Members of the Khoi and San communities staged a significant protest in the streets of Cape Town on Thursday, demanding formal recognition of their rights to land, territories, and resources, and asserting their heritage as the First Nations of South Africa.
The march, which proceeded through the city center to Parliament, is part of a long-standing struggle to reclaim ancestral lands lost during colonialism and apartheid and to achieve legal and social recognition for the indigenous peoples of Southern Africa.
The national convenor for the National Khoi and San March for Freedom, Larry Varrie, who addressed the crowd on Keizersgracht Street in District Six, articulated the core grievance of the protesters. “The Koi and the San communities are saying that their rights as Aboriginal people are not being respected. Their constitutional rights are being trampled on,” he stated.
A central theme of the demonstration was a powerful rejection of the apartheid-era “colored” classification. “We are not colored,” Varrie declared. “We are the owners of the land, and the colored identity is the prison that the apartheid government built for us, and we are freeing ourselves. We are declaring that we are a free people.”
Protesters carried a memorandum and a declaration intended for Parliament. Varrie explained that the community insisted that their own elected representatives receive the documents, having been dissatisfied with the government’s response in the past. “We’ve sent this memorandum to them for years… they’ve never answered our call,” he said.
The declaration handed to officials is rooted in a 2003 Constitutional Court ruling. Varrie cited that the court recognized Khoi and San law as an independent legal system, separate from common law, affirming their status as a sovereign people who predate all pre-colonial, colonial, apartheid, and post-apartheid states. “We are here to assert those rights that the constitution has enshrined,” he said. “We are demanding that the parliament recognizes the constitutional jurisprudence that already exists. The constitution doesn’t need to be amended; we only need compliance.”
The protest also highlighted specific land disputes, with banners referencing areas such as Knoflokskraal. Varrie pointed to ongoing conflicts where communities face eviction from ancestral lands being sold to multinational corporations for development. “The Cape especially has a lot of our people that are still living on those lands, and we are demanding that those lands will never be touched,” he said, issuing a warning to the Western Cape’s DA-led government: “You touch one of us, you’ve touched all of us.”
Following the handover of the memorandum, Varrie announced the next step in their campaign: a national congress in Johannesburg. This gathering of leaders from within South Africa and abroad will aim to draft a new “freedom charter” for the First Nations peoples to chart a unified way forward.
The march underscores an enduring and escalating movement by South Africa’s first inhabitants to secure their rightful place in the nation’s legal and cultural landscape.
