How We Grew It: Taking on Shell, Mining Giants, And Building Community Resilience on South Africa's Wild Coast
Sinegugu Zukulu, founder of Sustaining the Wild Coast, on holding a resistance movement together through assassination attempts and murder—while building alternatives that work with 2,000 farmers and take on mining giants and Shell in the constitutional court.
What You'll Learn
Facing Threats and Violence:
Fighting Corporate Power:
Building Alternatives:
Read the full context: The Amampondos' battle plan to save their ancestral coast
Sustaining the Wild Coast: How It All Started
A team of archaeologists came to our area—some from abroad, some from local universities. They wanted to explore the red deserts in Xolobeni, to do some excavation. They asked for permission from the traditional court, which they were given.
But people who supported the mining proposals stopped them. These individuals saw the researchers' work as being a threat to the mining interests in the area. I was the person guiding these researchers. I left them to go to the field—the traditional court had given them somebody to accompany them—but that afternoon I heard that they were being chased away by these pro-mining individuals.
The struggle against mining in Xolobeni had already been building for years, with the community resisting titanium mining proposals that threatened ancestral lands and livelihoods.
The following day I took these researchers to the royal palace to meet the king, to report what was happening. When we arrived, the researchers were in the company of Sustaining the Wild Coast—an organization at that time formed mainly by people from outside, with no one from the local community involved.
I was addressing His Majesty, our king, while they listened to what I was telling him. Here they were as an advocacy organization of outsiders fighting against the things being proposed for our area. They got hold of my contact details and got in touch with me after that meeting. They wanted to work closely with me and invited me to join SWC.
Telling the outsiders they needed to listen to the community
When I came to SWC, the first thing I addressed was that it didn't make sense to me that they were a group of outsiders fighting for our area while we as locals knew nothing. I urged them to come and listen, because the people were also fighting. They needed to hear what people were saying in order to be justified in their fight.
Fortunately they agreed and invited me to work with them. I facilitated meetings where they started hearing what the community had to say. Therefore the struggle became very meaningful in the sense that it was now about the people and the people's needs. It was aligning very well because the things they were saying no to were the same things the community was rejecting.
SWC became a kind of vanguard, shield, microphone, and support to the community struggles. That's how it all started. It became very easy because you had people from the city who knew journalists. It became easy to mobilize other partner organizations that could come on board—bringing in the media, lawyers for human rights, getting in touch with the Human Rights Commission. They used their networks to support the struggle of the community. We became a very strong force working together—the outsiders and the local people.
Finding allies who understood what we were fighting for
The outsiders who formed Sustaining the Wild Coast included Bishop Jeff Davies, who was a bishop of the Anglican Church, Mthatha Diocese, based in Kokstad. He was somebody who had all these churches under him, scattered all over our area, and he was very passionate. He was a parishioner who knew the people. The Wild Coast was something very dear to him. The Anglican Church had owned land in Mkambati Nature Reserve, our closest protected environment.
Then you had other people who were environmentalists from the city. People like John Clark, a social worker from Johannesburg. People like Sandy Heather. These were individuals who loved the Wild Coast. They were seeing all of this so-called development which the government was organizing to implement in the Wild Coast and recognized the unsustainability of it.
Here on the ground, we were also unhappy about these things because we were seeing them as threatening our livelihoods, threatening our land. But people were fighting at a local scale. In other words, they were reactional, waiting for meetings. If there was a meeting—maybe EIA practitioners coming to do public participation for the mining—they would only fight there.
Therefore it was exciting to find companions or allies from outside who also understood what we were fighting for. Government has never understood the opposition to government-imposed programs. We have always been seen as troublesome people. To have people who were able to make sense of what we were saying was very exciting. That's why we embraced these outsiders—we realized our struggles were very much aligned. We were just walking parallel to each other. Now that we knew and were able to talk to them and get together, this was exciting because it gave us hope.
I remember one man I would quote, Balashini, who was one of the oldest serving traditional council members at Xolobeni. He said the only door that elders understand is the traditional leadership. When they are faced with challenges like mining, the only door they know to knock at and complain is the chief or the king. They don't know where else to go. When there are outsiders who know other doors where they can seek help, that makes the struggle more meaningful and more powerful.
In October 2006, I organized a media exposé
In 2006, on the 1st of October, I was starting a new job in Mpumalanga province in Nelspruit, near Kruger Park. But also in the same month, I had organized what I thought needed to be done first—a media exposé to expose the challenges we had as people.
