Clarification about South African Land Distribution

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To understand the current situation in South Africa, you need to understand first what happened in the past. The really short, simplified version is that white people have clashed with black people over land ever since white settlers arrived in South Africa.
During the Apartheid years, the white minority government forcibly removed and displaced many black people, took their land and forced them into small, semi-independent “homelands”, dotted all over the country:

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can see that the homelands (coloured areas of the map) form only a small part of the country. Yet the majority of black people lived there. True, the homelands were largely based on where these tribes already lived, but by the time Apartheid ended, millions of people had been confined to those areas.
In the cities, the same segregation happened. Residential areas were proclaimed as whites only suburbs, while black people were forcibly removed to “locations” outside the city, known as townships. These remain to this day the poorest areas of each city, with dense housing and shacks, minimal infrastructure and service delivery.

After white minority rule ended in 1994, the ANC government embarked on a long and difficult journey to restore these inequalities and right the injustices of the past. Massive housing projects were rolled out, to try and get black people out of shacks and informal settlements, and into small, government-built houses known as RDP houses (Reconstruction and Development Plan housing). These houses look like this:

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Meanwhile, a land claims court was set up to deal with the thorny issue of land restitution. People who were forcibly moved off their land during the Apartheid years could submit a land claim, which the government would then settle either by buying the land back from the current owner and giving that land to the claimants, or by means of financial compensation if the land owner was not willing to sell, or the claimants wanted cash compensation rather than land.
This land reform process was initially based on a Willing Seller, Willing Buyer principle. It failed miserably. In part because most claimants wanted cash, not land. Which means communities that have already been compensated through the land claims process, still have no land. And the average community member also did not benefit from the money paid to their tribal chiefs or family leaders or community trust.

Another reason it failed is because white farmers who reluctantly sold to the government as part of the land claims process, inflated their asking prices to ridiculous levels, far beyond the market value of the land. And when they left, they often sold all their stock and equipment, leaving the new black land owners with nothing, having to start farming from scratch, with no access to capital and limited or no commercial farming experience. It was destined to fail and left behind a bunch of struggling black farmers (now with land but still living in poverty) and a small number of obscenely rich white farmers, who walked away with millions.

In some cases, those same white farmers then approached the new black farm owners a few years later, offered them a fraction of the price they were paid for their farm by government, and got their farm back cheaply.

This was an expensive and painful exercise for the government, and while there were some notable exceptions, it became quite clear that many white farmers abused even the land reform process to their own advantage. They either refused to sell, or asked obscene amounts of money for their farms.

There are a few success stories, and a few white farmers were willing to assist the new owners to help make a success of farming, but the majority of commercial farms handed over to black claimants fell into disrepair and became unproductive. The land reform process failed to address the injustices of the past and did not make a meaningful dent in the inequality of land ownership.

The result is that the majority of productive, commercial farmland is still in the hands of the white minority. And the majority of black people are still without land and housing. Land invasions and illegal shack building is common on vacant land around big cities, due to the huge need for land and housing. Millions of the poorest black South Africans still live like this:

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If you have read this far, you can now begin to understand what is behind the government’s move to take a more radical approach to land reform. Black people have been in power, politically, since 1994, but they do not feel in power economically. The white minority (8% of the population) still own most of the economic wealth and most of the private land in South Africa. This, dear questioner, is why white landowners in South Africa are being “targeted by their own government”.

The land hunger is such a burning issue that many argue (including President Ramaphosa) that the stability of the country is at risk if we do not speed up land reform (through land expropriation without compensation). We do not want to see haphazard, illegal, violent land grabs as we saw in Zimbabwe. And to avoid that we have to address the land question and make tangible progress.

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