The Natives Land Act
A new law confines African land ownership to reserves covering about 7% of the country, turning millions of farmers into labourers and tenants overnight.
- Native Life in South Africa — Sol T. Plaatje, P. S. King & Son (1916)
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
- A Concise History of South Africa — Robert Ross, Cambridge University Press (2008)
- South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid — Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger, Routledge (2016)
The Natives Land Act of 1913 made it illegal for Africans to buy or rent land outside designated “native reserves”, which then made up about 7% of South Africa’s territory; a 1936 law later raised the share to about 13%. It also outlawed the sharecropping arrangements by which many African families farmed on white-owned land in return for part of their harvest. Africans, the large majority of the population, were left with a small fraction of the land, much of it poor.
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
- South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid — Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger, Routledge (2016)
The effect was immediate. Sol Plaatje travelled the countryside in the bitter winter of 1913 and described evicted families wandering the roads with their livestock, with nowhere legally to go. “Awakening on Friday morning, June 20, 1913,” he wrote, “the South African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.”
- Native Life in South Africa — Sol T. Plaatje, P. S. King & Son (1916)
The Act pushed rural Africans into wage labour on white farms and in the mines, under a system of migrant work and pass laws that split families for generations. The reserves later became the “homelands” of apartheid. The ANC’s appeals to Britain against the law failed.
- A Concise History of South Africa — Robert Ross, Cambridge University Press (2008)
- South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid — Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger, Routledge (2016)
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
Land distribution has changed only slowly since 1994. How fast to redistribute land, whether to allow expropriation without compensation, and how to do so without damaging food production remain among the most charged questions in South African politics.
- A Concise History of South Africa — Robert Ross, Cambridge University Press (2008)
- South Africa — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Why it matters today
The Act is the legal foundation of the land question. Post-1994 land restitution law allows claims only for dispossession after 19 June 1913, the day it took effect, and debates over land reform and expropriation still return to it. For many Black South Africans it is the moment the country's land was formally taken from them.