The land question was at the heart of the South African national liberation struggle. The 1913 Natives Land Act restricted black people from owning and occupying parts of the country, leading to whites owning about 87% of the land. This reduced the African majority to “pariahs in the land of their birth”, in the 1916 words of Sol Plaatje, the founding secretary general of the African National Congress, now South Africa’s governing party.
To reverse this injustice, in 2018 the national assembly acceded to demands from various pressure groups and began the process to amend section 25 of the constitution, which deals with restitution and redress of the dispossessed. Some had argued that the section hindered land expropriation. Parliament conducted public hearings across the country to get public input on the proposed amendments.
