south africa

There was a brief period in the mid-1980s when a rural town brought to life what the Freedom Charter meant by the ideal “The People Shall Govern.”

It was 1985 and that town was Cradock. More specifically it was the township of iLingelihle – the home of Fort Calata, Matthew Goniwe, Sparrow Mkonto and many other heroes of our Struggle.

The three, together with Oudtshoorn teacher Sicelo Mhlauli, would later become known as the Cradock Four.

They were murdered by an apartheid hit squad after being ambushed while returning home after a UDF meeting they had attended in Port Elizabeth in mid-1985.

Like the indomitable Gauls of my favourite childhood comic books, Asterix and Obelix, who held off the Romans, the people of iLingelihle would not be moved.

Cradock would show the blueprint for resistance for the rural oppressed of South Africa to counter apartheid in a way the government of the day would never have anticipated.

It moved the apartheid government to contrive a village council of apathetic leaders to control the municipality with the town as one of its guinea pigs. But they were no match for the formidable civic movements of Cradock, aligned to the UDF and formed by teachers and activists Calata and Goniwe.

In the first few days of January 1985, these council officials eventually relented and resigned in the midst of a 15-month school boycott as part of a tireless campaign by the community and its leaders. Cradock – and specifically Goniwe and Calata – was a headache for the apartheid regime.

This brief window of self-governance, free from the reach of the brutal regime, is described in a new book My Father Died for This, co-written by husband and wife team Abigail and Lukhanyo Calata.

Lukhanyo, the son of Fort Calata who was just 3 when his father and comrades were murdered, writes of that time: “The resignations of the members of the town council had effectively rendered iLingelihle a ‘liberated zone’.

“The small location boasting around 24000 residents was no longer governed in any way by the apartheid government.

“The people of iLingelihle through Cradora (Cradock Residents’ Association) were governing themselves. They, and they alone, were the ones deciding the kind of future they wanted for themselves and their children. The people of my home town were now the masters of their own destinies.”

How powerful is that? In the months that followed, the people indeed governed.

The community started a literacy programme for those affected by the school boycotts and opened a crèche as well as an advice centre to administer grants for the aged, children and disabled.

The Cradock Youth Association was responsible for community safety. Lukhanyo’s mother, Nomonde Calata, recalled that during that period iLingelihle had been virtually crime free.

Apartheid brigadier Joffel van der Westhuizen wrote in a report: “Goniwe played a prominent role in the aforementioned revolutionary onslaught in the Eastern Province. He was one of the leaders of the United Democratic Front and to the best of my knowledge, Cradock was the very first town in the Republic of South Africa where they successfully implemented alternative structures (of government).”

But such an uprising came at grave costs. In June 1985 a plan was made by the state security cabinet and endorsed by PW Botha to assassinate Goniwe and Calata.

Abigail and Lukhanyo take great care in their book to establish the genesis for activism in Cradock with the arrival of Lukhanyo’s great-grandfather and Fort’s grandfather, Canon James Arthur Calata.

Canon Calata worked tirelessly for decades to improve the lot of black people in the town. His work eventually saw him elevated to secretary-general of the ANC, succeeded years later by Walter Sisulu.

Canon Calata took his grandson Fort under his care and would lay the foundation for activism in Lukhanyo’s father. The legacy from grandfather to grandson would set the tone for iLingelihle’s resistance as Fort later joined forces with Goniwe.

In the unfolding chapters, Lukhanyo movingly documents the harrowing days of unrest leading up to the murder of his father and the rest of the Cradock Four. He writes of the powerful funeral that followed, which bolstered the resolve of the people even further.

He then bravely and painstakingly details the betrayal by the very movement the Calatas had played such a seminal role in to help liberate South Africa and the lingering agony that his father’s killers were never brought to book.

As one reflects on this book just days after another celebration of our liberation this past Freedom Day, we dare not forget. My Father Died for This makes sure we never forget the sacrifices made by so many for that freedom.

Also read: Calatas are an ordinary couple who are extraordinarily brave

* Follow more of Abarder’s musings on Twitter – @GasantAbarder.

