Reconciling competing claims to justice in urban South Africa: Cato Manor and District Six

ABSTRACT

This article examines two sharply divergent cases of urban land justice. Cato Manor is a massive, low-income housing project in central Durban that largely excluded land restitution claims to redress apartheid- and colonial-era forced removals from the area, and Cape Town’s District Six is currently being developed for resettlement by land restitution claimants, thus far without incorporating potential housing beneficiaries. The article critically appropriates Nancy Fraser’s work to conceptualise land restitution as a demand for ‘recognition’ and housing as a form of ‘redistribution’, and considers how these programmes might be reconciled in an integrated framework of justice. A more fundamental problem, however, is that these official programmes of justice administration fail to adequately deal with the basic demands for shelter and land in South Africa’s vast, informal settlements, and the article concludes that the primary imperative of justice is for far-reaching urban land reform.

KEYWORDS:

• Land restitution
• housing
• justice
• recognition
• redistribution

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Chris Beyers is Associate Professor of International Development Studies at Trent University. His work focuses on critical social theory; citizenship, rights and identity; community and social exclusion; and land struggles in South Africa. He has carried out extensive research on land restitution in South Africa, and has published in the Journal of Southern African Studies, African Affairs, Development and Change, Social Dynamics and Anthropologica. His most recent chapter, coauthored with Derick Fay, is titled ‘Law and Political Conflict in South African Land Reform’ and is forthcoming in Domains of Freedom (University of Cape Town Press). He can be contacted at: [email protected]

Notes

1. The land restitution program opened in 1995 to provide redress for individuals and communities that were forcibly removed on the basis of their racial classification during the apartheid and colonial eras. Although scholarly and political attention has largely focused on rural claims, there were more urban claims, and these have so far taken the most time and resources to process by the Land Claims Commission (see Beyers 2013).

2. Some housing had been constructed for low-income Indian families in the Bonella and Wiggins areas of Cato Manor after they were rezoned for Indian ownership and occupation in 1979, and although substantial numbers of Indian families did resettle, there were also invasions in 1993 of the still unoccupied units in Wiggins by mainly African settlers (Gigaba and Maharaj 1996).

3. It is difficult to know how many thousands more housing units have been built since then as the Cato Manor area is no longer treated as an integral unit for housing construction purposes, and instead consists of numerous projects in different areas (Interview with Mxolisi Tshabala, Eric Ndlala, Sara Watson, Ethekwini Municipality, 22 August 2014).

4. See Beyers (2007) for a detailed account, on which this section is based except where otherwise indicated.

5. In Fraser’s later work (2010, 17), she adds a third dimension of justice to her recognition-redistribution framework. ‘Representation’ is ‘rooted in the political constitution of society’, and ‘tells us who is included in, and who excluded from, the circle of those entitled to a just distribution and reciprocal recognition’. This would seem to turn a fundamental principle of justice, from which both ‘recognition’ and ‘redistribution’ are derived as categories that can inform practical divisions of justice administration, into another category alongside them – as if it were of the same order.

6. In this sense, restitution as a social project invokes the right of a minority community to survival (Kymlicka 1989; Taylor 1994).

7. It should be noted that this distinction does not neatly correspond to the legal criteria under which people qualify for each form of intervention. Thus while there are ‘community claims’ for restitution, the vast majority of urban claims are made by individuals – although in these latter cases, claims that are aggregated as a ‘group claim’ are prioritized.

8. Rectificatory justice concerns not only suffering of injustices, but also unjust actions on the part of those who caused such suffering. For the sake of clarity, the argument being made here brackets consideration of the latter.