Indigenous group's $10m-a-head claim fails — but judge gives them free copy of constitution

A chaotic attempt to secede three provinces, abolish the term “coloured” and secure a payout of $10m for each of SA’s nine million “aboriginal descendants” has failed in the Cape Town high court.

But Judge Vincent Saldanha said his decision was based in law and did not reflect a lack of sympathy with the “marginalisation and dispossession of ... indigenous people”.

Saldanha also acknowledged “the destruction of the culture and heritage of indigenous communities over many centuries by the diabolical ventures of settler colonialists and subsequently through the evil machinations of apartheid”.

The Homo Sapiens, Negro, Ethiopian, Semite, Israelite People of South Africa began their court arguments in October by saying they did not recognise the constitution or the courts.

In his judgment on December 6, however, Saldanha said they had fully accessed their right of access to the court as provided for in the constitution.

“It is the very constitution they so reject that is their strongest weapon against their marginalisation,” he said, adding that he was sending a free copy of the constitution to Sabina Clarisse, who led the group’s court fight.

The aboriginal people named the president, the National Treasury and the SA Revenue Service in their founding papers but only the presidency filed a response, with a confirmatory affidavit from President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Roseline Nyman, who appeared on behalf of the presidency, told Saldanha the aboriginal people — who had no legal representation — relied on a “bundle of documents” containing photographs, diagrams, newspaper articles and statements of anti-Semitic hate speech and Holocaust denial.

She said the aboriginal people dismissed other indigenous groups as “Nguni settlers” and lumped them together with European colonialists as “intruders”.

Saldanha said the incoherent way Clarisse and her group approached the litigation did not help their cause. Some of their arguments were “incomprehensible, foreign and devoid of any merit”, he added.

The aboriginal people:

— Demanded a payment of $10m to all descendants of the people they claimed to represent;

— Said tax laws should not apply to them and demanded the reimbursement of all taxes they have ever paid;

— Rejected the authority of the Reserve Bank, Sars, the SA National Defence Force and the SA Police Service;

— Called for a court order handing over the Western Cape, Northern Cape and Eastern Cape;

— Claimed they were victims of “cultural genocide”; and

— Deplored “derogatory labelling . that is keeping us hostage”.

Saldanha said: “They make the bizarre claim that [former president Nelson Mandela] had been killed in 1985 and was thereafter substituted by what they termed the ‘impostor’.”

If they had accepted the legal representation offered to them, he said, “they may have ... better conceptualised and framed a proper action”.

As it was, they had simply claimed “the land” and asserted a lineage to SA’s indigenous people without advancing any evidence to a claim of “aboriginal title”.

With their financial demand, in particular, Saldanha said the group had “created unrealistic expectations” among those they claimed to represent.

These were people who “find emotive resonance with the claims of marginalisation and the perceived disregard [for them] by state institutions in the transformative programmes of affirmative action”.

The judge said at the end of the October hearing, he invited members of Clarisse’s group to address the court, and a number of them did so.

“They raised both their individual and collective plight of marginalisation, a failure by the government to recognise them as indigenous people, the rampant crime and its consequences in predominantly ‘coloured’ communities ... the humiliation suffered by them when referred to as ‘coloured’, the failure of government departments to recognise their indigenous status in statistical and other forms and a number of other issues and complaints,” he said.

“Of particular significance was a group in traditional attire who addressed the court with much pride in their indigenous tongue.”

Saldanha concluded his judgment with the inscription from the national coat of arms mounted on the wall of the court behind the judge’s seat: “! ke e: /xarra //ke”. The phrase, written in the Khoisan language of the /Xam people, means “diverse people unite”.