Native Land Act
The Natives Land Act , Act No. 27/1913 (German: "Native Land Law") came into force in the South African Union in 1913 and is seen as one of the core elements of the policy of racial segregation, which became known as apartheid from 1948 onwards . This law followed the concerns of the Glen Gray Act of 1894 with its orientation towards the administrative expropriation of the indigenous population .
The Natives Land Act is based on the division of the available land into areas exclusively for whites and exclusively for blacks. Blacks were then not allowed to acquire land in the “white” areas and vice versa. Blacks were also prohibited from leasing land from private white individuals. With this law there was a land division, as a result of which the black population only had about 7% of the area (9,709,586 ha) of the territory of the South African Union as living and usable space.
In this way, the Natives Land Act not only consolidated the spatial separation of the various ethnic groups, it also supported the system of migrant labor. The mine owners who hired migrant workers as cheap labor benefited from this system. The wages for migrant workers were lower than for white workers, who often lived with their families near the mines or mines in their compounds . The reason for this was that the black migrant workers did not have to support their families with their wages, who stayed in the country and lived there on the farm. In the opposite way, families in the countryside ensured the reproduction of the labor force of the migrant worker, for example by providing services for him when he was sick or too old to work in the mine. In this way, the migrant worker's family took on the role of social security - a task that in the case of a fully urbanized worker would normally be done by the employer.
The Natives Land Act ensured that the income from the farming of the black families was neither too high nor too low in their view. If the income from farming had been too high from the mine owners' point of view, there would have been no incentive for migrant workers to offer their labor to mine owners. If the yield from the farm had been too low, however, the migrant worker's family would no longer have been able to live on it. As a result, the family of the migrant worker should have moved with the head of the family near the mines. This would have forced the mine owners to pay the worker a higher wage in order to ensure the reproduction of his labor.
The Natives Land Act of 1913 could not prevent the progressive urbanization and proletarianization of black workers in the long term. Since the portion of the land allocated to blacks was not large enough, the soil could no longer feed the families after a while and they were forced to move to the cities. The Native Trust and Land Act of 1936 was a reaction to this .
literature
- Andrea Lang: Separate Development and the Department of Bantu Administration in South Africa. History and analysis of special administrations for blacks . (Works from the Institut für Afrika-Kunde, 103), Hamburg 1999. ISBN 3-928049-58-5 , pp. 48, 53-54, 88