Nonwhite South Africans Want Land Back Taken During Apartheid

The nonwhite families that were kicked off their land during apartheid say the process to reclaim their land has been too slow, the BBC reports. 

The policy was called the Group Areas Act, and it reinforced the regional separation of the races.

“Among other things, it led to the removal of nonwhites from real estate considered desirable by the government. Over the following decades, thousands of families were forced to leave their homes and relocate to barren land,” the BBC report explains.

After apartheid ended in the early 1990s, polices were introduced to allow nonwhite families to retrieve the land confiscated from them, but some families complain that the process is moving at a glacial pace and that white people are still the landowners of the best pieces of real estate in the country.

“The effects of this policy have yet to be reversed. Even in post-apartheid South Africa, much of the most fertile territory is still in the hands of a few thousand white commercial farmers,” the news site reports.

Earlier this year South Africa’s current president, Jacob Zuma, created a new deadline for families to file claims so that they could retrieve their confiscated land. The last claims deadline was back in 1998, and thus many families are taking advantage of this new window of opportunity.

Since Zuma’s announcement, some 12,500 new claims have been entered, according to a government-backed report viewed by the BBC. 

Read more at the BBC.