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In conversation with... Nonhle Mbtumba

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In conversation with… South African land rights activist Nonhle Mbtumba

On the day that London’s annual Mines and Money conference holds its Women in Mining Networking Drinks, the frontline defender talks of bribes, death threats and her community’s defiance of its government.

In a struggle spanning over 16 years, a rural community in South Africa’s Wild Coast is fighting an Australian mining company, Mineral Commodities Limited (MRC), who want to dig for titanium, and the South African government eager to grant the company a license.

The Wild Coast is unique, says Nonhle Mbtumba, land and human rights defender from the Xolobeni region of Pondoland, who has travelled widely without finding places like it.

“Maybe it’s because I’m touched, I’m rooted, that is why I am not planning to leave. The coast is rare because of its biodiversity, culture and fish, not just in South Africa but in the world. It looks like it’s a protected area, but it’s only been protected by the people themselves.

“If you’re sick, you know which plant you can go outside and use, if you have a problem, you know who you can talk to. In other parts of South Africa, that lifestyle is no longer there. In the Wild Coast we are still doing things in a collective way.”

The mining company may be Australian, but the UK has a role to play. British millionaire property developer Graham Edwards is a major investor in MRC, owning 40 percent of shares in the company. Further, this week’s annual Mines and Money conference in London, with all its greenwashing and pinkwashing, neglect to platform any stakeholders, men or women, from affected communities.

Nonhle’s home couldn’t be more different to our surroundings near Euston station where we chat in a cafe, watching the traffic roar past and people dash across the road. She says that Xolobeni is one of the only places in South Africa that hasn’t been developed. She lives in Amadiba, a 5,000-strong community within Xolobeni, near the coast.

Amadiba did have six villages, now there are five, after the South African government built a tourist resort there in the apartheid era. This remains a source of deep offence in Nonhle’s community, because the resort was built on the graves of the ancestors of the villagers who were forcibly displaced. When the villagers try to return to visit these graves, the police have arrested them. “When you separate me from my grave, you take out my identity completely”, she says.

Amadiba residents live simply and see development in different terms to their government, who have a short-term, capitalist vision. Nonhle believes they have the right to choose their own development.

“We choose agriculture and ecotourism. This type of mining they want to do will only last 22 years. After that, how will we survive?”

“A bomb to my heart”

Australian mining company Mineral Commodities (MRC) arrived in Amadiba in 1996. They discovered minerals on the fertile lands, including on burial grounds, and told village elders that they wanted to start its Xolobeni Mineral Sands Project there. The elders denied them permission.

Under South African customary law, the people of Amadiba have the informal rights to the land and mining companies must seek their consent in order to be granted a license. In 2000, MRC began seeking a community resolution but, having failed to obtain consent, it approached the South African government for permission.

The state granted the company’s South African subsidiary – Transworld Energy and Mineral Resources (TEM) – a license for prospective mining in 2003-4. The community managed to block the license for a while, but soon the company returned and began to explore for minerals. When drilling under homes and graves in 2007, the community formed a group, the Amadiba Crisis Committee, to voice their resistance to the project.

The year after, in September 2008, the South African government minister for mineral resources came to Amadiba to announce that they had granted TEM a full mining license for their Xolobeni Minerals Sands project.

“The license was granted without us. We were not even invited on the day when the minister came to the community for a celebration of granting mining rights. When I heard about it from a journalist, it was a bomb to my heart”.

Bribes

Any support there is for the project has been gained through underhand tactics, says Nonhle. Before foreign companies start projects in South Africa, they must partner with the local community. This is where the government’s Black Economic Empowerment programme comes in: a “policy to advance the economic transformation and enhance the economic participation of black people”.

The Xolobeni Empowerment Company (Xolco) was set up in 2003 as the local partner to the South African subsidiary mining company. While many directors of Xolco aren’t from the community, Amadiba tribal leader chief Lunga Baleni is an exception. He is a director of both Transworld Energy and Mineral Resources (TEM) and Xolco.

