A Richtersveld elder on Tuesday told how as a young man he laboured for less than 40c a day on the state diamond diggings that his community is now reclaiming.
Oom Gert Domroch (75), speaking his mother tongue, Nama, told the Land Claims Court in Cape Town that he worked for 40 years on the diggings at Brandkaros and Arries.
His first wage had been ”three shillings and a few pennies a day”.
The community is claiming 85 000ha of land and compensation of up to R2,5-billion, including R1,5-billion for diamonds that state-owned Alexkor has extracted from the ground for more than three-quarters of a century.
Domroch, speaking through an interpreter and bundled up in the jackets of two members of the community’s legal team against the cold of the courtroom air-conditioning, told the court that the fencing-off of the diggings when diamonds were discovered in the 1920s had devastating consequences for the community.
”The community were totally excluded,” he said. ”You could not enter that land. The old people saw the erection of the fence as the end of the existence of the community.”
He said the fences cut the community off from grazing land, and from the grave of a chief named Links.
”This dispossession, this denudation, meant our human dignity was taken away, we were stripped of everything,” Domroch said.
Asked by the community’s attorney Henk Smit what could be done to put this right, he replied: ”I think the person who took a thing from you must give it back.”
Domroch said the conditions under which he worked on the diggings were ”bad”.
”Right from the morning, you were threatened, a man stood behind you. We worked from seven o’clock in the morning to six in the evening. Then it improved, from seven to five.”
He said the people who threatened him were white people.
”They were not the owners, but they were our supervisors. From the time I started working until I left, I never saw the white people working with pick and spade.”
He said the place they were given to sleep was ”very bad” and that they were given only coarse blankets.
Domroch said he is the only surviving member of a land committee set up by the community in 1993 to push its restitution claim.
”My goal and responsibility to the community in Koeboes was to give advice and keep on going to the very end.”
Domroch is the second witness to be called by the community’s legal team in the case.
On Monday, Shanduka executive chairperson Cyril Ramaphosa testified that his group has formed a strategic partnership with the community that will allow it to exploit the diamond resource if the restitution claim is successful.
The Constitutional Court has already ruled that the community is entitled to restitution; the Land Claims Court now only has to decide the nature of that restitution.
The hearing, being held in the Cape High Court, is expected to last several weeks. — Sapa