Protesters illegally occupying flats in District Six have started leaving the complex in compliance with a court order.
|||Cape Town - Protesters illegally occupying flats in District Six during the past week started leaving the complex on Friday in compliance with a high court order that was finalised during a late-night sitting on Thursday.
The protesters, who said they were acting in support of original District Six claimants as well as of descendants of the Khoi and San whom they claimed had been the original owners of the land, appeared to have vacated the flats they’d occupied illegally – some having used crowbars to get in – but they were still on the premises at the 10am court deadline.
Others had packed their belongings and started moving out earlier.
A poster reading “Alienation and extermination of the Khoisan” hung on a first-floor door.
Just before 9pm on Thursday, Western Cape High Court judge Robert Henney confirmed his interim order earlier this week that the protesters had to leave the flats.
However, he allowed one family with young children to stay, pending the government finding suitable alternative accommodation for them.
Henney said the group who claimed an ancestral link to the land “failed to show that they had a legitimate need” and that people who occupied a place unlawfully could not be allowed to “take the law into their own hands”.
He told a packed courtroom he was not convinced the group had a legitimate need for housing and that because the sheriff of the court found only two children in one of the occupied flats when he went there on Sunday, only those children and their parents should be allowed to stay.
Henney said that the family, the Stoffels, needed to be back in court on July 9, when he would hear arguments for a final eviction order.
In the meantime, he ordered that the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform investigate the family’s circumstances and that the City of Cape Town look into whether it will be able to assist the family with accommodation.
Henney said the interim order, which he had made on Monday, should be executed and that these changes to the order be accommodated.
Speaking at a dinner on Thursday night to mark the centenary of the 1913 Natives Land Act, President Jacob Zuma said the dispossession of land from black people had begun earlier than 1913, including from the Khoi and San.
“The colonial wars were in essence about land, with the indigenous people fighting endless battles to retain control of their land and dignity,” he said.
“The land dispossession was a culmination of the aggression that had taken place against the Khoi and the San many years earlier, which is one of the most brutal forms of human aggression.”
Zuma said everyone was aware that progress with the land restitution had been slow and the 2014 redistribution target would not be met.
“Only 6.7 million hectares of land have so far been transferred through redistribution and restitution.”
However, “some progress has been made in land reform and that should be acknowledged”.
A total of 4 813 farms had been transferred to black people through various redistribution programmes since 1994. This translated to more than four million hectares, benefiting 230 886 people.
Cape Argus