ABSTRACT
One of the first democratically passed acts in South African history, brought into law by the 1994 Parliament of the Republic, was the Restitution of Land Rights Act (South Africa, Act 22, 1994). Its purpose was to redress one of the most hated activities of the apartheid regime and its predecessors, namely the confiscation of land and the forced removal of its inhabitants because they happened to be of the wrong “racial” group, according to the classification which the government had imposed. Where possible, the land was to be returned to those who had been dispossessed, or their heirs. Where this was not possible, some other form of compensation, monetary or in terms of alternative land, was to be provided.1 Certain conditions were imposed on the land claims, of which the most important is that the dispossession had to take place after the enactment of the Land Act of 1913, which for much of the country formed the basis of the racial segregation of at least the countryside. This meant that in principle no claims could be entertained which resulted from the original colonial conquest of South Africa, which had in principle been completed before the Land Act came into operation.