I spoke to John Clark, a social worker who was part of SWC, to help me find journalists willing to come and hear the people about their challenges. Amongst the challenges, of course, was this mining being imposed. John Clark was happy to organize that, and we were able to get SABC journalists working for the SABC TV program called 50/50, which is 50% environment, 50% people.
These journalists came to interview. We had people in various villages gathered, waiting for this TV crew to come and explain their challenges, the things they were experiencing that they were unhappy about. We shot over a number of days.
When a cousin hired a hitman and Bazooka Baza intervened
It was after that filming that a hitman had been hired. I was lucky because this man who had been hired as a hitman spoke to Sikhosiphi "Bazooka" Radebe—the community leader who would later be assassinated in 2016. The hitman told Bazooka, because they were friends, "I've been hired to assassinate Sinegugu."
When we were doing the media exposé, I had wanted Bazooka to be interviewed by journalists, but he kept running away from being interviewed. We ended up not interviewing him. When he heard that a hitman had been hired to kill me, that's when it started ringing the bell. He called me and said, "I hear somebody has been hired to kill you. What is it that you know that I don't know which is going to lead to you being killed?"
My immediate response was, "What they want to kill me for is what I wanted to tell you about when you kept running away from me."
He said, "No, they are not going to kill you. I've told this man that he cannot kill you because you are my blood relative. We need to meet and talk about these things."
When they told me who had hired the hitman—it was a cousin of mine—I gave my cousin a call and said, "I hear that you have hired a hitman to kill me because I am disturbing your mining plans."
He denied it. Of course, I knew he was going to deny it. But I also knew that when I confronted him like that, I wanted him to be aware that I knew they had hired a hitman. I knew that they wouldn't be able to continue. Because if they killed me now that it was out in the open, everyone would know they had hired a hitman. That's how I got saved.
Otherwise, it never changed anything. We just continued to mobilize even stronger because we knew they were very serious about this. They were prepared to kill in order to have the mining go ahead. That helped us to openly mobilize, engage, and talk about how serious the threat was.
An environmental activist's best defence is to speak out
Environmental activists, people protecting their territories and their land globally, are always at risk. That risk doesn't go away as long as there is a multinational corporation that wants to mine the land, or in some places wants to do logging. In some places they want to build a dam. I know that in some countries the threats are also driven by the state because government does not like it when people are opposing government programs.
But I think the most important thing is when you realize that you are being threatened or they want to kill you, to be able to come out publicly and announce that you are under threat, you are being followed, or they want to kill you, so that it becomes common knowledge.
It's very difficult to say you would have bodyguards, because bodyguards require lots of money. For me, the most important thing is to speak out, not to stop. Because the more we talk openly about the threats and the challenges, the more the media, the internet, the documentaries, the better. When you speak out, you are getting your voice out there, your message out there, and that is what makes your movement stronger.
When you are scared, and because you are scared you don't want to talk, you are giving those people an opportunity to go ahead. Because if you are scared to talk, that means even if there's a public meeting where they come and talk about those things, you are going to be scared to oppose them.
The only way is to speak out, to challenge it. You challenge them through media, in debates, in court, with litigation. When you do that, you are able to discredit whatever they are planning. When you do that, you will continue to speak even when you are dead. Even if they kill you, you will continue, because your voice and your messages and your views are documented. They are recorded. They will continue to be watched, to be heard. You will even speak from your grave.
But if you are scared and you are not speaking truth to the powers, then the powers will thrive. Therefore the only way is to make sure that you mobilize, you empower others, you enlighten others. You help everyone who listens to you to see the bad and what's being done. When you do that, you are multiplying the forces, the people who struggle, the advocacy—that's how you strengthen it. You don't strengthen advocacy by being silent, but by speaking the truth to the powers so that people can learn and discern the truth from the lies being spread around.
When you face a veld fire, you fight it with everything you have
When you are faced with a veld fire—if you're living in a forest and there's a raging veld fire, you've seen veld fires in California, in Australia—when you are faced with a big challenge or a big war, you fight it with everything you have.
When Legal Resource Center, a legal NGO, heard in the media about the struggle of the community, they came to visit and offered their services. They are legal professionals, so we didn't have to pay anything. They came and offered their services.
But also Richard Spoor, who is a human rights lawyer—when he heard about these challenges, fortunately he was friends with John Clark, the social worker who helped us mobilize media back in 2006. When there was a threat of mining, Richard Spoor was always on radio talking about mining companies. He has spent his life fighting mining companies. He is the man who has taken up the challenge on silicosis.