There was a brief period in the mid-1980s when a rural town brought to life what the Freedom Charter meant by the ideal “The People Shall Govern.”

It was 1985 and that town was Cradock. More specifically it was the township of iLingelihle – the home of Fort Calata, Matthew Goniwe, Sparrow Mkonto and many other heroes of our Struggle.

The three, together with Oudtshoorn teacher Sicelo Mhlauli, would later become known as the Cradock Four.

They were murdered by an apartheid hit squad after being ambushed while returning home after a UDF meeting they had attended in Port Elizabeth in mid-1985.

Like the indomitable Gauls of my favourite childhood comic books, Asterix and Obelix, who held off the Romans, the people of iLingelihle would not be moved.

Cradock would show the blueprint for resistance for the rural oppressed of South Africa to counter apartheid in a way the government of the day would never have anticipated.

It moved the apartheid government to contrive a village council of apathetic leaders to control the municipality with the town as one of its guinea pigs. But they were no match for the formidable civic movements of Cradock, aligned to the UDF and formed by teachers and activists Calata and Goniwe.

In the first few days of January 1985, these council officials eventually relented and resigned in the midst of a 15-month school boycott as part of a tireless campaign by the community and its leaders. Cradock – and specifically Goniwe and Calata – was a headache for the apartheid regime.

This brief window of self-governance, free from the reach of the brutal regime, is described in a new book My Father Died for This, co-written by husband and wife team Abigail and Lukhanyo Calata.

Lukhanyo, the son of Fort Calata who was just 3 when his father and comrades were murdered, writes of that time: “The resignations of the members of the town council had effectively rendered iLingelihle a ‘liberated zone’.

“The small location boasting around 24000 residents was no longer governed in any way by the apartheid government.

“The people of iLingelihle through Cradora (Cradock Residents’ Association) were governing themselves. They, and they alone, were the ones deciding the kind of future they wanted for themselves and their children. The people of my home town were now the masters of their own destinies.”

How powerful is that? In the months that followed, the people indeed governed.

The community started a literacy programme for those affected by the school boycotts and opened a crèche as well as an advice centre to administer grants for the aged, children and disabled.

The Cradock Youth Association was responsible for community safety. Lukhanyo’s mother, Nomonde Calata, recalled that during that period iLingelihle had been virtually crime free.

Apartheid brigadier Joffel van der Westhuizen wrote in a report: “Goniwe played a prominent role in the aforementioned revolutionary onslaught in the Eastern Province. He was one of the leaders of the United Democratic Front and to the best of my knowledge, Cradock was the very first town in the Republic of South Africa where they successfully implemented alternative structures (of government).”

But such an uprising came at grave costs. In June 1985 a plan was made by the state security cabinet and endorsed by PW Botha to assassinate Goniwe and Calata.

Abigail and Lukhanyo take great care in their book to establish the genesis for activism in Cradock with the arrival of Lukhanyo’s great-grandfather and Fort’s grandfather, Canon James Arthur Calata.

Canon Calata worked tirelessly for decades to improve the lot of black people in the town. His work eventually saw him elevated to secretary-general of the ANC, succeeded years later by Walter Sisulu.

Canon Calata took his grandson Fort under his care and would lay the foundation for activism in Lukhanyo’s father. The legacy from grandfather to grandson would set the tone for iLingelihle’s resistance as Fort later joined forces with Goniwe.

In the unfolding chapters, Lukhanyo movingly documents the harrowing days of unrest leading up to the murder of his father and the rest of the Cradock Four. He writes of the powerful funeral that followed, which bolstered the resolve of the people even further.

He then bravely and painstakingly details the betrayal by the very movement the Calatas had played such a seminal role in to help liberate South Africa and the lingering agony that his father’s killers were never brought to book.

As one reflects on this book just days after another celebration of our liberation this past Freedom Day, we dare not forget. My Father Died for This makes sure we never forget the sacrifices made by so many for that freedom.

