Rocher v Registrar of Deeds [1911] ZATPD 56 (28 April 1911)

Land - Ownership - Transfer - Registration - What Rights Registrable - Quasi-Servitudes - Mineral and Surface Rights

Ownership of Land includes the Mineral as well as the Surface Rights, and nothing less.

The Registrar of Deeds is entitled to refuse to register a deed of transfer conveying rights other than rights to land or to praedial servitudes.

Joint owners of certain land, in pursuance of a partition agreement, transferred to each other certain shares in the said land, subject to the condition that the mineral rights of the whole should remain undivided and be held by all the owners jointly in proportion to their divided interests. Subsequently one of the owners sought to transfer in one deed his divided share in the land subject to the said condition. The Registrar of Deeds refused to register the deed.

Held, that the condition as to the reservation of mineral rights in common imposed neither a right to land nor to a praedial servitude, and the Registrar was entitled to refuse to register the deed.