When we were fighting a mining company, John Clark invited him to come visit and hear and talk to the people about the challenges. We ended up with two legal teams—Richard Spoor's firm, and because Richard Spoor was a human rights lawyer, he knew how to go about fundraising. We had two legal firms prepared to do this pro bono because it was about human rights.
Legal Resource Center, as much as they are an NGO, needs resources to pay legal fees for advocates when they go to court. Therefore, as SWC, we had to help out in fundraising as well. Legal Resource Center was fundraising, Richard Spoor was also fundraising to enable this so there could be resources to pay legal teams.
I know that going to constitutional court costs millions of rands. But we were lucky because we had legal teams willing to work with us even when we didn't have money, due to the significance. These legal cases were not cases for individuals—these were impact cases about upholding the constitutional rights that we as South Africans have but which were being suppressed or neglected by what was being proposed.
Fighting on all fronts simultaneously
We had to use everything we had simultaneously. There wasn't a time when we said we are stopping everything, we are focusing in courts. Though the lawyers would be taking the matter to court, we would have legal strategy meetings with the lawyers as clients. We would have Legal Resource Center and Richard Spoor in one meeting, strategizing. We would split the strategies and say Legal Resource Center would do this, Richard would do that.
They would also bring the knowledge of law that they had that we didn't have. But we would also contribute the customary law that we knew. Because our constitution recognizes customary law, we would tell them what our customary law says and what rights were being trampled in terms of our customary rights.
Litigation was one strategy, the media another strategy, mobilization on the ground and protest, going to the municipality, going to government, and also approaching the Human Rights Commission. We never focused on only fighting the war on one front. We had to fight in all fronts. We had to use all different strategies at our disposal to make sure that we win the war we were facing.
Fundraising never stops. For instance, in the recent court case against Shell, we were making fundraising efforts. Various NGOs came on board. We had applicants who joined us like Natural Justice. We had Greenpeace Africa joining us. We had All Rise, a climate change firm in Switzerland. We had Legal Resource Center as well, Cullinan & Associates and the Green Connection in Cape Town.
We had many legal teams representing different applicants. What made it successful and fantastic was the collaboration. We had other organizations such as Green Connection coming on board and helping with fundraising. The NGOs came together with one particular pot where the money should go to pay for lawyers. It has always been collaboration with other organizations that think alike to make sure that we are stronger.
When your struggle is aligned, collaboration becomes easy
It's easy when your struggle is aligned. When we're saying no to the extractive industry, and these outsiders and organizations are also saying no, it becomes very easy because we all have the same goal, the same mission, the same aspirations.
We have meetings where we do media press releases or press statements. When we do those, we make sure that the voices, quotations from us as leaders at the committee level, are also heard. We have meetings to strategize where we all sit together and discuss and make sure that the voices of the ordinary people are taken care of as well.
When you are faced with a challenge, it is not about who is in control. A challenge is a challenge. When you are faced with a challenge, you need collaborators. As long as the end game or the end goal is the same—to make sure that this does not happen, to make sure that we win—that's the important thing.
If we are saying no to Shell exploration in our ocean, it doesn't matter if people in Cape Town are also protesting saying no to Shell. Why should we worry about controlling them? Because the end product, the goal, is the same. If Greenpeace Africa, Natural Justice are joining us, why should we worry about them being in control?
You worry about control if we were talking about our land—then you have to make sure that they don't control your land. But here we are talking about a problem that we all see, that we all want to see going away. If we have a common enemy, a common problem, therefore the best thing is to collaborate, to work together.
Collaboration is about trusting the other person, allowing other voices to be heard as well, and trusting them and believing that because we have discussed, we are collaborating and we are aiming for one thing, one goal—to get rid of these external companies—therefore you have to trust them.
We hoped when we voted in 1994 that we would finally have a government who listens to us
The biggest challenge is the fact that you are taken away from positive work that you're supposed to be doing. We love to make sure that there is development in our community. Our energies and times are being wasted by reactive work, and we end up not being able to focus on the proactive work because our time is wasted.
Of course, the other challenge is the resources. Trying to raise money for litigation is a nightmare. It is not easy. The people who have deeper pockets, who have the money, are the corporates. Then when you need money to fight against the corporates, the ones with deeper pockets are not willing to give you money. Fundraising has always been an issue.
The other challenge which continues is that when you are fighting against government-imposed so-called development like oil and gas, the extractive industry, you are seen as being anti-government. You are labeled as being anti-development. They fail to listen and to hear you.