Also read: Calatas are an ordinary couple who are extraordinarily brave

* Follow more of Abarder’s musings on Twitter – @GasantAbarder.

analysis
By Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

It’s 20 years since the submission of the report of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was a court-like restorative justice body that sought to reveal human rights abuses under apartheid. When Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired the TRC process, handed over the report to then President Nelson Mandela in October 1998, he was handing over more than a physical archive of memory of the past.

Tutu aptly called the TRC “the third way”. It lifted the veil of lies perpetuated under apartheid, offering victims, perpetrators and “implicated others”. To borrow American academic Michael Rothberg‘s term, it was a horizon moment pregnant with possibility that oriented the country toward a hopeful (if unpredictable) future.

Here was a chance for South Africans to begin anew. But, two decades later and after almost 25 years of post-apartheid democracy, the hope that was envisioned then – and the racial reconciliation these historical moments of 1994 and 1998 promised – are only barely visible.

What remains are the memories of the stories told at the TRC and their history-making impetus. All that remains, as Chief Justice Ismail Mohamed then said,

is the truth of wounded memories of loved ones.

It’s a deep and traumatic memory that could be shared, but is impossible to translate, into objective and corroborative evidence which could survive the rigours of the law.

“No one to blame”

Some of the cases that came before the TRC had already been tried and tested in a case of law and the courts had found “no one to blame”. It’s a refrain at the end of many inquests, which became the title of a book by George Bizos, the South African human rights lawyer who represented anti-apartheid activists, including Mandela and Walter Sisulu.

Bizos served as the lawyer at the TRC for the families of those who suffered gross human rights violations. Among them were the widows of the Cradock Four whose husbands were brutally killed by apartheid security forces. During her testimony one of the widows, Nomonde Calata, let out a scream that still haunts many of us who were present at that first TRC hearing in East London.

She was bearing witness to the shards of her brokenness after the murder of her husband, Fort Calata. She recalled the painful details of the day she received the news that his charred remains had been found with the burnt-out wreck of the car in which he was travelling with his comrades. At the time she was a 26-year-old mother of two, and expecting her third child.

Even the memory of this moment was too much to bear. Mrs Calata’s “iconic” scream didn’t just mark the opening of the TRC. Hers was the voice of a “second wounding”; an expression of anger and pain, screamed at a past that goes back several generations, calling up deeply buried emotions that reverberated over several generations.

There was a sense that Mrs Calata was at last reclaiming her agency, with the violent movement of her body thrown back as she let out her wailing cry. She was confronting this violent history told on the stage of the TRC, exposing those responsible for her irreparable loss.

American social activist bell hooks writes that black subjectivity is not a standpoint that exists only to oppose dehumanisation,

but as that movement which enables… self-actualisation.

Objectified in so many ways as the racial and sexual “other” to legitimise the colonial and apartheid order, Calata’s TRC testimony shifted the gaze from the object of oppression to shine the light on the perpetrators’ depravity. This powerful stance unsettles the view of a world that associates goodness with all things white and savagery with black people.

The TRC laid bare the savagery of apartheid. No longer would it be possible to deny the barbarism of the apartheid state and the men and women who were its executioners.

White spectators

A similar move is reflected in the exposure of white America’s vicious terrorism of the lynching of black people in the artist Ken Gonzales Day’s project “Erased Lynchings”.

In a series of photographs, Gonzales Day shows lynchings of black bodies with the images of the ropes and bodies removed from the scene of the crime, leaving the white spectators in the photographs. The series invites the viewer to cast the gaze not on the victims of the lynchings, but rather on the spectators to this crime, gleefully standing by to witness this atrocity to its conclusion.

This forces us to reflect on the extreme depravity of these spectators, and to ponder about the conditions of a society that perpetuates such acts of dehumanisation. Far from denial of history, inviting the imaginary at these sites of the crime presents the viewer with potent evidence of who the doer of the evil deed is.

Who are these people, and what stories did or do they tell their children about this shameful history? How are the memories of this shame passed down? Through its silencing and denial? Most importantly, how does it play out in societies where perpetrators and victims live in the same country in the aftermath of violent pasts?

