In this chapter, I will use what Du Toit (2019) calls ‘policy-sensemaking’ to explain the populist right-wing assumptions that play a large part in determining the public response to land reform debates in South Africa:

It is important to deconstruct the rhetorical strategies that underlie gatekeeping around resource entitlement and how it is based in a logic of enclosure, where viability is defined by liberal, market-based property regimes that are remnants of the colonial era. I argue that post-apartheid-era liberalism allows for the mainstream rhetorical turn to the right, through strategies of discourse Steyn (2012) labels ‘epistemologies of ignorance’. Land holds a symbolic significance in the post-apartheid political landscape, often a scapegoat for unresolved racial tensions combined with the persistent economic inequality yet to be significantly addressed, which is why I focus on discussions around land reform to get a sense of how far-right groups engage with civil society and the state at the rhetorical level. Land equates symbolically to property, which signifies human rights and self-determination for proponents of liberalism. For marginalized groups, land signals the opportunity to take back what was stolen from them through colonial conquest and apartheid.

Land restitution policies post-apartheid were pursued through a neoliberal economic framework in alignment with major international trade and development organizations dominated by the hegemonic influence of the industrialized world. The initial post-apartheid strategy for land reform was incorporated into the Reconstruction and Development Plan, which was an attempt to kickstart the post-apartheid economy by way of privatization and drawing in foreign direct investment through trade liberalization. The African National Congress (ANC) government initially adopted a market-based ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ model that compensated current landowners for their land at market rates, making land reform prohibitively expensive, preventing the timely processing of land claim applications (Aliber & Cousins, 2013). For those who did have their land restituted, the government required participation in cooperative schemas that expanded the production capacity of the land to signal commitment to food security as envisioned by industrialized countries (Cousins & Scoones, 2010; Greenberg, 2015). Due to lack of training and inputs for newly minted farmers to produce at this scale, these schemas largely failed. The failure of these projects has provided justification for current agricultural landowners, white farmers that own farmland due to historical colonial territorialization, to underline their entitlement as contributors to national prosperity and underscore the failures of the ANC's post-apartheid policies. Right-wing organizations in South Africa have reshaped the language of former colonial imaginaries by using transformed identity narratives that prompt nostalgia of nationalist discourses prevalent during apartheid. The controversial amendment to the South African constitution, article 25, proposing expropriation without compensation (Parliament of South Africa, 2019), became a lightning rod for controversy because it challenged the liberal state's role in reinforcing property regimes. The amendment would allow for privately held property to be seized by the state for the purpose of land redistribution without compensating the current owners for its value. Privately owned land is still overwhelmingly held by white landowners who use it for large-scale commercial agricultural operations (Ashton, 2012).

In order for white minority groups to include themselves in the post-apartheid liberal democratic ‘rainbow nation’, the language of colonial trusteeship and racial segregation has to be couched in terms of democratic participation. Groups that represented liberal whites during apartheid such as the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the South African Institute of Race Relations (IRR) have taken a decidedly skewed political orientation to the right, siding them with AfriForum, a right-wing minority Afrikaner interest group, and the apartheid-era white agricultural unions now conglomerated into Agri SA. The commitment to liberalism and property rights is largely what ties together the special interests and language of the political alliances of far-right groups in South Africa and abroad. Similar to other right-wing groups in the industrialized world, market economies and entrepreneurial individualism are conflated with human rights, democracy and free speech, which is reliant on the erasure of past abuse and dispossession that accumulated the capital necessary for European global dominance. By investigating the rhetorical strategies of the far right around land reform and race, we see that many of the tropes of racialization during apartheid are still used to claim gatekeeping and resource entitlement, as the liberalized post-apartheid economy prioritizes large-scale industrial operations with global supply chain linkages over the subsistence needs of the most marginalized. This signals the limitations of the liberal democratic state as a vehicle for emancipatory projects like land reform, as well as its ability to reverse the state-sanctioned violence and territorialization characteristic of the colonial era. Lastly, the findings emphasize the importance of understanding the symbolic and affective dimensions of policy debate as a necessary facet of policy implementation, which emphasizes the importance of historical background in shaping civic cooperation.

