Jacklyn Cock
Abstract: Although imported from the United States, the discourse of environmental justice has been radicalized in South Africa, as elsewhere in the Global South. Activists in South Africa go beyond symptoms to identify and challenge the structural causes of the current environmental crisis. The case of Steel Valley illustrates the power of the more radical concept of environmental justice by showing how a small, local environmental justice organization was able to challenge toxic pollution by the most powerful steel corporation in the world. The traveling and adaptive discourse of environmental justice has the capacity to connect local, particularistic struggles, generalize them, and forge global alliances.
Keywords: Environmental justice, activism, pollution, conservation, mining, South Africa
“Steel Valley” is the area around Vanderbjlpark, about one hundred miles from Johannesburg, in the industrial heartland of South Africa. It is the site of a struggle whereby a small environmental justice organization successfully challenged toxic pollution by the most powerful steel corporation in the world. The case of Steel Valley demonstrates both the power of the discourse of environmental justice and what has been called “the slow violence of ecological degradation.” This is a violence that extends over time; it is insidious, undramatic, and relatively invisible. In Steel Valley the penetration of toxic pollution by a steel mill was extensive and largely invisible, permeating the landscape and moving slowly through the air and the groundwater. In many cases it was driven inward and embodied in the form of illness, genetic defects, cancers, and kidney failures among five hundred residents.
When the struggle began, one of the key actors, Lakshmi Mittal, was estimated to be the third-richest man in the world. He was chair of ArcelorMittal, a corporation that controlled 10 percent of global steel production and operated in twenty-seven different countries, including South Africa. One of his most profitable steel mills was situated in Steel Valley.
The second key actor was Strike Matsepo, one of the small farmers who lost his health and livelihood from the pollution of the air and groundwater around the steel mill. As he described in an interview in 2007, during the political transition, “at the time of Mandela when people could buy where they liked,” he cashed his retirement pension to buy a farm in the area. He had heard that there were pollution problems but thought they were a myth created to keep black people out. He brought his large extended family to live with him. As he stated proudly, “A big sack of mealie meal [corn] was finished in two weeks.” He claimed that Steel Valley “used to be a good place,” but in the last years several of his animals had died, and many were born with birth defects. “In all thirty cows have died, as well as 9 calves, 5 sheep, 6 goats, 3 tortoises, 1 pig, 7 dogs, 30 chickens and 4 cats.” Several family members also died. Strike himself was sickly and had spent several periods in hospital being treated for kidney failure associated with pollutants known to be in the groundwater. He became one of the founding members of a small local group, the Steel Valley Crisis Committee, formed to address local concerns about this spreading toxic pollution.
This was the context in which Samson Mokoena and several other local, young black activists were exposed to the discourse of environmental justice and formed the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance (VEJA) “to stop the pollution.” Many participants at the foundational workshop were excited by the concept of environmental justice. Some defined the concept very broadly: one participant maintained that “[e]nvironmental justice means the creation of jobs, the total eradication of poverty, the equal distribution of wealth, ending discrimination due to illness[,] and health protection.” Most participants linked the concept to protecting livelihoods: “Environmental justice to us means the natural resources need to be used in a way that will preserve them for generations to come. The environment must provide the resources to live. You can’t tell a hungry person not to kill an animal, or a cold person not to cut down a tree and make a fire to warm himself. We must not destroy the environment which is our source of life.”
As the concept circulated in various township communities, activists decided to broaden the struggle against the steel mill to target other corporations in the area that were concerned with “profit at the expense of environmental and social justice” and whose emissions were creating severe air pollution. They formed VEJA in 2004. As Samson explained in a 2013 interview, when he was the chair of VEJA, “For me with environmental justice you become yourself . . . . [Y]ou engage with real issues that the community is faced with every day, like having water in your tap. It’s a powerful concept because it links all the issues. It shows how everything is connected.”
Over time the community engaged in many forms of collective action to stop the pollution and obtain compensation. Actions included three court cases, publicity, protest marches, picketing, participation in local forums, and appeals directly to Presidents Mandela and Mbeki. All these strategies failed as the steel mill denied the toxic nature of the pollution and so escaped liability for it. For instance, all requests to gain access to the secret 2002 environmental “master plan” of the steel mill, which documented the extent and liabilities of the pollution from the company’s waste dumps and unlined dams, were refused. VEJA waged a ten-year battle to obtain the plan. Finally, a judge ruled in 2013 that the company had been “disingenuous” and that VEJA’s monitoring of the pollution, as well as its mobilization and dissemination of information, proved “a vital collaboration between the state and private entities.” He ordered the corporation to divulge the contents of its nine-thousand-page master plan. ArcelorMittal appealed. But the Supreme Court of South Africa confirmed the judgment in May 2015, ruling that “in relation to the environment . . . there is no room for secrecy . . . [and] constitutional values will be enforced.” This judgment will be the grounds for a new series of campaigns to force the corporation to rehabilitate the area and pay compensation to the victims. “There must be a process whereby ArcelorMittal acknowledges it has done wrong. There must be compensation for residents,” explained Samson.
