Quitrent Tenure and the Village System in the Former Ciskei Region of the Eastern Cape: Implications for Contemporary Land Reform of a Century of Social Change

Both quitrent tenure and the village model of settlement in the former Ciskei region of the Eastern Cape have been through a sequence of changes since their introduction and gradual entrenchment following the conquest of local African chiefdoms during the nineteenth century. Initially planned around mission stations west of the Kei River, in what became the Ciskei, quitrent was extended to some districts in the Transkei as well. Under the Glen Grey Act (1894), nuclear families were provided with indivisible individual plots, heritable only by the oldest male son. Over time, complex local politics and social dynamics evolved around this landholding system. This article examines developments over the years, especially following the 1936 Native Land and Trust Act, which brought the reserve areas of the Cape Province in line with those in other provinces. By the mid twentieth century most quitrent villages of the Ciskei were re-planned under countrywide ‘betterment’ planning, mainly because they were deemed to be heavily congested, ecologically vulnerable and difficult to administer. Their rehabilitation and re-planning created new residential plots, enabling the National Party government to foster a supposedly more egalitarian system by granting rights to hitherto landless families. The processes paralleled intense villagisation and the inception of ‘tribal authorities’ in the Ciskei, as it was brought under the homeland system in the apartheid years. How do we understand these wide-ranging historical processes that have shaped relationships to land in these villages? How have potential solutions to unequal land rights been articulated and negotiated at local level? What challenges have confronted post-1994 land reform policy in resolving uneven access to land within these settlements? These are the questions that this article explores.