Thesis (M.A. (Political Science))--University of Limpopo, 2007 / Since 1913 black South Africans have been forcefully dispossessed of land under the racist land laws of the successive white South African governments. In 1994 the black government began to pass land laws that were supposed to provide blacks with land ownership rights. Ten years later blacks have re-claimed less than four percent of the eighty seven percent of the land they were dispossessed of. The failure to return dispossessed land to blacks is attributed to the ideology of the current government with respect to its land policy. This study attempts to fill the void regarding the ideological implications of the land reform policy of the post-apartheid government. We speculate that neo-liberal implications are dominant within this policy. Social democracy can overcome the failure of the policy as it is cost-effective and efficient and attempts to achieve social justice. It can therefore afford dispossessed and landless blacks land ownership.

This thesis postulates that the inability of the post-apartheid government to deal decisively with the “legacies of apartheid education” is linked to the macro-educational policy trajectory endorsed by the African National Congress government in the early 1990s. It notes that post-apartheid education policymaking shows similarities with the National Party reforms initiated towards the end of the 1980s in education. In the late 1980s the apartheid government implemented a broad educational framework consonant with the rise of neo-liberal restructuring emerging internationally. It is argued that the teacher unions, and the South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU) in particular, were active role-players in shaping the new educational trajectory and discourse and that it was particularly because of the acquiescence of the unions that the government was able to embark on the road of neo-liberal restructuring with very little organised opposition. SADTU’s weak opposition to the rising influence of neo-liberal educational restructuring greatly facilitated the creation of a two-tier education system that South Africa is grappling with today, one for the rich and one for the poor. / Thesis (PhD (Education Policy Studies))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Education Management and Policy Studies / PhD / unrestricted

Masters of Art / The starting point of this thesis is the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Missing Person’s Task Team (MPTT), two instruments of the post-apartheid government, both of which have directly attended to the disappeared dead. The disappeared dead are defined in this thesis as persons abducted and subject to enforced disappearances, as well as those killed in other political circumstances whose bodies were buried by the apartheid state, in some cases as unnamed paupers, thus denying families the opportunity to bury and mourn according to familial or cultural norms. Today the MPTT still seeks to locate the gravesites of the disappeared dead, to exhume, identify and to return the mortal remains to their families.