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This thesis deals with the politicized struggles for land in South Africa’s Limpopo Province. With land having been an essential part of colonial and apartheid segregation policies and practice – with 87% of land appropriated by whites –, a land reform programme was imperative after the African National Congress came to power in 1994. One of the three branches of the land reform programme, land restitution, is a key focus of this thesis. It is particular in its goal to do justice to victims of past land dispossessions who lost land rights as result of racially-discriminatory laws by compensating them for this past loss of land and livelihoods. Where compensation for lost rights involves the government buying and redistributing land to groups with historical rights to land, such land deals present particular challenges around the ideal of restorative justice and what is means to ‘bring the past into the present’.
