How the diamond mining industry is destroying South Africa’s West Coast
A stretch of once beautiful land is being turned into a lunar landscape by destructive mining practices
Just over two years ago, a group of South African surfers, scientists, journalists and activists launched Protect The West Coast, a collective born to confront the destructive practices of the mining industry. For the past 100 years, the diamond – and now minerals mining industries – have had a home high on the north west western stretch of the West Coast. Mostly it remained out of sight and out of mind, but now the miners have started to creep further down the coast, closer to Cape Town. These mines are destroying landscapes – what were once beautiful areas of biodiversity are turning into barren lunar landscapes. Places that were once spots for subsistence fishing, surfing and camping have now started to become off-limits.
Last year, an NGO called Sustaining the Wild Coast partnered with local Indigenous communities in the Eastern Cape to fight a large seismic survey being planned by Shell on the Wild Coast, looking for oil and gas deposits under the seafloor. The campaign was supported by Parley, Sentinel Ocean Alliance and Protect The West Coast who helped mobilize on-the-ground protests and push the message out on social media. The result was a high court ruling that Shell could not go ahead with the survey, a procedure that would have caused untold damage to marine life and exposed an environmentally sensitive area to fossil fuels. Now, a different battle is on the agenda. Last week, Protect The West Coast lodged a high court application to prevent the diamond mining company Moonstone from mining near the fishing community Doringbaai.
A new film, shot during a Parley expedition on World Cleanup Day, made in partnership with Patagonia, shows the problems that the area faces, contending with both plastic pollution and the arrival of miners. We caught up with two people featured in the film, who are on the frontline in the battle to save South Africa’s West Coast. “The mouth of the Olifants River Estuary, just North of Doringbaai, supports significant wildlife,” explains Marguerite Hofmeyr from Sentinel Ocean Alliance. “Being an estuary, it is critical for the survival of many species, including being a breeding site for endangered bird species.” Marguerite is being so vocal about what’s happening along the West Coast because of the sheer scale of the mining operations, stretching all the way to Namibia. In the film, we also see the issue of plastic pollution up close. “We collected 1,091 chip packets,” she says. “We could tell that what we were collecting from this beach had been there a very long time, plastic waste from cargo ships, plastic that had been washed across the ocean by prevailing winds. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the plastic we found on that beach had been there for a decade or more. We found heaps of plastic waste and we could see the destruction that the mining had caused on the beaches.”
Mike Schlebach from Protect The West Coast has seen firsthand what the future holds if mining is allowed to continue with no strict rehabilitation plans in place. “The long term implications of allowing this to continue are devastating,” he says. “My team and I took a trip up into the Northern Cape and we saw first hand what the mining industry has done to a 250 km stretch of coastline between Hondeklip Bay and Alexander Bay, an area that used to be a wild and beautiful coastline teeming with plant and animal life which now looks more like the moon. Utterly devastated from 100 years of diamond mining with no rehabilitation. If we allow the same mining companies to do what they’ve done to the Northern Cape further and further down the coastline, the whole area will look like the moon and that will mean that no one wins, most of all the environment and the communities that live there.”
The mining industry is allowed carte blanche on the West Coast because it’s seen as an economic savior by the government. This often means that land rehabilitation plans go unchecked and cowboy procedures are able to flourish. It is, quite literally, the Wild West. When miners turned up unannounced in Doringbaai, unable to provide official paperwork, Mike knew they had to act.
“We’ve taken the Doringbaai mine to court now,” he says. “Last year, Moonstone Diamond Marketing (Ex Transhex - they've changed their names four times since they started) just showed up on the beach in Doringbaai and started mining for diamonds. Nobody in the community knew anything about it, so we as an organization reached out to the powers that be, and reached out to Moonstone themselves. They said that Moonstone got a renewal on a permit that was granted to them in 2002. We came to the realization that the department of minerals and energy had given Moonstone another renewal on a permit that was granted to them in the 1990s, and they weren’t made to go through the same procedures and provide the same level of environmental or social plans. These permits were just renewed, without having to go through the same processes that all modern mining applications have to. It’s just crazy!"
Photo by Khaya Pullen
“Local communities have come to the realization that the mining industry is not what it says it is. There are new industries like algae farming and kelp farming that represent a much more sustainable, circular, non-extractive opportunity, and they’re much more excited about that. They’re sick and tired of being lied to.”
Mike Schlebach
The issue isn’t just environmental, it’s human too. Mike says that often mining companies curry favor amongst local communities with the promise of jobs and investment, much of which never sees the light of day. “They promise the world to local communities in their applications and provide social and environmental plans, jobs, so their applications are approved,” he says. “They hire unscrupulous environmental practitioners who write dodgy reports. But that’s where it’s left once their applications are approved, these companies are literally left to their own devices while the governing bodies tasked with oversight are nowhere to be seen. The proof is there for anyone to see – all you have to do is drive through that area and you will be mortified. I often wonder what the government officials or mining executives themselves think when they see this? It's soul destroying...and the worst bit is that companies like De Beers and Transhex have extracted billions of dollars worth of their wealth from this exact area but the communities there are some of the poorest in South Africa. A mining company will go in and once it becomes financially unviable, they’ll sell those mining rights to some members of their board who start a new company, or they sell it to another, smaller mining company. They also sell their rehabilitation rights and social plans with that and then those companies ultimately go bankrupt and then there’s no money to follow through.” Mike says the communities are waking up to the smoke and mirrors tactics employed by the mining companies and expressing interest in different, more sustainable industries. “Local communities have come to the realization that the mining industry is not what it says it is,” he says. “There are new industries like algae farming and kelp farming that represent a much more sustainable, circular, non-extractive opportunity, and they’re much more excited about that. They’re sick and tired of being lied to.”
The Northern Cape stretch of coastline is a unique, semi-arid, sparse area, home to succulents, plants, flora and fauna that you don’t find anywhere else in the world, an expansive area once teeming with life. Mike says it’s not too late to restore it to the land it once was. “There are rehabilitation methods that have been developed over the years that are specific to that area,” he says. “If the mining companies and the governments actually cared, these rehabilitation practices could easily be implemented. The local communities could do these things, so there could be job opportunities. It’d take some time, but it could go back to its former glory.”
Visit the Protect The West Coast website here to follow their work.
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