This chapter provides an account of everyday life on a land reform farm and paints a vivid picture of the multiple realities that emerge during the process of land restitution, and after beneficiaries have acquired their land. If the dayto- day dynamics of land reform are to be adequately understood, one needs to engage with beneficiaries frequently by means of a situational analysis, participatory observation, and formal and informal interviews. This provides a contrast with the abstract and quantitative ways in which policymakers and land reform analysts generally evaluate land reform projects. The chapter argues that sweeping policy statements and evaluations that are based on prescribed outcomes fail to register much of what is actually happening on the ground. It is essential that the voices and opinions of the social actors directly and indirectly involved in land reform – beneficiaries, frontline extension workers, consultants, commercial farmers – are heard and respected.

Newly settled land reform beneficiaries tend to ignore approved business plans or find them too difficult to implement. Many of the beneficiaries explore alternative ways of improving their lives and combine new livelihood activities with the ones that they pursued before they became farmers. Land reform produces many kinds of beneficiaries and multiple livelihood scenarios. It is too simplistic to claim that it merely produces a new class structure among the rural poor (Davis et al. 2004; Driver 2007; Greenberg 2003; Hall 2007; Kariuki and Van der Walt 2000; Wegerif 2004: 43).

Conceptualising the land reform programme

The South African land reform programme brings together a range of social actors and produces a kaleidoscope of experiences. Different actors encounter one another in a context that is new to most of them. The multiple encounters between different social actors together constitute the land reform arena, in which fierce struggles over the future and nature of the land reform project occur. Land reform does not represent a single, linear set of experiences. In fact, only a small percentage of the experiences that it does produce are consistent with policy expectations. This chapter seeks to capture and present some of these multiple experiences in the form of life-history accounts which are offered as vignettes of the social realities that are emerging on land reform farms in South Africa.