350pp., maps, paperback, Cape Town, 2020
Journalist and lawyer Karl Kemp documents the effects of failing land reform throughout South Africa. He offers a brief history of land conflict and conquest in each area he visits and discusses the current situation and reports of recent land invasions, with perspectives from land activists, property owners and government officials. He also looks at the issues surrounding the land debate – corruption, farm murders, illegal foreign labour, mechanisation and eviction.
"Kemp makes sense of the land conflict in a way I've not come across, closely attending to the history of possession and dispossession...This is a book that all truth-seeking South Africans should read." Eben Venter, author of Trencherman and Wolf, Wolf