ArcelorMittal has provoked globalized protests. At the same time, advocacy organizations have “upscaled”—from the small local organization that is the Steel Valley Crisis Committee, to the wider Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance, to the formation of Global Action on ArcelorMittal in 2008. Global Action involves environmental justice activists worldwide—from Kazakhstan to India, from Ohio to Luxembourg. Its formation and scope suggest the potential of resistance to environmental injustice that is locally rooted but globally connected.
The discourse of environmental justice originated in the Unites States in opposition to practices termed “environmental racism.” It was radicalized in South Africa in a process of translation. The appropriation from the United States was not a passive transmission; the discourse changed dramatically in the process of translation from the North to the Global South. As it circulated it was extended beyond a concern with inequity in distributional impacts. The linkage of notions of rights, justice, power, and equality meant that the South African adaptation of the concept involved a commitment to radical, transformative change. Unlike in the United States, this change was driven by majority rather than minority interests. As such, the movement in South Africa frequently addresses the root causes of environmental degradation and processes rooted in neoliberalism, like privatization and deregulation—in contrast to the US movement’s historical focus on symptoms.
The concept of environmental justice was first formally introduced in South Africa by an American sociologist at a conference of environmental activists in 1992. The concept resonated with the experience of black South Africans. As one participant said, “It was articulated as a black concept and a poor concept and it took root very well.” This intervention came at a charged political moment; the transition to democracy was under way and, as Nadine Gordimer said at the time, “[p]rogressive forces in our country are pledged to one of the most extraordinary events in world social history, the complete reversal of everything that, for centuries, has ordered the lives of all our people.” The “reversal” of environmental racism was central to the process of democratization, especially between 1990 and 1994.
The most dramatic outcome of the conference was the creation of the Environmental Justice Networking Forum (EJNF). The forum signaled a decisive break with the narrow, authoritarian conservationism that was dominant at the time. The EJNF described itself as a “democratic network, a shared resource, a forum which seeks to advance the interrelatedness of social, economic, environmental and political issues, and to reverse and prevent environmental injustices affecting the poor and the working class.” It brought together over seven hundred organizations ranging from community-based organizations (CBOs) to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), from churches to trade unions. Members took up grassroots issues such as the mercury poisoning of workers and communities, the toxic legacy of asbestos mining, illness as a result of working with poisonous substances, the absence of basic services such as access to water and sanitation, and waste dumps situated next to townships. The EJNF also did high-profile policy work, playing a leading role in post–apartheid environmental policy formulation such as in the National Environmental Policy Process (CONNEP), which formulated South Africa’s progressive National Environmental Management Act, a framework law that laid down the principles for further legislation and also formulated Section 24 of the new constitution, the “environmental justice right.”
During both the colonial and the apartheid regimes, environmentalism operated effectively as an authoritarian conservation strategy that was mainly concerned with the protection of threatened plants, animals, and wilderness areas. As elsewhere, the conservation approach neglected urban, health, labor, and development issues. In the 1970s the mainstream environmental movement in the United States was subject to criticism of its “environmental elitism,” and the establishment of many national parks involved displacement and dispossession. Similarly, for many black South Africans, dispossession was the other side of conservation. They were forcibly removed to create national parks and “protected areas,” thereby losing their lands and undermining their livelihoods. The Makuleke people, for example, were evicted (their huts burned and their crops destroyed) from the northern area of the Kruger National Park in 1962. Although the new post-apartheid Board of the South African National Parks restored their land, many claims of land dispossession by indigenous communities have still not been resolved.
Under apartheid the national parks reflected the culture and practices of white exclusivity and domination. Until the 1980s, African visitors in Kruger National Park were allowed accommodation only at a tented camp with very rudimentary facilities. Since then the national parks have become more inclusive, and the value of cultural diversity as well as biodiversity has been made explicit through the promotion of local tourism and the development of cultural heritage sites such as Thulamela (the walled stone remains of a vital fifteenth-century trading center). Some progress has also been made in improving relations with neighboring communities, but community members continue to live in desperate poverty. Improvements in communication are largely due to environmental justice organizations demanding change from a “fortress and fines” model of conservation in which neighboring communities were perceived and treated as threats.
