People and machines. At Malahleni, Mpumalanga of South Africa.In the short-term, communities need to address some
\nof the most pressing issues they face. They cannot always afford to wait for
\nlaws to be changed or amended. This is why community empowerment is so
\ncritical, particularly in the mine-hosting communities of Southern Africa,
\nwhere community members endure many harmful mining conditions.\u00a0\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n
It is through action that change emerges. It is still the case that meaningful
\ninteractions between mining communities and the mines only come about as a result of protest or demonstrations. To find alternatives to mining in the
\nlong-term and to address pressing issues in the short-term, civil society needs
\nto invest resources into countering power through more coordinated resistance
\nand solidarity. This starts with building a strong community voice aware of
\ncommunity level issues.<\/p>\n
The continuing legacy of mining in South Africa as
\nit relates to the well being of mine-hosting communities necessarily presents
\nus with contradictory perspectives. Mining, main source of the country\u2019s wealth,
\ncontributed significantly to developing South Africa into one of the leading
\neconomies in Africa and the Third World. But mining has also caused
\nconsiderable destruction to black communities and sowed divisions between white
\nand non-white populations. Black Africans had been mining South Africa\u2019s natural
\nresources before the arrival of whites. But whites industrialised and
\ncorporatised mining, stifling artisanal mining practices in the process of introducing
\nadvanced machinery. As their land was appropriated and exploited, the only role
\nfor blacks was to provide the labour to mine it. The wealth of whites like
\nCecil Rhodes and Ernest Oppenheimer was built on this exploitation, while
\nblacks became landless. However, the transition from artisanal to
\nindustrialisation was not smooth.<\/p>\n
Resistance has always been a significant feature of
\nthe South African socio-economic landscape. It was not the colonial wars over
\nland, which alone shaped modern South Africa. The allocation of the proceeds of
\ngold and diamond mining also gave rise to resistance. The Anglo-Boer War, the
\nrise of a white Afrikaner working class, and the emergence of Afrikaner capital
\nthat competed with English corporations \u2013 all these pivotal events shaped the sinister
\nsystem of Apartheid. The consequences of mining were numerous, including: the
\nmigrant labor system that helped destroy African peasant life; the destructive
\n\u201clocation\u201d, the urban and rural settlements created for black populations that
\npersist today; and the creation of a white poor who rose rapidly up the class
\nladder and ever since have feared that they will fall and become like \u201cthe
\nnative\u201d, \u201c bantu\u201d or \u201cthe black\u201d, whom they were taught to fear as they feared
\nthe devil.<\/p>\n
All the mining areas today suffer a range of
\nproblems, one of the first being the ongoing land dispossession which is
\nsupported \u2013 whether directly or indirectly \u2013 by government officials and
\ntraditional leaders. The Royal Bafokeng is one of many examples. In provinces
\nsuch as North West and Limpopo, there are a number of conflicts between the
\npeople and traditional leaders. People\u2019s traditional economic practices have
\nbeen severely disrupted by mining. Moreover, the moving of ancestral graveyards
\nand the destruction of traditional plants serve to illustrate how the cultural
\nand spiritual aspects of community life also fall victim to this process.<\/p>\n
Vale Mining Corporation fence at Tete, a coal-mining village in Mozambique. Children playing.The disruption of family life and community cohesion combined with
\na mass of unemployed youth has opened the way to serious drug, alcohol and
\ncrime problems. The large increase in teenage pregnancy is one of the outcomes.
\nYoung women live in a state of permanent violence. Mining areas show the
\nhighest incidence of HIV\/Aids. The disruption of villagers over 100 years by rapid
\nunplanned mining development brings in a large number of migrant workers, many
\nof them casuals seeking work. Competing pressures on social services lead to
\ngruesome crimes.<\/i><\/p>\n
Then there is the environmental damage: the
\ndestruction of soil so that no agriculture will be possible in the future in
\nareas such as Rustenburg, once a regional food basket. Health problems from air
\npollution are now reaching serious proportions, together with the destruction
\nof the wetlands, pollution of rivers and over-use of water in a water scarce
\ncountry.<\/i><\/p>\n
The successful export of raw materials earns large
\nreturns \u2013 enough for a society to purchase from outside the country and neglect
\nto develop its own manufacturing base. The leadership elite and big mining
\ncorporations have become very powerful and estranged from the people.
