Long Road to Justice for the Diamond Dispossessed

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Long road to justice for the diamond dispossessed

A community's seven-year legal fight for its ancestral territory is nearing its climax in a test of South Africa's land reform laws

Kristy Siegfried in Kuboes
Monday April 25, 2005
The Guardian

Gert Domroch has lived in the village of Kuboes in a remote corner of South Africa's Northern Cape province for all his 75 years. Seated on a blanket in his back yard, the old man gestures with his pipe to the surrounding windswept desert with its backdrop of jagged mountains:

"This is the land of our forefathers," he says. "We've been dispossessed."

The land he is referring to is the Richtersveld, and for its 4,000 inhabitants - most of whom lack jobs and access to basic services - the outcome of a hearing due to begin in Cape Town's land claims court today could mean the difference between continued poverty and joblessness and the possibility of a better future for their children. Mr Domroch's grandfather was a Nama, one of an indigenous people who once grazed their livestock on the plains surrounding Alexander Bay on the north-west coast.

Following the discovery of diamonds there in the 1920s, the British colonial government seized the land and drove the Nama east into the harsh desert interior, where most still live in tin shacks and small cinderblock houses, many without electricity or running water. The community's continued isolation from the outside world is ensured by unpaved roads that are virtually impassable without a four-wheel-drive vehicle.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/southafrica/story/0,13262,1469451,00.html