The purpose of this chapter is to review land and agrarian development policies in South Africa and to chart the changes that have taken place over the years. This overview spans the period before the native reserves came into being as result of the infamous 1913 Land Act, to the recent post-apartheid land and agrarian reform policies.

A historical analysis of policy structures the chapter. Land and agrarian reform policies are not designed and implemented in a socio-political and historical vacuum. Policies ‘have left their historical traces’ as James (2010: 222) points out and these are still visible and felt to this day. Notably, the residual effects of colonial and apartheid policies constrain the social transformations that postapartheid policymakers would like to facilitate. An account of policies and their formulation requires a chronology, preferably one which intertwines the nature of state power with advancements in the sciences.

The history of South Africa clearly did not begin in 1652 with the colonisation of a small piece of land near present-day Cape Town by Dutch settlers instigated by the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Our concern is with the role the colonial state and state policies have played since 1654 in the reordering of what is currently South Africa and how this concurred with the interests of the state, white settlers and later those of the mining sector. A common periodisation is one that distinguishes the colonial from the Union era and apartheid from postapartheid. State policies, acts and degrees do not neatly fit these four periods, but they nevertheless have some degree of distinctiveness. During the colonial period policies were implemented to expand and control the frontier and that laid the foundation for racial segregation. The second period roughly covers the Union years (1910–1948) during which key land, labour and land-use legislation was passed that exclusively favoured white land ownership and large-scale farming. The apartheid period (1948–1994) hinged on a continuation of betterment and the implementation of homeland policies and a fine-tuning of discriminatory laws. In the post-apartheid era, all discriminatory laws, acts and decrees previously passed to limit the mobility of black people and their access to land have been repealed, and reform policies have been initiated.