A judgement for those still on the bus: Tafelberg and the fight for home

On Thursday 2 July 2026, sitting on the bench of Sea Point Methodist Church with families and communities from across Cape Town, we awaited the Tafelberg judgement. This judgement that had been fought for, for ten years, a judgement that represented so many things and stirred a plethora of emotions: of exclusion, expulsion, and of stories being sidelined, but also hope for a more equitable and just future.

When the court finally declared that the Tafelberg land must be used for affordable and social housing, it reminded the city of its constitutional responsibilities and proved that access to well-located land is not a far-fetched reality.

Euphoria erupted in the church. The case is a historic victory for the many generations of students, parents, and grandparents I saw in that church, many of whom broke into tears, celebrating and cheering for a glimpse of change, not least of all, for the activists who have been at the forefront of this movement.

For my generation, apartheid doesn’t look like police vans or pass laws. Largely, we live it, in the daily commute, where thousands of Cape Town’s workers board buses, taxis, and trains hours before the sun rises, travelling for hours from the city’s far periphery to its centre. The younger generation, like me, born after 1994, did not live under apartheid, but have inherited pieces of it through this commute. It is a commute that is a direct consequence of decades of state-sponsored racial planning under laws such as the Housing Act of 1920 and the Group Areas Act of 1950.

I have seen many South Africans live in a city that normalises the numerous informal settlements we see today, from Mitchells Plain and Gugulethu, to Khayelitsha and beyond. We have grown up believing in the promise of one of the world’s most progressive constitutions, while still witnessing that, 32 years after democracy, apartheid lives on in Cape Town’s geography.

My day-to-day life revolved around that same contrast, where the sight of immense poverty and shacks standing next to condos and gated communities became a common scene. Apartheid is brazenly vocal in the landscape, and I quickly came to see that the difference between having access and lacking access to the city remains tied to the colour of one’s skin.

Cape Town has long grappled with an age-old spatial apartheid system whose legacy remains starkly apparent today, a legacy that constantly makes me ask: who is this city actually meant for?

This land question has deep roots, and it is exactly what the Tafelberg case fought against. The case started from the sale of the Tafelberg property in Sea Point, a well-located suburb close to employment opportunities, education, healthcare, and other essential services. Being one of the earliest sites of forced removals in Cape Town, Sea Point’s proximity to infrastructure and services is no accident.

Reclaim the City protest, in April 2016, against the sale of the Tafelberg property in Sea Point. Archive photo: GroundUp/Naib Mian

In 2013, the Minister of Human Settlements committed, in his budget speech, to devolving all state-owned land suitable for housing development. Only two years later, in 2015, the Western Cape government announced that the Tafelberg site would instead be sold to a private school, despite a feasibility study having found it suitable for social housing – yet another instance of affordable housing being deprioritised in favour of private development.

The City of Cape Town has over the years alleged many possibilities for well-located affordable housing. Notably, in 2017, the City of Cape Town announced eleven central land parcels earmarked for affordable social housing. To this day, no development has occurred on any of the eleven sites, while hundreds of thousands have died or are still waiting decades on housing lists for access to promised housing.

This court victory is proof that this history of exclusion can be successfully challenged through organised community action. The fight against the sale gave rise to Reclaim the City (RTC), a people-powered campaign calling for the desegregation of Cape Town and access to affordable housing.

RTC partnered with Ndifuna Ukwazi (NU), a spatial justice organisation and law centre, to obtain a high court interdict halting the sale. After a decade of proceedings before the interdict, and later applications to the Western Cape High Court, and the Supreme Court of Appeal, the Constitutional Court finally ruled in NU’s favour on 2 July 2026, in an unanimous judgement. Communities and activists from Reclaim the City and Ndifuna Ukwazi had succeeded in stopping the sale for good.

The court firmly reminded the Western Cape government and the City of Cape Town that spatial transformation is not an act of political generosity, but a constitutional obligation. Well-located public land like Tafelberg, the court held, is not simply surplus property, because it is one of the few remaining instruments through which the state can undo apartheid’s geography.

Importantly, the court rejected the narrow view that housing rights can be assessed without regard to location. It reaffirmed instead that sections of the constitution – specifically sections 25(5) (“The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to foster conditions which enable citizens to gain access to land on an equitable basis”) and 26 (the right to adequate housing for everyone) – must be read in conjunction to see that the duty to ensure equitable access to land cannot be divorced from the duty to realise the right of access to adequate housing.

The two clauses are inseparable because in a city like Cape Town, and all other cities across South Africa, access to land determines access to housing, and access to housing determines access to opportunity.

The judgement also challenges the fiction that markets are neutral, and that the state therefore bears no responsibility for where poor people are able to live. Cape Town’s property market was built on land dispossession and decades of investment directed toward white and foreign-owned neighbourhoods. If the government simply accepts the market as the final arbiter of where people can live, it allows apartheid’s inequalities to reproduce themselves under the language of development.

What makes the moment of the decision especially powerful is that the principle reaches far beyond Tafelberg. It speaks to every parcel of well-located public land still awaiting development, to every housing project delayed by political indecision. It speaks to my generation, who have only been able to imagine a different reality, and to every worker forced to commute because land close to economic opportunity remains out of reach. It confronts this very reality and reminds us that these commutes are not a permanent fact of geography. They can be challenged.

This is a lesson for the Democratic Alliance, the ruling party for both the Western Cape government and the City of Cape Town, and to forces resistant to transformation, who continue to imagine Cape Town as a city whose centre belongs only to those who can afford its exorbitant property prices.

History has already judged apartheid’s architects. It will be no less unforgiving to those who continue its façade.

South Africa faces a housing backlog of at least 2.6-million units, for more than 12-million people, according to the Department of Human Settlements. Archive Photo by Mzi Velapi

Tomorrow morning, thousands of Cape Town’s workers will once again board buses, taxis, and trains. They will leave Khayelitsha, Gugulethu, Delft, and Mitchells Plain while the city still sleeps. For too long, these journeys have been treated as inevitable, and perhaps that is the greatest danger. Community action has reminded us that change is possible.

The judgment has shown us that choices made by apartheid’s planners yesterday, and choices made by governments today, are linked in perpetuating that legacy. This judgment also showed us that those choices can be challenged and changed; and that our work as communities to end spatial apartheid has only just begun.

Buhlebenkosi Nondumiso Masuku, second-year BA law student at the University of the Witwatersrand with a strong interest in politics, governance, and social justice, currently interning with the Ndifuna Ukwazi Law Centre.

Mahmoud Idriss is a university student studying public policy at Duke University (USA). He is passionate about how history informs past and current policy. He is interning at Ndifuna Ukwazi as a political organising and education intern, spending his time learning about spatial apartheid in Cape Town and working on projects with the inner-city occupation movement.