On 27 April 2013, the national public holiday of Freedom DayinSouth Africa which some grassroots social movements have termed UnFreedom Day, members of Abahlali baseMjondolo occupied a piece of land in Philippi, Cape Town. They named the occupation Marikana after the Marikana miners' strike. The occupation was repeatedly destroyed by the city's anti-land invasion unit.[1][2][3][4] According to the Daily Maverick the occupiers were evicted on six separate occasions.[5] Two months after the eviction 90 people were still sleeping on the site under a tent.[6]
Cindy Ketani was quoted in Red Pepper as saying that "When they come to destroy these shacks, they show us no court orders or papers. They just pull these people out like dogs".[7]
Abahlali baseMjondolo alleged that the evictions were violent, that their members' property was broken and stolen and that they were also unlawful as the City did not have a court order.[8][9][10][11] This view was later endorsed by legal experts and an article in the Daily Maverick suggested that the City of Cape Town was making reference to a fictitious law to justify the evictions and, also, lying about the fact that the shacks had all been unoccupied before they were demolished.[12] Constitutional law expert Pierre de Vos later wrote that these evictions were "Brutal, inhumane, and totally unlawful".[13]
The City of Cape Town had argued that the 2013 evictions by its ALIU were legal and did not require a court-order in part because the land was city-owned.[14] However, this land was actually owned by two private owners. One was an individual, Iris Fischer, and the other was NTWA Dumela Investments.[15] The land that was occupied is part of a larger parcel of 200h of land bought by NTWA Dumela Investments in 2007.[16]
The 2017 Western Cape High Court judgement on the matter included three groups of land owners.[17] The first was Iris Fischer, who had been living on the property since 1969, though herself and her two sons were estimated to occupy only around 5% of the land they owned at the time of the occupation. The second was a group that included Manfred Stock and NTWA Dumela Investments. The land owned by this group had been acquired in parts over approximately 40 years. The third was Copper Moon Trading, which acquired an erf in 2007.[18]