Owning your own home is a significant milestone. It transverses many layers of society and offers homeowners and their families security, emotional and financial stability, spiritual grounding and allows them to build up generational wealth. But, in SA’s historical dispensation, a huge portion of the population was denied the right to hold any rights to property as a result of laws created during the apartheid regime. This includes laws such as the Black Land Act, Group Areas Act and the Black Administration Act.

While we understand laws as a clear set of rules that ensure fairness and safety that are meant to uphold the rights of each and every person, these laws served the purpose of controlling where black people could reside. Township homes in black communities during this era were “rented out” to families. The property rights of these township homes were transferred to individual owners at the end of the apartheid era on the basis of permits that listed the multiple family members connected to that home, creating the concept of the collective family home...