Journalist pieces together Fourways land and graves dispute

Zanele Mji was in a taxi on her way to visit her grandparents in Dainfern when the driver started talking about how some of the townhouses in Fourways have been built on top of thousands of graves, some of which are hidden in plain sight.

She said they are located alongside busy roads and outside the boundary walls of several properties. The graves belong to people who lived and worked on hundreds of farms.

They are amongst the handful of burial sites that have remained in place since property investors began developing the area in the 1980s. In the early 2000s, Fourways Review reported about land claims that could shake foundations in Dainfern and Dainfern Valley.

About 30 families were evicted after being notified about plans to develop the area which was mainly populated by the Ndebele, Basotho, and Tswana tribes.

They lived in mud houses and shack dwellings at the old Zevenfontein Farm beside Wiliam Nicol Drive, currently known as, Winnie Mandela Drive, according to the article.

“These residential estates were built on portions of the old farm and subdivided after its purchase by mining house JCI in 1985.”

The community representative at the time, Lucky Moshimane, said, “We were given five days to move out of our homes in 1971.”

This was during the apartheid era. “Who were we to fight against it in those days?”

The article continues, “Families lost their livestock when they were evicted without sufficient time to transport the animals elsewhere. In addition to these land concerns, Moshimane has spent six years searching for almost 590 graves exhumed from portion 172 of the old farm.”

“They went missing without a record of their relocation. Small graveyards, dating back to the days when black families lived on the farm, now exist in pockets bordering Dainfern and Dainfern Valley. A mangled fence surrounds the stone-covered grave sites. Moshimane recalled one cemetery stretched out to where the Dainfern Estate stands today.”

“The CEO of the estate [at the time] said he had no records of any graves or exhumations occurring anywhere on the estate.”

Moshimane sought legal action and demanded compensation for livestock lost, and that the land rightfully belonged to their evicted families.

This article became one of the main resources for Mji to delve into the issue as an investigative journalist of AmaBhungane, five years ago.

“This brought a lot of pain to hundreds of disgruntled families who could not locate their loved ones. They are desperately looking for answers. They want to know what happened to them for closure and to enable them to continue practising their cultural and ancestral beliefs. They also want to be acknowledged as the rightful owners of the land.”

Mji was mesmerised by the beauty of the area which has seen much growth in residential and business development in recent years when the conversation started.

“The driver said the area had many farms. It was hard to believe at first because the area looked very new like it was so perfect.”

This became one of the biggest stories Mji covered.

“The Fourways Review did such great journalism. So, I collected all these old articles and that’s how I got the background of the story.”

She won a special award at the Taco Kuiper for best investigative journalism and became the finalist at Sikuvile Awards in 2019. Her accolades include a heartfelt play at the Joburg Theatre performed the same year.

“It was sponsored by the Open Society after they wanted investigative journalism stories to be more easily understood and accessed by regular people because often investigative journalists draft these complex stories that sometimes people do not understand and then ignore. So, they wanted to explore ways to get people to pay attention to important news stories.

“That is how my story got chosen as one of the ‘wanted to tell’ and we were paired with creatives and writers who would then tell the story differently. I was paired with a playwright named Jefferson Shabalala and his crew did an amazing and interactive play, it was like a game show. I am proud of this.”

But fame was not her aim. She started recording Golden City, a podcast that tells never-before-heard stories about the City of Gold.

One of the episodes, Those Graves Were Our Title Deeds deals specifically with the greater Fourways area.

Mji educates listeners, including those who have lived or do live in the area, about its roots and includes interviews she had with various sources while researching the story.

“I made a special podcast episode to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the story. I am so happy and proud of this. To this day, it still defines me as a storyteller and writer. It is so special to me.”

The full episode can be found on streaming services, Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube.

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