Place of mourning: The home where environmental activist Fikile Ntshangase was killed while children played outside. (Oupa Nkosi/M&G)
Nearly a year after Fikile Ntshangase was murdered, her daughter, Malungelo Xhakaza, says her mother’s struggle against the expansion of Petmin’s Somkhele coal mine in northern KwaZulu-Natal, operated by its subsidiary Tendele Coal Mining, lives on.
“When Fikile gave her life for her people, she kickstarted a movement that will stand up for what’s right,” says Xhakaza in a report by Global Witness, an environmental and human rights watchdog.
“People sometimes ask me what I’m going to do, whether I’m going to stay here and keep my mother’s fight alive. I’m too proud of her to let it die. I know the dangers — we all know the dangers. But I’ve decided to stay. I’m going to join the fight.”
The report lists Ntshangase, who was the deputy chairperson of the Mfolozi Community Environmental Justice Organisation (Mcejo), as one of a record 227 land and environmental defenders killed in the world in 2020 — an average of more than four people a week, with three quarter of the killings in Latin America.
This deadly toll marks 2020 as “the most dangerous year” for people defending their homes, land and livelihoods and the ecosystems vital for biodiversity and the climate. “It has become clear that the unaccountable exploitation and greed driving the climate crisis is also driving violence against land and environmental defenders,” Global Witness says.
In the report, Xhakaza relays how her mother was a teacher, a mother and a leader who “saw the cracks in the walls of people’s homes and wondered if they were caused by the constant blasts from the mine. She saw the coal dust gathering in living rooms and wondered if it was also gathering in people’s lungs. And she saw the tension the mine caused, the families it broke apart, the fear it spread”.
When Tendele applied to extend its open cast operations, her mother would become the mine’s “worst nightmare”, she says. “She organised, campaigned and educated people about their rights. Many in the path of the extension agreed to leave. But not my mum. She stood firm, rejecting payouts, supporting Mcejo’s legal action against the mine. Ultimately, I believe that’s what cost my mother’s life.”
Ntshangase was gunned down in October last year, while Xhakaza’s son, Buyile, was playing with the dogs in the yard. Three men arrived and asked Buyile whether his grandmother was at home. “She was,” says Xhakaza. “They shot her dead in her living room.”
Since then, things have not gone well. “[The] supreme court recently ruled in favour of the mine. The courts are yet to rule on the extension. To this day, no arrests have been made in the investigation into my mother’s murder. There has been no accountability. It seems to me that someone wants this mine expansion and the extraction to go ahead, no matter the cost,” says Xhakaza.
Mcejo, she says, highlights the urgent need to change the view of extractive industries such as coal mining and the association they have with so-called development. “True development means sustainable management of land and natural resources for the benefit of future generations, particularly in the climate crisis.”
In the report, Petmin Limited says tensions among Somkhele’s residents have been a factor in Ntshangase’s death and strongly condemns any form of violence or intimidation. It has offered full cooperation to the police.
“Petmin Limited have said that investigations by independent third parties found reported house cracks to be due to poor workmanship rather than blasting; and that reports of respiratory illnesses were unfounded. They state that the mine conforms to legal standards regarding dust in the area.”
The report reveals how, internationally, more than a third of the attacks on land and environmental defenders were reportedly linked to resource exploitation — logging, mining and large-scale agribusiness — hydroelectric dams and other infrastructure.
But this figure is likely to be higher because the reasons behind these attacks are often not properly investigated or reported on.
“We know that beyond killings, many defenders and communities also experience attempts to silence them, with tactics like death threats, surveillance, sexual violence, or criminalisation — and that these kinds of attacks are even less well reported. These challenges, coupled with the requirement to meet strict verification criteria for recording killings, mean that our figures are almost certainly an underestimate,” it says.
Most of those killed, says Global Witness, were working to defend the world’s forests from deforestation and industrial development, while others were murdered for their work protecting rivers, coastal areas and the oceans.
Colombia once again had the highest recorded attacks, with 65 environmentalists killed in 2020. A third of these attacks targeted indigenous and Afro-descendant people and almost half were against small-scale farmers. Attacks against indigenous defenders were reported in Mexico, Central and South America, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia.
Global Witness documented 18 killings in Africa in 2020, compared with seven in 2019. Most took place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). There were two in South Africa — Ntshangase and Lieutenant Colonel Leroy Bruwer, a top anti-rhino poaching detective who was killed while driving to work in Mbombela, and one in Uganda.
In the DRC, 12 park rangers and a driver were killed in an attack by militia groups in the Virunga National Park. “Verifying cases from across the continent continues to be difficult and it is possible cases are widely unreported.”
Violence against land and environmental defenders is overwhelmingly concentrated in countries in the global south, according to the report, noting how in 2020, all but one of the 227 killings took place there.
The organisation has documented an increase in the number of killings globally since 2018, rising to well over 200 murdered in 2019 and 2020 — more than double the numbers it recorded in 2013.
“Unfortunately, without significant change this situation is only likely to get worse — as more land is grabbed, more forests felled in the interest of short-term profits, both the climate crisis and attacks against defenders will continue to worsen,” it says.
The core truths about violence against land and environmental defenders “mirror what we know about the climate crisis itself: its impacts are unequal, business is responsible and governments are both causing and failing to prevent it”.
The Global Witness report says each killing is a tragedy rooted in a “predatory” economic model driven by greed”.
“It’s important to understand what connects these seemingly disparate cases — the water defenders murdered in northern Mexico to the South African grandmother shot dead outside her home seemingly for rejecting the expansion of a nearby coal mine.”
Analysing the whole dataset helps the understanding of the overlap between the causes of these attacks, what they represent, what’s at stake and the actions that governments and companies must take to prevent them, according to the report.
Environmental and land defenders are “canaries in the proverbial and sometimes literal coal mine. In every story of defiance against corporate theft and land grabbing, against deadly pollution and against environmental disaster, is hope that we can turn the tide on this crisis and learn to live in harmony with the natural world. Until we do, the violence will continue.”
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