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The fight over Oude Molen is more than a land-use dispute. It is a struggle over living heritage, memory and who gets to define belonging in post-apartheid South Africa.
By SAALIEGAH ZARDAD
This month, in our ‘Decolonial Heritage Reflections and Dialogues’, we introduce a new voice to our conversation on heritage. Saaliegah Zardad is a researcher and writer whose work focuses on heritage, cultural landscapes and post-apartheid spatial justice.
Forced Removal: A lens from which to view the struggle at Oude Molen
I was a teenager when my family was forcibly removed from a place called Sjambokland, now known as Kenwyn, near the military support base in Wetton Road, Wynberg. Like thousands of others across Cape Town, we were uprooted under the apartheid Group Areas Act, severed from neighbours, livelihoods and a sense of place. We were relocated to the Cape Flats and expected to rebuild our lives as if land, memory and belonging were interchangeable. Forced removal, however, did not end with physical displacement; it continued through the disappearance of voices from official records, planning files and archival records. This experience set me on a lifelong path toward human rights work, advocacy and justice.
The current contestation over the heritage rights of the Oude Molen Precinct (OMP) transcends a conventional land-use dispute between occupants and the Western Cape Government (WCG). It is a struggle for recognition as a living heritage; a demand that a community’s ongoing presence, memory and cultural continuity be acknowledged as integral to the site’s identity. The battle for Oude Molen is a crucial assertion: that heritage is not only rooted in the past but is a fundamental right to belong in the present. It is from this perspective that I will explore the unfolding struggle about living heritage within the OMP.
Ongoing indigenous cultural activity at Oude Molen, illustrating the site’s living and intangible cultural heritage. (Photo: Advocate Rod Solomon)
Redevelopment proposal at Oude Molen
As the WCG advances its redevelopment plans for Oude Molen, a 44.03ha site nestled between Vincent Pallotti Hospital, Valkenberg Hospital, Maitland Garden Village and Pinelands, a profound heritage dispute has erupted. It is a dispute not only about buildings, zoning or density, but the very meaning of heritage in a democratic South Africa.
The fight over Oude Molen serves as a pivotal case for a broader inquiry: Who gets to define heritage in a post-apartheid South Africa and whose cultural continuity is recognised as worthy of protection and safeguarding?
At issue is the revised Heritage Impact Assessment (HIA), submitted in November 2025, as part of the WCG’s proposal to redevelop the precinct with high-density mixed-use buildings, office and commercial activity, with a 34 per cent allocation for social housing. The land today hosts the Oude Molen Eco-Village, home to a unique community of First Nations practitioners, horse trainers, agro-ecologists, artisans, educators, healers and social development organisations represented collectively by the Oude Molen Eco-Village Tenants Association (OMEVTA).
These communities argue that the provincial government’s revised HIA incorrectly claims there is no living heritage at Oude Molen, which threatens to erase more than 30 years of cultural, ecological and community-based practice, along with older layers of significance embedded in the landscape. They argue that reliance on desktop research and limited archives risks mistaking silence for absence in landscapes shaped by dispossession.
Definition one – Vertical vs horizontal interpretation of the UNESCO Convention
The dispute at Oude Molen is not just political; it is conceptual and legal. At its core lies the interpretation of UNESCO’s 2003 Convention on intangible cultural heritage (ICH), particularly the phrase ‘transmitted from generation to generation’. This matters because the interpretation of transmission determines whose practices qualify as heritage.
The revised HIA adopts a narrow, vertical interpretation, treating transmission as biological inheritance or long-established lineage supported by formal records. By contrast, UNESCO embraces a broader, horizontal interpretation not confined to biology. Here, heritage can circulate across communities, peer networks, mentorships, apprenticeships and ongoing practice. Recognising this horizontal transmission is crucial at Oude Molen, where revivalist and living traditions, from First Nations continuity and therapeutic practices to equestrian, agro-ecological and community-learning activities, thrive across diverse groups. How this interpretation is applied will decide whether these dynamic practices are legally acknowledged or erased, making ICH a central battleground in the site’s heritage dispute.
A broader, horizontal interpretation more accurately reflects UNESCO’s intent and one in which the lived heritage practices associated with the Oude Molen Eco-Village clearly fit.
Understanding place: Why Oude Molen matters
The OMP, located within Cape Town’s Two Rivers Urban Park, is more than a parcel of land. Situated at the confluence of the Black and Liesbeek rivers, it is a layered cultural landscape where multiple, contested histories converge.
The area forms part of ancient Khoe and San grazing lands and movement routes, later overlaid by colonial agriculture shaped by racialised and unrecorded labour. Valkenberg Hospital, established in 1891, adds a further institutional layer reflecting a complex and racialised therapeutic history embedded in the landscape.
Today, Oude Molen is home to the post-1994, community-generated heritage of the Oude Molen Eco-Village, whose agro-ecological, cultural and social practices constitute an active living heritage. This significance exists alongside a persistent archival silence, where the lives of the dispossessed were excluded from official records.
