The Commission on Restitution of Land Rights in the Western Cape is to compensate families and former tenants in Paarl on Saturday for tenancy rights lost in terms of the Group Areas Act of the apartheid era.
Regional land claims commissioner Beverley Jansen will hand over a total of R5 779 360 to 54 families who lost their properties and R912 000 for 40 former tenants at a handover ceremony at the Paulus Joubert Senior Secondary School at 10am.
The coloured and African tenants were moved when the areas were proclaimed as white group areas in the 1950s. The commission said the African inhabitants of Paarl were forcibly removed to an emergency transit camp called Langabuya. Later some of them were deported to the defunct ”homelands”, while others went to live on farms in the area. Still others were moved to council houses in Mbekweni, a township in Paarl created in 1949/50 to accommodate the African population.
The 54 former property owners accepted the Standard Settlement Offer (STO) of R40 000 per property plus R40 per square metre extra for properties lost over 600 square metres in extent. The tenancy claimants accepted the STO offer of R22 800 from the state for tenancy rights lost.
According to Jansen more than 1 600 claims in the Western Cape had been settled in the last few months. – Sapa