Reactionary narratives of the far right in South Africa

I begin by using the research of Steyn (2012) to explicate the rhetorical strategies adopted by white supremacist and far-right groups in South Africa. Steyn uses a framework called epistemologies of ignorance to describe discourses around Afrikaner identity and race in post-apartheid South Africa. She draws from McHugh's (2005) definition of epistemologies of ignorance as an active engagement in choosing what is remembered and what is brought to light, which is useful in explaining historical erasure that is characteristic of post-apartheid Afrikaner and white minority discourse. For settler colonial societies such as South Africa, social reproductions of ignorance are dependent on racial imaginaries that enforce social hierarchies and delimit access to resources. Steyn's analysis is useful for outlining the motivations and assumptions of far-right groups and why they deploy reactionary rhetoric in this way.

The Racial Contract by Charles Mills (1997: 18) provides an explanatory framework for white ignorance, describing it as a cognitive dysfunction that renders whites unable to perceive the world that they themselves created. The Racial Contract is a global commitment to ignorance that upholds structures of white supremacy, denying the lived experiences of the subjugated. White ignorance is a strategic move enabled by creating structures of power through legal mechanisms that make a priori claims of egalitarianism in settler colonial societies (Applebaum, 2008). Hoagland (2007) states that in contrast, there is a refusal of relationality that white ignorance cultivates, and the lack of accountability or denial of responsibility white ignorance allows. White South Africans tread a thin line of discourse that justifies their continued occupation of dispossessed land after generations of capital accumulation gained from forced labour.

Steyn and Foster dissect what continues to be a resistant whiteness to the transformation of South Africa as an inclusive democracy. The authors demonstrate this by analysing what they come to call repertoires for talking white which are deployed as ‘New South Africa Speak’ (NSAS) and ‘white ululation’, which ‘allows the ideological function of the discourse to operate efficiently while at the same time rendering the position of the speaker/writer more difficult to pin down and critique. Moreover, the ambivalence enables positive self-presentation even as hard-nosed self-interest is being pursued’ (2008: 27). These rhetorical strategies serve to reproduce apartheid-era dominance for whites, while also incorporating the popularized discourses that developed as a result of instituting inclusive democracy. NSAS carries assumptions of democratic principles such as egalitarianism, reconciliation and freedom; seeking to recover a visage of dignity and reconciliation for white South Africans who seek to participate in democratic processes and consensus. Framing rhetoric under these assumptions allows white South Africans to no longer associate with the violence of former racial regimes and signals goodwill efforts to reconcile the wrongs of the previous government. Despite these impressions, NSAS is implemented strategically, embracing parts of an inclusive democracy that do not threaten their status or enforce restitution through non-racialism (MacDonald, 2006). By stressing the notion of an even playing field, poverty and failure are no longer structural factors but individual choices, which allows whites to deflect any responsibility for societal change while also claiming victim status. Despite appearances of commitment to egalitarianism, there is a selective application of inclusive democratic principles (Steyn & Foster, 2008: 29, 32).

In contrast to NSAS, white ululation engages in an inclusive democracy by way of representation politics (Steyn & Foster, 2008), claiming that whites as a minority group risk being victimized by a non-white majority. This rhetorical strategy actually flips the narrative on its head to now claim that the newly inclusive democratic government is targeting or neglecting minorities (whites) by adopting policies that aim to reverse the inequalities created during apartheid. With bureaucratic seats increasingly filled by black politicians through affirmative action and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policies, any complex societal ill that has not been successfully addressed becomes evidence of its failure and is linked to societal decline. Crime in South Africa is often a focus of WU, being considered a visible symptom of a society in decline. By shifting blame to the ANC, whites are able to deflect any calls to change, convinced that the apartheid-era government managed societal needs better than the current one (Steyn & Foster, 2008: 35, 38, 40).

