CRG Seminar: Between ‘Community’ and ‘Custom’: Mining, Land, and Distributional Conflict in Rural South Africa

This seminar examines contemporary modalities of distributional conflict in rural South Africa, focusing on the impacts of the rapid expansion of platinum group metal extraction in areas where land is held under customary tenure systems. Conflict emerges amid rapid socio-economic transformations driven by mining-led land dispossession and the growing dominance of market exchange as the primary mechanism of wealth distribution in a rural political economy historically structured around subsistence agriculture and other land-based livelihoods. Mining has entrenched an asocial and exclusionary model of development in which the benefits derived from mineral extraction are concentrated in the hands of local elites, who position themselves as representatives of ‘traditional communities’. Under these conditions, mining royalties and development initiatives become mechanisms for elite accumulation, deepening the marginalisation of ordinary villagers and generating localised struggles not only over mineral-rich land and mining revenues, but also over social membership and belonging.

 

I argue that these struggles reflect not only the historical distortion of African customary systems of landholding under colonialism and apartheid, but also the attenuation of “community” as a shared social principle. To better understand these dynamics, I propose that both “custom” and “community” must be analytically extricated from the structural forces underpinning what I term the “definition paradigm” — a framework that reduces them to fixed, externally imposed, legally and administratively defined categories. Instead, they should be conceptualised as relatively autonomous local institutional domains, located within the social imaginary, which local social actors may invoke, negotiate, share, contest, or even reject in struggles over land, authority, belonging, and distributive justice.