Chapter 5 - Love in the Time of Land Reform

Summary

There are few issues in South African politics, culture and literature more resonant, more freighted, more emotive, than land. Chapter 5 begins by observing the ongoing centrality of land and ownership, especially in the wake of land reform programmes and populist shifts in political rhetoric. Novels by Anne Landsman, Marlene van Niekerk and Damon Galgut engage in detail with the crucial question of ownership, which is linked to race. They explore connections between the abject, labour and ownership, with the bodily and affective experiences shared by white women farmers and their brown or black workers being central themes of each novel. These novels struggle to articulate answers to the challenges of land reform, but they also foreground intimate gestures of recompense. In relation to the ethics of care, and the practices associated with love, they mark an important beginning of the conversation between the post-apartheid pastoral on the one hand, and land reform on the other.