The transition from a colonial state to an inclusive democratic one requires hegemonic groups to retool their approach to how they can justify their continued occupation and extraction. Rhetorical strategies based in historical assumptions of white dominance are a key tool for maintaining a sense of entitlement to the services of the state, which has in the past catered to white interests at a large disadvantage to other groups. The rhetorical strategies of white supremacists obscure the complicity and material benefits that structural inequality allows whites by using the discourse of egalitarianism and liberal democracy. The following sections will demonstrate how these rhetorical strategies are deployed around issues of property and entitlement; in this case the land reform debate is the arena of tension in the South African political landscape.

The case of South Africa: land reform, neoliberalism and territorialization

This section will outline the historical basis for assumptions around race, property and resource entitlement in South Africa. I focus on land restitution as an arena where multiple contestations are meted out; the approach to land reform belies post-apartheid commitment to liberal principles of property enclosure and productive fitness, which thwarts any attempts to redistribute the country's resources. Even with the commitment to land restitution written into the post-apartheid constitution, capital accumulation takes precedence, shoring up inequalities produced through colonial territorialization and apartheid. The hegemonic adherence to liberal principles imported through colonization provides legitimacy to the right-wing campaigns that reify the racial tropes of apartheid. This section will provide background to the contestations, with the rhetoric used by right-wing groups in South Africa in the next section.

Historically in South Africa, a system of coerced black labour was necessary to produce agricultural commodities on the scale of industrial-level efficiency, which necessitated subordination of black sharecropping and tenant labour. Colonial agricultural schemas were often a net negative venture that was highly subsidized by the colonial authority and then the apartheid state (Giliomee, 2003: 347). Landowning was a signal of status to the gentry of the metropole, so the actual productive output of the estate was low and depended highly on black indentured labour as the landowners generally made money outside farming (Keegan, 1986: 637). As European demand for wool heightened in the mid-nineteenth century, non-productive farms suddenly became very lucrative ventures which incentivized the transition to large-scale industrial agriculture to increase production for export to the British metropole. As the boom precipitated, indebted Boers began to sell land in parcels which made cultivation a logical use of the land and soil instead of animal husbandry of game hunting (Keegan, 1986: 638). Black tenants and sharecroppers were used in place of costly technological inputs for their superior knowledge of the soil.

Foreign colonial investment in the farms served to incentivize using black labour, valuing the skill of black farmers while also rendering them subhuman. Black farm labour performed the tasks and duties that Boer landowners were either too unskilled for or were seen as impure labour for whites. This attitude stems from conceptions of civility that were effectively imported to the African continent with them: ‘The landed whites saw themselves as an emergent class, a class in the making; and their corporate self-perception was based fundamentally on a pre-existing sense of racial identity as standard-bearers of European civilization’ (Keegan, 1986: 640). The ability of black sharecroppers to cultivate the land successfully became a threat to Boers who were economically precarious and unable to survive under the harsh conditions of the climate.

Capitalist accumulation in rural areas was bolstered by the capital influx from urban centres because of lucrative mining in the region in the early twentieth century. The mineral boom provided the capital to support a state intervention in economic sectors; in this case capital was funnelled into the rural areas where Boers were indebted and struggling. State support helped to incorporate them into the capitalist class. The flexible loans given to Afrikaner farmers allowed for the industrialization of farming practices which entailed a scaling up of productive capacity that we now see as large-scale industrial farming (Keegan, 1986: 642). Suppression of black producers and their subsequent proletarianization was a key element of capital accumulation strategies for imperialist and Afrikaner nationalist entrepreneurs. A litany of legislation such as the Group Areas Act of 1950 targeted black South Africans as a mechanism to violently displace and control their resources and labour. As black South Africans became relegated to the Bantustans, sharecropper labour declined in use due to pass controls and shifts to mining labour.

