The ambiguous policies of the Federal officials, despite their commitment to the rapid revival of cottoncultivation on a capitalist basis, undermined the planters’ ability to establish and maintain wage labour ontheir plantations.The freedmen, despite protests from their former masters, reorganized their householdsand withheld female and juvenile labour-power from the plantations.The resulting labour shortage createda fertile environment for the formation of proto-trade unions among the freedpeople. Kin-based‘Associations’ and ‘Companies’ attempted to negotiate wages, hours and working conditions, and organizedshort strikes during the cotton harvests to press their demands. Their organization and struggle at theworkplace merged with political struggles for full citizenship and voting rights for the freedmen, who hadbeen excluded from representation in the first postbellum southern state governments.

Land and Labor ends with a description of the state of the class conflict over labour and land inlate 1865 and early 1866. On the one hand, the Freedmen’s Bureau’s insistence on written contracts,payment of wages and the ban on corporal punishment of freedpeople combined with the freedpeo-ple’s economic and political self-organization was beginning to make capitalist plantation agriculture inthe south untenable. On the other, the ‘Black Codes’ and reports of political terror against and physicalintimidation of the freedpeople radicalized northern capitalist and petty-bourgeois public opinion. Theresulting Congressional or Radical Reconstruction disbanded the planter-dominated southern stategovernments, enfranchised African-American men and opened the road to new, Republican stategovernments in the south. Radical Reconstruction in the south was the death-knell of capitalistagriculture, and led by 1868 to the consolidation of sharecropping as the dominant form of sociallabour in the region.

This volume of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation is an invaluable resource for studentsof agrarian class relations in the post-bellum US south. We can only look forward to the subsequentvolume on 1865, and further collections that trace the collapse of capitalist plantation agriculture and therise of sharecropping in 1866 and 1867.

REFERENCE

Post, C., 2010. The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict.Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.

RUTH HALL

Landmarked: Land Claims and Land Restitution in South Africa, by Cherryl Walker. Cape Town: Jacana Pressand Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008. Pp. xi+292. $26.95 (pb). ISBN: 978-1-77009-632-5 and978-0-8214-1870-3

Restoring land to those dispossessed through apartheid laws and practices has been part of the work ofdemocratization and reconstruction in South Africa since 1994. This spectacularly ambitious initiativeaimed to unravel, reverse and redress decades of forced removals of millions of people following theNatives’ Land Act of 1913 and the pursuit of apartheid (‘separateness’), but not to confront dispossessionin the more than two centuries of colonial conquest prior to that. Together with the Truth andReconciliation Commission, post-apartheid land restitution was expected to underpin a process ofreconciling as a nation, with our history and with each other. This book is the second major academicwork to explore the contours of the process of land claiming and restitution.

Landmarked is an unusual as well as a significant book, being (as the author puts it) the product of hermany years of work ‘at the crossroads of policy involvement and academic reflection’ (p. 26). Now headof sociology and social anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch, at the inception of the restitutionprocess Walker was the regional land claims commissioner for KwaZulu–Natal, serving in this capacity for

Ruth Hall, Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, Private Bag X17,Bellville 7535, South Africa. E-mail: rhall@uwc.ac.za

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the first five years of its operation from 1995 to 2000 – which she describes as ‘among the mostchallenging, humbling, frustrating and intriguing years of my working life’ (p. 13).

The book is a rich and vivid read, including photos and personal narratives, and is accessible to thelayperson while challenging for the specialist. It depicts in attentive detail the legal, political andinstitutional framing of a programme of land restitution.This is also a deeply political book, not only inits attention to the government’s ambivalence on how to deal with historical claims and the internaldramas of the Commission on the Restitution of Land Rights charged with responding to such claims,but also in the intensely personal politics of land to which Walker draws our attention.While moving ablyamong different levels of analysis, from the individual to the national,Walker interweaves a deeply (evenintimately) autobiographical narrative. Her own experiences of land, landscape and identity draw atten-tion to the similarities – the universality – of connections to the land. In so doing, she resurrects somerecognition of white South Africans’ connection to place, alongside (and in conversation with) therealities of race, class and gender that set her relationship with land apart from those whose struggles shesupported and documents.

