Sanelisiwe Dlamini from Polity chatted to Professor Peter Delius about his new book Rights to Land: A Guide to Tenure Upgrading and Restitution in South Africa.

The book, co-authored William Beinart and Michelle Hay, seeks to understand the issues around land rights and distribution of land in South Africa and proposes that new policies and processes should be developed and adopted.

Click on the link above for more about the book!

‘We have to go back into colonial and imperial history,’ Delius says. ‘And what you see in South Africa is a powerful imperial colonial system which effectively dispossesses Africans of the land, and it does it in a variety of ways. But there’s always an element of violence.

‘So two things happen as a result, one is that you end up with an enormous unequal distribution of land, that you get in South Africa, but the other is that the ideas of the vast majority of South Africans about what rights in land are and how land should be dealt with were ignored. Instead an external system of land values and land rights was imposed.

‘So what we have is an illegitimate system of land holding, if you like. At one level, people don’t accept the distribution of land, but at another level there are profoundly different ideas about how land should be regarded and treated.

‘We have to solve that, and the Constitution has provided us with some mechanisms, but we’re a long way from getting there.’

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Categories Non-fiction South Africa

Tags Jacana Media Michelle Hay Peter Delius Polity Rights to Land Videos William Beinart