The Land Is Ours tells the fascinating story of South Africa's early black lawyers, and explores the relationship between the law and politics. It shows that the concept of a Bill of Rights, which is an international norm today, was pioneered by these black South African lawyers, and is particularly relevant in light of current debates about the Co

The coasts of today's American South feature luxury condominiums, resorts, and gated communities, yet just a century ago, a surprising amount of beachfront property in the Chesapeake, along the Carolina shores, and around the Gulf of Mexico was owned and populated by African Americans. Blending social and environmental history, Andrew W. Kahrl tells the story of African American–owned beaches in the twentieth century. By reconstructing African American life along the coast, Kahrl demonstrates just how important these properties were for African American communities and leisure, as well as for economic empowerment, especially during the era of the Jim Crow South. However, in the wake of the civil rights movement and amid the growing prosperity of the Sunbelt, many African Americans fell victim to effective campaigns to dispossess black landowners of their properties and beaches. Kahrl makes a signal contribution to our understanding of African American landowners and real-estate developers, as well as the development of coastal capitalism along the southern seaboard, tying the creation of overdeveloped, unsustainable coastlines to the unmaking of black communities and cultures along the shore. The result is a skillful appraisal of the ambiguous legacy of racial progress in the Sunbelt.

In This Land Is Ours Now, Wendy Wolford presents an original framework for understanding social mobilization. She argues that social movements are not the politically coherent, bounded entities often portrayed by scholars, the press, and movement leaders. Instead, they are constantly changing mediations between localized moral economies and official movement ideologies. Wolford develops her argument by analyzing how a particular social movement works: Brazil’s Rural Landless Workers’ Movement, known as the Movimento Sem Terra (MST). Founded in the southernmost states of Brazil in the mid-1980s, this extraordinary grassroots agrarian movement grew dramatically in the ensuing years. By the late 1990s it was the most dynamic, well-organized social movement in Brazilian history. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Wolford compares the development of the movement in Brazil’s southern state of Santa Catarina and its northeastern state of Pernambuco. As she explains, in the south, most of the movement’s members were sons and daughters of small peasant farmers; in the northeast, they were almost all former plantation workers, who related awkwardly to the movement’s agenda of accessing “land for those who work it.” The MST became an effective presence in Pernambuco only after the local sugarcane economy had collapsed. Worldwide sugarcane prices dropped throughout the 1990s, and by 1999 the MST was a prominent political organizer in the northeastern plantation region. Yet fewer than four years later, most of the region’s workers had dropped out of the movement. By delving into the northeastern workers’ motivations for joining and then leaving the MST, Wolford adds nuance and depth to accounts of a celebrated grassroots social movement, and she highlights the contingent nature of social movements and political identities more broadly.

Why has land reform been such a failure in South Africa? Will expropriation without compensation solve the problem? What can be done to get the land programme back on track? In Land Matters, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi tackles the past, present and future of the land question in South Africa. Going back in history, he shows how Africans’ communal systems of landownership were used by colonial rulers to deny that Africans owned the land at all. He explores the effects of the Land Acts, Bantustans and forced removals. And he evaluates the ANC’s policies on land throughout the struggle years, during the negotiations of the 1990s, and in government. Land Matters unpacks the government’s achievements and failures in land redistribution, restitution and tenure reform, and makes suggestions for what needs to be done in future. The book also explores the power of chiefs, the tension between communal landownership and the desire for private title, the failure of the willing-seller, willing-buyer approach, women and land reform, the role of banks, and the debates around amending the Constitution. Steering clear of the simplistic and polarising terms of the land debate, Ngcukaitobi argues for a return to the nuanced constitutional requirements of justice and equity in South Africa’s land policy. Thoughtful and provocative, Land Matters sheds light on one of the most topical, complex and urgent issues in South Africa today.