Fragments of the linkage of environmentalism with conservation remain in post-apartheid South Africa. The protection of biodiversity is often eclipsed by survivalist concerns with jobs and livelihoods. As a workshop participant recently commented, “White people must be mad to care so much about the poaching of rhinos when black children are going hungry.” The concept of environmental justice provides a radical alternative to the discourse of “conservation and sustainable development,” questioning the market’s ability to bring about social or environmental sustainability. It affirms the value of all forms of life against the interests of the rich and powerful. It represents a powerful challenge to the anodyne concept of sustainable development, and the increasing commodification and financialization of nature packaged as “the green economy.”
Environmental injustice continues in post-apartheid South Africa as inequality deepens and the 65 percent of the population classified as “poor” bear the brunt of increasing environmental degradation. Black South Africans continue to live on the most damaged land, in the most polluted neighborhoods often adjoining mine dumps, waste sites, or polluting industries, without adequate services of refuse removal, water, electricity, and sanitation. In the province of Gauteng, in which Johannesburg is situated, some 1.6 million people live on mine dumps contaminated with uranium and toxic heavy metals including arsenic, aluminum, manganese, and mercury. Environmental injustice involves the externalization of the costs of production in the form of toxic pollution of the air and groundwater in many communities, and the enclosure of natural resources, such as land and water. Poor people (the majority of whom continue to be black) are also the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change such as more extreme weather events, crop failures, rising food prices, and water shortages.
Established environmental justice organizations such as Earthlife Africa, Groundwork, VEJA, and the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance are bridging ecological and social justice issues. New environmental justice organizations are emerging such as the Highveld Environmental Justice Alliance, Mining Affected Communities United in Action (MACUA), and WoMin. They are developing new alliances, new forms of power, and new narratives of “food sovereignty” and “energy democracy.” These are vital steps toward achieving environmental justice. They are part of a growing emphasis on moving beyond denunciation to formulating alternative social forms. For example, several organizations are not only mobilizing opposition to fracking but also “exploring alternatives which will foster energy democracy and transformative development while protecting the natural resources and people of the Karoo.” Other organizations are promoting concrete postcarbon alternatives such as the Earthlife’s Sustainable Energy and Livelihoods Project, which combines water harvesting, food sovereignty, and clean energy through installing and maintaining biogas digesters and PVC solar-power units and training women on their use. These initiatives are generating demands that either challenge or cannot easily be accommodated by neoliberal capitalism.
Some of these new alliances or coalitions are between formerly antagonistic groupings, such as those concerned with the conservation of threatened plants, animals, and wilderness areas and those concerned with social needs. An example is the struggle against the proposed huge open-cast Fuleni coal mine near the border of Hluhluwe iMfolozi Park, one of Africa’s oldest game reserves and central to rhino conservation. The mine is supported by Glencore and BHB Billiton, the world’s largest commodity trader and mining house, respectively. Local women, however, have mobilized against the mine with the support of conservation organizations to form the iMfolozi Community and Wilderness Alliance. Similarly, the Save Mapungubwe Coalition was formed to safeguard the Mapungubwe National Park, a World Heritage Site, from an Australian–based mining company, Coal of Africa. The diverse coalition includes environmental NGOs such as World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT) as well as local people. Such alliances are beginning to close a historic gap in the environmental movement between two (sometimes antagonistic) main streams: those organized around the discourse of conservation and those organized around the discourse of environmental justice.
New linkages exposing the false binary of “jobs” versus “environmental protection” are emerging between another set of distinct and often antagonistic groupings—labor and environmental justice activists. For example, the main trade-union federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), established two committees consisting of representatives from all twenty-two affiliate unions and from key environmental organizations. These committees promoted shared research into coal mining, chemicals, and poultry farming. They have engaged in extensive popular education and formulated policy positions around a “just transition”—a shift away from fossil fuel energy to a renewable energy regime based on the principles of both justice and sustainability. Another example of collaborations between unions and environmental organizations is the Climate Jobs Campaign, which has collected one hundred thousand signatures in support of creating jobs to address both poverty and climate change. Based on meticulous research, the campaign has demonstrated that up to three million such jobs are possible, challenging capitalist ownership in favor of community-owned projects. Informal collaboration with the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) is strongly promoting the environmental justice notion of energy democracy as another building block toward an alternative future. Energy democracy resists the agenda of fossil-fuels corporations and reclaims the energy sector as part of “the commons” so that public resources are outside the market and democratically controlled. The idea was endorsed by fifty-one Africa countries in the Abuja Declaration of 2006.
