The land question in smallholder development in South Africa - Institutional Constraints to Small Farmer Development in Southern Africa - page 176

that share borders with the country given the dominant influence South Africa has always
had in the region.
There is evidence that the increasing agricultural activities brought with them unexpected
affluence among the Dutch settlers and, along with this development, increasing envy of the
others both within and without who were beginning to develop some interest in what was
going on in the territory. The most outstanding such new entrants were the English who
apparently saw themselves being marginalized by the new economic prosperity. According
to Plaatjie (2005), the war that is variously described as the South African War and the
Anglo-Boer War fought over the period 1899-1902 was about land and brought devastating
consequences on the territory's agricultural economy.
The phenomenon of the 'poor white man' is no doubt one of the clearest manifestations of
the extreme hardship that was unleashed on the immigrant Dutch farmers, or Afrikaaners,
whose agricultural economies were virtually wiped out (Plaatjie, 2005). The English had by
this time destroyed every Afrikaner farm they could not take and created so much misery
among the Afrikaner population that they became virtually the most destitute people
within the territory that later became the Union of South Africa. It was clear that the war
had indeed given rise to a fundamental restructuring of the agricultural sector in terms of
the ownership and control of land and the racial structure of economic power in ways that
would reverberate into the next century and possibly to the present day. Murray (1997) has
contributed a very graphic description of the role of Lord Alfred Milner, in attempting to
'break the back of (any) lingering spirit of Boer rebelliousness by sprinkling the countryside
with English-speaking yeoman farmers'.
During this period, the practice of allocating city areas on racial lines began to take hold.
Kassier and Groenewald (1990), cited by Van Schalkwyk (1995), recall the discriminatory
practice of allocating land to the immigrants from Europe in a manner that ignored the
existence of the black population. The phenomenon of the 'black reserves' emerged at this
time as well, representing geographical areas demarcated for the exclusive residence of the
black population. Within these reserves, land tenure arrangements followed a different
pattern from what prevailed in the white areas, with more traditional communal systems
of ownership being kept in place.
The black population was forbidden to seek or use land outside those reserves. In the Orange
Free State, at least, a formal legal system had been established, codified in the Orange Free
State. barring the indigenous black population from owning or leasing land outside the
black reserves (Davenport and Hunt, 1974). Of course, this was not uniformly applied in
the rest of the country, with some provinces allowing limited black access to land as a 1905
Supreme Court interpretation of the Pretoria Convention of 1881 revealed (Davenport
and Hunt, 1974). The rest of the territory was designated 'white area' (Meredith, 1988)