The land question in smallholder development in South Africa - Institutional Constraints to Small Farmer Development in Southern Africa - page 177

unless otherwise reserved as 'state land'. The state land could be allocated to either blacks
or whites but the blacks were obliged to conduct themselves in a manner approved by the
state in order to retain their allocation (Meredith, 1988).
By this time, the conflictual environment had stabilized sufficiently for a system of land
trading to evolve. According to Kassier and Groenewald (1990), land in the Natal area
was being traded on the London Stock Exchange by 1860 when some 15 speculators had
acquired about 275,000 ha of land in the area. With the growth of a land market, the
need to farm profitably was becoming quite urgent. Some of the factors that motivated
the black population to seek wage employment as peace returned to this volatile area have
been mentioned earlier in this chapter. To these, Groosskopf (1932) adds the growing
poverty among a black population that had lost its land to the whites and now had to live
in overcrowded black areas where even the raising of animals was hampered by overgrazing
and thets.
There are numerous accounts of how the African peasantry held up in spite of the
embattlement it faced in the hands of racism and deliberate attempts to stifle it. Evidence
has been found to support the claim that a prosperous black farming class was able to
exploit the burgeoning consumer markets in Johannesburg and Kimberley where mining
incomes was creating wealth and effective demand beyond their wildest imagination. The
mine workers and urban entrepreneurs in the newly formed towns and cities needed to
be fed, and the story is that the food came, not only from the white but also the black
farms (Plaatjie, 2005). This was the situation up to the formation of the Union of South
Africa in 1910 and unified system of governance came into existence with administrative
headquarters in Pretoria.
With the new administration stationed in Pretoria, a new emphasis was placed on
centralization of policies on property rights. The in-coming government under Lord Alfred
Milner took the first definitive step in this direction by setting up the South African Native
Affairs Commission to spearhead the process of centralization of land policy for the whole
country ( Jeeves and Crush, 1997; Murray, 1997). This commission was named the Lagden
Commission after its first chairman. According to Van Schalkwyk (1995), this commission
became the architect of some of the most repressive legislations which enthroned white
economic interests to the detriment of those of the black population. As noted by Kassier
and Groenewald (1990), this era defined the eventual structure and character of South
African agriculture. As the era drew to a close, the profusion of legislations that would
result in a record 87 bills over a quarter of a century began with two of the most influential
and historically significant ones, namely the 1912 Land and Agricultural Bank Act and the
infamous Land Act of 1913.