The perceptions of young South Africans to the land reform : -A qualitative study of young people in Stellenbosch

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study is to examine the opinions of the land reform by the young population in Stellenbosch, South Africa. So far, the land reform that was implemented already in 1994, has not proven to be effective on the country’s huge inequality of land ownership between the black and white population. The white minority still own the majority of the land, due to historical injustices that developed through colonisation of South Africa and during the apartheid rule.  Since 2014, the discussions of the land reform have got more attention, both nationally and internationally, due to a new policy proposal called land expropriation without compensation. The objective of the thesis were therefore to gain an understanding on the perception of the land reform by both black and white people. To accomplish this, semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with seven people from black ethnicities and seven people from white ethnicities. The interviews were outlined to analyse how grievance would be affected by the land reform, as well as if the respondents answers differed due to homogeneous characteristics. The main results from this research was that there were no indication on that the level of relative deprivation would be affected by the land reform. Although, the majority of the respondents stressed the importance of the land reform to be given the right support and attention by the government in order to be successful. This could in turn be seen as problematic whereas most of them did not express much trust for the government. In addition, the perception by the land reform could generally not be interconnected to a certain background characteristics. The answers to both of the research questions could be explained by the uncertainty about the implementation of the land reform.