Gavin Williams

Setting the agenda: a critique of the World Bank's rural restructuring programme for South Africa

This article offers a critique of the presuppositions of the recommendations put forward in the World Banks ‘Options for Land Reform and Rural Restructuring in South Africa’ 1993. It examines the documents which informed the proposals; the adequacy of their accounts of the experiences, notably of land reforms in Kenya, on which they draw; the strength of their evidence and arguments, particularly regarding agricultural performance and policies; and the feasibility and purposes of their proposals for land redistribution. It argues that the World Bank proposals rest on misleading intellectual foundations. The World Banks analyses regarding the relative (in)efficiency of large‐scale farming in South Africa with respect to scale of production, factor productivity and prices are not supported by much of the evidence they cite. Their proposals revived aspects of the thinking behind the Swynnerton and Tomlinson reports of the 1950s. Government programmes to develop black farmers in South Africa in the late 198...

Liberalizing markets and reforming land in South Africa

Two ministries, a Bank and a manifesto In 1994, the new Government of National Unity established two separate ministries to deal with Agriculture and with Land Affairs. Both ministers were white Afrikaners and each, like his ministry, was accountable to different constituencies. Derek Hanekom of the African National Congress (ANC) was appointed Minister of Land Affairs. Hanekom had to take control of the bureaucracy he had inherited from the Department of Regional and Land Affairs and its much-renamed predecessors and to guide it in new directions. His first priority was to get land reform underway. To do so, he needed to ensure that the clause in the Constitution protecting property rights did not stymie the restitution or redistribution of land to black people. Kraai van Niekerk of the NP continued to hold the portfolio of Minister of Agriculture, which he had held in the previous regime. He had close links with organized agriculture, the network of agricultural unions, co-operatives, marketing boards and the Land (and Agricultural) Bank which integrated the state, the National Party and farmers organizations in the direction of state land and agricultural policies under the old regime. He clearly saw himself as representing the interests of these constituencies in the new government and threatened to fight against any dilution of the protection of property rights (which the previous government had treated so cavalierly when the rights of black title-holders were at issue).

Imperialism and development: A critique

Abstract At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production … From forms of the development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. …No social order ever perishes before all productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the materials conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises omly when the material conditions for its solution exist or least are in the process of formation. K. Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. The transformation, through the division of labour, of personal power (relationships) into material powers, cannot be dispelled by dismissig the general idea of it from ones mind, but can only be abolished by the individuals again subjecting those material powers to themselves community (with others has each) individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. In the previous substitutes for the community. in the State, etc. personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed within the relationships of the ruling class, and only in so far as they were individuals of this class. The illusory community, in which individuals have up till now combined, always took on an independent existence in relation to them, and was at the same time, since it was the combination of one class over another, not only a completely illusory community, but a new fetter as well. In the real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association. K. Marx & F. Engels, The German Ideology.

Ruth First: the analysis and practice of politics in South Africa

This is the text prepared for a lecture given to the Walter Rodney Memorial Series, African Studies Centre, Boston University, 8 November 1982, in tribute to Ruth First. It discusses her writing on South Africa and Namibia in the context of her political commitments and ultimately her assassination. It considers the forms and themes of her writing; her role as communist and journalist; the Congress Alliance; nationalism, socialism and the Freedom Charter; capital and labour; the treason trial to the sabotage campaign; Namibia; peasants and politics; detention without trial; exile and solidarity; historical interpretation and revolutionary strategy.

Não vamos esquecer (We will not forget)

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Who, Where, and When were the Cape Gentry?

ABSTRACT The “Cape gentry” has come to be conventional in descriptions and in analyses of the south-western Cape during the rule of the VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie). Implicit in the idea of a “Cape gentry” are ownership of land and of slaves, degrees of inequalities, tenure and exercise of political office, and recognition of status honour, which were perpetuated over generations in networks of intermarried kin. This paper emphasizes the relevance of published statistics for interpreting changes over time in economic inequalities and social relations among the districts of the Colony. It sets out Mentzels account of the four “classes” of rural society and ends by bringing into question the deployment of the idea of “Cape gentry” in analyses of the social structure in the Cape for lacking geographic and historical specificity.

Transformation: Critical perspectives on Southern Africa

TRANSFORMATION: critical perspectives on Southern Africa. Nos. 1–4 (1986–87). c/o Economic History Department, University of Natal, King George V Ave, 4001 Durban, South Africa. Subscription R14.00 (£10.00 UK,

Capitalist and petty commodity production in Nigeria: A note

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