Pretoria News - An elderly Mabopane woman risks losing the house she has called home for more than 40 years due to a discriminatory apartheid era law which excluded adult black women from holding any rights regarding property.
Mary Rahube, 68, has been staying in her family home north of Pretoria with her children and grandchildren for several decades.
She now faces eviction.
Under the apartheid laws, the property rights of women, particularly in townships, was placed under the custody of men. Only an adult male was allowed to acquire property rights.
Her brother, Hendsrine Rahube, as the male in the house, became the holder of these rights after their parents died decades ago.
He later obtained a title deed over the family home under the then Bophuthatswana homeland.
He now wants to evict his sister and her family from the house.
Lawyers for Human Rights took up her fight to challenge the constitutional validity of the Upgrading of Land Tenure Rights Act.
The eviction application has been placed on hold pending the outcome of the constitutional battle.
The lawyers want Rahube to be declared the owner of the house.
She and her siblings, together with their grandmother, moved into the house in the early 1970s.
Due to the apartheid laws at the time, the family could not obtain the title deed for the property and were issued with a so-called certificate of occupation.
As her brother was the older male, this was issued to him.
In the early 1990s, Rahube’s brother left the home while she continued to live there with her children. It was not until an application was launched by her brother to have her and her family evicted from the house that she discovered that he had automatically become the owner of the family home under the new laws.
The lawyers said no notice or an enquiry to determine the actual occupiers of the house took place prior to converting the ownership of the house automatically into her brother’s name.
According to them, the legislation was lacking in this regard and the flaws should be addressed.
They said that the absence of this opportunity, together with the gender and racially discriminatory laws which regulated the allocation of houses in the apartheid era - only allowing males to have these rights - continued to cause indirect discrimination against female households.
On Tuesday Rahube told the Pretoria News that her biggest wish was to have the house in her name. “It’s the only place I can call home. I know no other,” she said.
Legal counsel for the various government departments, cited as respondents in the case, did not pitch in court despite being informed of the date.
The matter will resume on Friday.
Pretoria News