Why Land Reform in Southern Africa Is Failing to Break Its Colonial Chains

Across Southern Africa, handing land back to dispossessed communities was supposed to be the great undoing of colonialism. A sweeping review published in Frontiers in Sustainable Resource Management argues that, decades after independence, the region’s land reforms are doing something far stranger than simply failing: they are quietly rebuilding the very colonial structures they were meant to dismantle. Sicelo Leonard Makapela and Bianca Ifeoma Chigbu of Walter Sisulu University synthesized 43 studies and policy texts spanning South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Mozambique, and their conclusion is provocative. Land reform that changes only who owns the soil, while leaving labor regimes and knowledge systems untouched, risks entrenching what decolonial scholars call the colonial present.

The technical heart of the study lies in its integrative, theory-informed review design. Rather than statistically pooling intervention studies, the authors ran a PRISMA-guided search across Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and African Journals Online between January and March 2026, identifying 295 records before duplicate removal. After screening, 43 studies and documents entered the final synthesis. Each source was coded across four analytical domains: land and tenure configurations, labor and livelihood systems, knowledge and epistemic orders, and justice and transition dimensions. The point was not to estimate effect sizes but to build an explanatory framework showing how land, labor, livelihoods, and knowledge co-constitute reform outcomes.

The theoretical scaffolding draws on three strands. Decolonial theory, particularly Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s concept of the coloniality of power, distinguishes formal decolonisation from the racialised hierarchies, capitalist accumulation, and Eurocentric knowledge regimes that persist after independence. Agrarian political economy situates land within class formation, labor regimes, and state-capital relations. And scholarship on Indigenous Knowledge Systems, or IKS, insists that colonial domination was as much epistemic as territorial. Together, these strands let the authors ask a question most land debates avoid: not just who gains access to land, but what kinds of work become possible, and which knowledge systems are authorized to define the transformation.

The empirical picture is sobering. In South Africa, the 1913 Natives Land Act confined the Black majority to a fraction of the country, and post-1994 reform has only partially challenged that configuration. By the mid-2010s, roughly 5 percent of land had been transferred against a 30 percent target. Kepe and Hall’s analysis of the Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy is particularly damning: because the state remains the nominal owner and leases land to beneficiaries under performance conditions, paternalistic relations echo apartheid rather than dismantle it. The authors describe this as recolonisation, a situation where the state stands in for former colonial proprietors while maintaining hierarchical control over beneficiaries.

Zimbabwe tells a different but equally instructive story. The fast-track land reform after 2000 radically altered ownership, disrupting white commercial dominance on a massive scale. Yet the process involved violent occupations, politicized allocation, and deep economic disruption, with severe productivity declines and food insecurity. Former farmworkers were especially marginalized, often lacking secure land access and becoming part of a precarious, mobile class of labor straddling farm work, informal urban livelihoods, and residual rural claims. The poorest subsistence farmers in congested communal areas saw little benefit at all.

What emerges across both trajectories is a pattern the authors call hybrid, precarious livelihood portfolios. Rural households stitch together small-scale farming on marginal or insecure plots, seasonal and casual wage labor, informal trade, and social grants or remittances. Evidence from Zimbabwe suggests this hybridity is as much an expression of constraint and vulnerability as of diversification, given the absence of robust agrarian support or rural employment creation. Chipenda’s transformative social policy perspective offers a countervailing note: where beneficiaries have meaningful land access and supportive institutions, land reform can function as an agrarian welfare regime, strengthening resilience during shocks such as COVID-19. The lesson is that redistribution without concurrent support for production, social infrastructure, and income security converts land into a burden rather than a livelihood.

The knowledge dimension may be the review’s most viral insight. Land and conservation policies across the region continue to privilege Euro-modern epistemologies, treating indigenous land uses as backward or illegitimate. Fortress conservation models, rooted in European land ideologies of individualized ownership and untouched wilderness, continue to justify the displacement and criminalization of indigenous communities such as the Batwa, Ogiek, and Endorois from ancestral territories. The result is a double injustice: material displacement and epistemic erasure. Meanwhile, Masenya’s analysis of South African IKS policy shows that even well-intentioned protection frameworks rely on documentation and intellectual property regimes misaligned with communal, oral, and relational modes of knowledge transmission, effectively capturing indigenous knowledge as an object rather than recognizing communities as co-producers and custodians.

Yet the review also documents countervailing possibilities. Winkler’s exploration of communal landholdings in Southern Africa shows traditional leaders functioning as custodians of lands, cultures, languages, and nonhuman actants, with residents engaging pre-colonial land laws and grounded relationality that yield radically different political and spatial outcomes, delinked from Western planning paradigms. Huizenga’s work on Aboriginal title in South Africa’s restitution programme demonstrates that indigenous rights are not simply constrained by colonial legal regimes but co-constituted through litigation, social activism, and living customary law in ways that sometimes expand indigenous agency. Kenjio’s Mozambique case illustrates that decolonising tenure is arduous but feasible when modern reforms are guided by, rather than imposed upon, existing tenure logics.

The authors’ proposed conceptual framework treats land reform as agrarian-epistemic reconfiguration across four mutually constitutive domains: property regimes and coloniality, labor regimes and livelihood systems, knowledge systems and epistemic orders, and justice outcomes. Changes in any one domain generate feedback effects across the others. Secure, democratically governed tenure may strengthen livelihood stability, which enhances community capacity to sustain and mobilize indigenous knowledge. Greater epistemic recognition can then reshape governance and deepen distributive, procedural, and recognitional justice. Conversely, technocratic control over land may marginalize local knowledge, weaken autonomy, and undermine the transformative promise of redistribution. The central proposition is stark: agrarian justice and epistemic justice are inseparable, and neither can be achieved in isolation.

For policymakers, the implications are concrete. Land reform should be reoriented toward structural transformation rather than deracialisation of ownership alone, explicitly addressing who controls land after redistribution and how benefits are distributed within communities, with attention to gender, age, and class. Statutory land codes and conservation policies reproducing colonial logics need systematic revision, replacing fortress conservation with rights-based, community-centered models. Indigenous knowledge holders should be recognized as central actors in land use planning, agricultural extension, and climate adaptation, through co-designed programmes and community-led monitoring. Digital archiving of IKS, if not carefully governed, risks expropriation and misrepresentation, demanding ethical frameworks co-developed with communities. Without such shifts, the review warns, land reform in Southern Africa will remain caught between populist promises and recolonising practices, redistributing hectares while the deeper structures of dispossession, exploitation, and epistemic domination persist intact beneath the surface.

Subject of Research: Land reform, knowledge systems, and the reconfiguration of work and livelihoods in Southern Africa

Article Title: Land reform, knowledge systems, and the reconfiguration of work and livelihoods in Southern Africa

Article References: Makapela, S. L., & Chigbu, B. I. (2026). Land reform, knowledge systems, and the reconfiguration of work and livelihoods in Southern Africa. Frontiers in Sustainable Resource Management, 5, Article 1880790. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsrma.2026.1880790

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsrma.2026.1880790

Keywords: Land, reform, knowledge, systems, reconfiguration, work, livelihoods, Southern, Africa, scientific research