On Friday, 29 August, there will be a public engagement process in Rondebosch, Cape Town, to discuss the possibility of recognising Table Mountain, also known as Hoerikwaggo and Umlindi Weningizimu, as a legal subject with inherent rights.
The Wild Law Institute in Cape Town convened the meeting to promote the idea of the “Rights of Nature” because they, like many other activists, citizens and lawyers around the world, believe that mountains and rivers often hold deep ecological, cultural and spiritual significance for people.
In the case of Table Mountain, it is held that it requires legal protection given its role as a vital water catchment and biodiversity hotspot that supports thousands of endemic and indigenous species.
It is also a place that continues to have a dynamic role in the lives of Capetonians – including weekend hikers, mountain climbers, runners, cyclists, dog walkers, users of plants for medicinal and spiritual purposes, and African Independent Church congregants who are drawn to the clear streams running down its slopes.
All these historical and ongoing relationships between people and the mountain will be highlighted by those advocating for the recognition of Table Mountain as a legal entity with inherent rights.
For more than two decades, I have walked my dogs every day in the shadow of Table Mountain, at the Newlands Arboretum. During these walks, I imbibed the striking beauty of the tall pine trees and riverine landscape at the confluence of two streams that feed into the Liesbeek River.
I even became a bird whisperer for a while, convincing myself that I was indeed communicating with the pair of resident owls who seemed to tolerate, if not humour, my attempts to imitate their calls. Occasionally, I would encounter treasure hunters scanning the ground with their metal detectors in search of coins and other material traces of what was once a vibrant black settlement.
This piece of land opposite the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens was previously a 211-acre estate known as Bosheuvel. It had been granted on loan to VOC Commander Jan van Riebeeck in 1658.
A year earlier, the VOC (the Dutch East India Company) had settled free-burgher farms along the Liesbeek, on established Khoi grazing routes. This resulted in conflict over land and stock, culminating in open warfare in May 1659, with the Khoi forces led by Doman (Nommoa).
Van Riebeeck’s small house on the property was burnt down during the skirmishes.
Fast forward almost two centuries, in 1851, Cape Town’s first Anglican Bishop, Robert Gray, bought the Protea estate as his official residence and renamed it “Bishop’s Court”. In 1936, most of the estate was sold and later developed into the affluent suburb of Bishopscourt.
Protea Village forced removal
By the early decades of the 1900s, black workers who had constructed Rhodes Drive were living with their families on this piece of land. Then, in the 1960s, the bulldozers arrived, and the residents of Protea Village were forcibly removed to the Cape Flats.
In 2006, following a successful land claim, this land was granted to the Protea Village claimant community. This was followed by four years of litigation by Bishopscourt residents opposed to the restitution settlement.
A few years ago, I participated in a walk through the Arboretum with the parish minister from the adjacent Good Shepherd Anglican Church. The minister, who had grown up in Protea Village, recollected playing rugby with his school friends on a field that, until recently, was the preserve of the mostly white middle-class strollers who walked their dogs there.
In early 2021, during one of my daily walks, I met an elderly man who showed me a small concrete block, which was all that remained of the school that he had once attended. His family had been evicted in the 1960s, and he recalled to me his feelings of anger and hurt upon encountering hostility when he returned to visit the site of the former Protea Village.
In February 2019, I participated in a Sunday morning walk along the Liesbeek River with a group of recreational walkers. As we followed the river from the Protea Village site, we came across graffiti stencilled on a bridge – “Whites Must Face Our History”.
Yet, almost three decades since the end of apartheid, there are still no commemorative plaques or memorials testifying to forced removals from Protea Village, Newlands and Claremont. This amnesia, among a minority of residents in the area, reared its head at the end of 2024 when the construction phase began at the former Protea Village site.
A small but vocal minority of Newlands, Fernwood and Bishopscourt residents took to social media to express their outrage and despair when workers with chainsaws began felling trees and clearing the thick vegetation at the Arboretum site. They decried the “greedy developers” who were destroying nature in the name of profits.
When two baby owlets had to be rescued from the chainsaws, residents raged even louder and lamented the sad loss of their “green paradise”. The local WhatsApp group became the space for venting their feelings of anger and despair.
A profoundly dispirited resident wrote:
“I don’t go there anymore after 30 years of enjoying the Arboretum with my dogs. My paradise has totally collapsed, and I don’t feel at home in Fernwood anymore. The Arboretum has always been the heartbeat of this suburb. I feel dead inside when I go near there now. How can we allow this heartbeat to stop!! We have to save at least some bits and pieces, but how??!!”
A particularly loud critic of the housing development claimed the following:
“The main fact is that the Arboretum is precious land. There is no price tag attached to it, unless you have no consideration for the environment and the people living in that environment… We are the environment – it’s all linked.”
It is certainly understandable that some residents would be angry and distraught by the destruction of the Arboretum’s tall pine trees by bulldozers and chainsaws.
Difficult trade-offs
However, at numerous public meetings and consultations since 2017, it was repeatedly explained that the claimant community had no option but to sell land in the heart of the Arboretum to private homebuyers to subsidise the construction of their own homes on the adjacent piece of restored land.
Without this cross-subsidisation, the 86 families and former residents would not have been able to afford to return to this affluent and largely white, upper-middle-class suburb.
Clearly, difficult trade-offs had to be made to address the painful apartheid history of land dispossession. This made it necessary to “sacrifice” a large part of the Arboretum for sale to private homeowners.
While the protection of green spaces, rivers and mountains is absolutely vital in this age of the relentless destruction of the planet’s finite resources in the name of capitalist development and growth, protecting the “Rights of Nature” requires taking seriously the complex relationships humans have with nature.
In the Protea Village case, social justice could not have been achieved without acknowledging the historical relationship between the “green paradise” at the source of the Liesbeek River in the largely white suburbs and the “downstream communities” of historically dispossessed people on the Cape Flats.
Restitution required “sacrificing nature” to address the traumatic legacies of racialised spatial inequality that continue to shape Cape Town’s deeply segregated urban landscape.
Two weeks ago, as I was walking with my dogs in the section of the Arboretum that has not yet been developed, I met up with my feathery friends: the two adult owls.
I went through my ritualistic imitation of their calls, and they responded. Although the bulldozers and chainsaws had levelled a large section of what was once the Arboretum, and the construction of roads, sewerage and water pipes and houses was at an advanced stage, there were still some trees left for the owls to return to.
Notwithstanding the loss of green space, it is worthwhile celebrating that the descendants of those forcibly removed will soon return to Protea Village.
This story of trade-offs and sacrifices of green spaces is what socio-ecological justice often looks like. While the rights of rivers and mountains are certainly a vital aspect of environmentalism in this age of ecological crisis, these rights often have to be weighed up against contested claims and complicated historical relationships of people to nature.
The process of promoting the rights of Table Mountain will hopefully be able to address and accommodate the many past and ongoing relationships that Capetonians have with this extraordinary mountain. DM
Public engagement on the recognition of Table Mountain as a legal subject with rights, 29 August 2025, 17:30 for 6pm-9pm. Erin Hall, 8 Erin Road, Rondebosch, Cape Town, info@tablemountainrights.org