Our land, our life, our future

Unisa Press

Author:	Harvey M. Feinberg
ISBN:	978-1-86888-748-4
Number of pages:	273
Contact:	To buy the book contact UNISA Press on +27 (0) 12 429 3515/3368
How to buy:	To buy the book contact UNISA Press on +27 (0) 12 429 3515/3368

This book is not available in electronic format

About the book

This ground-breaking book evaluates a topic central to the past century of South African history — the 1913 Natives Land Act and its consequences. Applying rigorous scholarly standards, Harvey Feinberg analyses, reassesses and then challenges previously accepted ideas about the impact of the Land Act. The book, a product of meticulous research in major South African archives, is notable for its reference to a wide array of documents scholars have until now neglected. A plethora of evidence provides the data to challenge major theories about the impact of the Natives Land Act, and to illuminate changes in government land policy.

Objectively presenting this new evidence, Feinberg convincingly demonstrates that through African agency, black South Africans continued to buy land after 1913 thereby challenging the territorial segregation goals of the rural white population. His study also includes important contrasts between the 1910—1948 period and the apartheid era.

This book will appeal to a wide readership, including international researchers interested in land history, South Africa–oriented academics, and the South African legal community — lawyers, policymakers and NGOs dealing with the land claims process. Readers interested in early 20th century South African history, and in the current debates over land policy and access to land, will be intrigued by this rich vein of new material, and will find that it includes important background information for the post-1994 restitution process.

Harvey M. Feinberg is Professor Emeritus of African History, Connecticut State University, and former Research Collaborator at the Department of Historical and Heritage Studies, University of Pretoria. Early in his career, he studied the 18th-century history of Ghana and published Africans and Europeans in West Africa: Elminans and Dutchmen on the Gold Coast during the Eighteenth Century. He began investigating early 20th century South Africa in the mid-1980s and has published numerous articles based on that research in The Journal of African History, International Journal of African Historical Studies, Journal for Contemporary History, Historia, Kleio, and History in Africa

Table of content

Preface and Acknowledgements
		Introduction

		PART 1 Politics, race and the land, 1913—1948

	1	Politics, race and the land: An introduction
	2	The Natives Land Act, 1913
	3	The defeat of a new land bill, 1916—1918
	4	Land policy and change, 1918—1948 The Botha—Smuts land policy, 1918—1924 J. B. M. Hertzog’s land policy, 1924—1936 The Native Trust and Land Act and beyond, 1936—1948

		PART 2 African buyers and African landowners, 1913—1948

	5	Buyers and buying
	6	The Bakwena-ba-Magopa and indebtedness
	7	Financing farm purchases: Credit and debt
	8	Resistance without violence: Tweefontein 529
	9	Resistance without violence: The defence of ownership rights
	10	Is official protection of African interests paternalism?
	11	Territorial segregation policy: A goal not achieved, 1913—1948
	12	The complex world of African land ownership

		Epilogue: The state and the land, 2013—2014 Notes Bibliography Index