Microsoft Word - PhD Thesis Final.pdf - University of Limpopo ...

involved planned village land use. Before “betterment”, people in the
Makgabeng area, lived in clustered homesteads, along the hills or ridges,
with their fields near rivers and streams. They grazed cattle on hills and
in forests, or further from home. With “betterment”, they were forcefully
allocated new fields and new residential areas. The new land use system
was inflexible in which people found themselves with smaller fields and
gardens than before, and had to walk greater distances to fetch wood,
water and thatching grass. That was accompanied by very unpopular
stock-culling measures which triggered peasant resistance to
“betterment” throughout the homelands. The land use system in the
homelands was frozen by the abolition of those homelands when the new
democratic order was ushered in the early 1990s. Land reform policies
were put in place from 1994 by the new democratically elected
government in an attempt to redress the previous imbalances, and the
Makgabeng area was also affected by those changes.
The homeland identity has never become a salient feature on most Black
communities even if it was so vigorously imposed and promoted. It has
never become more salient than the communal identity of villages.
Communities in the Makgabeng area, for instance, still defined
themselves according to their respective villages in which they lived. The
homeland identity was even less salient than that of chieftaincy in which
communities still defined themselves as the Matlala or Malebogo people,
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