The land question in smallholder development in South Africa - Institutional Constraints to Small Farmer Development in Southern Africa - page 179

and provided the strongest motivation for political participation to influence legislation in
favour of the Afrikaners.
In 1922, the Union government enacted the Cooperative Societies Act of 1922 to create an
elaborate network of agricultural cooperative system to support white farming. This system
aimed to capacitate white farmers through ensuring the prompt delivery of information
about techniques and markets. Working side by side with the newly reconstituted Land
Bank that delivered soft loans, the cooperative system was instrumental to the strengthening
of a competitive advantage enjoyed exclusively by white agriculture that as a consequence
faced much lower transactions cost than the black farming system.
In the meantime, the profusion of land-related legislations continued. In 1936, the Native
Trust and Land Act of 1936 was enacted to endow the Governor-General with more
powers over the land tenure arrangements within the black reserves (Van Schalkwyk, 1995).
This was clearly overkill in a situation where the black population had been consigned
into the reserves and was still not free to manage their use of the land. The next year, the
Marketing Act of 1937 was enacted to provide support to the white commercial farmers in
the marketing of their produce. The aim was to give more certainty to the white farmers as
the farmers had assurance of marketing a good part of what they produced and therefore
had strong motivation to expand production as much as possible.
Given the massive help in subsidies that was coming from the reconstituted Agricultural
and Land Bank, this was in no way a tall order for the white farmers. As would be expected,
the benefits of the Marketing Act of 1937 completely by-passed the black farmers in the
reserves. Mention needs also be made of the measures that aimed to improve soil quality
and further enhance the production environment for white agriculture. Notable among
this is the Soil Conservation Act of 1946 which aimed to conserve the soil quality in the
white areas.
9.3.3 The apartheid era and land laws
The National Party controlled by the Afrikaner population came to power in 1948.
This review will be limited to laws enacted during this era that had implications for land
ownership and control and leave out those that were more of a political nature except where
these cannot be separated. The Groups Areas Act of 1956 is perhaps the signature legislation
of the new regime which had come to power on the ticket to redress wrongs done to the
Afrikaner population by the English. The Act divided the country along race lines. Nobody
was allowed to own property outside his/her own colour-based area. If there was any hope
of somehow circumventing the Land Act of 1913 by acquiring land elsewhere from your
place of residence, the Group Areas Act effectively put an end to that dream.