Citation Act No. 27 of 1913 Date commenced 19 June 1913 | Date of Royal Assent 16 June 1913 Date repealed 30 June 1991 | |
Enacted by Parliament of South Africahi Administered by Minister of Native Affairs | ||
The Natives Land Act, 1913 (subsequently renamed Bantu Land Act, 1913 and Black Land Act, 1913; Act No. 27 of 1913) was an Act of the Parliament of South Africa that was aimed at regulating the acquisition of land. The Act was an important part of apartheid.
Contents
Overview
The Natives Land Act of 1913 was the first major piece of segregation legislation passed by the Union Parliament. It was replaced by the current policy of land restitution. The act decreed that whites were not allowed to buy land from natives and vice versa. That stopped white farmers from buying more native land. Exceptions had to be approved by the Governor-General. The native areas left initially totaled less than 10% of the entire land mass of the Union, which was later expanded to 13%.
The Act further prohibited the practice of serfdom or sharecropping. It also protected existing agreements or arrangement of land hired or leased by both parties.
This land was in "native reserve" areas, which meant it was under "communal" tenure vested in African chiefs: it could not be bought, sold or used as surety. Outside such areas, perhaps of even greater significance for black farming was that the Act forbade black tenant farming on white-owned land. Since so many black farmers were sharecroppers or labor tenants, that had a devastating effect, but its full implementation was not immediate. The Act strengthened the chiefs, who were part of the state administration, but it forced many blacks into the "white" areas into wage labour.
Impact
The Act created a system of land tenure that deprived most South Africans of the right to own land. That had major socio-economic repercussions. Had the Supreme Court of South Africa not rendered the Act's application void for a few years, it also would have disenfranchised all "natives" in the Cape Colony, where blacks and people of mixed race (Cape Coloureds) had greater political rights than in the other provinces as a legacy of British rule. It had a property (and education)-based franchise. The Act continued in force 40 years.
The opposition was modest but vocal. John Dube used his newspaper to create an issue. As president of what would become the African National Congress, he supported whites like William Cullen Wilcox, who had created the Zululand Industrial Improvement Company. That had led to them supplying land to thousands of black people in Natal. Dube was one of five people who were sent to Britain to try and overturn the law once it came into force in South Africa.
Sol Plaatje traveled to Britain with the SANNC (later the African National Congress) to protest the Natives Land Act but to no avail. He collected transcripts of court deliberations on the Natives Land Act and testimonies from those directly subject to the act in the 1916 book Native Life in South Africa.
Political ironies
Much political irony surrounded the Act: