The environment has always been a social issue in South Africa, and the eco-justice movement is on the rise. EMMA BRYCE argues that in honour of our history of activism, and in light of a state that is forgetting the needs of its people, it is time to stand up again.

In 1994, during the post-democracy elation that thrust South Africans into a memorably united frenzy, a paragraph was written into the Constitution. Embedded in the Bill of Rights, among calls for freedom of expression and legislated equality, it read, “Everyone has the right to an environment that is not harmful to their health or well-being.” It goes on to say that all citizens deserve an environment that is conserved, unpolluted, and ecologically healthy. These words grandly frame the notion that environmental rights are equivalent to human rights; they immortalise a moment in history, when glorious optimism saw the fusion of a country, its environment, and its people. South Africans of all races were given a remarkable constitutional gift: the right to resources, the right to land, and the right to enjoy the natural environment. For the first time, protected reserves presented all citizens with wide open spaces, symbolic of the freedom of access and right to leisure so longed for, for so long. The environment became a social issue, inextricably linked to democratic rights.

As a South African, I marvel that people still say we’re living in a ‘passive’ society, that citizens ‘don’t have anything to fight for.’ Years down the line from 1994, social and environmental activism – a movement called ‘eco-justice’ - is on the rise, provoked by the neglectful actions of a state that is ignoring - or in the process of forgetting - the rights of its people. Increasingly, these rights are tied up with the environment: poverty and inequality have become equated with a lack of access to natural resources; injustice can be defined as the damaging effects of big industry pollution on people and their environments, or the red tape that stops citizens reclaiming the land of their forefathers. Activism is what many see as a necessary response to the state’s neglect of some of the fundamental ideals that underpinned the new dispensation. Certainly, so far we’ve flown the freedom flag in honour of ten years of democracy, we’ve witnessed two remarkably different presidencies, and the Constitution is still punted as one of the most advanced in the world. But since 1994 and the few golden years that followed, things have changed.

Due to a series of media exposés, the ANC has lost its shiny record, and the exploits of newly inaugurated President Zuma have hardly improved its reputation. Words like ‘corrupt’ and ‘self-serving’ are used to describe the government, and circulate in the media, at the dinner table, and between people who don’t even read the newspapers. And the government – like the apartheid authorities before it - has to deal with an increasingly active civil sector, which won’t leave eco-justice issues alone. Currently, the biggest concern on the eco-agenda is the potential spread of open-cast mines across South Africa. The Department of Minerals and Energy – restructured by the Zuma dispensation into separate mining and energy departments - has a reputation for approving dodgy prospecting licences and mining applications. So, South Africans countrywide are engaged in a challenge to mining companies, who are bent on establishing open-cast disasters in Wakkerstroom of Kwa-Zulu Natal, near Mapungubwe – a conservation and world heritage site – and closer to home, in Moutonshoek up the Cape West Coast. Here, I recently read that farmers and local farm workers are attending protest meetings in droves, waving placards marked with slogans like “Myn Verdwyn” (Mines Be Gone) and “Earth Before Greed”. The mine stands to threaten the livelihoods of agricultural farm workers, as well as the internationally protected Ramsar site downstream, called Verlorenvlei – one of the few remaining ‘pristine’ wetlands in the country. But protestors remain unfailingly fearless in the face of this greed. In another community threatened by mines, spokesperson Emmanuel Makgoga explained, “We have asked government…to deliver on our constitutional rights that protect us, but a democratic government is failing us. Thus we are organising and resisting against the aggression and violence of mining companies and the state.” These turbulent times are ringing the bells of the past.

It’s a country-wide trend. In the industrial bowl of South Durban, communities battle against toxic emissions that leave a permanent layer of pollution settled over the land. Inhabitants are sick, and some have died. In Cape Town, a division of the anti-nuclear NGO Earthlife Africa is looking to litigate against the parastatal Eskom, due to the effects of uranium exposure on its workers: these men are contracting odd strains of cancer and are getting sicker. Much further north, vegetable farmers near Potchefstroom are suffering the effects of gold mining waste that seeps into the water courses of the Wonderfonteinspruit catchment area. Traces of uranium and lead have been found in crops, damaging the health of the farmers who eat this food, their environment, and destroying their business. More broadly, the Campaign Against Nuclear Energy (CANE) targets Eskom for its irresponsible stance on nuclear waste, which is transported to, and buried in, the far reaches of the poorer Northern Cape. Here, so-called ‘indigenous’ workers of Bushman ancestry get sick from exposure to high-level waste. And these are South Africa’s ‘first people’, mind you, with special rights enshrined in the Constitution in the effort to protect our cultural heritage. That heritage is dying a quick and nasty death.

These contraventions of environmental rights involve every concern: social, economic, and emotional. It was not long ago, under oppression by an unforgiving regime, that similar concerns were raised, and a similarly progressive bunch of hopefuls – surfacing in revolutionary dribs and drabs all over the country – united to form a singular, powerful movement.

