OWN CORRESPONDENT AND AFP, Cape Town | Saturday
A SOUTH African court has for the first time awarded a person symbolic compensation for the distress suffered after being forced from their home by the former apartheid regime.
The Land Claims Court this week ordered that 75-year-old Ronald Hermanus, a coloured man, be paid R6 000 in comfort money for being forced to sell his house in what became a whites-only suburb 36 years ago, the daily Die Burger reported.
The court also ordered that Hermanus be paid R51 844 for having to sell the property to a government board at below its market price.
It is the smaller amount that makes Hermanus’ case a landmark one as it is the first time a court has recognised the emotional stress of one of the estimated three million South Africans who were forced to abandon or sell their homes in areas declared white by the former regime.
Hermanus sold the house he inherited from his father for R3_ 760 after the suburb of Goodwood, north of Cape Town, was in 1958 declared a white area in terms of the infamous segregation law, the Group Areas Act.
He moved his family to the poor mixed-race area of Crawford but was unable to pay for his new home and ended up living in a shack in an informal settlement in “abhorrent conditions,” he told the court.
Judge Antonie Gildenhuys said the sum awarded to Hermanus after a five-year court battle was symbolic reparation.
“The grief and suffering caused by forced removals is enormous. Not every past injustice is capable of being remedied. No amount of money can compensate the claimant for his sufferings,” he said.
Hermanus, who now lives in Mitchell’s Plain, told Die Burger: “The victory does not make up for what I lost.”
He said his wife had become depressed following the move and died in a mental hospital 10 years later.
His son, who was a small child at the time of the move, had also developed a mental illness. The boy was run over by a car and killed when he tried to walk from Crawford back to Goodwood.
The Land Claims Court was set up by the post-apartheid government in 1996 to deal with claims for compensation or restitution by people who lost their homes and land during 48 years of apartheid.
It had by the end of 1999 heard 174 cases.