Claims to land, as part of a wider project of nation-building, have rested on what Walker terms a‘master narrative of loss and restoration’ (p. 233). Questioning this narrative is a central theme of thebook; although its elements are not quintessentially untrue, Walker argues that it is too simple and itshomogenizing tendencies are unhelpful in charting a way forward for redressing injustice and respondingto the current livelihood crises that confront so many of those who were dispossessed:

Generally the story of removals as a central theme in South Africa’s recent history skips overdevelopments between the experience of dispossession and the moment when restoration appearedpossible, in the early 1990s. It fails to consider carefully and dispassionately what has happened inthe intervening years, both to dispossessed households and communities and their descendants, andto the land from which they were removed. . . . The simple story of forced removals leads to anarrative of restitution that is constructed around the equally ingenuous idea of reversal. (pp. 16–17)

The book illustrates the practical impossibility and often undesirability of full reversal, documenting‘fiercely parochial, local geographies’ and the ‘tension between national imperatives and local needs’ (pp.13, 23).Three case-study chapters serve as a basis both for interrogating what might be termed successesand for illuminating the real tensions between competing interests and objectives in the process of settlingspecific claims.

The first land claim to be settled in KwaZulu–Natal involved the return of former owners (of aresilient and relatively privileged class) and their former tenants to the rural ‘black spot’ of Cremin.Theowners had bought the land as a syndicate on the eve of the Natives Land Act, and were finallyremoved in the late 1970s. Their return to Cremin thirty years later was celebrated with jubilation bythe claimants at an event presided over by then-President Nelson Mandela. Later, a poignant interviewwith an elderly community member reveals that while hopes of a return to a life once lived therehave been dashed, they are nevertheless ‘consoled’. Walker explores several dimensions that enabled thisrelative success: validation of the past and the right to return. She points to class, gender and gener-ational cleavages among land claimants, as well as to (and in intersection with) race: ‘black landownersand their descendants have tended to be better educated and resourced than most rural dwellers’(p. 221) and better positioned to submit and pursue their claims. For this reason, restitution has attimes entailed the restoration of older forms of inequality, not least between those of a previouslandowning class and those dispossessed prior to 1913, or those who lost their land through economichardship rather than state coercion.

A second case deals with the rural claim by the Bhangazi community, who were not allowed to returnto the shores of St Lucia on the northern KwaZulu–Natal coast. This precious place in which theirhistory, spirituality and identity were woven now constitutes part of a world heritage site, the Greater StLucia Wetland Park. Its significance to a public (and ecosystems) beyond the interests of the claimantsinformed the Commission’s decision that environmental protection and ‘development’ should takeprecedence over their return. Instead, they were compensated in cash and, as partners in environmentalstewardship and tourism initiatives, won the right to access the park, use some of its natural resources,

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maintain grave and other important sites, and derive income from a ‘community levy’ charged to tourists.This attempt to reconcile specific claims with wider public interests led to a partial and contestedresolution that responded – imperfectly – to the multiple meanings and values that the territoryrepresented.

A third case, Cato Manor on the fringes of Durban, provides an urban counterpoint tothe common association of restitution with a return to rural life. Here, under the Group AreasAct, a racially mixed working-class settlement was obliterated in the 1950s and 1960s by apartheidplanners, who relocated its residents mostly to African and Indian townships. By the 1990s, expandingshack settlements had emerged, pitting former residents (owners and tenants) against those who arguedin favour of tenure upgrading and formal housing for people already living there – people who hadtheir own relationships and claims to this strategically positioned place, and their own histories ofprior displacement. In the contest between restitution and housing delivery, and with institutionallydivided mandates between the Commission and local authorities, housing for shack dwellers wasgiven preference over those whose claims dated from previous occupation. Walker argues that here,restitution was ‘in default’, lacking a more imaginative response to claims than full restoration or cashcompensation.

Walker details the oft-recited political, policy, budgetary and institutional constraints of land restitutionin South Africa, but is unconvinced that these adequately explain the travails and complexities ofrestitution. Her focus, drawing from the case studies, falls on non-programmatic, structural constraints;these, she argues, are the real limits to restitution. First are the demographic constraints of a growing andurbanizing population: many claimant communities have grown several-fold since dispossession, and arenow dispersed across the country. Not all can or wish to return to pre-existing settlements and land uses.Second are agro-ecological and macro-economic constraints: a largely semi-arid country and a post-deregulation and liberalization era make for a remarkably hostile natural and policy environment in whichto return to a rural life.Third are constraints on mobility: the poorest and female-headed households arethose least able to relocate once again and to risk losing existing social networks, a pattern aggravated byadditional vulnerabilities in an era of HIV/AIDS.

Attending to these constraints, and the dynamism of the lives of those dispossessed (and society as awhole) brings into question the presumptions about ‘turning back the clock’ that first informed theframing of restitution. Dispossession represented an injustice for which there might be no adequatecompensation; years and even generations later, restoring rights to land is only one contribution to thecomplex task of rebuilding livelihoods in a changed landscape and economy. For many claimants, therestoration they sought through land has been driven by a yearning for something that is no longer there– or to which others (and not only the elite) have competing claims and plans.

