Legal geographies of ‘community’ in South Africa and the Tafelberg case (a children’s story) – Sonya Cotton PhD Researcher at UCD Sutherland School of Law
Sonya Cotton is a South African socio-legal scholar with a Master of Laws from Peking University specializing in Chinese law and society, and a Master of Philosophy in Comparative Law in Africa from the University of Cape Town (UCT). Her most recent academic publication is Diala, A. C., & Cotton, S. R. (2021). At-issue: Chained communities: A critique of South Africa's approach to land restitution. African Studies Quarterly, 20(3), 73-86.
Legal geographies of 'community' in South Africa and the Tafelberg case (a children's story) by Sonya Cotton is the latest publication on the Property [In]justice Project. PROPERTY[IN]JUSTICE (2020-2025) is a research project that investigates the role of international law in creating spatial justice and injustice through its conception of property rights in land. In going beyond traditional legal analysis to include interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives, the project aims to push the boundaries of property and advocate for more place-based understandings of land across international law. The project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC), led by Amy Strecker, and hosted by the Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin.
Extract from the Blog:
In August 2020, the High Court of South Africa overturned the sale of land purchased for the construction of private Jewish school, ruling instead that the land must be developed for social housing (Adonisi2020, which I will also refer to as the “Tafelberg Case”). This legal outcome was the result of four years of campaigning by a Cape Town-based group called Reclaim the City (RTC), which aimed to expose and combat spatial segregation resulting from apartheid urban planning. The land at the heart of the Tafelberg dispute is located in a previously “whites only” area situated between the mountain and the sea, and, through the activism of RTC, became symbolic of continued spatial inequality in post-apartheid South Africa (Eyong 2020). ... The case has particular personal relevance for me. In addition to growing up on the slopes of Table Mountain, I am part of Cape Town’s Jewish minority (less than 0.1% of the country’s entire population) and the intended beneficiary of the proposed private school (and whose directors were included among the defendants brought to court by RTC). Having this “insider” perspective, I wanted to engage with the case in a manner that embraces my experiences and perceptions of growing up as a member of a tight-knit community in post-Apartheid South Africa, and tease out some of the contradictions animating our identities.
This short, yet very interesting, article along with previous publications of the PROPERTY [IN]JUSTICE Project can be read by clicking here.