Cape Town - On June 15, 40 ‘Khoi activists’ occupied 11 units in a District Six apartment complex. The complex was built in 2011 for returnees. On Tuesday, the Western Cape High Court granted a final eviction order against the group. The group had been evicted earlier following an interim eviction order. Their spokeswoman, Tania Kleinhans, head of the Institute for Restoration of the Aborigines of South Africa, spoke to Jan Cronje.
Q: Why did the group occupy the apartments?
Our right to the land is entrenched in history. It is undisputed.
We have ancestral rights to the land because it was not granted or sold to anybody.
The land belonged to aborigines who were there long before Europeans settled.
We have, for example, a treaty from 1670 between the Cochoqua and the Dutch.
But colonialists took the aborigines and classified them as coloured.
Then these “coloureds” had to go through a restitution process. But this process only further alienated them from their land, as it required property rights and title deeds.
Even the Land Restitution Act alienated the aborigines, because its cut-off date was 1913.
Did you submit a claim for restitution?
My father submitted a claim in 1995.
Our family lived in Smart Street 11a and b, and 13a and b. We were removed in 1970.
My father was offered R40 000 in financial compensation for these four apartments by the current government. But once you take the financial compensation, you give up your right to return to the land.
And there has always been a longing to come back to District Six.I now see my father aged. He will never be able to come back; he doesn’t have the R200 000 (for a unit in the complex the group occupied). My father has given me proxy to represent his claim.
Did you welcome the fact that government re-opened the land restitution process for people who missed the 1998 deadline?
No. We first need constitutional recognition of the aborigines.
You first have to acknowledge their identity and include them as the “first people” in the preamble of the constitution.
What do you think about pre-1913 land claims possibly being opened for the Khoi?
To open claims preceding 1913, the process needs to go to the Constitutional Court. But this won’t help unless you first change the constitution, to get legal recognition of aborigines.
Why did your group occupy the units, when the period for lodging new claims had been reopened?
Of the people who applied in 1995 to 1998, most have not been justly restituted.
Currently they are busy with the claims list of 1995, but we are in 2013.
Calculate the number of years it has taken for only some to get restitution, and there are thousands still waiting for financial compensation.
If they can’t settle people with claims from 1995, when will they settle all the claims from 2013?
They just don’t have administrative will or capacity.
The process has been reopened, so that administrators, who earn huge salaries, get jobs and employment for another five to 10 years.
It is clear that restitution is a failure.
So will any of your group lodge new claims?
No, they don’t have to.
The people who moved in (occupied the flats) all applied in the official process.
You have frequently spoken out against the District Six Redevelopment and Beneficiary Trust, that manages the complex. Why do you not trust them?
They are not legitimate.
They formed in 2001 and only had their first annual general meeting in 2008.
From 2008 to 2013 they have never had another annual general meeting.
Nobody has since seen their audit reports.
They don’t have the mandate to speak on behalf of everybody.
Anwar Nagia (the trust’s head) is not even a District Six claimant.
Do you feel guilty, as one of the groups leaders, for the fact that members were evicted?
When we decided on this action, we all knew there was a probability of us being evicted.
What we wanted to achieve was not people looking for homes, it was about the whole process.
The responsibility was on all of us.
It was a collective decision we made.
* The group said on Thursday they would submit a motion for leave to appeal against their eviction today at the Western Cape High Court.
Cape Times