Paper short abstract:

An ongoing land occupation of marginalized indigenous people in South Africa shows how land reform, food security, community building and environmental management can be organized from below. However, such an appraisal requires a specific methodological and reflexive approach.

Paper long abstract:

In November 2020, about a dozen activists identifying as Khoisan—South Africa’s unrecognized indigenous people—illegally moved onto a large area of state-owned land near Grabouw in the Western Cape. They argued that “Knoflookskraal” belonged to their ancestors and that establishing a ‘Khoisan village’ was the most effective way to ensure food security and protect the biodiversity in the area. Thousands of people have since joined the ‘reclaim’, which helped stave off eviction, but also created friction with neighboring farmers, local politicians, and government officials. Drawing on data collected during ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how the Khoisan navigate these conflicts, organize everyday life at Knoflokskraal and pursue their long-term goals. Rather than a land ‘invasion’, I argue that Knoflokskraal is better understood as an attempt to carry out land reform ‘from below’; deliberately targeting state-owned land and borne out of frustrations with the lack of affordable housing and with government policies that fail to take into account indigenous knowledge. The mixed response to Knoflokskraal by non-Khoisan stakeholders suggests that the absence of the bureaucratic red tape of state-led land reform does not just create lawlessness, but also leaves room for improvised mutually beneficial settlements. Land reform from below has many pitfalls, but it should be explored more extensively as a potential way of breaking the current impasse in South African land reform. Such an agency-oriented appraisal requires a specific methodological and reflexive approach, which I discuss in relation to a community workshop that I co-organized at Knoflokskraal.