A Durban judge has thrown out a 20-year-old multimillion-rand claim by a community on the KZN South Coast for prime sugar cane land owned by the JSE-listed agricultural group Crookes Brothers, says a Times Select report. Land Claims Court Judge Yasmin Meer had strong words for the Elambini community when she rejected the claim yesterday.

The claim was lodged by the community – comprising 23 families – in November and December 1998. It was subsequently granted by the commission and endorsed by the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform. But the owners of the 30 sugar cane farms, including agribusiness conglomerate Crookes Brothers and several other farmers, opposed the claims and the matter was referred to the Land Claims Court in 2012.

They denied that the families had occupied the land or that they were dispossessed under the 1913 Native Land Act.

In his evidence, Clement Dube (68), chairperson of the Elambini community represented by former Public Protector Thuli Madonsela, said he couldn’t confirm that they had lived on the land since 1913 but that he had heard this from his father and family.

Meer said she was upset the community, represented at the state’s expense, ‘could have pursued and persisted with a claim without a shred of evidence to prove their dispossession and use of land’.

She said the community had commissioned a historian to compile a report, which they suppressed when the results disproved their claim. Meer said that based on the evidence by the community, who gave ‘fragmented recollections of conversations of grandparents and parents which were often vague and contradictory’, she was unable to validate the claim that they lived in the area or that they were dispossessed of the land as a result of the Act.

Full Times Select report