June Bam-Hutchison part of panel discussion about Xolobeni documentary film, ‘The Shore Break’

APC senior researcher June Bam-Hutchison was invited to serve as one of the post-screening panellists, to contribute to the ongoing discourse on ‘listening’/Lalela and its implications for inter-disciplinary scholarship and activism beyond the binaries created by apartheid, which persist in contemporary South Africa.

Directed by Ryley Grunenwald, the film The Shore Break tells the story of the proposed titanium mining project in the Amadiba area and the government’s plans to build a tolled highway across the land of the Pondo people. A worryingly violent situation has since developed in this area, at Xolobeni, which is now tearing the community apart. 

Hosted by Anthropology’s Environmental Humanities on 27 May 2016 in the AC Jordan Building,  the lively panel discussion following the screening (held late on a Friday afternoon) had more than 40 people in attendance (environmental activists, professionals, scholars and researchers from across disciplinary fields in English and Literature, Law, Film and Media, Environment studies, Education and Historical Studies). The panel discussion was chaired by fellow APC Research Associate Hedley Twidle.

Do we need mines in South Africa for the development of infrastructure (to build roads, clinics, schools and hospitals) and to create jobs? Do we need to destroy biodiversity and endemism in order to create ‘development’ on coastal sand dunes? What entails ‘enough community consultation’ before we embark on ‘development’? How do we help to sustain communities and development in a way that promotes peace and stability rather than violence, displacement and conflict? These were some of the questions a viewer would typically ask after watching ‘The Shore Break’.

APC senior researcher June Bam-Hutchison was invited to serve as one of the post-screening panellists, to contribute to the ongoing discourse on ‘listening’/Lalela and its implications for inter-disciplinary scholarship and activism beyond the binaries created by apartheid and which persist in contemporary South Africa.  In her contribution to the discussion, Bam-Hutchison emphasised the importance of a ‘shared language’ in developing interdisciplinary discourse on ‘listening’ in addressing resolutions for community conflict in a South Africa which is increasingly becoming racially polarised aggravated by insensitive corporate agreements between white foreign companies, government and BEE local entrepreneurship.

The affected community in Xolobeni has consistently compIained about disputes concerning ‘representation’ and ‘consultation’, which is a legal requirement since 2002 for any planned mining project in South Africa. There have been media reports on community conflicts about ‘voices and representation’ in an area of historical and ideological significance in the country.

The region is well known for its deep history of militancy against chiefdoms rooted in the diverse ideological activism of the Mbekis, Tabatas, school teachers etc. who campaigned decades ago against colonial and apartheid ‘betterment’.  In listening and developing a ‘shared language’, historical knowledge and appreciation of the existing intellectual archive of a community becomes imperative.

The Xolobeni story of conflict brings to surface, for instance, particularist and conflicting notions of ‘poverty’, ‘human rights’, ‘development’ and ‘modernisation’ (between the profit-driven foreign mining company, the intransigent government and the deeply divided community along the lines of ‘pro-mining’ and ‘anti-mining’). The Australian mining company MRC Ltd. has evidently shown little interest in listening to the voices of the people of Xolobeni and how that archive lives on fiercely in the memory of the landscape. This memory landscape includes, amongst other things, the traces of the historic 1960 Pondoland Revolt against ‘betterment’ and the notorious Bantu Authorities Act; as well as the profound memory of the apartheid government’s divide and rule strategies using ‘traditional chiefs’ in the region to support their unpopular schemes.

The Xolobeni area is clearly in need of a clinic, sanitation and toilets but activists argue that mining should not be conditional on provision of roads in the area.  Ecotourism and farming are stable and vibrant economic activities and the community has not self-identified as ‘poor’. To the community affected, the area is ‘ancestral land’, ‘burial land’, ‘subsistence land’ and therefore sacrosanct.

The Xolobeni mining project (which will use 22km long and 1,5km wide coastline of communal land) is worth R8 billion rand and will create over 300 jobs. An ‘Africa Down Under Mining Conference’ held in Perth in 2015 has highlighted that in-ground discoveries made by Australian companies in Africa amount to $687 billion. The Xolobeni area is not only titanium-rich, but also heritage-rich and an area of noted endemism. Ecotourism contributes R21 billion per year to the South African economy and creates jobs.

Anti-mining activists argue that the proposed 22 year mining project will threaten a vibrant ecotourism sector in the region, displace 200 farming families and homesteads and rip a community apart. The lack of meaningful dialogue on these issues has proved unhelpful in resolving what has now become a place of violent conflict, noting the recent assassination of prominent anti-mining activist of the Amadiba Crisis Committee, Sikhosiphi Bazooka Rhadebe.

In the panel discussion, Bam-Hutchison made the point that in working within the complex framework of ‘development’, Xolobeni presents an interesting case for understanding the archive and its inherent connection to problematic and disputed notions of ‘poverty’ and ‘betterment’. Extraction models of modernisation and development are of necessity violent and do not allow respectful listening to self-determination models of ‘development’.

How do we listen with historical sensibility, with a respect for agency in order to gain a sense of how a community may understand new inequalities, what they are and what they mean especially since remembering has become problematic in South Africa? How do we make sense of ‘constitutional sensibility’ in a participatory democracy and how can we apply it in the ‘everyday’ in disengaging unhelpful binaries through a process of deep listening? Is egalitarian dialogue at all possible in a structurally unequal South Africa?

For anti-mining activist Mzamo Dlamini, the voices of the community ‘are always reminded as black’; ‘no one wants to hear such voices’. Fellow activist Nonhle Mbuthuma urges in the film, ‘Go to people, speak to them, listen to them…lots are happening here which are not documented…come down to the people to listen and learn’. The panel discussion noted (amongst others) the importance of APC Research Fellow Mbongiseni Buthelezi’s work on the invention of ‘tradition’ in understanding the question of ‘kinship’ and ‘customary law’.

Lesley Green made concluding remarks on how the panel discussion was helpful in getting scholars to think about how we change the game in practising law and rights in terms of ‘listening’, in working with multiple sources of evidence, and with different types of scholarship such as through a meaningful integration of historical scholarship and practising law.