One of the first major acts passed through Parliament after the post-apartheid elections was the 1994 Restitution of Land Rights Act. The de facto system used to determine the value of land to be restituted is the ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ model, which is essentially a market-based supplyand-demand model. The willing-buyer, willing-seller model comes with a litany of stipulations, such as the land is to be used under certain conditions and generational transference of ownership is limited. The proposed plan is that though the constitution seeks to ensure the rightful restitution of land, individuals must earn their share of the land through its productive development (INDABA, 2015). Cousins (2017) notes how this schema will likely only benefit those well placed in the system to capture the benefits in backdoor partnerships.

The continuous support of neoliberal economic policies shapes production and supply chains that are reminiscent of the apartheid era. Cousins and Scoones argue that contemporary agricultural production aligns with the international development nexus, which operates on assumptions of technocratic viability:

Cousins and Scoones identify the normative assumptions in models of economic development which are based in notions of scarcity which require a technological fix at the macro scale to produce sufficient economies of scale. The technocratic model of agriculture is fundamentally rooted in the ideology of progress through modern frameworks of legibility that centre the needs of white European men (Cousins & Scoones, 2010: 35). Because modern progress situates the white European male at the apex, models of agricultural development were based in temperate zone acclimation and not the indigenous African climate:

Even with the known realities of market-based, export-oriented approaches to land reform and its failures, the technocratic narrative of food security conveniently erases the historical pathways of racial coercion and spatial resource segregation that resulted from the colonial era and state-sanctioned apartheid. Instead, the conversation gets reoriented towards large-scale commercial farming that is predominantly monopolized by white farmers and global agrocorps as a result of the retrenchment of centuries of forced removals.

The next section will detail the rhetoric deployed by influential right-wing groups in South Africa aiming to influence public discourse and policy debates. Liberal values are a common over-riding theme in how right-wing groups engage with the state and the civic arena. Groups that were historically progressive during apartheid have taken a hard turn to the right of the political spectrum; paradoxically, these groups, such as the DA and the IRR, which campaigned to end apartheid and racial segregation, now use rhetorical tactics such as non-racialism to obscure the effects that apartheid continues to have on racial inequality. The politics of representation have become a key tool for right-wing and white supremacist groups to lobby the state for access to resources; in this case land is a significant symbolic and material resource. By supporting the de facto ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ model for land restitution, right-wing lobbying groups are gatekeeping the resources taken from colonial territorialization but obscuring that process through the rhetoric of liberal democratic engagement and productive fitness.

Property, land reform and liberal democracy: an arena for racial tension

South African governmental institutions are no longer solely controlled by a white racial minority, which leaves whites uncertain about their representation in post-apartheid politics. In reality, whites in South Africa continue to control the vast majority of privately owned land and corporate monopolies in the country (Du Toit, 2019). The arena of controversy for racial tensions has consolidated in land reform debates, particularly those surrounding agricultural land, which is primarily held by whites. This section will profile influential right-wing organizations in South Africa, and how they spread misinformation and racial panic with the aim of obscuring the ways that the post-apartheid neoliberal economy continues to reinforce the structure of inequality that is still present in the country. There are some key liberal concepts that align these organizations and how they frame political issues and policy interventions. Private property is foundational to how right-wing organizations interface with the state, being framed as the essential basis for rule of law and protection of human rights. This framing is important for erasing the possible generational advantages given to whites; where the ideology of the liberal democratic state presses the notion that the effects of structural barriers and historic pathways are in fact individual failures. The economic orientation of these right-wing groups is unfettered privatization and market-based incentives originating in property regimes. For instance, the DA states in its Value and Principles that it supports ‘the right of all people to private ownership and to participate freely in the market economy’ (Democratic Alliance, 2019). For the IRR, the commitments are the same: in the ‘What We Stand For’ section of its website it states that ‘Property rights for all and Real Economic Empowerment’ are part of its core principles (South African Institute of Race Relations, 2021a). AfriForum's five core principles are vaguely defined as ‘safety’, ‘cultural identity’, ‘organisation building’, ‘self-dependence’ and ‘justice’, which underlie its mission and goals (AfriForum, n. d.). Even the national organization of agricultural unions under Agri SA belie their neoliberal leanings when speaking about the ‘land debate’, especially concerning the section 25 amendment. Instead of the nationalization of parcels of privately held agricultural land, Agri SA pushes titled land deeds as the alternative form for land restitution that achieves ‘economic empowerment’ (Agri SA, 2021b). I will focus further on these four organizations and how their right-wing political and economic leanings influence debates on race, inequality and land in South Africa.

