Democracy Dispossessed: Land, Law & the Politics of Redistribution In
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Democracy Dispossessed: Land, Law & the Politics of Redistribution in South Africa Amanda Alexander Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2015 Amanda Alexander All rights reserved ABSTRACT Democracy Dispossessed: Land, Law & the Politics of Redistribution in South Africa Amanda Alexander This dissertation concerns the history of land politics in South Africa and, equally, land as a vehicle for understanding the transition from apartheid to the post-apartheid order. In 2004, after a decade in power, the ANC government’s failure to carry out widespread land reform began to test the country’s democratic possibilities. In the lead up to that year’s national election, social movements urged landless people to boycott the polls and occupy land instead as part of a “No Land! No Vote!” campaign. With this clash as its entry point for analysis, this dissertation examines historical factors that have shaped South Africa’s neoliberal democracy and prospects for redistribution. It offers insights into some of the most significant questions facing the country: What is the historical relationship between land dispossession, citizenship, and politics in South Africa? And why, well into the Mbeki years, was the country unable, or unwilling, to reckon with it? Broad in scope, this dissertation examines a number of institutions that shaped the politics of land, economic development, and citizenship in South Africa over the last century. It is particularly focused on period of the 1940s-2004, encompassing the apartheid era and the first ten years of democracy. I begin by recasting the history of apartheid pass laws in the mid-twentieth century, widening the scope beyond their role in containing labor mobility and controlling access to cities. I show how vagrancy laws were one piece of a continuum that stretched through jails and prisons to rural plantations, supplying labor to farms and subsidizing agricultural development. Later chapters examine how, beginning in the 1970s, the World Bank and other international institutions helped shape the contours of land and housing policies and the relationship between states and citizens. My research also shows how, during the apartheid transition and through the Mandela and Mbeki administrations, private prisons and harsh criminal justice reforms became integral parts of neoliberal economic development. This dissertation weaves together the history that has shaped South Africa’s ‘dispossessed democracy’ and concludes with a discussion of the implications for social movements and political change. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS …………………………………………………………….ii DEDICATION ………………………………………………………………………….ix CHAPTER ONE ………………………………………………………………………...1 Introduction CHAPTER TWO ……………………………………………………………………...50 “The Authorities Cannot Meet Demand”: Prison Labor, Pass Laws, and Agricultural Development in Apartheid South Africa CHAPTER THREE ……………………………………………………………..……123 “A Disciplining Mechanism for Holding Standards Down”: The World Bank, Urban Planning, and South Africa’s Transition from Apartheid CHAPTER FOUR ……………………………………………………………………183 “To All Who Live In It”: Crime, Prisons, and Neoliberal Development CHAPTER FIVE ……………………………………………………………………..255 Rights Beyond the Urban-Rural Divide: South Africa’s Landless People’s Movement and the Battle for Post-Apartheid Democracy CHAPTER SIX ……………………………………………………………………….305 Epilogue BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………………………….320 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is a privilege to be able to thank the many people and institutions that shaped this project. My research in South Africa began nearly 12 years ago, and this dissertation would not be possible without friendships, conversations, and immense generosity spanning the Atlantic over that time. Gregory Mann has been an extraordinary advisor, guiding my development as a researcher, writer, and historian. His brilliant insights, well- timed questions, enduring support, and practical advice have sharpened the focus of this project and sustained it. I am deeply grateful for his wisdom and patience. A year into my graduate studies Mamadou Diouf joined the Columbia faculty and took the helm of the Institute of African Studies. I am immensely thankful for his visionary leadership and his work to promote interdisciplinary and transnational approaches to African studies. I have benefitted a great deal from our conversations and from his support and that of the Institute. I am grateful to Sean Jacobs, Dan Magaziner, and Sam Roberts for serving on my dissertation committee. My thinking about South African politics and history has benefitted enormously from discussions with Sean over the years, and I am thankful for his model of engaged scholarship and provocative, deeply committed public intellectualism. My work on South African history has been ii enriched by Dan Magaziner’s writings and by his approach to the study of South African intellectual history and political thought. I am grateful to Sam Roberts for his powerful example of historical research that cuts across disciplinary boundaries, and for the initiatives he is driving at Columbia to foster engaged scholarship on health, incarceration, and criminal justice. While at Columbia, I benefitted from the guidance of Marcia Wright, Eric Foner, Manning Marable, Mahmood Mamdani, Gail Gerhart, Fred Cooper, David Scott, Saidiya Hartman, Betsy Blackmar, Mark Mazower, Barbara Fields, Janet Roitman, Anupama Rao, Adam McKeown, Abosede George, Hlonipha Mokoena, Natasha Lightfoot, and Katherine Franke. I am honored to have worked with the late Manning Marable. From our first conversation about the links between Black freedom movements in South Africa and the U.S., I knew I had found an intellectual home at Columbia and an extraordinary mentor. He remains my role model for producing engaged historical scholarship and building institutions to support it. I, along with so many undergraduate and graduate students, owe much to the institutions he nurtured: the Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS), the Center for Contemporary Black History (CCBH), the Harlem Digital Archive, and Souls journal. I was very fortunate to develop orals fields with David Scott (Third World Intellectual iii History), Saidiya Hartman (Race and Political Economic Theory), and Anupama Rao (Twentieth Century International History) that continue to inform my thinking and research. Gail Gerhart and Marcia Wright have been remarkably generous mentors; they grounded my graduate studies in South African history and politics and my own endeavors to teach and write in this field owe much to them. I am deeply grateful for conversations and feedback from Mahmood Mamdani, and am indebted to his scholarship and his approach to the study of history and politics in Africa. I am also grateful to Sharee Nash, whose support as History Ph.D. Program Administrator was invaluable. My dissertation research in South Africa was funded through the generous support of the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. My doctoral training was supported by a Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship and a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship. The Ford Fellow community has been a valuable source of inspiration and support. I am grateful to Lungisile Ntsebeza and his National Research Foundation (NRF) Chair in “Land Reform, Democracy, and Civil Society Dynamics” at the University of Cape Town, who hosted me during my dissertation research year iv in 2009-10. My debt to Lungisile is profound. I am extremely fortunate to have been part of the rich intellectual community of the NRF cohort, a deeply committed group of faculty and students well aware of the stakes of research on land reform in southern Africa. This project has benefitted much from Lungisile’s scholarship and insights, and I am deeply appreciative for our conversations and his support over the course of my research year. At Yale Law School, I benefitted from conversations and feedback from John Fabian Witt and Nicholas Parrillo. I am thankful to Yale’s legal history community, especially the American Legal History Research Seminar. Richard Brooks provided pivotal support, feedback, and wisdom, for which I am deeply grateful. Thanks to Vincent Brown and Emmanuel Akyeampong at Harvard for helping to spark my interest in pursuing graduate research on the history of Africa and its diaspora. I am grateful for opportunities to present earlier versions of this work at the 2014 African Studies Association Conference, and am particularly thankful to the organizers of the “State, Violence, and Migration” panel; the Center for Immigrant Families in New York, the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society; New York’s Brecht Forum; the Yale Law School American Legal History Research Seminar; and the Silencing Human Rights Conference at the v University of Sussex. I am also thankful to anonymous reviewers at the Review of African Political Economy who gave helpful feedback on a version of chapter three. I have learned so much from my fellow graduate students at Columbia, and am especially grateful to the members of Black Historians Matter (BHM) for insights, feedback, and support: Russell Rickford, Adrienne Clay, Horace Grant, Kellie Carter-Jackson, Elizabeth Kai Hinton, Toja Okoh, Zaheer