Claimants set to take on Ingonyama Trust
A group of seven individual claimants will take on King Goodwill Zwelithini and his Ingonyama Trust in the KZN High Court (Pietermaritzburg) on 22 November to secure the rights to their homesteads. The lawsuit involves the trust’s quest to get residents to sign leases, with rents that increase by 10% a year.
The claimants will argue that the contracts undermine the property rights of people who have often lived on the land for generations and have little means to pay.
In their discussion of the case on the Custom Contested website, journalists Gabriele Steinhauser and Aaisha Dadi Patel quote one of the claimants, Hluphekile Mabuyakhulu, who said she was ordered to attend a community meeting in 2011, where the local headman told attendees that they could lose their homes should they refuse to sign leases, written in English, with the Ingonyama Trust.
‘This paper was written in a language I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘Even at the meeting it wasn’t explained what the content was.’
She later discovered that her lease – a copy of which is included in the court application against the trust – required her to pay rent of R1 500 a year for her 0.24 hectare plot, an amount that would increase by 10% each year. The authors note that the lawsuit – led by the Council for the Advancement of the SA Constitution and the Rural Women’s Movement – raises complicated questions over SA’s national identity as a liberal democracy, which has sought to protect customary laws and traditions.
The authors note that some claimants in the case say they have received threatening letters and phone calls reminding them of money they owed to the trust.
Others allege that the leases discriminate against women, some of whom saw contracts for their land made out in the name of male partners.
The trust’s chairperson, Jerome Ngwenya, said the leases were an attempt to combine traditional notions of communal land ownership with Western legal principles.
‘The leasehold is the closest we have to customary law,’ he said.
Article disclaimer: While we have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of this article, it is not intended to provide final legal advice as facts and situations will differ from case to case, and therefore specific legal advice should be sought with a lawyer.
