NASLU NEWS: Labour Studies podcast/video: Sonwabile Mnwana | "Who Owns the Land, Who Owns the Platinum? Conflict and Contested Meanings of Land and Mineral Wealth in Rural South Africa?"
TOPIC: The 'platinum belt' - a vast stretch of platinum-rich land in South Africa's North West and Limpopo provinces - has been marked by a rapid expansion of mining over the last two decades. Platinum has increasingly displaced gold as an employer and as a part of crucial mining sector. But the platinum belt is largely located in the old 'homelands, ' on 'communal' land controlled by 'traditional' authorities (chiefs). These 'tribal' authorities lease mining rights and land to large private corporations in return for payments. Large mines operate amidst impoverished villages in overcrowded areas, where generations of dispossessed and impoverished African families have eked out a precarious existence through farming and other strategies.
The social shifts and struggles that have been produced by the rapid expansion of this homeland-based mining have not been properly examined. The paper takes a step towards addressing the gaps. It examines some of the emerging local struggles over control of land and mining revenues. I argue that these struggles attest to the reality that ordinary villagers receive very limited benefits from mining leases, and only limited access to mine jobs. They also epitomize contestations over the meaning that actors attach to land and mineral wealth in rural South Africa. I demonstrate the agency of the rural poor in using competing histories of land and politics, and contestations over the meaning of land, to resist the control and distributive power that chiefs wield over land and mining revenues, and to claim land rights and social identities. Distributive struggles on the platinum belt, by commoners, are also struggles over the meaning of land and mineral wealth. The paper draws on detailed ethnographic and archival material gathered over years in the villages under traditional authoritie in the North West and Limpopo.
DETAILS: This is a recording of an live event in the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) Labour Studies Seminar Series, held on Tuesday, 13 March 2018, at Eden Grove, Seminar Room 2, Rhodes University, Makhanda, South Africa.
YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/anMZkfM8-G4
PODCAST: https://tinyurl.com/mv883vbv
SPEAKER: Professor Sonwabile Mnwana is based in Sociology at the University of Fort Hare, and is Project Leader for the Mineral Wealth and Politics of Distribution on the Platinum Belt investigation. He worked as a researcher in the Mining and Rural Transformation in Southern Africa (MARTISA) project, was Deputy Director of the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand, and served as President of the South African Sociological Association (SASA). He has published inter alia in 'Development Southern Africa,' the 'Journal of Contemporary African Studies,' the 'Review of African Political Economy, 'the 'South African Crime Quarterly' and the 'South African Labour Bulletin.'
HOSTS: The Labour Studies Seminar Series is run by the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) in partnership with the Departments of Sociology & Industrial Sociology, and Economics & Economic History, Rhodes University. ABOUT NALSU: Based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, NALSU is engaged in policy, research and workers' education. Built around a vibrant team, including from the disciplines of Sociology and Economics, NALSU has a democratic, nonâsectarian, non-aligned and pluralist practice, and active relations with a range of advocacy, labour and research organisations. We draw strength from our location in a province where the legacy of apartheid and the cheap labour system, and post-apartheid contradictions, are keenly felt. NALSU is named in honour of Neil Hudson Aggett, union organiser and medical doctor who died in an apartheid jail in 1982 following brutality and torture.