Richard M. Levin

Apartheid Representations in a Digital Landscape: GIS, Remote Sensing and Local Knowledge in Kiepersol, South Africa

A GIS is currently being developed for the Kiepersol locality in the Eastern Transvaal which integrates conventional environmental and infrastructural data with nonconventional behavioral and cognitive information. Regional political ecology informs the GIS design in which socially differentiated knowledge sources are brought together. The GIS production process is undertaken with concern for the competing discourses associated with post-apartheid social transformation in South Africa and in full appreciation that geographic information systems are social constructions. The multiple realities of resource access and use represented within the Kiepersol GIS are intended to contribute to democratic decision-making for land and agrarian reform.

The politics of land reform in South Africa after apartheid: Perspectives, problems, prospects

Transforming existing land and agrarian relations presents the new democratic South African government with one of its major challenges. Colonial land dispossession and apartheid forced removals lie at the heart of the repressive regime which the national liberation movement sought to overthrow. A decisive transformation of land and agrarian relations is thus intimately bound up with the construction of a new democratic order in South Africa. Expectations in rural areas are very high, and the 1994 election results reveal that with the exception of Natal, there was a massive ANC vote in provinces with a predominantly rural constituency. This offers a major challenge to the ANC, as its capacity to deliver will weigh heavily in future elections, as was the case in the November 1995 local government elections. The commitment to undertake a national programme of land and agrarian reform is likely to be severely constrained by numerous political and economic concerns. This study identifies a variety of political considerations which will constrain or enhance the possibilities for meaningful land and agrarian reform. These are essentially linked to the balance of political forces as they manifest themselves in the process of democratic transformation and are expressed in the nature of the political transition itself, as well as in the character of local organisation, the role of civil society, the constitution of the new government and its bureaucracies, and

The Agrarian Question and Politics in the 'New' South Africa

New right and neo‐liberal ‘development’ discourses have heavily impacted on the politics of agrarian restructuring in South Africa. Mechanisms for resolving agrarian contradictions are being discussed and presented as abstract planning decisions to be made by agricultural and rural development experts. This legitimation of ‘neo‐classicism’, if unchallenged, will reproduce and support current neo‐apartheid forms of restructuring. In this article, we argue for a process of agrarian transformation where rural political mobilisation and the establishment of viable agricultural production systems are complementary. The paper is not an exercise in proposing specific (top‐down) ‘solutions’ or ‘models’, which has become a recent pre‐occupation in South Africa. Rather, we write with the objective of supporting a process whereby democratic transformation in rural South Africa remains possible.

Class struggle, popular democratic struggle and the South African state

A consideration of the character of the ongoing democratic struggle in South Africa, this article focuses on the strategy of the state and the nature of opposition groups in the conflict and the way in which they transform the terrain of struggle. It is argued that a decisive phase of the struggle has been reached involving a shift in the balance of forces in favour of those struggling for a democratic resolution, although state power remains entrenched and numerous problems of strategy and tactics remain for the liberation movements. This analysis is then used to assess the class character and nature of the unlikely changes which could result from the struggle.