Environmental justice struggles involve a range of mobilizing issues. The most common demands and claims relate to “rights” and health, drawing on the constitutional framing of the human right in the post-apartheid constitution, which proclaims the right of all “to live in an environment that is not harmful to health or wellbeing.” The overall focus is on the “environmentalism of the poor,” which flows from the recognition that it is the poor and the working class who are most burdened by environmental injury.
Nonetheless, much current popular mobilization is about access to services such as water and energy. The actions are localized, episodic, discontinuous, and not framed as “environmental struggles.” Such a reframing could, however, provide an ideological basis for unified collective action. Clearly coal, as the main driver of the ecological crisis in the form of climate change, constitutes a powerful ground for unified action. Formal alliances in opposition to coal are growing to include human rights issues such as land dispossession, health impacts through water and air pollution, loss of livelihoods, corruption in the granting of mining licenses, inadequate consultation with frontline communities, and methods for increasing food security. Many of these “land grabs” are driven by multinational corporations. In a number of cases, there are serious allegations of Australian and Indian corporations fomenting violence in these communities to destroy any local opposition.
While coal is the main cause, food insecurity is acknowledged to be one of the most serious consequences of climate change. Popular mobilization against the present food regime in South Africa is growing. The coexistence of hunger (53 percent of the population is officially classified as experiencing hunger either regularly or intermittently) and food waste (a third of all food produced) is acknowledged as profoundly unjust. Like coal, food is an intensely political, connecting issue. One of the growing initiatives confronting the food regime in South Africa is the Food Sovereignty Campaign. The campaign is mobilizing grassroots communities, engaging in activist schools and study groups, establishing food gardens, and developing innovative strategies. In 2015, for example, they brought together grassroots experiences and “expert” evidence in the People’s Tribunal on Hunger, Food Prices and Landlessness. The tribunal involved hearing accounts such as, “I fainted but I explained that I was not really sick. It was just not my turn to eat that day.”
The linking of principles of social justice with ecological sustainability in the discourse of environmental justice is providing the impetus for many of these struggles. Collectively, all these initiatives confront different aspects of the ecological crisis. They demonstrate an alternative paradigm, a different relationship both among human beings and between human beings and nature. For some, these relationships draw on the traditional African notion of ubuntu, which in Xhosa asserts that “people are people through other people.” Ubuntu emphasizes collective action, solidarity, and empowerment rather than individual advancement. Furthermore, the traditional African view that people, animals, and plants form an integral whole provides a strong contrast to the dualistic understanding of “nature” and “society” as separate entities that is widespread in the Global North.
All over the world the discourse of environmental justice is creating a form of “epistemic solidarity,” both in forging alliances locally and globally between north and south, and in linking the principles of social justice and ecological sustainability. The radicalization of the concept in South Africa involves a direction to structural causes—the expansionist logic of extractivism in the case of mobilization around coal, for example. The South African case described in this chapter is not unique. Many of the environmental justice struggles on the African continent are against the dispossession and toxic pollution involved in extractivism. This “second scramble for Africa” involves the appropriation of Africa’s profitable natural resources by powerful multinational corporations. Throughout the continent poor people are not passive victims of these processes. Much protest activity is directed against these corporations, such as that of the Ogoni, the Ijaw, and other groups in the Niger Delta against the damage from oil extraction by Shell. The hybridized discourse of environmental justice is critical in many of these struggles.
South Africa is a microcosm of the contemporary world order, a world marked by growing inequality and environmental degradation that is leading to environmental catastrophe. The traveling and adaptive discourse of environmental justice has the capacity to connect particularistic local struggles, generalize them, and forge global alliances. The current unprecedented global concentration of corporate power calls for these forms of transnational solidarity.
The chapter draws from a review of the relevant primary and secondary literature, interviews, and the author’s participation as an environmental justice activist in many of the events described.
Cock, Jacklyn. The War against Ourselves. Nature, Justice and Power in South Africa. Braamfontein, South Africa: Wits University Press, 2007.
Hallowes, David. Toxic Futures: South Africa in the Crises of Energy, Environment and Capital. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011.
Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon and Shuster, 2014.
McDonald, David. Environmental Justice in South Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
• • •
JACKLYN COCK is a professor emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and is active in the environmental justice movement.