WINDHOEK – /Hoa /Ara //Aixa //Aes Traditional Authority Chief Edward Afrikaner has pleaded with government to avail 400 000 hectares of land in the Khomas Region to serve as a communal area for his community.
Chief Afrikaner made this plea during the poorly-attended Presidential Commission into Claims on Ancestral Land Rights and Restitution meeting held at the Khomas Regional Council in Windhoek on Wednesday.
/Hoa /Ara //Aixa //Aes community is also know is the Afrikaner or Oorlam community.
Khomas region has 3.7 million hectors of land, which means 400 000 hectares is equivalent to about 10 percent of the Khomas Region. Namibia has 82.5 million hectares of land.
Addressing the meeting, Chief Afrikaner said his community, since it fled for its life after the death of its leader Jonker Afrikaner in 1887, has been scattered all over the country and does not have a place they can call home.
“My community has settled themselves in and around Windhoek as well as in the area of Rehoboth,” he said, adding that a small number has settled themselves permanently at Warmbad areas close to the border of Namibia and South Africa where David and Titus Afrikaner were living.
“My community used to own land just like any other tribe or clan in this country but today we are landless,” Chief Afrikaner told the commission.
Chief Afrikaner claims that farms such as Haksteen, Melrose, Welgemoed, Hefner, Hohenhose, Vaalgrass, Naos, Gollsaw, Kromneck, Taras Hansen, Trinidal, Prospect, Friedental, Weissenveld in the Khomas Region, and some partly in the Hardap Region, are where the greater Afrikaner clan were born and bred.
“Our parents and grandparents were the owners of these farms during the nomadic times. Some are buried there, some evicted and some still alive but are working as farmworkers,” said the tribal leader.
He said /Ae //gams, known as Windhoek today, was home of the Afrikaners under the leadership of Jonker Afrikaner from about 1840.
“Windhoek was a formal settlement to the Afrikaner clan,” he said.
“Windhoek is regarded as the spiritual home of the Afrikaner,” the tribal leader said, adding that this can be confirmed by the many graves of leaders from the Afrikaner which can be found in the surrounding areas of the city.
“The property in Klein Windhoek, which is now the Office of the High Commissioner of South Africa, used to be Chief Jonker Afrikaner’s palace,” he stresses.
Chief Afrikaner also called for the renaming of all Jan Jonker roads and avenues to Jonker Afrikaner, and said a monument of Jonker Afrikaner, the “Founder of Windhoek”, be erected at a later stage.
He also wants government to help the clan in identifying the remains of the person identified as Jonker, who according to him was apparently buried at Jonkersgrab in Windhoek West.