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Paper short abstract:

The indigenous Khoisan feel left out of state-led land reform in South Africa and some have recently ‘reclaimed’ land illegally. By examining the occupiers’ motivations and interactions with neighbours and officials, I reconceptualize their occupation as an attempt at land reform from below.

Paper long abstract:

In November 2020, about a dozen people 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 their land claims were unjustly left out of the official land reform program, which only investigates dispossessions that occurred after 1913. Thousands of people have since joined the ‘reclaim’. This influx of people with varying political agendas and socioeconomic backgrounds has helped stave off eviction, but it has also created friction with neighboring farmers, local politicians, rival Khoisan groups, and government officials. Drawing on data collected during ethnographic fieldwork, I examine these tensions and conflicts, as well as the various arguments that Khoisan activists put forward to bolster their claim to the land. Rather than a land ‘invasion’, I argue that Knoflokskraal is scrutinized more productively as an attempt to carry out land reform ‘from below’; deliberately aimed at state-owned land and borne out of decades of frustration with the lack of affordable housing and with government policies that fail to remedy Khoisan marginalization. The jurisdictional ambiguity inherent in the occupation creates lawlessness. However, the mixed response to Knoflokskraal by non-Khoisan stakeholders suggests that the absence of the bureaucratic red tape of state-led land reform also leaves room for improvised mutually beneficial settlements. Land reform from below should therefore be explored more extensively as a potential way of breaking the current impasse in South African land reform.