Natives Land Act of 1913

The Natives Land Act of 1913, an Act of the Parliament of South Africa that received royal assent on 16 June 1913, regulated the agricultural land black South Africans were legally permitted to own or occupy, restricting them to designated "reserves" that made up less than one-tenth of the country' s land area and barring any purchase or lease of land outside those reserves; the remaining more than 80 percent of the country' s land was reserved for the white minority, who made up less than a fifth of the population. Stated in Parliament as a measure to ensure territorial segregation of the races, the Act became the cornerstone of South Africa' s system of land-based racial segregation and a foundational instrument of the apartheid era that followed decades later, remaining in force until its repeal by the Abolition of Racially Based Land Measures Act of 1991.