African access to and ownership of land are critical issues in contemporary South Africa, so important that sections of the 1994 interim constitution and the 1996 constitution are devoted to the restitution of land rights. A tee-shirt emblazoned with ‘Stake your Claim’ across the front of the shirt, together with the deadline, 31 December 1998, and a pencil in a fist between the two sets of words was one small example of the government's efforts to publicise widely the land claims process. On the back, the shirt proclaimed ‘Know Your Land Rights’. Thus, since the early 1990s, land ownership is once again a very sensitive issue for many South Africans. An editorial in The Star noted that ‘for the majority of our population the land question is possibly the most [emotional] issue of all’. An academic wrote: ‘The land has a political significance that appears out of all proportion to the role of land in the economy.’ Politicians also discussed the gravity of this issue: one member of the small Democratic Party (DP) wrote that the DP ‘is convinced that the land issue is of the gravest importance to the future of our country and is the key to the procurement of peace and stability’. A page in the Sunday Times carried a headline in 2½ centimetre high letters over three articles: ‘This land is our land’. The articles reflected the emotional tie Africans and Afrikaners have to the land because of their birth, upbringing, history and tradition.

The burning issues of access to and ownership of land are not recent phenomena, but date back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Black South Africans periodically emphasised the importance of land to African existence and identity. For example, in 1904, Rev. Edward Tsewu, an important early 20th century leader stated: ‘Now the land question is a deep question among all men.’ The expropriation of African rural land and forced removal of populations during the apartheid years threatened what a 1920s Native Affairs Commissioner identified about land ownership being ‘the basis and touch-stone of all … [African] relationships’.