By Kim Harrisberg
ELIM, South Africa, Jan 17 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – On the plains of South Africa’s Western Cape, a tiny town has become an unlikely contender in South Africa’s drive for more equitable land rights.
Nearly 200 years ago, German missionaries set up a mission station in what would later be named Elim to provide a home for freed slaves and indigenous Khoi people who would become their first converts.
Now, their descendants say the time has come for them to own the land the Elimers have been living on for almost two centuries, rather than the Moravian church that set up the mission station.
In February Elimers will present a proposal to the Moravian church council, with different land ownership possibilities, such as buying or leasing the 7,500 hectares they call home from the church.
“Not owning land feels like we have gone back to being slaves,” said Amanda Cloete, Elim’s heritage officer.
“Our ancestors built this town. We want the land,” the 58-year-old said inside the Elim heritage museum she founded in 2004.
Across South Africa, a quarter century after segregation and white minority rule under apartheid was officially ended through a negotiated settlement, land ownership remains a sensitive topic.
President and African National Congress leader Cyril Ramaphosa in 2018 launched a process to change the constitution to make explicit provision for the redistribution of land without pay to address high levels of inequality.
This national conversation has trickled into the town of Elim known for thatched roofing, the occasional horse-drawn cart, slave memorials and wild indigenous fynbos plants.
“People are land-hungry,” Kenneth Cloete, 78, a retired Elim school principal told the Thomson Reuters Foundation inside an old church building now used for meetings.
“To have land, especially in South Africa, you feel like you are somebody, you have a self-esteem, a sense of belonging,” he said.
Yet Elimers are cautious about challenging the traditional role the Moravian church, which originated in Bohemia and Moravia in what is the present-day Czech Republic, has played in the town.
