His name means
Struggle, and despite turning 101 in January, Zabalaza Mshengu is still
struggling to get government to process his legal claim to the land
where he hopes to live out the time he has left.
From
his derelict home on a commercial farm near Ashburton, Mshengu points
across the N3, shaking with emotion at his memory of a precarious life.
“This all used to be one farm before the highway came. My mother and
father worked there for no wages, and when I was old enough I also
worked on that farm. In return, the farmer gave us land to graze our
cattle and grow our crops. My father’s grave is there – I don’t know if
that owner even knows it is there.”
Mshengu had reason to
hope in 1996 when a new law promised to secure his rights to the land he
had grown up on. The Land Reform (Labour Tenants) Act derives from the
Constitution, which guarantees tenure to people deprived of it in terms
of racially discriminatory laws. The act addressed the plight of labour
tenants who, like Mshengu, had clung to land and the remnants of
independent farming by working for land owners without receiving wages
despite attempts by successive apartheid laws to destroy this way of
life. It provided for labour tenants to claim ownership of the land they
and their fathers had lived on and used. By the closing date for the
lodging of claims in March 2001, about 19,000 labour tenants had applied
for land ownership. Mshengu was one of them.
But 14 years later,
the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform has once again
failed to comply with a Land Claims Court order that it explain how it
will resolve these land claims. The application was brought in July 2013
on behalf of all labour tenant claimants by the Legal Resources Centre
acting for the Association for Rural Advancement (AFRA) and four labour
tenants who reside on land belonging to Hilton College. The Department
has, on at least five occasions, either failed to respond to Court
orders or has submitted affidavits late. A report on the case by AFRA’s
director, Mike Cowling, a former professor of law, states: “The bottom
line is that the Department has comprehensively and systematically
failed to carry out its basic mandate in respect of labour tenant
applications.”
Cowling’s conclusion
was once again confirmed last week when the Department failed to provide
the information the Court required. Once again, the Department failed
to show the courtesy of informing the Court or the applicants that it
was unable to comply with its orders. And once again, the applicants’
lawyers have had to request that either the information is provided or
that the Department is found to be in contempt of Court. It has until
Friday to respond.
Mshengu, understating his exhausted patience, says simply: “Land affairs is taking far too long to settle my claim.”
By Donna Hornby
3 April, 2015
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