In its well-justified turn to the local, the book downplays the macro-politics of restitution, and thepro-market character of land reform, which extends beyond the means of acquiring the land, to its‘preferred’ uses. For instance, the attachment of bureaucrats and consultants to commercial farmingmodels has fed an insistence that rural claimants partner with agribusinesses to ensure continuity inproduction, constraining whether, or on what terms, people can return to the farms they claim, andwhether restitution contributes to new trajectories of agrarian change. These points have been madeelsewhere, in public debate and policy circles, and in a more recent edited volume on restitution (Walkeret al. 2010). In Landmarked, however, the author’s interest is to draw attention to dimensions neglected inthese debates.

The distinctive contribution of this book is to depict some of the intrinsic limits of South Africa’sland reform process, set in the context of demographic change, ecological constraints and the changesin economic structures associated with de-agrarianization in rural South Africa. While the Bantustanpolicy and influx control created a ‘displaced proletariat’, forcing people into ‘huge rural slums’ as areserve labour force for the factories and mines (p. 226), Walker questions whether restitution’sre-agrarianization agenda will or can find traction – or whether this is ‘misplaced agrarianisation’(p. 226). The book mounts a convincing argument for a more variegated, adaptive and locality-drivenresponse to claims, rather than chasing national targets that themselves are arbitrary in origin andbear little relation to actual needs. From the vantage point of a scholar–bureaucrat, the book brings

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integrity and humanity to understanding a process fraught with personal trauma, social urgency andpolitical division. It is rare indeed to encounter this mix of accessible and vivid writing, as grippingas any novel, but with scholarly rigour. It is already influential and widely read, and is likely to berecognized as a key text on South Africa for years to come.

REFERENCE

Walker, C., A. Bohlin, R. Hall and T. Kepe, eds, 2010. Land, Memory, Reconstruction and Justice. Perspectives on LandRestitution in South Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press and Scottsville: University of KwaZulu–Natal Press.

LEANDRO VERGARA-CAMUS

Land, Protest, and Politics: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for Agrarian Reform in Brazil, by GabrielOndetti. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Pp. xviii+280. $60.00 (hb); ISBN978-0-271-03353-2

As the increasing number of publications on the subject can attest, agrarian movements are once morea hot research topic within the broad field of development studies. Among the world’s agrarianmovements, Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Rural Workers’ Movement,MST) has become the major reference. Gabriel Ondetti’s book on the MST, Land, Protest, and Politics, isthus timely and has the potential of finding a large readership. The book examines the emergence, rise,decline and resurgence of the MST by focusing on the economic, social and political conditions thattriggered the struggle for land and on the movement’s organizational structure, political strategy andinteractions with the Brazilian state.The period covered by the book is from the late 1970s to Luiz InácioLula’s da Silva’s first administration (2002–6).

Gabriel Ondetti’s knowledge of Brazilian rural politics and the MST’s history in particular isimpressive, very well documented, and complemented with several years of fieldwork in the diverseregions of the country. It is a shame, though, that what must have been extremely interesting eth-nographic work is not more prominently showcased in the book. Because of its depth of informationon the movement and the author’s great capacity for synthesis, the book is an excellent resource fornewcomers to the study of the MST or for readers with a general interest on the matter. For morespecialized researchers already familiar with the history and politics of the MST, the book does notprovide much in terms of new material. Ondetti’s primary contribution is to systematically organizeavailable knowledge on the MST in order to further the discussion of a particular brand of socialmovement theory. The book is thus an important addition to the existing body of literature on theMST, adding a new dimension to the current English-speaking books on the subject (Branford andRocha 2002; Wright and Wolford 2003). The subject and scope of the study are extremely wellcircumscribed, but it reads more like a PhD thesis than a book, which is its major strength in termsof its systematic approach and its most important weakness in terms of the limited scope of questionsit covers.

The book is organized in six chapters. The first chapter is an exposition of different theoreticalperspectives that focus on explaining the emergence, rise and decline of movements, which the authorwill later ‘test’ in his case study.These ‘theories’ – all offsprings of the resource mobilization paradigm –include the grievance/discontent perspective, the organizational capacity perspective, the activist strategyperspective and the political opportunity perspective. The theoretical chapter is interesting in its clearpresentation and succinct summary of the main features of the approaches. But disappointingly, Ondetti’sdegree of critical engagement with the assumptions and flaws of these theories is limited, for he never

Leando Vergara-Camus, Department of International Relations and International Organisations, University ofGroningen, P.O. Box 716, 9700 AS, Groningen, The Netherlands. E-mail: l.a.vergara@rug.nl

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