We saw this when we were fighting against Shell. Instead of government engaging with us, they would label us. If they realized that yes, there's a local voice, they would say that local voice is being bribed by outside forces, the people who hate government. In other words, they would never want to believe that this is our voice, this is something that we are opposing. It's always, "No, there must be white people somewhere in Europe or somewhere who want to stop this thing that the government wants to see happening."
That is very painful. Especially in a young democracy like South Africa, where we hoped when we voted in 1994 that we would finally have a government who listens to us. But you have a government who wants to continue ignoring what people say.
In courts fighting against a government who fought to liberate us
When you go to court, the people who are respondents when we litigate are the government and these corporates like Shell. We are fighting against our government, and our government hires lawyers and uses public money, taxpayers' money, to fight against us. On the other hand, we are taxpayers, but we are expected to find money to fight against the government who's using public funds.
On the other hand, we are fighting against these corporates, these multinational corporations using money they have earned or made through selling natural resources somewhere. In other words, somebody's land is being trashed somewhere, whether it's in Amazonia or in Congo or in Southeast Asia, and the money made there is used by corporates like Shell. Shell made money in Nigeria, in Niger Delta. That money is being used to fight us here when we go to court.
That is an unfair fight, for us to have to mobilize resources to fight against our own government when the government is using our own taxpayers' money. The playing ground is not level. It's tilted towards the corporates and government. You can see that their legal strategy is to tire you out, to make sure that you run out of money so that you can stop fighting so that they can continue.
No one would have imagined, would have seen it coming in 1994, that we now, 30 years down the line, would be in courts fighting against a government who fought to liberate us. But instead, we are being strangled and pressurized to let go of our land. The little land that we have left—remember, the 1913 Land Act took 87% of the land and we were left with 13%. Now the little land that we have, we must give away to corporates, and the government is certifying that. That's very painful.
Bazooka Baza was a symbol of resistance
Sikhosiphi "Bazooka" Radebe was a symbol of unity of the community and a very respectable community leader. He was also a taxi owner, a very respected member of the community, but also a symbol of resistance against the imposed, proposed mine. He was very dedicated to the cause of making sure that we stop the mining.
His assassination in 2016 showed us how serious they are in terms of getting their hands to the money. To this day, no one has been charged with his murder. But the movement was not intimidated. Instead, we became more determined.
Demonstrating that protecting land is better than giving it away to be trashed
After years of resistance, we realized that saying no wasn't enough. We had to show communities what yes looks like. We had to prove that protecting land creates more opportunity than giving it away to mining companies. This understanding led us to invest in building alternatives—agroecology projects that work with indigenous knowledge, tourism initiatives that benefit women directly, and plans for an Indigenous Knowledge Resource Center that could preserve centuries of wisdom while creating sustainable livelihoods.
Part of the reason why we started investing time on ecotourism development and agriculture was to demonstrate, to convince that if we protect our land and use it to produce food and surplus food, we would be better off.
Part of the reason why we're working with young and emerging farmers, helping young people link up to markets, is to demonstrate that protecting the land for livelihoods is a better option than giving your land away to be trashed. Because if you give your land away to be trashed, it's going to be rendered useless for the future.
Those who are pro-mining say there are no jobs. We need to demonstrate and show that when you own your land and you are farming, you will be able to create income for yourself. It's even more so when you are farming in the correct manner, when you are not being influenced by Monsanto, when you are not using poisonous chemicals like Roundup, when you are taking care of your land and becoming a good steward for the land.
There are crops that we produce here like sweet potatoes, like amadumbe, where you can have market access, where you can earn money, you can be self-employed, you can be independent, you can have full sovereignty. Part of that work that we do, the development work, is about demonstrating, showing those people so that we don't only verbally say it, but we also demonstrate physically to show them that people will always be better off if they are left alone with their land.
Close to 2,000 farmers across 10 village forums
The agroecology work is about encouraging young people to get into farming. Globally, farming is seen as a dirty job. Educated people want to work in an office somewhere. They want to stay in a city in an apartment block. For young people, farming is only seen as an option for those who are not successful at school.
We are trying to change that particular mindset, to show that you can go to university and have your degree, but you can come back and be a successful farmer. Because people need food, and when you are producing food and you have market access, you are able to create an income.
How do we farm better? How do we move away from chemicals coming from the West? The West is pushing GMOs, and coming with GMOs are poisonous chemicals such as Roundup. It's about encouraging and finding solutions, helping people to see indigenous knowledge, indigenous ways of farming, improving on those, bringing in other lessons and knowledge from other places.
In South Africa, we have a very high unemployment rate. Young people don't have to be unemployed. They can be self-employed. Therefore, making sure that young people in their homes have a vegetable garden, don't have to buy everything, can produce their own food, is very critical.
