The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets

by Jason Hickel

Successive colonial administrations introduced policies designed to do exactly that. As early as 1857, they began forcing Africans to pay taxes, which compelled African households to send family members to the mines and plantations for work. Those who didn’t pay taxes were punished – so there was always the threat of violence lurking in the background. On top of this, they began to systematically push Africans off their land in a process that mimicked the enclosure movement in England. The Natives Land Act of 1913 restricted African land ownership to a series of ‘native reserves’ or ‘homelands’ that totalled only 10 per cent of the country’s area. The division was brutally enforced: Africans were gradually and systematically forced off their land and into the reserves. And because the reserves were on marginal, unproductive land inadequate to support the population, Africans had