Shake-up looms after ruling on Cape’s largest land claim

A LANDMARK judgment looks set to change the face of an area of approximately 5 000 hectares in the Ebenhaeser region, about 25km north-west of Vredendal on the West Coast.

On March 6, the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) successfully applied to the Land Claims Court in Cape Town for a separation of a land reclamation area. It is the largest land claim in the Western Cape, worth about R350 million.

The antagonism stems from the fact that of the 44 landowners, 22 are willing sellers while 22 are not. The state also owns some of the land.

The unwilling sellers say the judgment is invalid for a number of technical reasons, but the community of Ebenhaeser, standing to benefit from the sale of the land, says it is nothing but sour grapes. The land is mostly irrigation land used for vineyards. The 44 landowners are all white.

The Ebenhaeser community was dispossessed of its right to the land as a result of racially discriminatory laws, including the Ebenhaeser Grond Ruil Wet of 1925 and racially discriminatory practices without just and equitable compensation, which saw the group of coloured people lose their land in 1926.

Henk Smith, of the LRC, said that now 1 700 adults are affected by the loss of their land and their community wants the land back. “The act that was passed was racist in design and in terms, and the coloured community are now confined to a type of reservation at the bottom of the irrigated area, that being desirable than the top area.”

David Mason, representing the land claimants, said the area was set aside for poorer whites, and the state cancelled any of their outstanding municipal and land debts at the time.

In 1996, the coloured community submitted a claim to the land, but the unwilling sellers contended that they had received ample compensation at the time in terms of land and water. But, says Mason, it was a claim quite different to other apartheid land snatches because of the opportunities the land offered, not merely the land itself.

Thus, when in 1999 the state offered the community R20m in compensation, they declined, saying it was the land and its opportunities, and not the money, they wanted.

By 2005, it was accepted that their land claim was valid and a framework agreement was set out for the process of the land acquisition plan. However, the state did nothing about it for more than a decade.

Jannie Mostert, spokesman of Lutzville Toekoms, for the so-called unwilling sellers, said yesterday it was simply that they wanted to keep their land, but that neither he nor his lawyer were comfortable talking to the media on a Sunday.

He said he had no further comment, but that his lawyer, Bertus van der Merwe, could be contacted on a weekday.

Willem Fortuin, chairman of the Ebenhaeser Communal Property Association, was unavailable at the time of publishing.

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