The land on which SA’s most expensive private school, Hilton College, is located is again subject to a land claim by a community that claims it was forcefully removed from the picturesque site more than 100 years ago.
Hilton College, whose fees fetch R430,000 a year, is home to sprawling land in KwaZulu-Natal that stretches 1,695ha, including 650ha of nature reserve bordered by the Umgeni River.
The land court last week set aside a 2005 decision by the KwaZulu-Natal regional land claims commissioner, a land claim lodged by then leader of the Nxamalala tribe in 1998, Inkosi Sikholwa Zuma.
The land claim was rejected after the regional commissioner deemed it frivolous and vexatious, concluding the inkosi was claiming tribal jurisdiction. Former president Jacob Zuma hails from the Nxamalala clan.
Racial removals
The court found this conclusion absurd, stressing the claim by the inkosi was not based on tribal jurisdiction but racial removals.
“An irrational decision is the decision which is shockingly bad and defies logic to the extent that no sensible person who had applied his/her mind correctly to the question to be decided could have arrived at that decision,” reads the judgment.
“To test the reasonableness of the decision or conduct, the court must ask itself whether an ordinary person in the same circumstances would have had the same belief or acted in the same way,” it said.
The court remitted the matter to the KwaZulu-Natal regional land claims commissioner for reconsideration based on the reports by the JL Dube Institute and Babhekile Mpisane dated 2016. The JL Dube Institute recommended that authorities accept the validity of the claim.
Hilton College, which traces its roots to 1872, has produced eight Springbok players, including two captains, Bobby Skinstad and Gary Teichmann. The school has also produced two Constitutional Court justices, John Didcott and Arthur Chaskalson, who became the country’s first chief justice after the 1994 democratic breakthrough.
SA is still grappling with its polarising land dispossession past. The Commission on Restitution of Land Rights estimated that settling land claim backlogs will take SA 30 years and cost more than R170bn. SA has a backlog of 4,995 cases, with KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and Mpumalanga accounting for the highest number.
Since its inception and up to September 2022, the commission has settled more than 82,000 claims equating to 3.8-million hectares.
In a 2016 ruling, known as the Land Access Movement of SA (Lamosa) case, the Constitutional Court put the processing of claims lodged in 2014-16 in abeyance until all land claims submitted by December 1998 had been finalised.
Another Constitutional Court judgment in 2019, referred to as Lamosa 2, prohibits the commission from processing any new-order claims lodged between July 1 2014 and July 28 2016, until it has settled or referred to the Land Claims Commission all claims lodged on or before December 31 1998.
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