- amaMpondo environmental defenders on South Africa’s Wild Coast bring the same spirit of resistance to extractive mining interests today as their forebears did to the apartheid state in the 1960s.
- Their connection with the land, and the customs that underpin this, makes them mindful custodians of the wilderness.
- The amaMpondo say they welcome economic development, but want it on their own terms, many preferring light-touch tourism over extractive mining.
- The amaMpondo’s worldview and values are passed down through the generations through the oral tradition.
MPONDOLAND, South Africa — The day the prospectors came, so did the storm. It was 2007, and clouds barreled toward the coast, driven by a wind that churned up dust and foretold of the downpour to come. Beyond the rusty dunes, the Indian Ocean surged with equal force.
“It was scary,” says Mamjozi Danca, a traditional healer who has lived here all her life.
Her family couldn’t bring the cattle in from grazing, and “even cooking wasn’t easy.” They hunkered down in their rondavel, a round homestead with a thatched roof not far from the mineral-dense dunes of Xolobeni on South Africa’s Wild Coast, to wait it out.
Xolobeni is a village on a 24-kilometer (15-mile) stretch of wilderness about four hours’ drive south of the port city of Durban. It has become synonymous with a two-decade-long fight by the Indigenous amaMpondo against extractive mining interests that had sights on the powdered titanium in the dunes. There have also been more recent attempts to conduct seismic surveys for offshore oil and gas.
On the day the mining prospectors came for their sand samples, the storm drove them away, Danca says. It was frightening. But it was a sign, she says, a miracle even.
This, by her interpretation, was the spirits of the ancestors bringing a message to the people, using the vocabulary of the elements.
“If we allow [mining], [we] will never be able to access any medicine, the beach, the sea, or food,” Danca says. According to her, it was a message of solidarity: we, your forebears, will fight alongside you, the living, who are protecting our ancestral lands.
When the government later granted a prospecting license to Mineral Sand Resources, an Australian company, the community challenged its legality in court, resulting in the license being suspended.
The spirit of resistance to these would-be profiteers is the same one that fueled the amaMpondo’s fight against the apartheid government in the 1950s and early 1960s, sources tell Mongabay. And it is their connection with “the land” — the web of life that surrounds them, and where the spiritual world is said to exist — that environmental defenders say they are willing to die for.
Some already have.
Nature: Where the living and the spirit realm meet
It’s no accident that this place is well preserved, the locals say. Their custodianship has kept it this way.
The land is their mother, they say; it is their identity, something they respect. In their belief system, the land owns the people; the people don’t own the land.
When the amaMpondo speak of “the land,” they aren’t referring merely to the soil beneath their feet, which can yield X bushels of corn that can be sold for Y dollars at the market.
They’re talking about the rains that roll in on a storm, and the water filtering into the wetland where the grass aloes grow. They’re talking about the springs where they collect bathwater, the grasslands where their herds graze, and where they gather plants for medicines and mystical charms. They speak of the forests that burst with fruit, and offer firewood or timber. They mean the rivers that run into the ocean where they cast their fishing lines, and the fish that nourish them.
The Pondoland Centre of Endemism is globally recognized for its unique plant diversity, with rarities such as the Pondoland coconut (Jubaeopsis afra), the Pondoland conebush (Leucadendron pondoense) and the Pondoland ghost bush (Raspalia trigyna).
It is also here, in nature, where the amaMpondo connect with the spirit realm.
The amaMpondo’s spiritualism is a blend of African animism and Christianity. They say that when someone dies, their spirit doesn’t go away to a far-off realm — a heaven, or hell, or a cycle of reincarnation — but lingers close by, staying near to places they loved when they were here in their physical bodies.
“Those who have passed on cling to the places close to their hearts,” says Sinegugu Zukulu, a conservationist, ecological infrastructure expert and Indigenous knowledge specialist. “Just like living people are everywhere, so are those who have passed on.
“There are those who reside in the ocean,” Zukulu says, “some are in the mountains. Some reside in waterfalls; some in beautiful, peaceful pools; some in forests.”
Everything is said to be a being. That means protecting individual species and the ecosystems in which they occur — the grasslands, forests, rivers and ocean — is as much about ensuring people can meet their daily needs as it is about protecting the spiritual places where they connect with the numinous.
To understand this, Zukulu says, a person must witness their daily practices.
A walk through the grasslands uncovers the medicinal plants tucked away among the grazing, which explains why they won’t plow all the virgin land. Most of the natural veld remains intact, with just a few small vegetable beds for each family.
Healers only collect bark from the north-facing side of a medicinal tree, so it doesn’t die.
“In customary law, we are not allowed to cut down fruit-bearing trees,” Zukulu says, “because they give food to wildlife, like birds, bees and insects, and to strangers on long journeys.”
Out of respect for the ancestors, and the need to keep in good standing with them — ancestors are said to have the power to punish, if someone strays — conservation practices take the shape of a ritual or lore, becoming practical while being imbued with the metaphysical.
Losing their land to extractive development will break these lores and customs, they say.
But fighting to protect their way of life has come at a cost.