These days, politicians hark back to Struggle days. They glorify South Africa’s turbulent twentieth century history and honour the courageous acts of those who stood up against the apartheid regime. But it seems that politicians are wearing their political blinkers, because activism is not a thing of the past: it’s happening all around them. They’re also forgetting that environmental injustice is increasingly being called the ‘new-apartheid’. It’s a reference that’s on the web, and people have written books about this great division of resources, access, and environmental rights. If ever there was an indictment of South Africa’s first democratic government, this is it.

Then there are those who argue that environmental activism is an irrelevant struggle in South Africa; that it feeds the urges of the elite, who have the time and money to indulge in fanciful pastimes. But they’re ignoring the social dimension, for when human justice is threatened on a large scale, activism becomes less of an indulgence, and more like a cause. Moreover, this is the struggle of the downtrodden: the elite are only just taking notice. We need to face it: unjust environmental management ultimately affects the poorest of the poor. But more importantly, activism – environmental and social – is entrenched in the past that we call up so proudly and regularly. When I spoke to veteran activist Mike Kantey, he took a moment to emphasise, “We didn’t survive the Struggle to sit on our hands and have our freedom taken away.” Activism is the very foundation upon which we stand; it is the one lesson we should take from South African History 101.

Of course, in history books and André Brink novels, the Struggle was perceived as primarily a social one. But we need to remember that the lack of environmental rights to resources, land, and environmental health funded some of the most poignant social struggles of the century. Way up in the dry reaches of South Africa, a collection of ‘black spots’ dot the map: the badlands of apartheid. In the 1970s, black populations were ‘relocated’ to these ‘homelands’ for ‘separate development’ – some of the greatest euphemisms of the time. Here, people built mud huts on sun-baked earth, and eked out a livelihood from dusty soil. The injustices that sprang from these godforsaken tracts of resource-dry ground manifested as some of the most virulent campaigns against apartheid. Later in the ‘70s, the Anti-Homeland Campaign gained a force, which biographer Ben Temkin argues led to the ANC-led mobilisation of black youth, and the most memorable student uprisings in the history of apartheid.

In other places and at other times, black farmers were denied the rights to their land under the Native Lands Act, and underpaid miners were made ill by asbestos - today formally recognised as a grave infringement of environmental justice. And the environmental legacy of apartheid? In the homelands, irreversible erosion, stony slopes, a ‘lunar landscape’ according to environmentalists of the time. But the dusty bowls left by apartheid, the neglected farm lands and the unregulated plumes of pollution drifting over industrial shanty towns – these environmental breakdowns are testimony to a profound social injustice, emotional scars that can never be healed. These scars are what made the role of the activist so valuable and so memorable.

Here, I need to pose a question: if this is the environmental legacy of apartheid, what will the environmental-social effects of our times be? On Cape Town’s infamous Baden Powell Drive, Khayelitsha unravels near the coastline, spewing waste and sewage. Some residents have been on the waiting list for RDP housing for over ten years, living with social issues like the spread of disease as a result of environmental meltdown. But the social injustices here are far larger. The right to human dignity has been discarded: it is a right that cannot prosper between waste and shacks. Here lies evidence that the government is not doing its job, that it has forgotten what its job is. In light of this, we need to remember that it is acceptable to be angry. Anger has done us good in the past: it has united and freed, it has cracked the foundations of a very nasty regime. In fact, for activism to flourish, anger is a requirement. And under the increasingly draconian clamp of the state’s so-called Regulation of Gatherings Act, eco-justice activism today in South Africa too has become not only a requirement, but a necessity.

A while back, a woman called in to a radio show to offer an opinion on the political situation in South Africa. She uttered a cliché, but it was said with such heart and hope that the words sounded new: “South Africa is such a beautiful, beautiful country,” she said, “What are we doing to it?” Whether or not the debate was environmental doesn’t matter: in her statement she brought forward a citizen’s concerns; she described the physical environment, as well as the social and cultural heart of the country. Implicit in that statement were all the things that should motivate action. It reminds me of another quote, by someone far removed from the world of the anonymous caller: “I always knew that someday I would again feel the grass under my feet and walk in the sunshine as a free man.” Nelson Mandela, 1994. These words seem chillingly, optimistically free of this post-1994 eco-justice struggle. It is also a poignant reminder of what a memorable activist equated with freedom: the chance to enjoy the natural environment.

Mandela links freedom with the natural environment on a most basic level. By extension, the environment has come to represent our rights and our freedoms; its entrenchment in our laws and democratic ideals has also come to symbolise the regrettable downfall of a government so full of promise at the start. But it has always fallen into the hands of the activist to maintain freedom, of whatever kind. The era of a new South African struggle is well underway. In honour of those who taught us from another age, perhaps it is now time for a new generation to take up this new cause.