For more than a decade, Johanna Motlhamme has been fighting to get her family home back after it was sold from under her, leaving her and her four children without their rightful inheritance.

The 74-year-old’s plight is one that has its roots in the racist laws that prevented Black people from owning land in apartheid South Africa, housing activists have said – a plight inadvertently worsened at the start of democracy when legislation seeking to repair the racial injustices created gender barriers instead.

“Thirty years after the end of apartheid, hundreds of thousands of Black families living in South Africa’s urban townships are facing the same tenure insecurity and the threat of homelessness as they fiercely contest the ownership, occupation, control and rights to access so-called ‘family homes’,” legal rights group the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI) said in a recent report (PDF).

Motlhamme’s story goes back to 1977, when the then-27-year-old married her husband in a community of property, meaning spouses share everything equally.

They moved into a small two-bedroom house in Soweto, a sprawling township southwest of Johannesburg, where Motlhamme lived until their divorce in 1991.

At the time, Black people in cities could at most secure long-term leases of their homes as the law sought to keep the country’s majority population landless.

By the time apartheid was defeated in 1994, the government had introduced new legislation, the Upgrading of Land Tenure Rights Act 112 of 1991, which “aimed to provide a more secure form of land tenure to Africans who, under the apartheid regime, had precarious land rights”, according to SERI.

The act upgraded the property rights of Black long-term leaseholders, allowing them to finally own their homes. But there was a caveat. “By legislative provision, only a man, considered the head of the family, could hold the [property] permit,” SERI said.

In a decision housing activists have said was rooted in “patriarchal customary succession norms”, the new law effectively pushed wives, sisters, mothers and daughters out of inheriting.

For Motlhamme, although she owned 50 percent of her township home by right and according to the terms of her divorce, the Upgrading Act did not enable a way to reflect that. So, when her ex-husband registered the house in 2000, sole ownership went to him.