Nearly three decades since democracy, equitable land reform and redistributive justice continue to elude most South Africans – especially rural women. This chapter argues that traditional leaders’ disproportionate powers account for this failure in ‘traditional areas’. Substantial data and research evidence address (1) how land is a primary site of contestation over traditional leaders’ powers and (un)accountability; (2) how traditional leaders use powers and unaccountability afforded by the apartheid government to stand in the way of democratic governance and economic progress; (3) the citizenship implications of rural people’s subjection to leadership without consultation or choice, and dispossession of ‘informal’, ‘communal’ land rights without consultation or consent, and (4) the direct tie between the impoverished systems of rural democracy and the continued and deepening impoverishment of the people (mostly women) who live in these areas. Analysis of the Itereleng Bakgatla and Ingonyama Trust cases shows how the opportunities and objectives that the Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act 31 of 1996 (IPILRA) presents for inclusive land reform remain unrealised.

This chapter focuses on the development of Kakabona, a series of peri-urban settlements just outside Honiara, the national capital. Drawing on a series of disputes that came before chiefs and courts during the 1980s and 1990s, in part due to rapid urbanisation, it demonstrates that the juridical construction and regulation of property prompts the delineation of boundaries between people and on the ground, often in palpably exclusionary ways. Thus rather than ‘securing’ people’s rights and reducing conflict, legal recognition has generated increased social fragmentation and stratification. In Kakabona as elsewhere in Solomon Islands, these processes are now strongly tied to the idea of masculine ‘chiefs’; however, they are also informed by culturally specific meanings attached to land. The chapter demonstrates that paying attention to the emotional or affective dimensions of land disputes, in particular the multifaceted danger they pose, casts light on the emergence of land disputes as crucial sites for the performance of idealised models of masculinity. Moreover, these processes simultaneously reproduce peri-urban areas as sites of insecurity and the state as a masculine domain.