On countless occasions in history one group with political power has taken property from a less powerful group as part of a larger strategy to dehumanize or infantilize them. The colonial expropriation of property from native peoples, the Nazi confiscation of property from Jews, the Hutu taking of property from Tutsis during and after the Rwandan genocide, and Saddam Hussein's seizing of property from the Kurds in Iraq all typify this enduring phenomenon. In such instances, the dispossessed were subjected to deprivations of property and dignity. Subsequent governments then had to navigate the perilous landscape surrounding the return of land and other property to displaced or decimated populations. They could ignore the fact that people were deprived of their property, or they could rectify it. We Want What's Ours is a detailed study of South Africa's attempts to rectify the deprivation of land suffered by thousands of people under the colonial and apartheid regimes. It teaches a critical lesson about these transitions: remedying past wrongs entails more than distributing money or even returning property, because the dispossessed did not just lose their possessions, they also had their dignity taken from them. A comprehensive remedy for these 'dignity takings' involves confronting the underlying dehumanization, infantilization, and political exclusion that enabled the dispossession. That is, it requires 'dignity restoration' - a remedy based on principles of restorative justice that seeks to rehabilitate the dispossessed and reintegrate them into the fabric of society. South Africa's colonial and apartheid-era land dispossessions are a quintessential example of 'dignity takings', and the post-apartheid government is unique because it has sought to move beyond the more common step of only providing reparations (compensation for tangible losses) and instead has tried to facilitate the restoration of the dignity of the dispossessed. Bernadette Atuahene's detailed research, and extensive interviews with over one hundred and fifty South Africans who participated in the nation's land restitution program, demonstrates what was required for this 'dignity restoration', and how successful it has ultimately been. Rooted solidly in both academic analysis and human experiences, this book serves as an invaluable resource to international organizations, government bureaucrats, policy makers, NGOs, students, and scholars interested in redress for historical injustice, defending property rights, and conflict prevention.

"This Country of Ours" is a collection of extraordinary stories from the history of the United States beginning with accounts of exploration and settlement and ending with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. This is a book which when you lay it down will make you say, "I'm glad that I was born an American." Contents: Stories of Explorers and Pioneers How the Vikings of Old Sought and Found New Lands The Sea of Darkness and the Great Faith of Columbus How Columbus Fared Forth Upon the Sea of Darkness and Came to Pleasant Lands Beyond How Columbus Returned in Triumph How America Was Named How the Flag of England Was Planted on the Shores of the New World How the Flag of France Was Planted in Florida How the French Founded a Colony in Florida How the Spaniards Drove the French Out of Florida How a Frenchman Avenged the Death of His Countrymen The Adventures of Sir Humphrey Gilbert About Sir Walter Raleigh's Adventures in the Golden West Stories of Virginia The Adventures of Captain John Smith More Adventures of Captain John Smith How the Colony Was Saved How Pocahontas Took a Journey Over the Seas How the Redmen Fought Against Their White Brothers How Englishmen Fought a Duel With Tyranny The Coming of the Cavaliers Bacon's Rebellion The Story of the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe Stories of New England The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers The Founding of Massachusetts The Story of Harry Vane The Story of Anne Hutchinson and the Founding of Rhode Island The Founding of Harvard How Quakers First Came to New England How Maine and New Hampshire Were Founded The Founding of Connecticut and War With the Indians The Founding of New Haven The Hunt for the Regicides King Philip's War How the Charter of Connecticut Was Saved The Witches of Salem Stories of the Middle and Southern Colonies Stories of the French in America Stories of the Struggle for Liberty The Boston Tea-party Stories of the United States Under the Constitution

This volume shows how ramblers, road protesters and country lovers are coming together to challenge the rural land ownership regime. It argues that the urban population should use its democratic strength to deprive rural landowners of their grip on the countryside. first of a series of forthcoming challenges to landowner control of the countryside. It was followed by the 100,000-strong protest of the landowners' Countryside Alliance at Hyde Park in July 1997. This work on the politics of rural land ownership, appears on the eve of the second reading of the fox-hunting Bill. the last 1000 years, and analyzes the current ownership of the countryside. It unveils a radical programme of action, setting out a new social contract through which landowners and the people would share control of the countryside.