To begin with AfriForum, the organization considers itself a civil rights organization giving a voice to minority Afrikaners in the country; its civil rights charter promotes non-racialism as a way of offering legal protections to minorities and mirrors global civil rights charters such as those of the United Nations. The language of the charter assumes Afrikaners are now left out of the post-apartheid democracy and that Afrikaans is a language undergoing erasure. The organization comments on political and cultural events perceived to affect Afrikaners. The strategic aim of the organization is to promote Afrikaner interests in the South African political arena. One controversial topic it has commented on is the banning of the apartheid flag and monuments, using loaded language such as ‘concentration camps’ for statues of apartheid-era leaders that were removed and put into storage (AfriForum, 2020). Its views on historical land dispossession are informed through denial of the historical violence of the voortrekkers’ colonization as they made their way from the Western Cape to the interior of the country, instead claiming that any land acquisitions by the Boers were done fairly under mutual agreements with Natives such as the Zulus (Uys, 2019). There is even debate concerning who can be considered ‘native’ to South Africa, with the presumption that Bantu speakers migrated from northern Africa not long before the settlement of the Dutch, which allows Afrikaners to claim nativity the same as any Bantu-speaking group (South Africa History Online, n. d.). The organization regularly criticizes the ANC government for perpetuating the same human rights abuses conducted by the apartheid regime while also claiming heritage to apartheid-era symbolism and monuments (Roets, 2019). Farm attacks, the perceived targeting of white farmers on their homesteads, are a large area of concern for the organization, as it tracks incidents to promote awareness of the occurrences which it claims is genocide of Afrikaners (Fairbanks, 2017). The organization also generates its own research and reports in order to push its ideology to the national discourse. In conjunction with other research/lobbyist organizations such as those described below, its ideological stance has been influential in shaping the public discourse around race relations and land.

Established in 1929, the IRR is considered one of the oldest liberal organizations in the country; developed by a group of white civic, educational and religious figures who were opposed to the apartheid government; even offering a bursary to Nelson Mandela to complete his legal studies. They also developed a journal where research from an interdisciplinary array of social scientists on racial inequality was published, providing rigorous annual survey data that was trusted by academics and policymakers. The IRR today can effectively be categorized as a libertarian think-tank, with many of its core values echoing the United States Republican Party and global right-wing advocates. The course that the organization has taken post-apartheid has been to promote the interests of neoliberal policymaking, with affiliations with the International Republican Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Atlas Network, and, more locally, the DA; reflecting a shift in the ideological stance of the organization to the far right from its more emancipatory roots. A number of social leaders and stakeholders have expressed concern about this shift, with an open letter published in the widely read News24 in September 2021 (News24, 2021). The shift in the organization began in the 1980s, when it began to cut its ties with civic and local community groups to focus on influencing broader policy mandates that would align with its ‘free market, small state’ ideology, such as lobbying to leave social and economic rights out of the budding constitutional Bill of Rights in 1995.

