Part I — Who counts, and what they are owed

The Sports Field at Wallacedene

A documented case, told from the record of South Africa's Constitutional Court.

Wallacedene was an informal settlement on the edge of Oostenberg, in the Cape metropolitan area. When the Constitutional Court described it, about half its people were children. Their shacks lacked water, sewerage and refuse removal, and many families had waited as long as seven years on the list for subsidised housing. In September 1998 some of them moved onto vacant private land that had been set aside for low-cost housing. The owner obtained an order to evict them. On 18 May 1999, at the start of the Cape winter, they were evicted at the municipality's expense, in a way the Court later called premature and inhumane: their homes were bulldozed and burnt, and their possessions destroyed. The 510 children and 390 adults who brought the case then sheltered on the Wallacedene sports field, under plastic sheeting, as the winter rains started.^[1]

The judgment, given in October 2000, is among the best known in the law of social rights. The Court held that the state's housing programme fell short of the Constitution because it made no reasonable provision for people without land, a roof or anywhere else to go: people in desperate need. It also held that the Constitution gave the families no claim to shelter immediately on demand, and it declined to determine a minimum core on the record before it. Its order declared what the state must do. It ordered housing for nobody.^[2]

Part I begins where that judgment stopped. It asks who counts as someone a constitution owes anything to; what exactly is owed, without being earned or waited for; what evidence would show that it arrived; what happens when there is genuinely too little to go round; and who must act when nothing reaches the person. This design writes down what the Court left undetermined: a floor owed to every person on personhood alone, with a named public body that owes it. By itself, writing it down would have housed nobody on that sports field. The chapters show what the rules can say, and where saying it stops.