These are some of the most urgent questions of our time. Few topics stake a more compelling claim on humanities research than the legacies of historical trauma. Apartheid, colonialism, slavery and other watershed moments of crimes against humanity in the 20th century are not events in “the past”. They are a history whose traumatic repercussions reverberates across multiple generations.

We should receive the cry of Nomonde Calata as a call to arms; to rethink our notions of “reconciliation”, “forgiveness” and other concepts that imply a goal, an accomplishment. Dealing with the past will always remain “unfinished business”, because I think that much of what happens in the afterlife of historical trauma is enigmatic, muddy, elusive, and unpredictable. The words “forgiveness” or “reconciliation” fall short of adequately capturing this complexity.

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Stellenbosch University

When Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired the TRC process, handed over the report to then President Nelson Mandela in October 1998, he was handing over more than a physical archive of memory of the past.

Tutu aptly called the TRC “the third way”. It lifted the veil of lies perpetuated under apartheid, offering victims, perpetrators and “implicated others”. To borrow American academic Michael Rothberg’s term, it was a horizon moment pregnant with possibility that oriented the country toward a hopeful (if unpredictable) future.

Here was a chance for South Africans to begin anew. But, two decades later and after almost 25 years of post-apartheid democracy, the hope that was envisioned then – and the racial reconciliation these historical moments of 1994 and 1998 promised – are only barely visible.

What remains are the memories of the stories told at the TRC and their history-making impetus. All that remains, as Chief Justice Ismail Mohamed then said,

is the truth of wounded memories of loved ones.

It’s a deep and traumatic memory that could be shared, but is impossible to translate, into objective and corroborative evidence which could survive the rigours of the law.

“No one to blame”

Some of the cases that came before the TRC had already been tried and tested in a case of law and the courts had found “no one to blame”. It’s a refrain at the end of many inquests, which became the title of a book by George Bizos, the South African human rights lawyer who represented anti-apartheid activists, including Mandela and Walter Sisulu.

Bizos served as the lawyer at the TRC for the families of those who suffered gross human rights violations. Among them were the widows of the Cradock Four whose husbands were brutally killed by apartheid security forces. During her testimony one of the widows, Nomonde Calata, let out a scream that still haunts many of us who were present at that first TRC hearing in East London.

She was bearing witness to the shards of her brokenness after the murder of her husband, Fort Calata. She recalled the painful details of the day she received the news that his charred remains had been found with the burnt-out wreck of the car in which he was travelling with his comrades. At the time she was a 26-year-old mother of two, and expecting her third child.

Even the memory of this moment was too much to bear. Mrs Calata’s “iconic” scream didn’t just mark the opening of the TRC. Hers was the voice of a “second wounding”; an expression of anger and pain, screamed at a past that goes back several generations, calling up deeply buried emotions that reverberated over several generations.

There was a sense that Mrs Calata was at last reclaiming her agency, with the violent movement of her body thrown back as she let out her wailing cry. She was confronting this violent history told on the stage of the TRC, exposing those responsible for her irreparable loss.

American social activist bell hooks writes that black subjectivity is not a standpoint that exists only to oppose dehumanisation,

but as that movement which enables… self-actualisation.

Objectified in so many ways as the racial and sexual “other” to legitimise the colonial and apartheid order, Calata’s TRC testimony shifted the gaze from the object of oppression to shine the light on the perpetrators’ depravity. This powerful stance unsettles the view of a world that associates goodness with all things white and savagery with black people.

The TRC laid bare the savagery of apartheid. No longer would it be possible to deny the barbarism of the apartheid state and the men and women who were its executioners.

White spectators

A similar move is reflected in the exposure of white America’s vicious terrorism of the lynching of black people in the artist Ken Gonzales Day’s project “Erased Lynchings”.

In a series of photographs, Gonzales Day shows lynchings of black bodies with the images of the ropes and bodies removed from the scene of the crime, leaving the white spectators in the photographs. The series invites the viewer to cast the gaze not on the victims of the lynchings, but rather on the spectators to this crime, gleefully standing by to witness this atrocity to its conclusion.

