A fight for the mineral-rich Richtersveld is pitting a small community against the state and its diamond mine Alexkor Barry Streek Three high-powered legal teams are squaring up the in the remote Northern Cape town of Kubus for one of the country’s most significant land claims battles. Communities in the Richtersveld are seeking to have their mineral-rich land returned to them – land that includes state-owned diamond mine Alexkor, which is currently making R500E000 profit a month. The Richtersveld applicants claim that their ancestors never alienated their land and that it rightfully belongs to them. In addition to lodging a case on the grounds of land restitution, they will also argue, with international law precedents, that they are the aboriginal owners of the land. With the help of hired high-powered legal teams, headed by Jeremy Gauntlett, SC, and Roelof Hiemstra, SC, the government and Alexkor will argue that the land belongs to the government. They say ownership was lawfully transferred to the state. Backed by the Surplus Peoples’ Project and the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), the four communities have instructed another high- powered legal team, headed by Wim Trengove, SC, and Geoff Budlender, the former director general of land affairs. “We are trying to bring to life the constitutional provisions on socio-economic rights, the rights to land and community participation in mineral rights,” says Anthea Billy, the coordinator of the LRC’s legal programme.
Large files of written evidence, including a number of affidavits by historians and academics, have also been prepared for the case that will be heard early next month by the former head of the National Peace Accord, Judge Athonie Gildenhuys, now of the Land Claims Court, for a week in Kubus and a further three weeks in Cape Town. The LRC’s Henk Smith says the semi-nomadic pastoralist community used the greater Richtersveld land for many centuries and although the colonial boundary of the Cape was extended to the Orange river in 1847 it was only in the 1920s when diamonds were discovered that the government showed any interest in the area. The community was dispossessed of the larger parts of its land by being denied access to the mining area, a corridor of farms around the declared mining reserve and along the river bank that was set aside for leasing to white settlers. Smith says the case involves restitution of land and mineral rights, redistribution and tenure reform. “Our constitutional reform and new land laws may now help to bring social justice and integrated development to this isolated community with significant policy implications.”
Alexkor, the first defendant, earlier asked the Land Claims Court to reject the Richtersveld claims and it was supported then by the Department of Land Affairs’s lawyers, but on September 13 last year Judge Gildenhuys rejected their bid to throw out the case. Alexkor and government lawyers argued then that whatever rights the Richtersveld people had to the land were extinguished before June 19 1913 and therefore they could not claim restitution. They also argued the Land Claims Court was not competent to inquire into the issue of aboriginal title.