Rehoboth community want their land back

ATTEMPTS by the Rehoboth Baster community to regain ownership over their ancestral land – or at least to be compensated for the loss of it after Independence – have gained momentum.

Two groups have now agreed to jointly fight for the cause.
‘The Rehoboth Baster community and the Rehoboth Burgerbeweging (RBB) met last Saturday and decided to set aside their differences to work together in unity and formed a joint committee,’ said Bernard Buys, one of the committee members.
‘It will develop strategic plans to re-possess alienated land and other assets and functions for a prosperous community and effective town management,’ Buys said in a statement on Wednesday.
‘The aim is to raise the Baster nation again to a level of a respected nation and to struggle for the restitution of its right for self-determination as stated in the Government’s decentralisation policy. This was however never exercised in Rehoboth despite the Basters having the skills and over 150 years of experience in self-determination,’ the statement noted.
The Baster community, who are descendants of indigenous Khoi-San people of South Africa and white colonisers, came from the Cape Province in South Africa to Namibia in 1870 and settled near hot springs 90 kilometres south of present-day Windhoek.
They called the place Rehoboth and in 1872 they compiled and adopted their own Ancestral Laws (Voorvaderlike Wette), which they adhered to through a Kapteinsraad (Chiefs’ Council) until Independence in 1990. They owned a vast area of arable land around the settlement which is still known today as Rehoboth Gebied.
The German colonial administration and also apartheid South Africa allowed them to continue with a certain degree of self-rule. In 1976, the Rehoboth Self-Government Act was proclaimed.
The Namibian Constitution of 1990 however states in Schedule 5 that ‘all property of which the ownership or control (…) constituted in any representative authority or in the Government of Rehoboth (…) prior to Independence, shall vest in or be under control of the Government of Namibia.’
The Rehoboth Basters took the Government to court after Independence, but lost the case.
Recently, efforts were made to take their case to international organisations.
In May 2008, Baster Kaptein (leader) John McNab brought the matter before the general assembly of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO).
The organisation resolved that ‘as a result of chicanery of law, the ignoring of international law and ignoring of minority rights and human rights, the Rehoboth community had lost virtually everything they owned. By these actions of the Government of Namibia, the Baster community is now in danger of becoming extinct.’
‘The general assembly asks UNPO to develop mechanisms to enable minority groups to approach the international courts to determine whether the constitution of any national state complies with the rights of minorities as determined by international law.’
The Baster community was accepted as a UNPO member in February 2007.
UNPO was funded in 1991 and is an international membership organisation based in Brussels, Belgium. Its members are indigenous peoples, minorities, and unrecognised or occupied territories who have joined together to protect and promote their human and cultural rights, to preserve their environments, and to find non-violent solutions to conflicts which affect them.
Last month, UNPO sent a letter to the German Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) in New York, asking the German Government to help review Schedule 5 of the Namibian Constitution and consider its compliance with the principles set out by Germany and the Contact Group in 1982 to prepare Namibia’s independence.
UNPO further requested that Germany’s diplomatic representative at the UN to ‘urge the Namibian government to provide just compensation for the expropriation of the (ancestral) land and other assets of the Rehoboth Baster and to grant communal land status to the Rehoboth Baster as was done for all Namibia’s other major ethnic groups.’