School of Social and Political Science

Description

Speaker: Professor Ruth Hall, Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies PLAAS, University of the Western Cape

Discussant: Phethani Madzivhandila, Pan-Africanist Marxist Historian

Chair: Dr Rama Salla Dieng, CAS, University of Edinburgh 

With an introductory welcome message from Dr Hazel Gray, Head of CAS

Land tenures in many parts of Africa are undergoing profound changes that are being driven both ‘from above’ by governments and development agencies, and ‘from below’ through societal, demographic, economic and ecological change. This seminar will open up questions about informal tenures that emerge from below, amidst failed development plans. While land grabs and privatisation of customary and community land continue apace across much of the continent, alongside these have been a range of land reforms – mostly modest or stalled – that have aimed to secure customary and informal tenure rights in law and in practice, to redistribute land or to establish robust and democratic forms of governance. Against this backdrop of contested land relations in flux, this seminar addresses long-range outcomes of South Africa’s peculiar brand of land reform, driven by demands for radical redistribution, shaped by World Bank market-based policy thinking, and reshaped over time by both state control and neglect. Drawing on a Marxist political economy framing, and on scholarship from within anthropology, I ask and present some perspectives on the question: what kinds of land tenure and land relations emerge amidst the stalled redistribution of land, why and what does this signify? Field-based study in South Africa’s Eastern Cape over an extended period has yielded insights into new tenure dynamics that emerge at the interstices of formality and informality, and where multiple forms of tenure co-exist, and sets out questions about the character of tenures which are neither statutory nor customary. The analysis raises questions as to whether or in what ways these sites and social relations constitute spaces of exclusion and marginality, or emancipatory spaces.

When: Wednesday 20th September 2023 (3.30pm-5pm BST)

To attend this event: This event will be hybrid (In-person and online). For attendance:

• In-person: Please join us at Chrystal Macmillan Building, Seminar Room 1
• Online: Please register in advance on Eventbrite, and a link to join the seminar will be sent to all registered guests on the day of the event.

Speaker Biography:

Professor Ruth Hall holds the South African Research Chair in Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, which is funded by the National Research Foundation. The Chair is located at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape. She holds a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford, where she previously obtained an MPhil in Development Studies. Her first two degrees were from the University of Cape Town. Professor Hall has published extensively on land reform, tenure and governance in Africa, with a focus on transnational land investments. She convenes a continent-wide accredited short course for land professionals, activists and officials and on the Political Economy of Land.

Discussant Biography:

Phethani Madzivhandila is a Pan-Africanist Marxist historian and activist based in Azania (South Africa). If not reading historical literature or thinking about the revolution, he spends most of his time missing Walter Rodney and imagining a world without capitalism. His research interests draw from the historical and current development of racial capitalism in Africa and how it influences the Social Relations of Agrarian Change in rural areas.

Phethani is currently focused on how the post-COVID-19 world continues to be shaped by even and uneven development in relation to the Global North and Global South's underdevelopment.