Limited access to land rights for the powerless in Potchefstroom

Abstract

The concept of structural violence is useful in the analysis of the land issue in urban areas in South Africa, more specifically in this case, the town of Potchefstroom from 1901 to 1952. By institutionalising racism, a situation of inequality of power and opportunities has been brought about. This can best be understood within the rigidly stratified system of apartheid: it imposed an alternative and restricted structure of land use on the specific subordinate category in the area of study. By creating this alternative system, those in power excluded the powerless from the "central" system. The concept of an alternative system can be understood in terms of the theory of structural violence, to explain the difference between the real and the potential attainment of human somatic and psychical abilities. Thus, structural violence is built into the very structures of a society and is concretized in unequal power and, consequently, unequal opportunities in life. Clearly, group and institutional discrimination in this area can be viewed as a form of structural violence because of the dire consequences, the indirect methods and the impersonal nature of these actions.
https://doi.org/10.4102/koers.v60i4.650
PDF

Copyright information

  • Ownership of copyright in terms of the Work remains with the authors.
  • The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the Work, provided attribution is given to the place and detail of original publication, as set out in the official citation of the Work published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the Work on the authors’ or their institutions’ websites or institutional repository.

Publication and user license

  • The authors grant the title owner and the publisher an irrevocable license and first right and perpetual subsequent right to (a) publish, reproduce, distribute, display and store the Work in  any form/medium, (b) to translate the Work into other languages, create adaptations, summaries or extracts of the Work or other derivative works based on the Work and exercise all of the rights set forth in (a) above in such translations, adaptations, summaries, extracts and derivative works, (c) to license others to do any or all of the above, and (d) to register the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for the Definitive Work.
  • The authors acknowledge and accept the user licence under which the Work will  be published as set out in https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (Creative Commons Attribution License South Africa)
  • The undersigned warrant that they have the authority to license these publication rights and that no portion of the copyright to the Work has been assigned or licensed previously to any other party.

Disclaimer: The publisher, editors and title owner accept no responsibility for any statement made or opinion expressed by any other person in this Work. Consequently, they will not be liable for any loss or damage sustained by any reader as a result of his or her action upon any statement or opinion in this Work. 
In cases where a manuscript is NOT accepted for publication by the editorial board, the portions of this agreement regarding the publishing licensing shall be null and void and the authors will be free to submit this manuscript to any other publication for first publication.

Our copyright policies are author-friendly and protect the rights of our authors and publishing partners.