In the mountains where the families of Kaiser Manailana and Mokhurane Thobejane have lived for more than a century the wind carries with it the dust of death. Some 12 000 people living in settlements near Mmafefe, a village straddling the banks of the Olifants River 80km south-east of Pietersburg, have for decades been living amid dumps of deadly asbestos waste.
The rugged escarpment in this remote region of Lebowa, together with a belt of mines near Kuruman in the Northern Cape, contain the only reserves of blue asbestos in the world. From 1907 multinationals like Cape Asbestos and US Steel, together with small local firms, moved into the region to mine the rare mineral. When they left in the 1970s – largely be¬ cause campaigns to highlight the lethal effects of asbestos had undermined international demand – they never bothered to clean up behind them. Vast dumps were left uncovered next to old mining adits and abandoned mills; waste from the dumps was used to surface the gravel roads that run through the villages in the area; houses and schools were built from bricks made out of the blue fibres; school play grounds were covered by asbestos waste; children slid down the banks on pieces of old cardboard; rivers were polluted with fibres that ran off the mounds during the rains; and even the breeze that blows through the valleys on most evenings carried the dust with it.
I first met Kaizer Manailana and Mokhurane Thobejane five years ago. At the time the two men spent much of the interview telling of their lifelong friendship. Both men were born in the village in 1914. They spent their childhood years together herding cattle. And when they turned 20, they went to the same circumcision school. In the 1950s the pair went to work in the mines that dotted the mountains around their village. Each of these mines was a primitive operation, consisting of a few unventilated adits that had been tunelled by hand into the mountain side and a mill where the ore was sorted and crushed before being packed into hessian bags. The larger companies often subcontracted the work out to smaller firms who employed the local villagers – who were called freelance tributors – on a piece-work basis.
”Mokhurane was the one who first went into the mountains to work,” said Kaizer. ”I was on the mines in Johannesburg but I came and joined trim because I wanted to be near my Family,” said Kaiser. ”When we started we were given 15 shillings for every two bags of rock. I remember it took me three weeks to fill the first bag. After that it went much quicker and if you had a 1elper and worked hard you could fill two bags a day. We called it working for stock.” The system encouraged men to take their wives into the mountains as helpers. Work at the mills also allowed family members to supplement a man’s wages. Women and children sorted the ore and did cobbing, the manual separation of fibres from the rock. After milling had taken place they packed the fine dust into hessian bags.
Company reports from the period mention mothers who left new-born babies to sleep on heaps of asbestos dust while they worked beside them. These practices were standard at the mines around Mmafefe well into the 1960s. By that time doctors working for the major mining companies were well-acquainted with medical research that had documented three fatal lung diseases caused by asbestos fibres: asbestosis, a scarring of the lung tis¬ sue; lung cancer, that destroys the lobes of the lungs; and mesothelioma, a rare tumour that strangles the lungs by thickening the lining around the organ.
Asbestosis comes from heavy and consistent exposure to dust but mesothelioma can be caused by inhaling just a single fibre of asbestos. From the time a person is first exposed it can take up to 40 years before the symptoms of cancer and mesothelioma manifest themselves. After that death comes quickly and painfully. Last month the Weekly Mail visited a unique community project in Mmafefe that was set up by concerned residents and a doctor from Johannesburg in the wake of the controversy that erupted five years ago. The project has since conducted an exhaustive survey of the dust levels and the extent of disease caused by the abandoned heaps of waste in the village.
A few kilometres from Mmafefe a large dump next to the gravel road – that became notorious – after newspapers printed photographs which showed children on its slopes under the headline ”Playing in the Shadow of Death” -is now covered with sisal plants and indigenous thorn trees. A few dumps around Mmafefe have been covered in the same way and the asbestos tailings on the road have been covered with sand. People in the area have stopped building their homes from bricks made of asbestos. Little else has changed. Most of the abandoned mills and uncovered dumps are still there. At a nearby village called Mantlane children play on a vast heap of waste next to their homes.
Some of the highest dust levels in the area – more than a hundred times the amounts that would require immediate government action in the United States – have been recorded by the local health workers at a densely populated settlement called Gemini. The playground of the biggest school in Mmafefe is still littered with small heaps of blue dust. The health project has scrupulously documented the number of buildings made of asbestos brick and plaster. These include 603 out of the 1 724 houses in the village, seven of the 12 schools, the local post office, the offices of the tribal authority and many of the churches. Health workers have conducted an extensive series of X-rays and lung function tests among the population. Although final results have not yet been collated, preliminary indications are that each family in the village could have at least one member with an asbestos-related disease.
Since 1978 former miners have been able to claim compensation, in terms of the Occupational Diseases in Mines and Works Act, for lung cancer and mesothelioma contracted during their working lives. Whites get R33 207 and a pension of R500 a month; blacks can claim a lumps sum of just over R2 000. Apart from the vast discrimination in the system, a major problem facing the Mmafefe health project is that old miners are effectively prevented from claiming compensation by a clause in the law which says victims must prove they were in the regular employ of a mining company. Under the system of ”working for stock”, payrolls and wage records were seldom kept. ”Even if the area was cleaned up tomorrow, we know that people will still be dying by the middle of the next century,” says Zacharia Mabiletsa, a full-time worker for the project.
On the last day of our visit to Mmafefe, Mabiletsa took us to the house where I met Kaiser and his friend five years ago. The old man was still alive and could remember the time we first sat outside his home talking about the village and its problems. . ”Two years ago Mokhurane got very ill. It took about a month before he died,” said Kaizer. ”I visited him one night and the next morning he never woke up. We had no car to take him to the graveyard and no money to buy a coffin. Somebody went to a store in Magoebaskloof and bought a few planks and knocked them into the shape of a coffin. ”And after him there were so many who have died,” said Kaizer. ”In this village it is becoming a tradition to bury and forget. The difference between the death of a donkey and that of a friend is the same. Those who are responsible for his death do not know that something has died.” A local shopkeeper agreed to take Mokhurane’s make-shift coffin down to the cemetery where the villagers have buried their dead -many of them beneath tombstones made of ce¬ment and asbestos waste.
This article originally appeared in the Weekly Mail.
