In 1905 the Transvaal Supreme Court handed down an emblematic decision. Tsewu v Registrar of Deeds 1905 TS 130 overturned the refusal of the registrar to register land title in the name of an African purchaser. The court affirmed his right under the common law to be registered as the owner. This short-lived and contentious assertion of a liberal law of property rights in accordance with which Africans were viewed in law as bearers of ordinary economic rights under common law, and not as bearers of differentiated rights, provides us with a starting point for a consideration of land law. Tsewu's case had been brought in the context of mounting pressure from Africans for the right to buy land and register it in their own names. ‘We must of course presume’, said Solomon, ‘that all the inhabitants of this country enjoy equal civil rights under the law.’ Specific legislative authority, he said, was needed to override these rights (135). In early republican law Africans had not been allowed to buy land. In 1881, in the Pretoria Convention which ended the first British occupation, the British forced upon the Transvaal provision for Africans to buy land, but transfer of land was to be to the Superintendent of Natives who held it in trust. There was immediate political reaction to the court's departure from the existing Transvaal law.