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Read more of our interview with Dr. Brent McCusker on land reform in South Africa.

Dispossession was a very long process. And most people don't realize that it is longer than 1948. It's something that had started when the first settlers arrived in the Cape of Good Hope. Legal-wise, it was codified in 1913 under the Natives' Land Act. And again in 1936, there was another little piece of legislation which drastically altered the landscape -- that's really when we see the creation of these bantustans or homelands.

Now these dispossessions that occurred from the beginning of settlement, excuse me, European settlement, took place at first in a series of wars, and history shows us, for instance, the wars in the Eastern Cape were large-scale dispossession. After the settlers had staked their claims and established a state, several states, then we start to see more of a legal process -- removal of communities into areas, taking them out of white lands. And then in 1913, we see a legalization of this, a codification.

What that means is, there was a geography of apartheid, a geography of separateness, with, obviously, an explicit spatial component, meaning: people were moved into certain areas based on race. And that's how we get the creation of homelands. The homelands were first called native reserves, and then in 1948 to the fifties, the real establishment of independent states began -- the notion that there could be an independent state, which was never independent, nor a state.

The idea behind separate development, or apartheid, was that people would develop along separate paths, and it basically released the white state from responsibility over the economy in these areas. And what happened was they would transfer funds to the homelands governments, ensure that the homelands governments were inefficient and ineffective -- unable to deliver agricultural extension, unable to deliver health services, unable to deliver education services. And then they would say, "But look, we have given the black population their own states -- four of them independent homelands -- and the rest were independent self-governing states, not completely independent yet, but on the path to independence. But look at what they've done? They haven't done anything!"

…Capitalism in South Africa went hand-in-hand with the state because, many times, business leaders, especially in the mining sector, would press the government for low wages: "Look we have to have low wages. We have this very disparate system. We have the white system we have to support, and we have nine different functioning governments we have to support. We've got all of these homelands, we've got new homelands coming in…"

Now remember, each homeland had its own capital, most of them had their own university, and they had their own bureaucratic infrastructure. They have their own delivery system for services, so you're replicating, in fact, the same state over and over and over -- it's a very big drain.

So the point is that there had to be surplus extraction from somewhere to run this incredibly large machinery of apartheid, and that surplus extraction didn't come from white settlers, from Europeans, it came from the African blacks, it came from labor, it came from extracting as much out of those homelands as was possible. And it came from keeping wages down, so that white farmers, who were heavily subsidized, heavily subsidized, from apartheid, would have cheap farmworkers, cheap inputs and a ready market for their products.

Now when we hear that black culture in the homelands [was] unsustainable and unproductive and inefficient, we have to really remind ourselves that they are using a base-point off what was exclusively white agriculture, and they tend to forget that white agriculture was heavily subsidized in every respect -- labor, capital and land.