Working Paper 134

Title
Land Restitution and Transitional Justice in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Author
Olaf Zenker

Department
Max Planck Fellow Group LOST

Year of publication
2011

Number of pages
24

Download
Working Paper 134

Abstract
This paper scrutinises South African land restitution in terms of ‘transitional justice’, in which, based on a legal framework redressing past human rights violations of the old state, ‘the justice’ of the new beginning in South Africa is continuously contested and renegotiated. After sketching the legal and institutional set-up of land restitution, the ‘justice’ of the actual restitution process is explored with regard to conflicting interpretations by various actors involved in an exemplary land claim on the so-called “Kafferskraal” farm in Mpumalanga. Here, a focus on divergent understandings of what historically constituted valid rights in land as well as corresponding forms of past compensation reveals continuing discrepancies regarding the legitimacy of various property regimes. Given that the legal framework for land restitution does not encourage intensive engagements between opposed parties, possibly furthering mutual understanding and ‘common-sense’, this reductionist processing has thus contributed little to racial reconciliation and a sense of working together towards a new state of justice – a fact that is arguably both reflected and exacerbated by the telling absence of any significant discussion of South African land restitution in terms of ‘transitional justice’.