Land rights key to uplifting women
AUGUST affords South Africa an opportunity to commemorate and celebrate its women.
The month reminds us about the struggles of South African women dating from the audacious deeds witnessed at the Union Buildings on August 9, 1956 when women stood unshaken, hell-bent on resisting the pass laws of the apartheid regime.
Women’s land rights remain one of the most important sites of social, political and economic contestation in post-colonial Africa.
Land is not only a source of food, employment and income; it also gives social prestige and access to political power.
Land has long been recognised as the key to advancing the socio-economic rights and well-being of women and their position in society.
Yet access, control and ownership of land largely remain the domain of male privilege, entrenching patriarchal structures of power and control over community resources, history, culture and tradition.
For the majority of women in Africa, access to land is linked to their relationship with a male family member and is forfeited if the relationship ends. Even where land reform policies include gender equality goals, these tend to fade when it comes to implementation.
The lack of serious attention to gender equality reinforces the marginalised position of women and undermines mainstreaming efforts to improve women’s rights. It also hampers, broadly speaking, strategies for economic development.
While civil society advocacy and government programmes to reform disparities in land-tenure regimes have removed some of the historical legal barriers, land remains an unachievable aspiration for the majority of the rural and urban poor on the continent.
Women’s prospects for socio-economic upliftment through secure tenure appear particularly grim, even more so as the global demand for land for large-scale agriculture and mining increases land scarcity, fuelling a rise in land prices and fierce competition for control.
Further, the de facto existence of a dual system of statutory law and indigenous customary law in many countries allows men to manoeuvre from one to the other as it favours them.
The complexity of legal systems narrows women’s access to justice as they often lack basic knowledge about legal procedures and their rights. Legislative and institutional reforms also need to engage with custom in order to deconstruct and re-conceptualise traditional notions of land access, control and ownership, with a view to intervene at points that will make the most difference for women.
Despite the gendered nature of power relations, land rights issues are constantly negotiated, contested and resisted by affected women in various ways. Beyond formal policy processes, the examples of women’s self-organised resistance to land grabs and their strategies to thwart patriarchal forms of dispossession offer powerful narratives.
It remains largely the domain of male privilege
Nkwe Estate, Pretoria