Having withstood the dispossession and displacement of over 60,000 black people from District Six through the Group Areas Act, a 78-year-old now pensioner in post-apartheid now faced a second attempt – this time by a development company – to evict her from District Six in Cape Town.

But the Western Cape High Court came to the rescue of the elderly Noor-Banu Allie, who faced homelessness after a Western Cape Magistrate’s Court ruled in favour of Westminster Properties Developments to have her evicted.

Judge Vincent Saldanha had harsh words for the magistrate who ordered her eviction after Allie successfully turned to the high court to appeal that order. He noted that Allie has, despite the demolition of the home in which she lived by the bulldozers of apartheid’s government, through sheer perseverance, remained in District Six for decades.

He said sadly, where the apartheid government failed in their attempts to displace Allie, the development company succeeded in the magistrate’s court. The judge said the irony is not lost that the entrance to the well-established District Six Museum in Buitenkant Street, where the agony and pain of thousands of residents that were displaced and forcefully removed from District Six are vividly recorded, lies directly across the very magistrate’s court that has relegated Allie to homelessness.

“History in the context of District Six shamefully repeats itself,” the judge remarked. Allie meanwhile proudly told the court that she had been living in District Six for most of her life. She was born in Mahad, India in 1947 and had come to South Africa as a toddler with her siblings.

They lived with an aunt in District Six. As a teenager, she worked and lived in her aunt’s shop in Sir Lowry Road and also in her cousin’s butchery in Hanover Street, District Six. From the 1960s onwards, she was employed at Groote Schuur Hospital as a nursing aid and continued so until her retirement.

She painfully recalled the declaration of District Six as a white group area in 1968 and the beginning of the forced removal of over 60,000 people from the area by 1982. Allie explained that in the 1970s, her cousin’s butchery in Hanover Street, which had become her home, was demolished to which she was never able to return.

She continued to live in Dorset Street until 2006, when she moved to her present semi-detached home in District Six, where she lived under successive lease agreements. She paid rent and maintained the property over the years. She recalled that she at first paid her monthly rental to a shopkeeper across from where she stayed.

In 2023, the managing agent acting on behalf of the new developer issued her with a notice to vacate, citing that they were going to do renovations to the property. This later turned into an eviction notice under the Prevention of Illegal Eviction from and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act {PIE}.

Allie opposed this and cited that she has deep historical ties with District Six and that she cannot afford to move. She also told the court that she had applied for public housing since 1983 and had been on the waiting list for decades. She said she will no longer be alive when this happens one day.

Meanwhile, she said, she is facing homelessness. Her lawyer told the court that District Six has a painful past and for Allie, and it now continues to have a painful present.

Judge Saldanha remarked on appeal that despite Allie having extensively set out her financial circumstances, the magistrate simply dismissed it. Regrettably, the magistrate failed to appreciate Allie’s circumstances at all, the judge said.

He also remarked that dispossessed people in District Six still find themselves thirty years into a constitutional democracy desperately awaiting a restitution process. “Every house was a home to many and successive families over decades,” he said.

In ruling in favour of Allie, the judge hailed the Ndifuna Ukwazi Law Centre for acting free of charge for her in this application.

zelda.venter@inl.co.za

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