Land rights in rural South Africa: Creating a record of practice in an ongoing crisis

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This project addresses the human dimensions and socio-cultural consequences of a regional experience of forced displacement, Apartheid policies, service delivery delays, and economic inequality - within the context of an unfolding contest over prime property land in the underserved rural community of Dixie, in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. Dixie includes land adjacent to the extremely profitable public-private enterprises of the Kruger National Park; for this reason, Dixie land has been the object of disputes between community members, local authorities, and private developers for decades. One dispute culminated in a landmark case in the Constitutional Court. Nonetheless, land rights once again came under contention in late 2019, when community members, local authorities, and private developers came into conflict over rights and access.This is a microcosmic case, occurring at a time when the country is grappling with the complex broader issue of land reform. Conflicts like this, unfolding across South Africa (with parallels across the Global South), remain largely undocumented: the decisions taken by individuals and communities within particular historical, social, cultural, and economic circumstances, day by day, are not maintained in any archive. This, in turn, means that there can be no systematic short or long-term reflection on or assessment of these struggles and their outcomes. The consequences are that individual communities cannot effectively learn from their own past actions, and communities cannot learn from each other. Nor can they aggregate their knowledge to understand the scope of the problem and consider the most effective solutions. And communities cannot reflect on how these struggles are influenced by - and in turn influence - social facts such as gender, ability, age, language, or familial relations. As a result, essential human knowledge and learning around such crises are at best fragmented and at worst disappearing. Working directly with Dixie residents and local grassroots development organisation Pala Forerunners, we will apply methods of community-led co-production to manage, monitor, record, analyse and evaluate this extraordinarily complex economic, political, social, and cultural dispute as it happens. We will produce an in-depth, community-designed archive of the lived experiences of this struggle, including notes and journals, documenting key decisions, milestones, personal reflections, local histories of dispossession and displacement. The archive will inform the design of new, practical instructional materials for rural residents in land disputes, and will constitute a case study for current practice and potential best practice, in just one instantiation of a much broader problem of property rights and disputes across South Africa and the Global South.