The Natives Land Act, assented to in June 1913, prohibited Africans from buying or leasing land outside scheduled areas amounting to roughly 7 percent of the Union, and specifically outlawed the sharecropping and rent-tenancy arrangements by which many African families farmed on white-owned land. Its anti-squatting provisions were intended to convert independent African cultivators into wage labourers or servants on white farms. Evictions began immediately, most sharply in the Orange Free State, and Sol Plaatje's contemporary account records families and their livestock moving along the roads between provinces in midwinter. The Act did not immediately apply in the Cape, where it conflicted with the qualified franchise, and its full application was worked out over the following decades. It is generally treated as the legal foundation of the reserve system that apartheid later elaborated into the bantustans.
The Parliament of the Union of South Africa barred Africans from buying or leasing land outside designated reserves and outlawed sharecropping, and white farmers evicted African tenant families across the Orange Free State and the Transvaal
The 1911 census, the first of the Union, recorded 4,019,006 Africans out of a total population of 5,973,394. The Act reserved about 7 per cent of the country's land for African occupation, raised to roughly 13 per cent by the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act, and outlawed sharecropping and labour tenancy on white-owned farms.
There was no significant direct death toll. The Act operated through law, eviction and impoverishment rather than killing, though Plaatje recorded deaths of children and livestock among families forced onto the roads in winter.
The statutory exclusion of Africans from land ownership outside the reserves and the eviction of tenant families are documented in the Act itself, in Sol Plaatje's contemporary account and in the South African History Online summary.
South Africa