The Dithabeng CPA’s historic title handover landed in a year loaded with meaning, and with clear direction
On Monday, 2 March 2026, after more than two decades of claims, negotiations, and four carefully constructed phases of settlement, the Dithabeng Communal Property Association received the title deeds to land that was taken from their community and that they spent years fighting to reclaim. It was a moment worth marking.
It is also, as the community knows better than anyone, not the finish line. We are writing together because what happens after the deed is handed over is at least as important as the handover itself.
The Dithabeng claim covers thirty farm properties that once constituted the QwaQwa National Park in Maluti-a-Phofung Local Municipality. Lodged in December 1998 on behalf of people dispossessed across those farms, it was settled in four phases between 2015 and 2019. Over 12,388 hectares have been restored by the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights, valued at just over R54.6 million, a significant achievement the Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development rightly describes as a symbolic reversal of the legacy of the Natives Land Act of 1913.
This handover did not happen by accident. It is the product of sustained legal process, multi-departmental partnership, and a community that held its claim together across more than twenty years. That deserves acknowledgement.
What gives this moment its weight goes beyond the legal and administrative achievement. It is also about when it happened. This handover falls in the sixtieth year since District Six was declared a White Group Area on 11 February 1966, the proclamation that scattered more than sixty thousand people from the slopes above Cape Town’s harbour across the Cape Flats in one of apartheid’s most documented and most unresolved acts of dispossession. It falls in the thirtieth year since South Africa adopted its Constitution and, in that same founding year, the Elandskloof community in the Cederberg became the first in democratic South Africa to have their land returned. In 1996, South Africa wrote its constitutional commitment to restitution and honoured it for the first time in the same year. The proximity was not coincidental.
It falls, too, in the month of March, when South Africa observes Human Rights Day on 21 March, pausing to remember the lives lost at Sharpeville in 1960, when police opened fire on people peacefully protesting the pass laws, and the world watched. And 2026 marks the seventieth anniversary of 9 August 1956, when more than twenty thousand women marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest those same pass laws, an act of collective courage that this country has never forgotten and that women’s movements worldwide still draw on.
Sixty years since the erasure of District Six began. Seventy years since the women marched. Thirty years since South Africa wrote its constitutional promise and handed back the first land. And now, this week, Dithabeng. The convergence is not incidental. It is a reckoning. It is an invitation to every South African to pause and ask: what does this country owe, and are we making good on it?
Research into the Elandskloof community, the subject of the documentary Uitgesmyt shows that land restitution is never a simple homecoming. Dispossession unravels not just ownership but the knowledge, relationships, and economic fabric that made land workable in the first place. The title comes back first. Everything else requires patient, sustained rebuilding, and institutional support that understands the difference between a settled claim and a restored life.
That gap is where Dithabeng now stands.
The framework around the community is real and populated with partners. A Co-Management Agreement with SANParks opens economic possibilities, and early piloting of the Eerstegeluk Camping Safari Site shows what is achievable when community, conservation authority, and private investment move in the same direction. Thirty-six households chose land restoration over financial compensation, a deliberate act of faith in the land and in the process. The goodwill is not rhetorical. It is operational.
We also know where the work is. Housing development needs to accelerate. Business plans need funding before they lapse. Post-settlement support to recapitalise the farms needs to move from commitment to delivery. None of this is beyond reach. What it requires is the same focused, coordinated attention that brought this community to Monday’s handover, sustained now into the years that follow.
Land holds far more than property value. It carries memory, structures community, and makes economic life possible, but only when the people on it have what they need to work it. The deed is necessary. What the deed unlocks takes longer, costs more, and demands more of all of us.
We ask South Africans to hold that in mind. In a year when we remember the women who marched, the lives lost at Sharpeville, sixty years of District Six’s unhealed wound, and thirty years since the first land came home, Monday’s handover was more than a legal milestone. It is a measure of who we are choosing to be.
The Dithabeng CPA has their title deeds. What follows will be shaped by whether the state, its partners, and every South African who believes in this country’s capacity for repair show up for the work with the same commitment the Dithabeng community has shown for more than twenty years.
Dr Wayne Alexander is Chief Land Claims Commissioner, Western Cape and Free State . Prof. Siona O’Connell is Head of Department of History and Heritage, University of Pretoria.
