Monday June 19th, marks 110 years since the 1913 Natives Land Act was passed in the then Union of South Africa. It prohibited Natives from owning, leasing or acquiring land. The Act was repealed in June 1991.
under government’s restitution programme. Her daughter Zahra Nordien says her mother almost gave up after struggling for many years to claim back what she was dispossessed of.“Practically, every week I was at the Land Claims Commission to come and enquire about her claim. And she was given the key in 2013. Then she was very, very happy to move back to District Six. That was her wish to come back to District Six. She is today a 100 years old.
“They could at least like make a change because like as you can see over there on that side behind the Mosque there is a squatter camp. And there is a squatter camp over there, so if they can just at least just give the people like proper houses instead of putting tents because I don’t like seeing people like that, for me it’s heartbreaking to see people like that, because no one deserve to live like that. Everyone deserves to be treated equally,” added another District Six youth.
“As they say this is an informal settlement, we just want the temporary housing here so that we can stay at a safe place. Even our Children, who are about to go to school, they can’t, because it’s raining the transport can’t go in when it’s raining. The transport won’t come in because it’s raining. As you see there are the dams all over, so the road is not good at all,” concluded a third resident from Zwezwe.
“So, looking back I think the progress has unfortunately been slow, especially in the last 30 years, despite the constitutional commitment to land reform and the fact that the Land Reform programme is laid out in the constitution. It consists of three steps. One is to secure the tenure of people.
But another party, the Freedom Front Plus has always disputed the patterns of land ownership in South Africa. “The view of the Freedom Front Plus when to comes to land reform, we firstly say we must go and look at state owned land. And if you want to redistribute, use those land, and then you redistribute it. Secondly, we said the civil servants of the department of land reform must be competent people and they must ensure that the corruption in that process of land reform must be removed, because there is lot of corruption when it comes to land reform.