This forces us to reflect on the extreme depravity of these spectators, and to ponder about the conditions of a society that perpetuates such acts of dehumanisation. Far from denial of history, inviting the imaginary at these sites of the crime presents the viewer with potent evidence of who the doer of the evil deed is.

Who are these people, and what stories did or do they tell their children about this shameful history? How are the memories of this shame passed down? Through its silencing and denial? Most importantly, how does it play out in societies where perpetrators and victims live in the same country in the aftermath of violent pasts?

These are some of the most urgent questions of our time. Few topics stake a more compelling claim on humanities research than the legacies of historical trauma. Apartheid, colonialism, slavery and other watershed moments of crimes against humanity in the 20th century are not events in “the past”. They are a history whose traumatic repercussions reverberates across multiple generations.

We should receive the cry of Nomonde Calata as a call to arms; to rethink our notions of “reconciliation”, “forgiveness” and other concepts that imply a goal, an accomplishment. Dealing with the past will always remain “unfinished business”, because I think that much of what happens in the afterlife of historical trauma is enigmatic, muddy, elusive, and unpredictable. The words “forgiveness” or “reconciliation” fall short of adequately capturing this complexity.

Originally published by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Stellenbosch University on The Conversation.

Photo: Joseph Chirume/GroundUp

By Joseph Chirume

The large number of people applying for asylum permits at the under-resourced Port Elizabeth Refugee Reception Office means that many are being turned away without getting the permits.

The office was reopened to new asylum seekers in October 2018. It followed years of legal action, public outcry and civil society activism after the office was closed in 2011. Home Affairs was ordered by the Supreme Court of Appeal in 2015 to reopen the facility.

The new premises are in Sydenham. Most of the people who apply for permits come from out of Port Elizabeth, and have to spend considerable money on transport.

When GroundUp visited the centre on Wednesday, hundreds of asylum seekers from Ethiopia and Burundi were jostling in long queues, hoping to be either served or to be allocated appointment times. Others were wandering about aimlessly after giving up hope of being served. The backlog for appointments is currently March 2019.

Chris Mapingure of the Zimbabwe Migrants Support Network said that hundreds of applicants visit the office every day hoping to get asylum permits. Most of them are turned away, he said, and only a fraction are processed. “We are appealing to the Department of Home Affairs to increase the number of people they assist daily. Many people are coming from far away places,” Mapingure said.

A 26-year-old man from Burundi who works in Cape Town as a gardener said Wednesday was his second trip to Port Elizabeth in two weeks. He failed on both occasions to get even an appointment date. He said he has spent about R1,500 for trips on transport and accommodation.

A Zimbabwean couple, who live in Cradock, got their appointment letters on Monday. They were glad but it took three attempts. Their appointments are for March next year.

Another Zimbabwean woman was concerned because her passport was taken by officials. They issued her with an appointment letter for February 2019. “How will I travel to Zimbabwe during the festive holidays?” she asked. [Asylum seekers may not travel to their home country. – Editor]

Department of Home Affairs spokesperson David Hlabane explained to GroundUp that the capacity at refugee reception offices across the country was planned for based on several factors, including closest points of entry into the country. But he said that the refugee reception offices in Pretoria and Musina, which have greater capacity, are receiving low volumes, while the majority of people are applying at the smallest centre which is in Port Elizabeth.

The large number of people applying for asylum permits at the under-resourced Port Elizabeth Refugee Reception Office means many are being turned away without getting the permits.

The office was reopened to new asylum seekers in October 2018. It followed years of legal action, public outcry and civil society activism after the office was closed in 2011. Home Affairs was ordered by the Supreme Court of Appeal in 2015 to reopen the facility.

The new premises are in Sydenham. Most of the people who apply for permits come from out of Port Elizabeth, and have to spend considerable money on transport.

When GroundUp visited the centre on Wednesday, hundreds of asylum seekers from Ethiopia and Burundi were jostling in long queues, hoping to be either served or be allocated appointment times. Others were wandering about aimlessly after giving up hope of being served. The backlog for appointments is currently March 2019.

