kotze said. "So I soon learned to use issues as a vehicle for my agenda. Hence, a land-use forum can be the Mpisi Co-operative Reserve – which is a grouping of 25 farmers, or a 'Working for Water' committee that is clearing wattle from watercourses and drainage lines to increase stream flow – with great success, using grants from Department of Water Affairs – or it may be a committee that started by working to bridge the divide around a land restitution action – with great animosities and conflict – and eventually turned into a forum for discussing what they all have in common: land and its uses."
"For me, it is about organizing civil society so that the interaction among them, and between them and the government, is facilitated," Kotze said. "They are empowered to make informed decisions and genuinely negotiate around issues – not to impose, or be imposed, upon, so that economic activity becomes the premise of all, and not just the privileged few."
