Land Reform for a Landless Chief in South Africa: History and Land Restitution in KwaZulu-Natal

Land claims and contests have been central to the construction of political authority across the African continent. South Africa's post-apartheid land reform program aims to address historical dispossessions, but the program has experienced numerous obstacles and limits-in terms of pace, communal land access, productivity, and rural class divides. Drawing on archival and newspaper sources, Kelly traces how the descendant of a colonially-appointed, landless chief manipulated a claim into a landed chieftaincy and how both the chief and the competing claimants have deployed histories of landlessness and firstcomer accounts in a manner distinct to the KwaZulu-Natal region as part of the land restitution process.