This silence is itself evidence of historical erasure, demanding recognition through oral history and community memory. Its fate is a litmus test for whether South Africa’s heritage framework can protect not just monumental history, but the full, living continuum of place.
The Valkenberg continuity and archival silence
Valkenberg operated as a racially segregated psychiatric hospital. Patients’ agricultural and care labour shaped a landscape organised around healing, rehabilitation and land-based therapy. This logic continues today through the Eco-Village’s equine-assisted therapy, community health and agro-ecological practices, reflecting a continuity of purpose recognised by UNESCO and South African heritage law.
Valkenberg’s archives, however, largely erase the people who animated this landscape, reducing patients to diagnoses and administrative records. This silence reflects broader colonial and apartheid systems of exclusion. Heritage does not disappear because it was undocumented; it endures through practice, memory and use. Any heritage assessment that acknowledges the institution while ignoring lived experience remains incomplete.
Definition two – Heritage resources in South African law (NHRA)
The National Heritage Resources Act (NHRA) adopts an intentionally expansive and integrated understanding of heritage resources that includes both tangible and intangible dimensions of cultural significance. Section 2 defines ‘cultural significance’ to include social, spiritual, symbolic and associative value, while ‘living heritage’ is expressly defined as the intangible aspects of inherited culture, including cultural tradition, oral history, performance, ritual, popular memory, skills and techniques. The Act therefore does not confine heritage to physical fabric.
This approach is reinforced in Section 3, which defines the national estate to include not only places and structures, but also cultural landscapes and sites associated with oral traditions, living heritage and social practices, including those shaped by slavery, colonialism and apartheid. Section 3(3) makes clear that heritage value arises from social meaning, community association and patterns of history, rather than age or monumentality alone.
Implications for the revised HIA
Against this framework, the revised HIA’s finding that Oude Molen has no living heritage constitutes a misapplication of the NHRA. By privileging age, built form and documentary archives over social value, oral tradition and ongoing practice, it narrows the Act’s deliberately broad conception of heritage and mistakes archival silence for absence.
The River Club litigation has reinforced that heritage impact assessments must meaningfully identify and engage with both tangible and intangible heritage, including living cultural practices and community meaning, through substantive public participation.
The crux of the dispute: What does ‘generation to generation’ mean?
The most contested issue for OMEVTA in the revised HIA concerns UNESCO’s phrase ‘transmitted from generation to generation’.
The WCG’s consultants appear to apply a vertical, genealogical interpretation implying biological inheritance over long periods, with 50 to 75 years often cited. Under this reading, many post-1994 practices at Oude Molen are dismissed as too recent.
OMEVTA, on the other hand, advances a horizontal, community-based interpretation consistent with UNESCO’s intent and practice. Under this model, ‘generation’ refers to the active transmission of knowledge and practice between practitioners and learners across cohorts and communities rather than along biological lines.
This interpretation reflects how living heritage functions globally, particularly within indigenous, African and post-colonial contexts.
Why Oude Molen qualifies as intangible cultural heritage and living heritage
Despite the evidentiary shortcomings of the revised HIA, Oude Molen embodies the core criteria for ICH. It demonstrates continuity in four key areas: its therapeutic landscape; pre-colonial and colonial Khoe and San practices; agricultural traditions; and a persistent purpose of care and community learning.
Oude Molen is more than a historical site; it is a place alive with stories and traditions that continue to shape the community today. Its value lies in the ongoing practices, knowledge and care that give the place meaning.
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Silent removal in a democratic era
What is happening at Oude Molen unsettles me because it feels familiar. As a teenager, I watched my family and neighbours live under the slow threat of removal. That same unease returns now. By claiming ‘no living heritage’, the WCG can make displacement seem inevitable, hiding injustice. Excluding communities from defining their own heritage turns redevelopment into a continuation of historical erasure, a form of silent removal that is both a heritage and human rights issue.
Conclusion
The heritage dispute at Oude Molen transcends a simple contestation over land, evolving into a fundamental question about custodianship in post-1994 South Africa. In other words, can a living community, actively shaping its identity in the present, be recognised as the rightful guardian of its own heritage?
This contribution challenges the limited, vertical interpretation of UNESCO’s ‘transmission from generation to generation’, which seeks heritage in documented, biological lineages. Instead, it demonstrates a living, horizontal transmission. At Oude Molen, heritage traditions include revivalist therapeutic practices and agro-ecology. Khoe and San cultural renewal are not archived artefacts, but shared knowledge. Therefore, the precinct’s fate is a litmus test for the nation’s heritage framework. If this dynamic, community-sustained continuity is not recognised as valid, the nation’s heritage framework will fail to protect what is truly alive.
The question is whether South Africa will safeguard only brick-and-mortar monuments from the past, or also the living culture being regenerated, right now, at places like Oude Molen.
SAALIEGAH ZARDAD is a researcher and writer whose work focuses on heritage, cultural landscapes and post-apartheid spatial justice. Her research engages with heritage impact assessment processes and questions of intangible cultural heritage, living heritage, community meaning and public decision-making in relation to the Oude Molen Precinct and other redevelopment plans.
