Hopeful Stories of Communities Organizing

Stories repeating collective history of united action save South African area

Columnist Cameron Conner completed Watson Fellowship in Spain, the United Kingdom, South Africa and the Philippines to observe community organizing. Back in the U.S., he continues sharing stories on how everyday people are organizing to fight multinational corporations, save their cultural heritage and rebuild democracy. This column is on South Africa.

"My name is John the Blessing," he said, extending his hand. "I am the bodyguard," making clear the stakes at play.

I climb in the back of his four-wheel-drive pickup as the rest of our party walks out of the hardware store opposite us.

Nonhle Mbuthuma, who leads the group and brings spare batteries for the microphone, joins me in the back seat. Another guard takes her other side.

At 7:30 a.m., it was hot, typical for May in South Africa. As we pull out, Nonhle signals to the black SUV waiting in the shade of the gas station across the road. They roll in behind us. After five hours on washed-out dirt roads crossing a green, rolling tundra, we arrive at a hilltop in the heart of Amadiba, South Africa's Wild Coast region.

The black SUV and the small caravan of vehicles behind it stop. Out of each vehicle steps a parliamentary candidate, each dressed in their party's colors. 

Atop the hill, a crowd of several hundred gathered under the shade of an enormous white canopy. For over two decades, the people under that tent lived on the front lines of a battle to protect their homeland from the pressure of international mining companies eager to exploit the titanium-rich earth.

Many traveled hours by foot or cramped truck-bed. Their presence and closeness gives an impression of unity as the candidates walk from their vehicles. The politicians were not invited to give their typical stump speeches but to be evaluated on their support for the community. 

They sit at folding tables. Nonhle opens the meeting shouting: "Amandla!" (Power!) In unison, the crowd roars: "Ngawethu!" (To the people!).

I met Nonhle three weeks before at a sports bar in Port Edwars, a small town halfway up the Eastern Cape. I had driven over 1,800 kilometers across the southern tip of Africa for the conversation. She had come from a community discussion on how to handle the increasing number of death threats directed at her. As leader of the community's anti-mining activities, Nonhle is targeted, shadowed by John the Blessing. Yet, she remains committed.

Earlier at a local bar's patio, I asked the question on my mind since learning about the Amadiba community's victories against international mining companies, Shell Oil and the South African government: What made her community different? 

I thought about my hometown in wheat fields of rural Eastern Washington. "Forever chemicals" had for years been leaching into the community's water from the Air Force base, but public outcry changed little. Why, in the face of bribery, violence and brutal political reprisals, had Amadiba succeeded against corporate Goliath?

"Unity," she told me. From the beginning, the greatest danger was division—that corporations or their political allies would bribe, threaten or ensnare enough people to set the community against itself.

"The first battle was in the community, not the courtroom," she said. "We had to rebuild the feeling, among every member, that they were a people," and inspire a sense that it was possible to win. "So we told stories that answered two questions: Where do we come from? Where are we going?"

For the people, the stories Nonhle wove together began and ended with land. The new fight against the mining company became a part of their parents' legacy, resisting English petroleum surveyors, and their grandparents' struggle against the apartheid state's attempted implementation of "Land Betterment Schemes."

The stories gave people a sense that they were one link in a long chain, reaching back and born out of something greater than themselves and stretching forward to support something that will outlive them.

That day on the hilltop, seeing the crowd work in unison as Nonhle addressed the politicians, the impact of these stories was clear. They hadn't made people like each other. There were still personal disagreements and political differences, but they helped people feel responsible for one another and capable of working together to protect their home.

In a world where we are constantly bombarded with stories of defeat and despair, this was different. This was a people finding deep, common strength by remembering their collective history and standing together to do the impossible. This was a story of personal bravery and collective courage. 

As we drove back that evening, Nonhle nodded at the horizon: "without that unity, all this land around us would today be an open-air titanium mine." Instead, it remains Amadiba, a sea of rolling green coastal hills along the blue Indian Ocean.