We're working with young people. We are bringing in permaculture practices such as beekeeping. We have close to 100 young people who are keeping bees here so they are able to harvest honey and make a living.
We have close to 2,000 farmers. We have about 10 farmers' forums on the ground. Farmers' forums are done per village. We have elderly farmers, but we also have a group of young farmers who are being trained on agroecology so they can also start farming. We started here in Amadiba, but we are spreading now to include other places in the greater Mpondoland.
Our farmers are growing the best quality crops
The most important thing is that it has to improve food security first and foremost. We grew up here—if you were to go back to the 1980s, the amount of farming that was happening here. Right now people have stopped farming at the scale we were farming back in those years.
Because of the social grants, since after 1994, government started introducing social grants. Because of the social grants, and the people who were farming in the '80s are now elderly and no longer have the energy to continue farming. Young people of today are growing up in an environment where there is less and less farming.
The most important first and foremost is food security. People must have food. With social grant money, people go to town. Every time they've been paid social grant money, they go to town, and that money goes back or goes away. But if we get people to produce their own food, that means the money that they get, wherever they get it, will circulate within and improve the local economy. Therefore the first prize is food security, and then once farmers have surplus, they are able to sell that.
People are making lots of money out of market access. To give you one example, in one village called Sigidi, which is closer to the tar road, in 2022 they were getting about seven bakkies or vans that would come to buy sweet potato there. When you look at the value of the sweet potato, the load that they buy from that village, it was about 105,000 Rand each load.
When you have seven vehicles, you're looking at about 700,000, and half of that money must be the money that remains in that community. If those vehicles come twice per month or twice per week, then you know the value amounts to millions of rands.
Those crops such as sweet potatoes that go to Durban city—because of the quality of our soil, the sweet potato from our area is better than sweet potato from somewhere else. Therefore, the demand for our sweet potato, because of our soil, is very high in Durban.
When we move to other villages, we have six villages in total where we have these particular farmers. We have 10 farmers' forums, meaning 10 villages where there are young people who are farming. There's a lot of money that flows into the community, showing people make a living through farming alone. We have not yet accounted for livestock. We're just talking about one crop, sweet potato.
Pondoland has always grown cannabis, and it will be a big part of our future
The other crop I haven't mentioned is cannabis. Our area has always been known globally—we have a particular strain of cannabis that comes from Pondoland. The demand for cannabis globally is also very high in our area. Therefore, it is the young people today who are the growers of cannabis.
Of course it is still illegal in South Africa to sell cannabis. But you are allowed to own a number of crops that you can grow for your own consumption. But in Pondoland, we have always grown cannabis, despite the persecution by the apartheid state. We have always been a region in Pondoland that produces a particular strain of cannabis. Cannabis is one crop which is a big game-changer because of the demand for cannabis globally.
Women opening their homes as tourism home stays
We have home stays. In Amadiba, we have maybe about five different home stays along the coast that are used. We are also building a community tourism lodge. If you cross over to the south, at Mtentu, we have helped a community to establish a number of home stays.
These are women who have opened their homes to hikers, and they are building huts or renovating structures which they use to accommodate tourists. That helps tourism grow because those ladies bring in the local food, the local cuisine for tourists to eat and try and taste the local food, the local crops, which links to our agroecology or farming.
We have a beautiful landscape with many flowers, many waterfalls, lots of flowers from the endemic plants. Therefore the potential to grow tourism is very high. Of course, there are challenges because the home stays don't grow as fast, the products that they offer—they lack funding. Government is not investing in these people's businesses for people to be able to continue to grow the ecotourism.
Also training the tourist guides, the local young people to be tourist guides as well for job creation. But we're trying to get the young people to diversify. If you are a tourist guide, you must also be farming, must also be keeping bees, so that you have diverse sources of income to sustain you and your family.
Waiting for constitutional court judgment while staying ready
With the Shell case, we are waiting for judgment from the constitutional court. Otherwise, the threat by oil and gas or seismic exploration in our ocean has not gone away, because government wants to give away our ocean for oil and gas. That threat is ongoing.
For our future work, we need funding for the proactive developmental projects. We need support for our agroecology work, to ramp up and improve tourism products. We need to employ young people who are facilitators of all this work. And we need resources to ensure we're ready when litigation becomes necessary.
As long as there is oil and gas underground, as long as there are still minerals underground, those threats are not going to go away. We need to be vigilant continuously. But most important, we need to keep building the alternatives that prove our way works.
