A critical race feminist reading of the South African property law

Abstract

The European colonial invasion of South Africa gave birth to the rule of Apartheid, which led to many black women being the most vulnerable to land dispossession. Although in the year 1994, a new democratic Constitution which sought to address the inequities of the Apartheid era was adopted, black women continued to suffer from land dispossession. This was worsened by the ineffective law policies that failed to acknowledge the racial, gender, and socio-economic marginalisation of black women in the regulation of land. Against this background, this chapter addresses the intersectionality between the oppressions of gender, racial, and class based discrimination, which black women in South Africa are afflicted by, in relation to land ownership and the security of land tenure. This chapter further illuminates how there is an urgent necessity for the decolonisation of the South African property law system as a whole, to rectify the problem of black women being the most vulnerable group to land dispossession in the post-Apartheid, democratic era. In assessing the ineffectiveness of the legal reforms, a critique of the Extension of Security of Tenure Act 62 of 1997 (ESTA) with reference to the Critical Race Feminist theory and South African case law is provided. This critique exposes how matters of race, gender, and class intersect in land dispossession. It is of great significance to purposefully interpret South African laws regulating the property system to bring about transformation in legal knowledge.