In 2016, a community leader with the Amadiba Crisis Committee (ACC) — which, together with civil society organization Sustaining the Wild Coast (SWC), helped spearhead the legal challenges to the titanium mine and other extractive development efforts — was killed. Sikhosiphi “Bazooka” Rhadebe was shot in a suspected hit linked with resistance to the titanium mine. His death has not been thoroughly investigated and his killers remain at large. Zukulu and fellow activist Nonhle Mbuthuma, another ACC leader, found their names on a purported hit list that began circulating before Rhadebe’s murder, believed to be issued by a person or people in the community who were pro-mining.
This hasn’t stopped the community. Now they continue with a protracted legal battle against the energy giant Shell, which planned offshore seismic surveys about 770 km (480 mi) south of Xolobeni to find oil and gas. So far, they’ve kept Shell’s prospecting license application snarled up in legal proceedings. Meanwhile, in April 2024, Zukulu and Mbuthuma received the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for the community’s efforts to thwart Shell.
The legal case centers around more than just the potential environmental impacts of the sonic blasting, such as injury to sound-sensitive marine life like dolphins, whales and the near-extinct African penguin (Spheniscus demersus).
The amaMpondo argue that it’s also a threat to their cosmology.
“Shell’s disruption of the ocean risks disrupting and disturbing those who have passed on, and the living don’t know what it may lead to in their lives,” Zukululu says.
Remembering hard times
Today, Mamjozi Danca is in her 60s. Like most of her generation, she doesn’t have a precise calendar date for her birthday, but uses the oral tradition to mark her arrival in the world.
She was born, her father told her, when the amabulu, the soldiers, stormed into their home, ripped off people’s jewelry and amulets, and looted the kitchen for food. This was the kind of intimidation tactic that the state used to bully the amaMpondo to submit to a national land-grab policy that aimed to push the country’s majority Black population into reserves and keep the country’s best farmlands for the minority white elite.
Part of this included imposing “betterment schemes” on Indigenous communities that were intended to upend traditional governance structures and communal land and grazing customs. State-sponsored chiefs drove wedges between communities. Extractive taxes forced Indigenous men to head to the mines, mostly in Johannesburg, as part of a conveyor belt of exploitative migrant labor.
The amaMpondo were having none of it, rising up in a peasant resistance to this violent and illegitimate state in the 1950s and early 1960s. The culmination of the Mpondo Revolt came on June 6, 1960, when a group gathered at Ngquza Hill, not far from Xolobeni. The military flew in, dropped tear gas and gunned down 11 people. In the months that followed, the state hunted down and arrested others believed to be complicit, sentencing 30 to death for their part in the uprising.
It was into this maelstrom that Danca was born.
Today, Danca, a member of the ACC, is defiant. The amaMpondo were fighting to protect their land and way of life during the revolt; now they’re fighting the same system that wants to dispossess them of their inheritance today.
“I will never give up. I will never stop fighting,” she says.
Stories keep customs and cosmology alive
On the day the helicopters came, before Christmas 1960, Nozilayi Gwalagwala clutched her newborn boy as she felt the pah-pah-pah-pah-pah of the propellers’ vibrations. She recalls the choppers wobbling as they hovered near her rondavel.
Today, at 98, she crumples her housecoat into a tiny bundle to show how small her infant was, not even 24 hours old.
It was six months since the Ngquza Hill massacre, and a fortnight after the government issued draconian measures to suppress the revolt. Soldiers had returned to round up resistance stragglers who were boycotting tax payments and rabble-rousing against puppet chiefs.
Gwalagwala’s husband was captured that day. He was locked in the back of a truck to ship the prisoners away when it got into trouble at a tricky river crossing and overturned. Many were injured. When news reached Gwalagwala, she feared her husband was dead.
It took a week to track him down, alive but seriously injured in a hospital 55 km (34 mi) away. Much of the journey to find him was on foot, carrying her infant. The baby was later named Gunyazile, because he was born during a time when the “authorities forced the people.”
These were hard times, and her child would forever carry this history in his name.
Today, Gwalagwala tells this story in the presence of her grandson, Lungelo Mtwa, born to the late Gunyazile. Mtwa is 29. After he completed his diploma in tourism management, he returned to the land of his forebears, where he now works as a tour guide.
Their tale encapsulates the amaMpondo’s wishes. Many welcome development, but want it on their own terms. Light-touch tourism allows them to draw on their culture and the region’s unique biodiversity by offering authentic catered accommodation and guiding services to hiking parties that trek up and down the coast.
“She is a living library,” Mtwa says of his grandmother. “You can hike the Mpondo coast alone, but it is these stories that bring the place to life.”
The amaMponodo’s stories, archived in the oral tradition, carry the customs and cosmology that have ensured the Wild Coast remains wild, then and now, and burns with the spirit of resistance to external powers that wish to profit from their inheritance.
Banner image: Traditional healers use the smoke from the coals of a yellow wood tree (Podocarpus latifolius) to cleanse a cattle herd of problematic spirits and stop the animals from fighting. Image by Leonie Joubert for Mongabay.
Related Mongabay podcast episode: In ‘the century of Africa,’ Mongabay’s new bureau reports its biggest environmental issues and solutions. Listen here:
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