Introduction

Communities who happen to live where there's potential for big money to be made from mining the resources from under their feet face a daunting set of challenges. In the processes of working through those challenges, outsiders tend to instrumentalise local people in pursuit of agendas that are pretty much scripted and shaped prior to ‘engaging’. This can be as true for outside actors in favour of extractive capital as it is for civil society ‘white knights’ opposed to it. Within local communities there is usually a range of questions, interests, prospects and views too. Many people are saying ‘No’ to mining capital, and many communities are divided on the issue. In this chapter we consider the thinking and praxis of militants from a number of areas in the province of KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa) who are thinking resistance to a wave of real and prospective new mining initiatives.

The chapter is based on the ongoing work of the Church Land Programme (CLP), a small, independent non-profit organisation based in KwaZulu-Natal province. CLP works to encourage, and learn from, the thinking and action of poor people who organise to resist injustice and to affirm humanity. (It initially focused on church-owned land while also challenging churches to engage in the national land question and transformation.) CLP relentlessly tries to break all-too-dominant patterns of civil society behaviour in favour of a disciplined praxis premised on the utterly simple idea that people think. We hope that we can continue our work on these issues and learn something about a new and democratic imagination of life and production, of culture and consumption, in the emancipatory spaces opened in popular militancy, thought and action.

Past

Extractive industry in the KwaZulu-Natal region of South Africa does not begin with the arrival of white people. At least since the Early Iron Age, during the first millennium CE, people have dug coal from the earth in KwaZulu-Natal to fire and fashion iron ore (Whitelaw, 1991; Maggs, 1992).

The patterns of pre-colonial society, including ferrous production, use and exchange, underwent dramatic shifts induced by western (especially British) colonial expansion, the arrival of which signalled a profound transformation through military conquest, racist political subjugation and capitalist economic predation, inaugurating the sequence to follow of colonialism, settler-colonialism and apartheid.