Nearly six decades after bulldozers ravaged District Six, 78-year-old Noor-Banu Allie has once again been forced to fight for her right to remain in the community she calls home.

But this time, the Western Cape High Court stood firmly behind her.

In a strongly worded judgment, it overturned an eviction application brought against her and rebuked the landlord for an ‘unlawful and disingenuous’ attempt to remove her.

Allie was born in India but came to SA as a toddler in 1947. News24 reports that she and her siblings lived with an aunt and her family in Sir Lowry Road, District Six. She was employed at Groote Schuur Hospital as a nursing aid and lived in the community for years until the apartheid government declared District Six a white group area in 1966.

It sent in bulldozers to demolish homes and buildings and forcibly remove over 60 000 people, including Allie, from the area.

She moved to the Cape Flats, but she returned to District Six in April 2006 and rented a home on Dorset Street.

For nearly two decades, she paid R750 in rent via the owner’s managing agent and later to a shopkeeper across the road. However, the owner obtained an eviction order.

The court on Friday dismissed the eviction bid with costs, finding that the landlord’s attempt to push her out under the guise of ‘renovations’ was legally baseless, factually unsupported, and an unfair practice under the Rental Housing Act.

It also held that the magistrate who first granted the eviction had ignored binding precedent, failed to apply the law, and granted an order that would have effectively rendered Allie homeless.

News24 reports that Judge Vincent Saldanha and Acting Judge Zuko Mapoma set aside the eviction granted by Magistrate Juan de Pontes and ordered the property owner, Waleed Ras of Westminster Property Developments, to pay costs.

They found the termination of Allie’s lease was both procedurally flawed and fundamentally unfair.

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The dispute began in March 2023, when Allie received notice from Ras that her lease was being terminated because the landlord ‘wished to renovate the property’.

But once the matter reached court, the landlord shifted its position entirely, arguing that because she was on a month-to-month lease, no reason for termination was required. 

News24 notes that the court labelled this reversal as ‘opportunistic and disingenuous’, saying the landlord tried to rewrite its own justification when the original claim fell apart.

Saldanha reflected on the weight of this history.  ‘Where the apartheid government failed in their attempts to displace Allie, Ras succeeded, in a judgment by Magistrate De Pontes.’

He stressed the constitutional significance of the case: 'To ignore her voice in the context of the circumstances of this particular matter was nothing more than to disregard the longstanding fight for justice in its true sense for the people of District Six.' 

Full News24 report

Judgment