King Khoisan SA can be seen at his camp on the lawns of the Union Buildings on 12 June 2020, Pretoria. He had spent most of the morning in his tent to avoid the freezing cold. Picture: Jacques Nelles
Plans to evict a group of Khoisan protesters from the grounds of the Union Buildings have been put on ice by the Department of Public Works and Infrastructure.
“Minister Patricia de Lille was not consulted on this matter and has requested that the matter be put on hold until she has been consulted,” said Zara Nicholson, a spokesperson for the department.
The small group of protesting Khoisan people, led by the Khoisan King, have been staging a sit-in on the terrace where the Nelson Mandela statue was erected for almost two years now.
During a recent visit to the group, the Khoisan leader showed off the vegetable garden they had planted under level 3 of the lockdown to feed themselves. Carrots, cabbage, beetroot, basil, broccoli, butternuts and squash could be seen in the garden.
“We eat from this garden as we also need to sustain ourselves as months would get rough,” he said.
The protest began when the group left Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape in 2018 for Pretoria on foot to find out what had become of their memorandum of demands submitted during their first campout in Pretoria the previous year.
Monday, 30 November marks two years since they started living at the Union Buildings.
“If we are given a court order for eviction, whether it’s today or days to come, we will not accept any eviction,” said the leader.
King Khoisan said their stay at the Union Buildings had already been unbearable, however, they had been through too many storms to quit now.
“We will tell any official here who wants to evict us that we need the president to first engage with us regarding the issues we had brought to him.”
He said they had originally not planned to stay in Pretoria for this long.
“When we came here, we thought this would be a journey of two to three weeks, however, we find ourselves being here for almost two years.”
King Khoisan said the Department of Public Works had allegedly been trying to use various actions to remove them.
“The first action was when we had power cuts where we were camping. We had stayed approximately a period of four months without power.
“Everything used to be dark, however, we approached the department officials and the lights were put back on.”
He said the department had blamed them for a broken irrigation system, while they had also been blamed for damages to old rocks used to create walls at the Union Buildings and harassing staff maintaining the gardens.
“Taps we would normally use to get water from would be cut off,” he claimed.
Since 2017, the group have been demanding:
This article first appeared on Rekord and was republished with permission.
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