Chris Mapingure of the Zimbabwe Migrants Support Network said that hundreds of applicants visited the office every day hoping to get asylum permits. Most of them were turned away, he said, and only a fraction were processed.

“We are appealing to the department of home affairs to increase the number of people they assist daily. Many people are coming from faraway places,” Mapingure said.

A 26-year-old man from Burundi who works in Cape Town as a gardener said Wednesday was his second trip to Port Elizabeth in two weeks. He failed on both occasions to get even an appointment date. He said he has spent about R1,500 for trips on transport and accommodation.

A Zimbabwean couple, who live in Cradock, got their appointment letters on Monday. They were glad but it took three attempts. Their appointments are for March next year.

Another Zimbabwean woman was concerned because her passport was taken by officials. They issued her with an appointment letter for February 2019.

“How will I travel to Zimbabwe during the festive holidays?” she asked. [Asylum seekers may not travel to their home country. – GroundUp editor]

Home affairs spokesperson David Hlabane explained to GroundUp that the capacity at refugee reception offices across the country was planned for based on several factors, including closest points of entry into the country. But he said the refugee reception offices in Pretoria and Musina, which have greater capacity, are receiving low volumes, while the majority of people are applying at the smallest centre, which is in Port Elizabeth.

Republished from GroundUp

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.

Photo: Joseph Chirume/GroundUp

By Joseph Chirume

The large number of people applying for asylum permits at the under-resourced Port Elizabeth Refugee Reception Office means that many are being turned away without getting the permits.

The office was reopened to new asylum seekers in October 2018. It followed years of legal action, public outcry and civil society activism after the office was closed in 2011. Home Affairs was ordered by the Supreme Court of Appeal in 2015 to reopen the facility.

The new premises are in Sydenham. Most of the people who apply for permits come from out of Port Elizabeth, and have to spend considerable money on transport.

When GroundUp visited the centre on Wednesday, hundreds of asylum seekers from Ethiopia and Burundi were jostling in long queues, hoping to be either served or to be allocated appointment times. Others were wandering about aimlessly after giving up hope of being served. The backlog for appointments is currently March 2019.

Chris Mapingure of the Zimbabwe Migrants Support Network said that hundreds of applicants visit the office every day hoping to get asylum permits. Most of them are turned away, he said, and only a fraction are processed. “We are appealing to the Department of Home Affairs to increase the number of people they assist daily. Many people are coming from far away places,” Mapingure said.

A 26-year-old man from Burundi who works in Cape Town as a gardener said Wednesday was his second trip to Port Elizabeth in two weeks. He failed on both occasions to get even an appointment date. He said he has spent about R1,500 for trips on transport and accommodation.

A Zimbabwean couple, who live in Cradock, got their appointment letters on Monday. They were glad but it took three attempts. Their appointments are for March next year.

Another Zimbabwean woman was concerned because her passport was taken by officials. They issued her with an appointment letter for February 2019. “How will I travel to Zimbabwe during the festive holidays?” she asked. [Asylum seekers may not travel to their home country. – Editor]

Department of Home Affairs spokesperson David Hlabane explained to GroundUp that the capacity at refugee reception offices across the country was planned for based on several factors, including closest points of entry into the country. But he said that the refugee reception offices in Pretoria and Musina, which have greater capacity, are receiving low volumes, while the majority of people are applying at the smallest centre which is in Port Elizabeth.

CAPE TOWN — Giving back to the rural folk among whom you were raised is always a heartfelt deed – but when you do this in a way so fundamental that it far outstrips what even the government has been able to do, it becomes profound. Navigating the complex apartheid-born legislation that reduces township residents to mere tenants with no collateral to work with is a major feat, especially in the small rural towns over which the winds of change seem to have whistled unchecked. Delighting one of their many beneficiaries, the Free Market Foundation (FMF), businessman Johann Rupert and his wife Gaynor, are proving effective land reformers for some 70 Aberdeen residents in the Karoo. They’ve facilitated their life-long tenancies into full freehold title, empowering them in a way the ANC have mysteriously so far failed to do nation-wide. The town has significant ancestral ties to both Rupert and his wife whose unheralded sponsorships have transformed education and reduced poverty and hunger across the Karoo. The FMF’s ownership campaign, called Khaya Lam (my home), is building steam, with Stellenbosch townships targeted next. – Chris Bateman

