On International Day of Rural Women, we spotlight the ongoing struggle for land and housing access faced by South African women, particularly in rural areas. Despite running over 40% of homes, women often encounter patriarchal barriers and a lack of tenure security. This article explores the realities of rural women and suggests solutions.
After 30 years in a democratic country, South African women, like many others around the world, are still calling for tangible change in their lives. One of the clearest disparities between women’s and men’s experiences is access to land and housing.
Over 40% of homes in South Africa are run by women, and this figure is higher in rural areas (47.7%). What do the effects of apartheid’s legacy and the past three decades of government talk mean for these women and those who rely on them?
The Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (Plaas) at the University of the Western Cape recently held a webinar on “Women’s land struggles in post-apartheid South Africa”.
Hosted by the dean of the faculty for economic and management science, Professor Michelle Essau, and chaired by Plaas researcher Nkanyiso Gumede, the webinar featured three influential women discussing rural and urban land reform. Tshepo Fokane, acting director of the Alliance for Rural Democracy, also participated.
Tenure security for women
Fokane lamented that tenure security remains elusive for many women due to the state’s failure to take meaningful action to secure their tenure, as the constitution mandates.
The only legislation available to protect women’s land rights is the Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act, which must be renewed annually. This, she argued, shows that the state does not believe women can or should manage land independently.
“The state infantilises black rural people. They say they are worried that if they give rural women land, they will borrow against it and lose it. Yet everyone else in the country is allowed to borrow on their properties,” Fokane said.
The contradictions and politics within families in urban areas also exist in rural families. Women in customary marriages need their rights protected as much as those in civil marriages.
Land-based investments, such as mining, continue to deprive women and their communities of land rights. This is further enabled by the lack of clarity in law on the role of traditional leaders in land administration, which they have manipulated to their advantage for personal gain at the expense of their communities.
Court judgments in favour of protecting these rights have been important, but “they are living documents that social movements must bring to people so they can interact with them and understand their significance,” said Fokane.
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Patriarchal practices in land restitution
The Nkuzi Development Association works closely with land restitution programme beneficiaries and claimants, as well as with communities in the former homelands.
Its director, Motlanalo Lebepe, highlighted that patriarchal practices favour men in restitution claims processes. Men were signatories on the initial land claim forms and continued to elect one another to leadership committees responsible for administering restitution land or making decisions.
Women are not the primary beneficiaries in practice. Financial compensation is sometimes presented as the only available option to women, thus depriving them of the opportunity to own land.
“We are telling poor women that they don’t deserve to own land by giving them financial compensation instead of assistance for restitution and reclamation,” said Lebepe.
At the same time, budgets for restitution programmes have been in decline over the years. Farmworkers and dwellers still face evictions, and their land claims are not prioritised.
According to Lebepe, redistribution is a viable alternative for restitution but it must be applied in a way that allows the state to expropriate land for restitution. She noted that this is done for shopping malls and mining.
Expropriation should include women and must also apply to farms where there are human rights violations, such as violence against farmworkers and dwellers.
Challenges in urban land access
Noziphiwo Sigwela from the spatial justice organisation Ndifuna Ukwazi, says problems in accessing land and housing are just as prevalent in urban areas, especially for working-class women. She added that this indicates the state’s apathy towards the issue.
“Housing is a major crisis in South Africa, which means the government has not done enough. What have we achieved after so many years if we still have spatial inequality, displacement, and gentrification?” Sigwela asked.
She noted that the women who do have access to land and housing often lose it due to patriarchal practices of male heir inheritance. Widows lose out to their husbands’ families, and divorcees lose to their husbands. One webinar attendee asked whether housing could truly be seen as a gendered issue.
Proposed interventions moving forward
All three participants demonstrated that a lack of state interventions means women remain vulnerable in rural and urban contexts. Proposals for moving forward include:
- Legislation and policy reforms that will genuinely consider women’s views and ensure that the right to equitable access is guaranteed. These could include clarifying the right to equitable access in law and developing land redistribution law as proposed in the High-Level Panel Report (2017) and the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform report (2019).
- A call for policy processes to be truly inclusive and deliberate in empowering women by enabling their access to land and securing their rights to land.
- The state must release land and take all measures to ensure women’s access to land.
- Land struggles and campaigns must continue to push the state to implement Section 25 of the Constitution, which states, collaboration between communities, civil society organisations, academics, and others is crucial for success in land justice, especially to rework laws and policies in favour of women and their communities.
This story was first published on PLAAS.
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