He was bribed with a four-wheel drive, in order for him to sign a letter in support of the project on Amadiba’s behalf. “The question is, how can he can speak on behalf of the community and on behalf of the mining company?” asks Nonhle.

Directors of Xolco work on the ground in an attempt to sway local opinion, pushing the narrative that local people are divided on the mining project. But Nonhle believes that if the community was divided, as widely reported in the media, then the mining project would have taken place a long time ago.

Who killed Bazooka?

After years of sustained campaigning, the government suspended TEM’s mining license, before finally cancelling the company’s mining rights in 2014. But the pressure on the people of Amadiba to give in from the subsidiary and parent mining companies, Xolco, and the South African government has continued, unabated.

Chair of the Amadiba Crisis Committee, Bazooka Radebe, was murdered in March 2016 for leading the opposition to the mining project. There were 12 other related killings before him, says Nonhle. The first was in 2002. There have been no arrests in connection with any of the murders to date.

The community raised money to hire a private investigator to look into Bazooka’s murder, but with no corpse and no corporation from the police – who deny police involvement and say that his murder was related to his job as a taxi driver – the community has lost hope that there will be justice for Bazooka.

“The murder files are still with the police in this province – we asked for them to be moved but we failed. They want to sit on top of their case, without doing anything to move it along. We are applying for an inquest”, says Nonhle.

“The question remains: who killed Bazooka? The people who came to his house that night said that they were the police. They were wearing police clothes and had blue lamps, which are only for the police by law. How can we be so sure that those people were not the police?

Bazooka knew he was going to be killed. He called me a couple of hours before he was killed to warn me that we were both on a hit list. He was number one, I was number two. Right now, I’m number one.”

It’s clear that Nonhle is used to talking about this. She is pragmatic. After his murder, a human rights organisation paid for bodyguards for Nonhle, until they ran out of funding in 2018.

“Yeah, my life is not good at all. I don’t know when the killers are going to come. It’s clear that everywhere where I go, people involved with the mine point at me and say ‘Nonhle, she’s the one, she blocks the mining.

“To try to kill the resistance, they decided to kill the leadership, Bazooka, but the resistance is still there. Women are organising and are on the frontline, which is why we are so successful. Even if they kill me, the resistance will still be there. Everybody is part of this struggle.”

A landmark ruling

Amadiba Crisis Committee launched a court battle in early 2018 to try to stop the South African government’s Department of Mineral Resources from giving the mining company the rights to their land. They took the state to court rather than the mining company, because “the state would have intervened and made way for the company, explains Nonhle. “The company haven’t been there illegally; they were there at the permission of the state. The state speaks socialism but they do capitalism”.

The Department of Mineral Resources was relying on the Mineral and Petroleum Act to push through mining, obstinately in the country’s best interests, but, in a landmark victory for communities versus multinational corporations in November last year, Pretoria’s High Court ruled that the Xolobeni people in South Africa have the right to say ‘no’ to mining.

The judge declared that the Minister of Mineral Resources Gwede Mantashe must obtain consent from the community as the holder of rights to the land, prior to granting any mining rights.

The Department of Mineral Resources have refused to acknowledge that the applicants have a right to consent to a mining license being granted.

In a statement after the ruling, Amadiba Crisis Committee (ACC) stated that “the judgement is 120 percent victory”, calling upon the government to respect the judgement. Instead it started an appeal, but has done little to act on it since.

On 22nd November 2019, lawyers for ACC issued a legal declaration to representatives of the Department of Mineral Resources at their Pretoria office. They were supported by 250 protesters and human rights organisations. The document asked for a signed pledge that the department would withdraw their appeal and respect the right of all South African communities to say no to mining.

The document was returned acknowledging receipt, but was left unsigned.

At last night’s prestigious Mines and Money Gala Dinner, nine women – executives of multinational mining companies and lawyers representing them – were shortlisted for ‘Most Inspirational Woman in Mining’. This was wrong. Nonhle and all the women around the world courageously and steadfastly resisting mining, and those who, horrifyingly, are being killed for it, deserve better than this.