Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa

This local history of Griqua Philippolis (1824-1862) and Afrikaner Orania (1990-2013) gets at the crux of the ever-pertinent land question in South Africa. Identifying the many layers of dispossession definitive of the South African past, the book presents a provocative new argument about land rights and the residues of settler colonialism.

'Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa has the feel of a publication designed to open, rather than resolve, a scholarly debate. It outlines a new potential interpretation of the relationship between precolonial and postcolonial South Africa...It raises possibilities regarding indigeneity and rights that remain intensely controversial in South African politics and popular culture. At first glance, the premise of Edward Cavanagh's slim monograph suggests a conference panel devised by harried organizers desperate to connect divergent papers. It is a testament to Cavanagh's vision and his writing that after reading the book this comparison seems not only entirely reasonable, but perhaps even essential to understanding the nature of land rights in contemporary South Africa...Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa: Possession and Dispossession on the Orange River makes new and insightful claims about the connections between pre-1867 Southern Africa and the postapartheid dispensation.' - Poppy Fry, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies "This is a highly innovative study of substantial contemporary relevance. In a compelling analysis Cavanagh uses the prism of settler colonialism to compare the Griqua Philippolis and Afrikaner Orania polities, foregrounding issues of dispossession, land rights, sovereignty, indigeneity and restitution. Insightful and accessible, this is a book that will appeal to both academic and lay readers." - Mohamed Adhikari, University of Cape Town "This book constitutes a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies. It does so in a very original and persuasive way: applying this paradigm to the analysis of past and present circumstances and to the investigation of developments affecting very different sociopolitical collectives in very different historical circumstances. Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa convincingly reintroduces settler colonialism to South African history." - Lorenzo Veracini, Swinburne Institute for Social Research "Edward Cavanagh has written an intensely brilliant gem of a book, excavating a credible, pointed comparison from diamondiferous but hard to mine Orange River Valley community history. The conundrums and contradictions of land dispossession and restitution in South Africa are here presented both factually and analytically in a powerful argument for an, until now, politically submerged, subterranean view of land rights and group identity. This study will surely renew much needed institutional as well as scholarly debate in this field." - David B. Coplan, University of the Witwatersrand

Edward Cavanagh is currently scholar-in-residence at the University of Ottawa, Canada, courtesy of the Ontario Trillium Foundation. He is the co-founder of the journal Settler Colonial Studies, and has published in the fields of law and history.