The IRR promotes libertarian ideals that flatten racial distinction and its histories. A recent publicity stunt pulled by the organization is billboards reading ‘www.racismisnottheproblem.co.za’ on the M1 South route in Johannesburg. In response to the multiple complaints about the billboard, IRR issued a statement saying that the billboard does not promote racism but simply conveys that racism is not the foremost issue for the country to tackle (South African Institute of Race Relations, 2021b), citing a self-conducted survey that concluded participants simply did not think racism was the most important issue. The methodology of studies conducted by organizations such as AfriForum, the IRR and the DA is considered questionable according to South African academics, framing questions and choosing participants in a way that furthers their political agenda. This attitude is reflected in a number of their stances on social issues, such as being against affirmative action and BEE initiatives. The IRR's stance on the constitutional amendment to section 25 is strongly opposed to the potential of nationalizing land for purposes of restitution, as reflected in its Stop Land Nationalization campaign. A report published in November 2021 by the IRR equates property rights as a human right, citing the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights article 17 as a source of legitimacy for this claim; also quoting a number of European Enlightenment thinkers such as St Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and John Locke to demonstrate the historical legacy of property rights (Corrigan, 2021: 6), much in alignment with AfriForum.

The Democratic Alliance is a historically centrist political party that has endured since 1959 when it was the Progressive Party. The party has a largely Capetonian white liberal voter base, and its popularity rivals the ANC (Reuters, 2021). During the apartheid era, the DA and the multiple parties it subsumed into itself represented the suburban, English-speaking white liberals who were opposed to the apartheid regime. More recently, in 2009, renowned journalist and former Cape Town mayor Helen Zille took the mantle of DA party leadership. Zille's legacy within the DA is rife with controversy, most notably her tweet defending colonialism, stating, ‘For those claiming legacy of colonialism was ONLY negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water etc’ (Marvin, 2020). As a former journalist and member of the Democratic Party, a precursor to the DA during apartheid, Zille's legacy is recognized as committed to anti-racism and the fall of apartheid. Zille moved up the party ranks to eventually become mayor of Cape Town once the ANC lost its foothold in the Western Cape in post-apartheid South Africa, but her political leanings began to tilt moderate-right as she eventually became the DA party premier in 2009. Since then, Zille's social media presence and political views have garnered controversy for their colonial and apartheid apologist tone. Her book, #StayWoke: Go Broke: Why South Africa Won't Survive America's Culture Wars (Zille, 2021), trumpets alt-right talking points such as free speech, identity politics, cancel culture, the ‘woke’ mob; even equating cancel culture with apartheid in that race is invoked as a structural critique, though conveniently eschewing the motivations of eugenics in the former versus anti-racism in the latter. Black members of the DA have resigned in response to her racist comments and viewpoints after seeing the lax disciplinary policy of the DA for such behaviour (Mhaka, 2019). Zille's supporters within the party commend her for upholding the liberal values on which the party was formed, as well as defending democratic principles such as the rule of law and meritocracy, which they claim are being eroded under the ANC (Centre for Social Science Research, n. d.). The difference in views for black members versus white or coloured members of the DA reveals a continued divide in how racism and the legacy of colonialism are experienced, exposing the tension that remains as a residual effect of apartheid.

Although agriculture contributes a smaller portion of national GDP in relation to mining or manufacturing, the sector is an important contributor to the land reform debates in South Africa and holds a substantial amount of lobbying power. Agri SA is the largest agricultural union in the country and is a successor of the primarily white regional agricultural unions of the colonial and apartheid era, such as the Transvaal, Natal, Rhodesian and Orange Free State agricultural unions (Agri SA, 2021a). Agri SA has a close relationship to the South African Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, regularly releasing policy advocacy and participating in important governmental summits and conferences related to economic policy and land issues. Its stance towards land reform and economic development is conservative and it often advocates for the status quo which supports white landowners and market intervention. The Expropriation Without Compensation (EWC) amendment was a major threat to stakeholders of Agri SA, who quickly staged interventions such as policy and press releases, also convening stakeholders and bureaucrats in order to intercede in the policymaking process. In the land affairs section of its website, the Agri SA motto reads, ‘Ensuring sustainable land reform and enhancing and protecting property rights’ (Agri SA, 2021b). Part of Agri SA's commitment to protecting property rights is its Agri Securitas campaign, which is sponsored by major corporations such as Nissan. The Agri Securitas funding campaign primarily highlights the narrative of farm murders and rural crime and advocates for increased militarization (Agri SA, 2021c). Agri SA, along with AfriForum and the Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU), have been releasing questionable data concerning farm murders and rural violence.

