In South Africa, patriarchal law cuts some women off from owning their home
Al Jazeera
How a land law seeking to fix the racial injustices of apartheid created gender barriers for Black women instead.
Johannesburg, South Africa – For more than a decade, Johanna Motlhamme has been fighting to get her family home back after it was sold from under her, leaving her and her four children without their rightful inheritance.
The 74-year-old’s plight is one that has its roots in the racist laws that prevented Black people from owning land in apartheid South Africa, housing activists have said – a plight inadvertently worsened at the start of democracy when legislation seeking to repair the racial injustices created gender barriers instead.
“Thirty years after the end of apartheid, hundreds of thousands of Black families living in South Africa’s urban townships are facing the same tenure insecurity and the threat of homelessness as they fiercely contest the ownership, occupation, control and rights to access so-called ‘family homes’,” legal rights group the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI) said in a recent report (PDF).
Motlhamme’s story goes back to 1977, when the then-27-year-old married her husband in community of property, meaning spouses share everything equally.
They moved into a small two-bedroom house in Soweto, a sprawling township southwest of Johannesburg, where Motlhamme lived until their divorce in 1991.
