An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Dineo Skosana (African Fellow; University of the Witwatersrand).
What is fair compensation for mining-induced dispossession?
Increased demand for coal-based energy, as well as the shift to open-cast coal mining, has led to the dispossession of communities in South Africa. This presentation illustrates that dispossession is a continuous experience for African families in the post-apartheid era because of extractivism. The presentation shares accounts of the loss of homes, land and ancestral graves, as well as the mechanisms of dispossession on tribal land in KwaZulu-Natal province, Somkhele and on agricultural farmland in the Mpumalanga province, Ogies.
Mining-led dispossession in both communities reveals not only the vulnerability of land and cultural rights but also the contestations over the meanings of the land, home, and ancestral graves. In other words, there is a failure by mining companies, and the state, to grasp the complexities of the meanings attached to sacred things. For this reason, the non-recognition of local meanings that African communities attach to land is at the root of conflict and resistance to private capital investments.
An understanding of people’s intangible connections to the land can help us shift from colonial and Eurocentric conceptualisation of land ownership which is individualistic and market oriented. I suggest in this presentation that when we explore the meanings of land from the view of communities, we shift from the existing narrow discourse about the materiality of the land; and it is this shift that can allow us to grapple with the question about compensation which has become pertinent in South African courts and which this project seeks to investigate.
Click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/86535202023
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2