UWC Land Collection
Welcome to the UWC Land Collection, a digital archive of information about land rights, land reform and land politics in South Africa. The focus is on the period from 1990 to the present, and the purpose is to democratise access to information, to encourage critical thinking and debate about land, to support research and training, and to preserve published and unpublished material that tells the story of land politics in this country for future generations.
Do you want to know more about land? You have arrived at the right place. From the repeal of apartheid land laws to the property clause in the Constitution, from land dispossession and evictions to land claims and restitution, land occupations, customary rights, farm dwellers, expropriation, and more, this collection provides an overview of critical developments in land rights, land reform and land politics in South Africa.
To explore this site, scroll across the timeline to see which materials are available. For now, we have uploaded a selection of documents from state institutions – policies, laws, reports and court documents. In the future, we will add a new timeline with documents from civil society, activist and community-based organisations, and another with published and unpublished research materials. As the collection grows, we aim to add more photos, videos, audio clips.
This collection is a project of the South African Research Chair in Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, funded by the South African Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) and National Research Foundation (NRF), and jointly implemented by the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) and the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR), both at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Materials in the collection have been curated from within PLAAS’s own resource centre, as well as individual researchers’ holdings. The collection forms part of UWC’s New Archival Visions project.
Do you have materials you would like to contribute to this collection? Fill here