Balance: The mouth of the Msikaba River on the Wild Coast. Environmental defender Sinegugu Zukulu says the land, which is threatened by development, must remain in the hands of its people, benefiting them through ecologically sustainable ways of living. Photo: Sinegugu Zukulu
It is early October and in the constitutional corridors of Johannesburg, judges are deliberating on a case that could alter the moral topography of our nation. Their ruling will determine whether controversial multinational mining interests may dig into the fragile heart of Mpondoland’s Wild Coast. One of Africa’s last living frontiers.
But hundreds of kilometres away, in the village of Ndengani, the true court is already in session. It sits not in marble chambers but beneath a wide Mpondoland sky, where cattle graze between acacias and the sea murmurs behind the hills. I sit here with Sinegugu Zukulu, environmental defender, teacher and son of Amadiba. The judgment of law is pending. The judgment of the earth is ongoing.
“Mpondoland,” he says, “means freedom. The right to self-determination. When your land is still your land, you are still free. You can decide your life … what you grow, what you build, what you heal with. When our land remains with us, we remain human.”
He pauses, his gaze following the wind as it ripples through the grass. “If I were to say it in one breath,” he continues, “Mpondoland means life.”
The meaning of freedom
In Mpondoland, freedom has never been a theory. It has always been an ecology. The people understand that personhood is inseparable from place, that the human spirit finds its wholeness in relationships with soil, sea and sky: “The personal is communal and the communal is personal,” Zukulu says. “You cannot separate them. Umntu ngumntu ngabantu.”
The Western imagination tends to see land as property. As something to be owned, traded and measured. The amaMpondo see it as kin … as the living body through which human life makes sense. To lose land here is not merely to lose an asset; it is to lose a mirror of one’s own being.
Every act of cultivation and ritual of passage is interwoven with the pulse of the landscape. The rising of Itimela, a cluster of winter stars, marks the season of initiation. The blooming of red fire lilies signals the time to plough. The return of migratory birds announces renewal.
“The land tells you when to move, when to plant, when to rest. The sky speaks to the ocean. The forest speaks to the soil. Life listens to itself. We are part of that conversation.”
That conversation — between land and life, between freedom and responsibility — is precisely what extractive modernity has forgotten.
The illusion of progress
“The greatest threat to the Wild Coast,” Zukulu tells me, “is taking land from local people and giving it to those with deeper pockets … all in the name of development.
“When people are seen only as workers, they lose their independence. When their land is taken, they lose their dignity. And when the land is damaged beyond recovery, there is nothing left to inherit.
“There is good development and there is bad development,” he says. “Good development sustains life. Bad development destroys the foundations of life … clean water, fertile soil, healthy air. It calls itself progress, but it leaves people poorer than before.”
He reminds me about the Niger Delta, where decades of oil extraction have poisoned rivers and communities. “They were promised jobs, prosperity, compensation. Now they have nothing. Only dead water and poisoned soil. They are still chasing justice in courts that cannot give it. How do you compensate for a river that no longer flows?”
This is the warning Mpondoland offers — that a development model which severs economy from ecology will ultimately devour itself.
Freedom after freedom
And yet, the most piercing truth of our conversation arrives quietly.
“It has become harder to defend our land now than during apartheid,” Zukulu says. “Back then, we knew who the enemy was. Today, when we resist the destruction of our land, we are called anti-government, anti-progress. Even anti-South African.”
His words cut through the mythology of our post-liberation era. Political freedom without ecological justice is a hollow victory. “The same comrades who fought for this land now sell it,” he says. “They forget that the real wealth of this country lies not beneath the ground but in the hands that tend it.”
Mpondoland is a reminder that liberation is not a moment in history but a living covenant with the earth.
The global pattern
Zukulu widens his gaze: “This is not just our struggle. Everywhere, indigenous people are fighting to protect what remains. In the Amazon, in the Philippines, in Indonesia. The story is the same. Corporations have eaten almost everything else and now they are coming for the last living places. The last watersheds. The last lungs of the earth.”
He speaks of the staggering numbers — 200 environmental defenders murdered each year, 2 000 between 2012 and 2020, 99% of them in indigenous territories.
“Eighty percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity exists in these lands. The water we all depend on flows from them. The world cannot breathe without these places.
“But the governments who should protect them have become collaborators in their destruction.”
The lessons of Amadiba
From his own community’s struggle … the Amadiba Crisis Committee, Zukulu draws lessons.
“We’ve learned that our story must be told in our own voices,” he says. “We can’t rely only on protest; we must use every tool available … the courts, the media, the sciences.
“We must collaborate with researchers, with journalists, with anyone who understands that the land is not a commodity. And above all, we must stay grounded among the people.”
In that lies a vision of leadership that is deeply modern yet profoundly ancestral — a fusion of strategy and spirit, litigation and ceremony, intellect and intimacy with place.
He calls it “development with a conscience”. And in those three words lies the blueprint for a new paradigm that refuses to choose between prosperity and the planet.
When I ask him to imagine Mpondoland 50 years from now, he looks away. “If, when I am gone, the land is still in the hands of its people,” he says slowly, “if the rivers still run clean, if the people still plant, still fish, still gather herbs in the forest, then I will rest well.”
Finally, he offers a phrase in isiXhosa: “Masikhumbule ukuba singobani.” Let us remember who we are. It is a call not just to his people but to all of us. It is a reminder that the crisis of the planet is, at its core, a crisis of identity. That we have forgotten what it means to belong.
Toward a new ethic
The conversation ends as the late sun floods the valley. Somewhere beyond the hills, the Constitutional Court prepares to hand down its judgment. But the real question remains unanswered. Not by judges, but by all of us.
What if freedom is not the right to exploit, but the responsibility to tend? What if progress is not measured by extraction but by regeneration? What if development could once again mean the unfolding of potential — of land, of people, of consciousness — rather than the depletion of everything we touch?
Mpondoland offers no easy answers. It offers something far more valuable — a way back into the right relationship with the world.
It tells us that sustainability is not a policy; it is a posture. It tells us that democracy divorced from ecology is only half a revolution. The land beneath our feet remembers what we have forgotten — that every economy is nested within an ecosystem and every constitution is, ultimately, written on the skin of the earth.
The Concourt will deliver its ruling but the deeper verdict, the one history will record, will be spoken not in law reports but in rivers, forests and the breath of future generations. If we listen, we might yet hear what Mpondoland is still trying to tell us: that freedom, like the land, must be lived in balance.
Or it will not last.
Geoff Brown is a wilderness retreat facilitator, mentor and founder of EarthSoul Africa and the African Centre for Healthy Masculinity.