Ann Eveleth
A Northern Cape pastor evicted 11 relatives – including two septuagenarian female cousins – from the only home they had ever known late last month after they fell behind on their rent in the midst of an ownership dispute.
The farm Uitkomst has been in the Jansen family for more than a century, and is one of a handful of farms still belonging to the descendants of coloured farmers who turned Gordonia’s “worthless desert” on the northern bank of the Oranje River into productive farmland in the late 1880s.
But an Upington small claims court decided in September to grant Reverend Floris Jansen the right to evict his cousins, Hendriena van Wyk (79) and Jeanetta Havenga (71) (both born Jansen) from the land of their birth owing to rental arrears of R500.
The court, which is empowered to decide cases involving a maximum value of R3 000, ruled in the matter in spite of a pending land claim by the two widows who say transactions which robbed them of their father’s inheritance in the 1950s followed similar “racially based practices” to those which saw most of Gordonia’s coloured farmers losing their land in the early 20th century.
Van Wyk and Havenga now share a two-bedroom council house with Van Wyk’s daughter and 14 other relatives, including nine children and grandchildren evicted with them, in Upington’s Rosedale township.
Jansen is the national chair of the Evangelical Fellowship of Congregational Churches – and delivers sermons to his homeless relatives every week at the Uitkomst church they all attend.
He has rejected appeals by the Human Rights Commission to reconsider the evictions on grounds the move infringes on the constitutional rights of the elderly women to dignity, equality and adequate housing.
Jansen told the Mail & Guardian this week that he would not change his mind because his cousins had “refused” to pay rent and forced him to go to court. His cousins subsequently paid their arrears, but this did not stop their eviction.
Local Uniting Reformed church Reverend Aubrey Beukes has lobbied the ministers of justice and land affairs, as well as legal non-governmental organisations, to intervene on behalf of the women, who dispute a 1956 division of the farm between their father, Job Jansen and his brother Cornelius – the father of Floris Jansen.
They also dispute a 1961 sale of their father’s land to a white farmer – a legal battle that has stretched 35 years on the instructions of their father’s will.
University of Western Cape history Professor Martin Legassick said the Jansen land dispute followed “the same pattern of shady lawyers manipulating land deals” which resulted in most of the Gordonia farms returning to white ownership after a former slave, Abraham September, enriched the “desert” soil by building an irrigation canal.
“September’s own farm was sold off in contravention of his will by sons who were unaware of the contents of the documents they signed,” said Legassick.