\nCorruption grows rapidly because the wealth is held within the company and this
\nmoney is not spread across the large working base. It is almost as though \u2018if\u2019
\nwe did not have such large mines, our conflicts would have been easier to resolve
\nbecause the stakes would have been easier. <\/p>\n
But the end of gold mining is devastating in once
\nthriving towns in the Goldfields and West Rand, such as Welkom and
\nDominionville. In 50 years, we will have serious problems in places like
\nRustenburg and Mokopane when platinum has run out. Opportunistic political leaders
\nonly live in 5-10 years mindsets, around what wealth they can accumulate while
\nthey are still in office. According to estimations made by The South African
\nInstitute of International Affairs, it would cost the government\u00a0R40-billion\u00a0to rehabilitate all the abandoned mines.<\/p>\n
<\/i><\/p>\n
Mining-affected communities are poor, with high
\nrates of youth unemployment and they are very divided. Mines and governments
\nsince 1994 have urged communities not to resist mining, promising that it would
\nbring jobs and development. This has not happened and the people are angry. The
\nprotests that have followed have been mainly about jobs, with other issues such
\nas environmental pollution and social insecurity coming second.<\/p>\n
Trucks carrying mining waste to be dumped at Motlhontlho, South Africa, where it encroaches on the fields and homes of the community.There is a continuing resistance against threats to
\nland ownership and mining community trusts which politicians, traditional
\nleaders and businesses have captured for their own benefit. The Bafokeng Land
\nBuyers Association (BLBA) has been waging a significant legal battle to regain
\ntheir land and there are many other communities taking such routes. Then there
\nare small groups of young people in every mining area who organise. The
\nCommunity Monitors, for example, work in 10 areas with an average of 10
\nactivists. As another example of grassroots activism, MACUA is a network of
\nmining-affected communities.<\/p>\n
<\/i><\/p>\n
We need more than superficial reform in mining, a
\nradical programme that removes mining from private corporations and government
\nelites in order to remove it from the dictates of the market. Our strategy must
\nstart with the community. We have to build a strong community advocacy that is
\naware, informed and progressive, but not populist. We have to develop a body of
\nhighly skilled community activists who are able to investigate problems,
\ndocument them, and effectively communicate both within the community and
\nglobally. <\/p>\n
In this way, they will be able to tell their own
\nstory, as opposed to that of the corporations or elites. Our tactics must
\nentail the skilful use of the tools available to us, such as the wealth of new
\ninformation and communications technology. Above all, we need to free the minds
\nof young black people; not in an abstract way, but for them to extricate
\nthemselves from a context in which they are brutalised by capitalist regimes.<\/p>\n
Civil society must support this future. If it is
\ncommitted to a truly open society, it must give support to local community
\nresistance, because it is at the grassroots level that one can determine
\nwhether society is open or not; not in the laws and institutions alone. The
\noppression and exploitation of mining communities means that even within our
\ndemocracy, the legacy of the apartheid and colonial era mining regimes
\ncontinues. Only through such a resistance can we slowly building the
\nalternative.<\/p>\n
A board at the entrance of the open pit of Mokgalakwena Platinum Mine, Limpopo, South Africa. <\/i><\/p>\n
Photographs are from the author's research into the region's mine-hosting communities.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" People and machines. At Malahleni, Mpumalanga of South Africa.In the short-term, communities need to address some of the most pressing issues they face. They cannot always afford to wait for laws to be changed or amended. This is why community empowerment is so critical, particularly in the mine-hosting communities of Southern Africa, where community members…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}