Image: Shelley Christians/UWCFor Professor Sue-Mari Viljoen, the path to becoming a property law scholar began with a choice between two seemingly different worlds – law and art. She chose law.
Her passion for property and property law has since become central to her academic career. Prof Viljoen recently delivered her inaugural lecture at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), reflecting on a field that has shaped her scholarship and her contribution to legal education.
Growing up in Durbanville and attending Stellenberg High School, she enjoyed the analytical challenges of mathematics and history, but also loved painting and other creative pursuits. Her father, an industrial psychologist, offered her practical advice and a few standard tests to help her build a career in law while keeping art as a hobby. Prof Viljoen took his advice, studying BCom Law and LLB at Stellenbosch University before continuing into postgraduate study. Yet, becoming an academic was never part of the original plan. She had already committed to joining a law firm when one class changed everything.
“My supervisor at the time was Prof André Van der Walt. He's passed away now, but he was an amazing scholar and got me completely hooked on property law. It was he who inspired me. He gave the class on advanced property law. And he just explained some of these things in a way that you would have said - this is fascinating, these issues, these very real social issues are important, and it's property. I never thought I would go into academics. I initially wanted to go into practice,” said Prof Viljoen.
Prof Viljoen delivers her inaugural lecture at the University of the Western Cape, marking an important milestone in her academic career. Picture by Shelley Christians/UWCHer studies then became a window into the reality of evictions, poverty, constitutional rights, vulnerable communities, and the state's responsibility to negotiate competing claims to land.
“It was becoming part of a community of scholars…I developed a passion for the work that I did, and then you have this network of academics that you work with, and all of a sudden you're so deep into it that there's no interest at all in doing anything else.”
She recalled that early on, under the tutelage of Prof Van der Walt, the bug bit and she wanted to know more and more about property law: “From almost the very first class, we talked about the then Port Elizabeth Municipality, which was where one of the big eviction cases was happening, and the complexities of the state coming into very real social problems. Those first debates are so vivid that they raise the question of how to regulate landowners' rights and give space to marginalised, vulnerable groups. The constitution is part of the whole thing. Because we must. The state must. And how do you navigate that balance? I found it interesting because it's just so complex and there's no easy answer to it; it's a wicked problem because you cannot tackle it in an unethical, unfair manner."
Today, UWC is firmly home for Prof Viljoen, and she says the campus invigorates and energises her because it’s lush with great open spaces. The reality is, though, that for quite some time she never set foot on campus when she first joined the law faculty. I started at UWC in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was very difficult. I came, and everything was online. No one was around. I wasn't around. I came for the interview the day before the lockdown, actually. So I started in October, and it was actually quite daunting and lonely because you didn't meet anyone. And then we gradually started coming back, and I started meeting people.
One of Prof Viljoen’s artworks, created in her spare time. Image: SuppliedBut it was very strange because you would be in a meeting, hear someone talk, and be like, ‘Oh, this is so-and-so’. But you'd have no idea what they looked like. So coming back face-to-face was nice.”
Her inaugural lecture was a full-circle academic moment for Prof Viljoen. Her lecture examined a central tension in South Africa’s property system – the need to provide secure land and housing rights to marginalised communities while also fairly protecting and regulating private property. This tension has contributed to South Africa’s ongoing land crisis and has placed the state at the centre of debates about how property should be understood and regulated. Prof Viljoen argued that property is not simply a private right, but an institution created and shaped by the state in response to political and socio-economic needs. Property, particularly land, should therefore contribute to both individual and community resilience. The lecture focused on the public value of property and how this influences regulation, court decisions, democratic debate and the fulfilment of constitutional rights. She goes beyond the idea that property merely has a social function, arguing that the state is an active stakeholder in defining what property means and how a limited resource such as land should be used.
WATCH: The Inaugural Lecture of Prof Sue-Mari Viljoen
What would Prof Sue–Mari Viljoen do with R1 billion to address a challenge connected to his research?
“It's going to sound very strange, but how I would use the money is to support not only the state, but state institute institutions, different types of institutions, to provide to them because a lot of them do really, really well.
“It's difficult to pinpoint exactly who, and at what level of government, because it's almost like a government-led type of organisation. You've got NGOs like Ndifuna Ukwazi that've done a lot of litigation; it would be more of these smaller institutions, but also in collaboration with the bigger ones. Because if you don't enable the state, nothing will actually get done. If you don't support the state in doing the right thing, nothing's going to get done. It has to be a collaborative effort between the local authority, the provincial government and the smaller institution. It would have to be, providing funding in the realm of housing and land reform. Because that's always been my passion: to provide funding and to foster better collaboration among these different institutions to drive the goals we need to see through.
“We must do it. The constitution dictates that you must do it. And it still lies at the centre for the state. So, with the state, they can incentivise the public and subsidise private corporations to get on board and start solving these issues, because they're not going to happen by themselves. The state has to realise that they need help. They cannot do this by themselves. We've got millions of people without houses. We've got millions of people without land. And you need a comprehensive plan with various components to start thinking about how to solve it. We're not there. We're not there at all.
“It took me a while to realise, but academics have a very small but crucial role to play. Because you talk and you talk and you talk and you write and you write and you write and it's like this iceberg – you build, and you build and at some point, the decisions get made, and the hope is that the decisions are the correct ones. It’s not a matter of writing something today, and tomorrow it's going to be different. It doesn't work like that; it takes time, you know, so you have to understand your role in that. So sometimes you can lobby, sometimes you can write something to the minister, and all of that does make a difference."
