Why Nations Fail by James A. Robinson Daron Acemoglu

Author:James A. Robinson Daron Acemoglu [Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781847654618
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2019-01-29T07:17:53.308744+00:00

Both of the goals of removing competition with white farmers and developing a large low-wage labor force were simultaneously accomplished by the Natives Land Act of 1913. The act, anticipating Lewis’s notion of dual economy, divided South Africa into two parts, a modern prosperous part and a traditional poor part. Except that the prosperity and poverty were actually being created by the act itself. It stated that 87 percent of the land was to be given to the Europeans, who represented about 20 percent of the population. The remaining 13 percent was to go to the Africans. The Land Act had many predecessors, of course, because gradually Europeans had been confining Africans onto smaller and smaller reserves. But it was the act of 1913 that definitively institutionalized the situation and set the stage for the formation of the South African Apartheid regime, with the white minority having both the political and economic rights and the black majority being excluded from both. The act specified that several land reserves, including the Transkei and the Ciskei, were to become the African “Homelands.” Later these would become known as the Bantustans, another part of the rhetoric of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, since it claimed that the African peoples of Southern Africa were not natives of the area but were descended from the Bantu people who had migrated out of Eastern Nigeria about a thousand years before. They thus had no more—and of course, in practice, less—entitlement to the land than the European settlers.

Map 16 (page 266) shows the derisory amount of land allocated to Africans by the 1913 Land Act and its successor in 1936. It also records information from 1970 on the extent of a similar land allocation that took place during the construction of another dual economy in Zimbabwe, which we discuss in chapter 13.

The 1913 legislation also included provisions intended to stop black sharecroppers and squatters from farming on white-owned land in any capacity other than as labor tenants. As the secretary for native affairs explained, “The effect of the act was to put a stop, for the future, to all transactions involving anything in the nature of partnership between Europeans and natives in respect of land or the fruits of land. All new contracts with natives must be contracts of service. Provided there is a bona fide contract of this nature there is nothing to prevent an employer from paying a native in kind, or by the privilege of cultivating a defined piece of ground . . . But the native cannot pay the master anything for his right to occupy the land.”

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