Because Agri SA is considered a national organization representing farmers in all categories, the alignment with AfriForum and TAU gives it legitimacy and a façade of scientific neutrality. In 2017, the South African Department of Rural Development and Land Reform released a long-anticipated land audit which measured private versus public ownership of land by province as well as the racial makeup of private landownership across the country. It was determined that the minority white population still owned 72 per cent of individual private land holdings, signalling the failures of past land reform legislation (Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, 2017). Agri SA also released its own land audit the following year, 2018 (Agri SA, 2017). According to the report, it emphasized the role of the market in the redistribution of land, particularly the ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ model as one that could be improved upon as a path to restitution. However, the data in this report and governmental figures shows that this model has made little progress in transferring land ownership from white to black hands.

The underlying assumptions of liberal democracy belie a structure and agreement among hegemonic groups to enforce a hierarchy which they are taught they will always remain at the apex of. The campaign of dispossession and the subjugation of black labour that mars South African history continues to influence the stances of minority white groups in post-apartheid South Africa. The epistemologies of ignorance have stymied any consciousness of the historical pathways and white complicity that continue to influence racial inequality in the country. The symbolic importance of land and liberal property regimes is a relic of the colonial and apartheid eras, with whites drawing many of their implicit assumptions from the racial hierarchies developed during that time. The language of inclusive democracy has transformed the rhetoric of white racial entitlement in key ways that allow it to seamlessly reposition itself from the hegemonic group to a group committed to egalitarianism. The rhetoric is also used to concretize a sense of identity and self when there are shifts in the social landscape such as a democratic transition. The aggressive criticism of the ANC government and the agitation around conspiracy theories such as farm attacks are attempts to delegitimize the current inclusive democratic system and create a nostalgia for the order of the former apartheid regime, while also denying that those past associations are in any way racialized. Through these processes, the white racial minority creates rhetorical strategies that suspend dissonance in an attempt to avoid accountability and continue to enjoy the entitlements created through the systematic discrimination of the colonial and apartheid eras.

Conclusion

To return to Du Toit's idea of ‘policy-sensemaking’: because public rhetoric has the capability to withhold and mask its true motives, it is necessary to contextualize what the discourse is responding to and what its assumptions say about its implicit biases. The central question that this chapter poses is asking why land reform has been a fundamental failure since 1994 and how its symbolic significance creates a discourse which goes on to interrogate larger issues in the country post-apartheid, its unresolved racial tensions and its deep-seated economic inequality. Though land reform policy was largely ignored as a political issue in post-apartheid South Africa, it has in the last five years been catapulted to the national spotlight and become a major electoral issue. In South Africa and globally, endemic economic inequality has polarized populations and spurred populist movements, putting into question the limitations of the state and democratic processes to effectively govern a fractured populace. Imaginaries around land come to serve a variety of symbolic purposes, but in South Africa, land signals an ability to produce independently, creating an entitlement to the nation-state as an integral group of providers; as we see in the empty land myth, the attempt to rewrite historical and genealogical accounts of who occupied the land first, colonial accounts of territorialization create mythologies that frame them as stewards to a virgin soil.

On paper, land reform is a primary constitutional tenet that acts as redress for the racially skewed conditions created by apartheid, so its symbolic significance has long preceded the proposal of the EWC amendment. Unfortunately, liberal democracy as an institution may not be the proper vehicle for such a considerable task; we must remember that during apartheid and the preceding colonial era, the tenets of liberalism were still the guiding fabric for the racially segregated system of separate development. In addition, the language of liberal democracy also creates space for right-wing and fascist groups to claim entitlement to the resources of the state that those same groups systematically altered to benefit themselves historically. Further research into the affective dynamics of right-wing groups in settler colonial states would be useful for determining further the rhetorical tactics and connection to hegemonic structures that continue to persist.