Includes bibliographical references and index.

"The ongoing racialised inequalities in land, inherited from colonia l dispossession, act as a spatial barrier to imagining a unitary nation in contemporary South Africa. The starting point for this book is that the current land reform policies in the country fail to take this colo nial context of division and exclusion into account. Consequently, ther e is an abiding crisis in land in South Africa. The book examines the v ery many dimensions of this crisis in urban areas, commercial farming a reas and communal areas. It argues for a fundamental change in approach to move beyond the impasse in both policy and thinking about land. The Promise of Land argues that social movements have a critcal role to pl ay in charting a new course, both in respect of access to land and in influencing broader policy options. Struggles from below are crucial fo r rethinking purely statist efforts at land reform and the book grapple s with the interplay between oppositional campaigns of social movements and the state's policies and responses." -- Back cover.