Culemborg Eviction Heads To Supreme Court Of Appeal As Activists Fight Removal

The long-running battle over the eviction of hundreds of people from Transnet-owned land at Culemborg near the N1 and Woodstock in Cape Town is heading for another round in court after housing advocacy organisation Ndifuna Ukwazi (NU) filed an application for leave to appeal directly to the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA).

The application effectively halts an eviction that was due to take place by September 30. In July, the Western Cape High Court ordered the eviction of 161 occupiers from the Transnet-owned site; according to court papers, there were initially 282 people occupying 10 pockets of Transnet land, some of whom had lived there for more than a decade.

After the high court subsequently refused leave to appeal on September 28, NU approached the SCA directly. The organisation, which advocates for access to well-located land and affordable housing for poor and working-class communities, said its appeal challenges what it describes as an unprecedented order allowing eviction and demolition without requiring the city to provide emergency accommodation. It argues that carrying out the order could result in immediate homelessness for vulnerable occupiers.

The City of Cape Town says the long-standing occupation has contributed to crime and placed an enormous strain on law enforcement resources. Mayoral committee member for safety and security JP Smith said the city had submitted extensive evidence detailing muggings, smash-and-grab incidents, infrastructure stripping and cable theft linked to the area, and warned that the challenge could delay the eviction for months or even years.

Ndifuna Ukwazi rejected what it described as attempts to conflate poverty and landlessness with criminality. It said the wider Transnet site was home to about 266 people, including children, elderly people and people with disabilities, some of whom had lived there for as long as 20 years, worked in the surrounding area and had nowhere else to go.

The organisation said the Constitution and the Prevention of Illegal Eviction from and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act require courts considering evictions to take all relevant circumstances into account, including the consequences for those being evicted. It argued that describing an entire community as criminal, and citing metropole-wide statistics, is not evidence against those 266 people, and that crime must be addressed without making families homeless.