Land claimants ask police to evict defiant invaders
notice that hundreds of people now illegally occupied their land.
Yesterday they embarked on a peaceful march to Macleantown police station, where in a letter of demand accepted by the acting station commander they demanded that police remove the invaders.
One of the leaders of the land claim, Baba Ncunyana, said they didn’t want to take the law into their own hands.
“We want to make sure that these people who are invading our land are peacefully removed, hence we are engaging the police.
“We don’t want to do this roughly, this is the land we’ve fought for since the 1980s,” said Ncunyana.
In the petition to the police, the residents gave the police 30 days to act.
“We got back this land through the court of law in Bloemfontein in 1995,” said Ncunyana.
In 1970, residents of Macleantown were forcefully removed and dumped in an area called Mpongo in Chalumna.
The area they were removed from was close to 2 000 hectares and consisted of grazing land, residential areas and open fields.
Close to 100 families lost the land they depended on to survive.
After they were removed, many moved to Chalumna in the Kidd’s Beach area and others moved to areas like Tshabo in King William’s Town.
In 1989, they started to reclaim the land, which had been allocated to white farmers in the area. In 1990, Ncunyana and his other neighbours illegally occupied the land and built shacks, demanding the land back, but they were later arrested.
“Our parents were angry with the decision to be removed from this land but because of our resilience, we fought back for our land. We were detained, we faced criminal charges but we knew what we wanted and later in the 1990s the court recognised our land claim,” said Ncunyana.
The Dispatch team visited the vast area land and saw close to 200 shacks and a few permanent structures erected in the area.
None of the shack occupants wanted to speak to the Dispatch. A Buffalo City Metro sign, erected to warn people not to occupy the land, had been damaged.
Another community member, Vuyelwa Kolwapi, said the land was being sold to foreign people for next to nothing.
“A plot can be bought for anything from R200. We want to remove these invaders peacefully but if they resist, we don’t know what will happen. We demand this land back,” said Kolwapi.