Nine years ago Joseph Cloete arrived at his stockpost in the Southern Richtersveld, an arid area of Namaqualand on the edge of the Namib desert, to find that it had been fenced off.
Two years later he was charged with trespassing, fined R150 and given three months to leave the area, which had been used as communal grazing ground by the 2 700-strong Richtersveld community for generations.
This week Cloete and his neighhours won back their land. Acting Justice Hofmeyer ruled in favour of a supreme court application brought by Cloete and seven others, ordering that communal grazing rights be restored to the community.
The judge ruled that neither the House of Representatives nor the management board for the region were empowered to subdivide or rent the land, which is part of the largest of 23 rural coloured reserves in South Africa.
“For this community, it means the land which was dispossesed is now being returned to them,” said Shehnaz Meer, an attorney from the Legal Resources Centre, which brought the application on behalf of the southern Richtersveld community. The community’s land had been carved up into farms and rented out to individual farmers.
Cloete moved his sheep and goals to another area, and when he was evicted from there shifted to a small area of commonage outside the villages of Lekkersing where his family has lived.
Over the years, his herd dwindled from 800 to less than 100. The application which was not opposed was awarded with costs.
In papers before me court, Cloete, a stock farmer said his great grandfather had settled in Richtersveld, an area spread over 500 000ha, in 1870.