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December 1997 Worlds Collide Along the Wild Coast By Daria Caliguire

 

South Africa is perhaps best known on the African continent as a land of extremes: unique for its sophisticated and dehumanizing system of racial oppression under apartheid as well as its near-miraculous and peaceful transition to democracy. In terms of development, South Africa's tendency toward extremes persists. There exists a striking and uneasy juxtaposition of first and third world conditions both within cities as gated suburbs neighbor squatter camps and on a much greater scale between South Africa's urban and rural areas. Part of the great challenge undertaken by the new government is to bridge these disparities in development through integrating and providing resources to previously disadvantaged communities and areas. The government's current attempt to tackle such a challenge in the Eastern Cape, one of the poorest provinces in the country, shows the difficult obstacles and choices inherent in such a development initiative.

Lushlands and Poverty
The Eastern Cape is legendary for both its natural and community resources. It has fertile farmlands, lush vegetation and the single largest stretch of undeveloped and spectacular coastline in South Africa, known as the Wild Coast. As the birthplace and training ground for many of the country's most famous anti-apartheid leaders, including Nelson Mandela and Stephen Biko, it also claims a proud heritage of political activism which is partially rooted in the traditional home it provides for the Xhosa people.

The Eastern Cape has other, less laudable features: high infant mortality, limited access to clean water and a migrant labor mining system which has left in its wake an extremely high concentration of poor, female headed households. These problematic conditions and other related indicators of the region's underdevelopment are notably worse in the rural parts of the province, which fall largely within the boundaries of the former black homelands, Ciskei and Transkei, than in the predominantly white urban centers, which form an industrial corridor.

Creating a Fault Line
In an attempt to bridge the gap between the Eastern Cape's rural and urban areas, in 1996 the national government targeted the Wild Coast and the industrial corridor for development under a special program, the Spatial Development Initiative (SDI). This planning-led program is meant to evaluate the particular needs of each targeted area, examine their linkages to the rest of the province and design an overall development strategy. To date, the needs-assessment for each area has been completed, but progress on the next stage of the Wild Coast SDI is stalled. Although there are a number of factors that have slowed the SDI development process, the Wild Coast as a case study provides insight into one critical set of issues that creates an urban-rural' fault line a divide between Western and developed, versus traditional and underdeveloped which becomes difficult to traverse.

The fault line lies in the land itself and has taken shape around the issues of ownership, community control and benefit, environmental impact and conflicting notions of development. The Wild Coast and much of the Transkei is dotted with small Xhosa villages connected by dirt roads and cattle paths that wash away when the rains come and even in the driest weather are difficult to travel. The absence of a comprehensive and paved highway system has left the Transkei isolated to both its benefit and detriment. The region's isolation has meant that the traditional community fabric remains strong and many of the villages are able to provide for themselves through local subsistence agriculture and harvesting from the sea. However, the Transkei's isolation has also meant that as South Africa's first world continues to prosper and expand, the gap widens. This not only leaves the Transkei further behind but puts additional pressure on the province to develop a natural resource base for large scale economic developments.

Land Ownership, Land Grab
As a first step toward opening up the Transkei for development and greater integration into the rest of the province, the SDI recommends building a highway along the Wild Coast to link the Transkei to the industrial corridor in the south and the developed Natal coastline in the north. The SDI plan argues that the highway is essential to: connect Transkei communities with each other and the rest of the country, develop their natural resource base with bigger markets for distribution, as well as opening the area up for eco-tourism.

There is one major problem: land ownership. Almost all of the land along the Wild Coast and in rural Transkei is communally owned. All decisions regarding land use and allocation are traditionally handled at the local level through community process, with the chief usually having the final say. The lack of private property rights has complicated standard procedures for expropriation by or sale to the government of land, and has temporarily put the SDI plans on hold. Unfortunately, however, it has not had the same effect on private sales. Instead, it has provided an opening for unscrupulous private developers and investors.

Once the 1994 democratic elections formally erased the hostile borders between the former Transkei homeland and its South African neighbors, developers started moving into the area and made deals with local chiefs to acquire prime ocean-front property on the Wild Coast for high-end resort development. Given that most of the communities have no mechanism for dealing with the sale of communal land to outsiders, most of the acquisitions were made for well below (any possible assessment of) market value and on terms that at best would benefit only the chief. Not only would the majority of the community fail to share in the benefits of the development, but it would suffer from a loss of access to the land an important means of subsistence.

The potential for abuse and virtually unlimited negative social and environmental impacts was so great that it rapidly caught public attention. A coalition of environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) successfully petitioned the court to halt the sale of all land along the Wild Coast. A commission was set up to investigate the abuses and recommend a set of procedures for handling the sale or transfer of communal land to both government and private parties. The commission's findings are due in 1998. Its release promises to re-ignite the debate surrounding the future of the Wild Coast and what development means when first and third worlds collide.

Daria Caliguire recently returned from three years in South Africa, where she was involved in a number of programs concerned with sustainable policies over land use and indigenous rights.

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