Natives Land Act

The Natives Land Act, which became law in South Africa on June 19, 1913, barred Black Africans from buying or leasing land outside designated 'scheduled areas', or reserves. These areas made up about 7 percent of the country, while white South Africans, who were less than a fifth of the population, could own the rest. Estimates of the reserved share vary somewhat by source: Britannica describes it as less than one-tenth of the land. The Act also banned white people from acquiring land inside the reserves. It was the first major piece of territorial segregation passed by the parliament of the Union of South Africa, created three years earlier.¹²³

The bill was introduced by J. W. Sauer, the minister of native affairs. Parliament presented it as a way to reduce friction between Black and white people, but African critics argued that its purpose was to give white farmers more land and to push Africans into wage labor. Its harshest effect fell on sharecroppers and labor tenants, Black farmers who had rented land on white-owned farms in exchange for money or a share of the crop. The Act outlawed sharecropping in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State and required Africans living outside the reserves to show they were employed. Many families were evicted with their livestock and had nowhere to go. The writer and journalist Sol Plaatje travelled the countryside by bicycle recording these evictions, and in his 1916 book Native Life in South Africa he wrote that the African had become 'not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.'¹²⁶

The South African Native National Congress, founded in 1912 and later renamed the African National Congress, organized protests and in 1914 sent five delegates, including Plaatje and John Dube, to petition the British government, which declined to intervene. A commission was appointed to mark out the boundaries of the reserves, and the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act later raised the reserved share to about 13.5 percent. The reserves became the basis of the apartheid-era homelands. The Act was repealed in 1991, and South Africa's post-apartheid constitution gives people dispossessed of land after June 19, 1913 by racially discriminatory laws a right to restitution or redress, making the Act's date the legal starting point of land restitution.¹⁴⁵