Union of South Africa and the Natives Land Act
The Natives Land Act of 1913 confined African land ownership in South Africa to seven per cent of the country. The Union of South Africa had been created three years earlier out of two British colonies and two defeated Boer republics, on terms that reconciled white South Africans to each other and excluded everyone else. The act prohibited Africans, who were about two-thirds of the population, from buying or leasing land outside designated reserves, and prohibited whites from buying inside them. The reserves amounted to some 7.3 per cent of the land, raised to 13.6 per cent in 1936 and never actually delivered in full. Its immediate target was the class of African tenant farmers who rented or sharecropped white-owned land and competed successfully with white farmers. Sharecropping was outlawed, and a tenant could remain only as a labourer. Sol Plaatje travelled the country recording what happened and opened his book with the sentence that the African found himself a pariah in the land of his birth. Families walked the roads in winter with their stock dying beside them. The effect, which was intended, was to force African men into wage labour on white farms and in the gold mines at wages that could be kept low because the family was assumed to be fed by the reserve. The South African Native National Congress, later the ANC, sent a delegation to London to protest and was told it was an internal matter. The act stood until 1991. Land restitution since then has moved slowly, and the ownership pattern the act created is still substantially the ownership pattern of rural South Africa. It is the single piece of legislation South Africans most often name as the foundation of apartheid.
- Year: 1910 CE
- Category: Political