From Free Market Foundation

On 16 November, 70 residents of the Karoo town of Aberdeen walked into the presentation hall as tenants and out as home owners, with full freehold title made possible by the generosity of businessman Johann Rupert and his wife Gaynor who are significant sponsors of the Free Market Foundation’s (FMF) Khaya Lam (my home) land reform project.

Khaya Lam delivers the real economic empowerment of home ownership to township residents, deprived of their dignity and rights under apartheid, by facilitating the conversion of council owned rental properties into freehold title – at no cost to the recipients. For more than 40 years the FMF has championed the cause of converting the numerous forms of Apartheid title found in the townships to full, unambiguous ownership for the current tenants.

Before personally handing the title deed certificates to recipients, Johann Rupert said the people of the Karoo were a “special breed” and spoke about how poor both his mother and father were as “children of the depression”, and had never let him forget his origins. Anton Rupert, his father, used to remind him that this region produced the Rev Beyers Naude, Robert Sobukwe and the Cradock 4. He said they had a special bond with Aberdeen (all recipients were from Aberdeen) because it was Gaynor’s home town. Her father was a master-builder and built the magnificent church in the centre of Aberdeen.

When introducing Johann Rupert, council Speaker Tembisa Nonnies talked about the care and concern to “give back to the people” shown by the Ruperts. “Ek het evidence! 24 schools in the area have computers and internet. Nobody goes to school hungry. The pupils might arrive hungry but they get a nourishing porridge every morning. (At) 7 o’clock every morning there are ladies who start cooking the porridge, thanks to the Ruperts,” she said. There were moving speeches by the Mayor Deon de Vos and an Aberdeen title deed recipient. Master of ceremonies was Clr Willem Safers.

FMF executive director Leon Louw said, “It was an extraordinary event. The Ruperts were returning to their roots, the town where the founder of the global family business, Anton Rupert, was born. They are sponsoring the most profound reversal of apartheid possible, title deeds for black victims of the apartheid land dispossession legacy. A generation after apartheid, most black people do not yet own their land. The Ruperts have risen to the challenge. They are personally committed to the reversal of racist land dispossession.”

The event took place in Rupert’s birth town of Graaff Reinet at the South African College of Tourism (SACT) which was founded and is funded by Gaynor Rupert. The presentation of title deeds followed a graduation ceremony of 92 hospitality students from disadvantaged backgrounds who will go on to forge careers in the tourism industry, supported and guided by the College.

On 3 December, in Stellenbosch, Johann and Gaynor Rupert will present more than 326 title deeds that they have sponsored to the ‘new’ home owners. Media are invited.

Titling in South Africa is a painstaking process complicated by lack of records of ownership and bureaucratic complexity. Each area has its own issues and complications. It takes time and commitment to work through individual difficulties to eventually be able to present the right title deed to the right recipient. It requires sponsors like the Ruperts who are willing to fund this process. Titling is particularly complicated in the Aberdeen and Graaff Reinet areas.

The 1913 Natives Land Act prohibited black South Africans from owning land in so-called ‘white areas’ – restricting the question of land ownership entirely to the ethnic authorities in the reserves, later known as homelands. Black people in the cities thus lived as tenants on property owned by the local municipality, which developed into what we know today as ‘townships’. Not much has changed and as many as 5 million families still live as tenants or without ownership rights across SA. Khaya Lam offers hope to these citizens 20 years after the end of apartheid.

• The FMF is an independent, non-profit, public benefit organisation, created in 1975 by pro-free market business and civil society national bodies to work for a non-racial, free and prosperous South Africa.

Chris Bateman

November 22, 2018

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Aberdeen, BNT5, Johann Rupert, Khaya Lam project, land reform, title deeds, weekender