The Land Claims Court sitting in Randburg has thrown out a Western Cape farmer’s application to evict a family that has been living on the property for 44 years.
The application was instituted by Boplaas Landgoed — the owner of what is more commonly known as Du Cap Farm in the Drakenstein area in the Western Cape, which was bought in 2016. The farm is owned by the Van der Merwe family, who applied for the eviction. Carl van der Merwe is the registered MD of the farm.
The farmer told Land Claims Court judge Luleka Flatela that the eviction he is seeking was triggered by the behaviour of the Julies family themselves.
Sophia Julies — now 66 and in poor health — moved onto the farm in 1979 when the previous farm owner offered her late husband Hendrik William a job to drive a digger on the farm.
Julies was employed as a domestic worker and pack store manager on the farm. The couple was given a three-bedroom house with a separate bathroom and kitchen as live-in accommodation on the property.
Over the years they had children and grandchildren. When she turned 58, Mrs Julies retired from her job due to ill health and then her husband passed away in October 2011.
The previous owner of the property allowed Mrs Julies and her children to continue living in their house, even after her retirement.
In 2020, the new farm owner offered to rent her a two-bedroom home off the property in East Paarl, and said he would pay the rent for her. She declined the offer because she believed it to be situated in a high crime area, and it was far from medical facilities and schools.
And so the farmer offered her the opportunity to look for a property of her choosing. But their search was interrupted when Covid-19 hit and the country went into lockdown. Once the national state of disaster was lifted, the search continued but they reached a deadlock.
In September 2021 the farmer applied to court for an interdict allowing him to relocate Sophia Julies and all the other people living in the house with her to another one-bedroom house on the farm. Julies did not oppose the relocation order and so the Sheriff relocated her, seven adults and three children into the small house nearby.
The farmer told the court that the three-bedroom house was not suitable for human occupation because it was situated close to the farm’s packhouse and that we was about to expand his operations and needed the house to serve as office space for the business.
Julies and her family proceeded to use plastic and pallets to erect makeshift rooms onto the house as the single-room dwelling was too small for the entire family. Their belongings did not fit into the house, and so the farmer allowed them to place some goods in storage.
The relocation of the family caught the attention of other farm dwellers and workers who stepped in to help. This led the Ubuntu Rural Women and Youth Movement and Women on Farms Project to file a complaint with the Cape Winelands District Municipality and the South African Human Rights Commission.
Together they staged protests on the farm, posted on social media and local journalists picked up the story.
The farmer responded with a complaint about the illegal structures that were erected, false social media posts and the operation of an illegal business of selling chips, fruit and sweets to children on the farm.
In February 2022 the farmer served a letter of demand on Mrs Julies, ordering her to remove belongings from the farm’s storage container and notifying her that the erection of the structure on her house was unlawful, had been carried out without consent and was in breach. He terminated her rights to the property and afforded her 30 days to vacate the property.
However, Julies and her family failed to move out. It was this refusal that led to the farmer’s application for permission to remove the family from his farm.
At the time of the application Sophia Julies was living on the property with her partner Smith, described as “a major male”, her 30-year-old granddaughter Jacqueline Rudolph (who since vacated the premises), 22-year-old grandson Darrel Rudolph, “purportedly suffering from a mental illness caused by drug abuse”, granddaughter Bianca De Vries, 31, and Radiwa Parker, 26, who has also since left the farm. The other resident family members were daughter Shaida Julies, 40, her partner Granville Malgas, 40, and a minor grandchild.
In his founding affidavit, the farmer told the court that he became the registered owner of the property in 2016, and though Julies and her husband had worked for the previous owner and received the housing as an employment benefit, none of the family members had ever worked for him. He told the court that while he recognised Mrs Julies' rights to be a long-term occupier in terms of the law, he felt that the other people living with her did not have an interest separate from Mrs Julies, and that any right they possessed “to live in any dwelling on the farm explicitly and solely flows from Julies’ status”.
He said he had offered to buy her a house off the premises and had identified a property that was suitable, but Mrs Julies had then had a discussion with Jo-Anne Johannes of Women on Farm Projects and DA member Calvin Kroutz regarding her moving to the house, and they decided this was not a possibility.
She returned to him, informing him that she rather wanted to move to the Simondium area or housing in Languedoc, but he found the costs of this were unreasonable. He asked her for another alternative and she did not come back to him.
The farmer said he needed the house occupied by the family to expand his business operations and was left with no option but to resort to legal action for a remedy.
He said the family’s behaviour and offensive posts on social media had caused a breach of trust that could not be remedied, and that they had also been part of illegal protests organised by Ubuntu Rural Women and Youth Movement and Woman on Farms Project inside the farm and had invited local media to attend.
He claimed the family had submitted false allegations to the Cape Winelands District Municipality and South African Human Rights Commission aimed at tarnishing his reputation and good name.
Sophia Julies told the court she lived in a one-room house with an extended room made of wood pallets and covered with plastic, which she shared with five other people. She said she is a 66-year-old pensioner with chronic illnesses and receives a R2,100 government pension. She has lived on the farm since 1975 when she was 21 years old.
She said the farmer knew she was a resident of the farm when he bought it, and despite knowing that he would need office space, he had failed to build anything on the property.
She explained that she had rejected the properties offered to her for good reasons, and that the two minor grandchildren living with her attended a local high school which collected them by bus from the main road close to the farm gate. One of the grandchildren had lost the use of her left arm.
She said she was still working with a probation officer of the department of rural development and land reform identified as Mr Tinnie, to find alternative accommodation.
She said she had been served with the court papers before they could find something. In the meantime she felt safe on the farm, as the place she has known as home for 44 years. She denied having made any false allegations against the farmer and denied organising any illegal protests.
In appraising the arguments, judge Flatela said that it was understandable that the relocation of the family from a three-bedroom to one-bedroom house would have caused an outcry. She said the organisations representing Mrs Julies had engaged the municipalities with jurisdiction in the area and that the farmer should have foreseen that genuine disputes of fact were likely to rise in his application. And yet he had elected to proceed with his action.
“It is my considered view that the applicant has failed to make a case for the relief sought in its notice of motion,” she said, in dismissing his request to evict the family.
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