OVER 120 Riemvasmaak families will be repatriated to the area formerly occupied by the community northwest of Upington in the Northern Cape as the South African government wraps up what was started in 1995.
Already more than 500 families and their livestock have returned from Namibia to their Northern Cape ancestral home.Abraham William Katimba, co-ordinator of the group at Khorixas, said the SA government had made available 13 farms totalling 46 000 hectares to accommodate the families still willing to return.The Riemvasmaak community was forcibly removed in 1974 from their 74 000 hectares of land to the former Transkei and Namibia under the National Party government’s ‘Black Spot Removal Programme’.Those classified as Damara under apartheid legislation were settled in arid areas in and around Khorixas in the northwest of what was then SA-administered South West Africa.The removals were brutal and the people were abandoned willy-nilly in Namibia and the Eastern Cape, where they were treated with open hostility by the communities already living there.The farm Riemvasmaak, about 140 km from Upington, has since been used as an infantry training ground, with 4 270 hectares purchased by the South African National Parks Board in 1982 and proclaimed part of the Augrabies Waterfall National Park.In July this year the SA High Commission in Windhoek said no Riemvasmaker would be forced to return and it was up to individuals to decide for themselves.The SA Commission on Restitution of Lands Rights said the government was committed to assisting the community to rebuild themselves through investments in the Riemvasmaak area.A letter from Peter Mokomele of the Regional Land Claims Commission for Northern Cape said they were even willing to help the Riemvaskmakers in Namibia with transport back home.’The Regional Land Claims Commission will assist you in your quest to regain your South African identity lost due to the apartheid discriminatory policies,’ Mokomele wrote to the community.He said the department of veterinary services in the agriculture ministry as well as others such as home affairs and newly created department of co-operative governance and human settlements were on hand to assist the community with their return.The repatriation, initiated by the SA Commission on Land Allocation in 1993, is a presidential project started by former SA President Nelson Mandela.Katimba said Mandela was at Riemvasmaak to welcome the first group of people in 1995. The second group went back in 1998.’This one is the last phase. Anyone who wants to go back and wants to be resettled there must do it now. They must not waste time,’ Katimba said.Riemvasmaak was one of the first land claims lodged during Mandela’s presidency and the exercise became known as the ‘Mandela Project’.When the first group went back they were accommodated in tents with water pipelines and taps provided by the reconstruction and development programme.A primary school was established, while high school students were accommodated in nearby Kakamas.The community has had to start again virtually from scratch.The land returned to the community covers about 75 000 ha in the country’s largest and least populated province. It is next to the Augrabies Falls National Park and is bordered by the Gariep (Orange) River in the south, private Kalahari farms in the north and Namibia in the west.
