Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried intermittently over the last six years, we accompanied the process of a plea for land restitution initiated by a Zulu family from rural KZN to its end, in order to understand how socioeconomic and emotional issues, with consequences that disturb both the living and the dead, emerge during the implementation of a public policy.

Paper long abstract:

Ingogo (KZN) is a sort of a hub connecting social ties within time and space. Over the last century Zulu speakers living in this rural area have experienced both displacements and immobility related to overwhelming white ownership of land in the region. Those forcefully removed have imaginatively extended their boarders to faraway places like the townships around Johannesburg. Those who stayed have prudently built a pillar concept of home for their living and their dead, whenever or wherever they stay. Recent land restitution processes in the region have brought together those who have spread out throughout time (whether living or ancestors) and space (inhabitants of townships and cities and those living on farms). Dealing with historically inherited inequalities, public policies established in Ingogo address different social groups according to their previous status or relationship to the land. In other words, their location in a broad range of governmental categories that go from private ownership to farm dwelling, among others, are tracked down. Inside those brackets, however various and heterogeneous, experiences are summed up according to kinship ties broadly understood as a clear expression of conviviality, reciprocity and common interests among people of the same "family". Different and distant social experiences intertwined throughout the last decades are underestimated, and therefore, those who have stayed and those who have moved to towns are forced into a contentious encounter that very few understand as fair or healing.