DURBAN, South Africa, Jan. 4 (UPI) -- The extraordinary traffic accident last Sunday in which 48 members of a South African family dead has left the survivors members of the Chego clan battling with a local farmer over burial rights for the victims, rights now linked to a major land dispute.
The original villain of the tragedy was the Chegos' truck driver, who lost control of his vehicle with 120 members of their extended family aboard. An emerging villain, for many, is Afrikaner Francois du Toit, the farmer who holds title to land once owned by Chegos.
The Chego clan originates in the village of Tubatse in South Africa's Mpumalanga province. Twenty of its families still live there, but in 1946 about half the clan was forced to move as previously tribal land was consolidated into white-owned private farmland.
The evicted half of the clan settled near Tafelkop in Northern Province but they remain fiercely attached to their traditional lands. Indeed, each year the 120 members of this northern branch make a pilgrimage to Tubatse to appease the spirits of their ancestors, all of whom are buried there.
As is common in South Africa, the family hired a truck to carry them and piled on board. But the always fearsome accident rate on the country's roads peaks over the Christmas holidays, with 758 people having died in recent weeks despite a broad campaign for public road safety.
These appalling statistics generally involve taxis -- Volkswagen Kombis or Toyota HiAces, built to carry six to eight people -- that may crowd 20 to 25 people aboard and travel at astonishing speeds on South Africa's motorway network. More than 80 percent of such taxis have been found to be unroadworthy and many of their drivers have only forged licenses. Yet they are so profitable that taxi wars frequently erupt over who dominates key routes and most taxi drivers carry firearms.
The truck carrying the Chegos along a dirt road at Hartelus veered out of control on a slope, rolled over and crashed into a line of trees. All 120 passengers were thrown off the truck as it rolled over and a large number were injured under trees brought down by the crashing truck.
Gladys Chego told how she was flung apart from her two children and, though badly injured herself, managed to find her infant daughter Portia, bruised, cut and crying under the branches of one tree while her 4-year-old son, Sizwe, sustained waist, head and arm injuries. Forty-six of the relatives were killed outright and two more have since died in the hospital.
The driver of the truck, Johannes Skosana, has appeared in the Middleburg magistrates' Court where he was charged with negligent driving and with 48 counts of culpable homicide. He was refused bail and remanded in custody.
The survivors demanded that the 46 immediate victims be buried along with their ancestors at Tubatse. But this land forms part of du Toit's Tigerhoek Farm, and he has refused to allow this: "This is a farm, not a public burial place," he said.
But the real issue is not burial rights but land. Already the Chego clan has entered a claim for the restitution of their old land at Tubatse with the Land Claims Commission, set up by the African National Congress government to deal with such situations. The LCC, which has already been investigating the Chegos' claim for the last two months, tried unsuccessfully to intercede with du Toit to secure the burial rights. Now, however, a local leader, Chief Mahlangu, has agreed that the 46 can be interred on tribal land near Groblersdaal, while the two others who died later in hospital will be buried elsewhere.
Behind the burial dispute lies the fact that in law it is now a major point of argument as to whether a group can claim that a particular piece of land was theirs traditionally. In short, one must show that ancestors lived there.
This is not easy, however: African tribal land is held communally by the tribe and there are no title deeds. Moreover, African families are extended and it is normal to refer to quite distant cousins as brothers and sisters and to a whole tribe as cousins. These traditions clash with land law based on individual tenure, title deeds and nuclear families with written wills and contracts.
Even when a group was forcibly removed, the land they lost has often been bought and sold to the point where the current owner was not the beneficiary of the forced removal.
To resolve tradition with law, the standard accepts a key definition of traditional land as whether a group can point to immediate family members and forebears buried on a particular plot of land.
The change has caused virtually all farmers, traditionally fairly relaxed about allowing burials of farm workers and their dependents on their land, to adamantly oppose any further such burials. Thus du Toit's refusal in the Chego case was not unexpected, even knowing how unpopular the decision appeared in the wake of public sympathy for the Chegos' loss.
Du Toit has no doubt taken the point, however, that the LCC -- knowing the significance of burials on determination of land ownership -- nonetheless attempted to lobby him to allow 46 new burials.
The LCC promises that it will make a decision on the Chego claim in a month's time.
