Probing the apartheid government's contentious resettlement policy, Capricious Patronage and Captive Land transcends a mere enquiry into the apartheid government's policy in shaping South Africa's human settlement - it provides a multifaceted scrutiny of forces that moulded this process. Zoning into the inner precincts of the Eastern Cape, Professor Wotshela demonstrates how its land became captive as apartheid design galvanised a spatial and demographic cataclysm in the traumatic displacement and relocation of African families.

Resettlement was not exclusively swayed by actions of Afrikanerdom's influential National Party: contrived tribal authorities, serving at the base of the government pyramid, dispensed land and linked basic services to loyalists of homeland political parties. This process of territorial manipulation fostered new social and political patronage networks. But civil movements from marginalised and disgruntled groups ardently contested the homeland policy.

Within a post-apartheid landscape, politics of remobilising communities expanded social boundaries of the Ciskei, the western parts of the Transkei and the adjacent white farming Border district. Capricious Patronage and Captive Land demonstrates in detail how these polygonal demands for land extended newer residential settlements as much as they tested the early forms of land reform in the early phases of South Africa's democracy.