Reflections on the Role of Traditional Authorities in Land Governance in 21st Century South Africa

By Joel Pearson This working paper offers a survey of recent South African literature on the role of the chieftaincy in issues of land administration and governance. It does so along three broad thematic areas which, I argue, underpin current debates around traditional authority in the post-apartheid context: (1) democracy; (2) bureaucracy; and (3) capitalism. In tracking the diversity of permutations that transformations along these three axes have produced in the chieftaincy and its relation to land, this overview emphasises the need for sustained and situated empirical studies.