The surfer and tribal chief fighting to save a 550km South African coast | Environment

Martinus Fredericks meets me exterior the police station in South Africa’s Atlantis, a considerably forlorn semi-industrial city on the outskirts of Cape City. On this winter’s morning, Atlantis is shrouded in fog. After a agency handshake, he leads me throughout the highway into an unmarked constructing.

On the second flooring, on the finish of a large, ethereal hall that additionally homes the neighborhood radio station, we enter an empty espresso store with six plastic tables adorned with black tablecloths and gold place settings. Over tea and sandwiches, Fredericks tells me how an astounding midlife revelation led him to turn out to be the face of a social and environmental battle.

Born in 1965, he grew up within the agricultural city of Robertson, talking Afrikaans and figuring out as “colored” – the apartheid regime’s catch-all time period for individuals who didn’t match into their “white”, “Black” or “Indian” racial packing containers. After faculty, he studied agriculture and environmental sciences, later working in nature conservation.

His life was upended in 2012 when representatives of the !Ama Chieftaincy in Bethany, Namibia, visited him in Atlantis. “They informed me that I used to be a direct descendant of their chief !Abeb,” he says, including that they requested him to take over the South African management of the !Ama tribe.

The !Ama individuals are pastoralists who, earlier than the arrival of Europeans, adopted their herds throughout an enormous swath of Southern Africa (present-day South Africa and Namibia) seeking the very best grazing.

“My first thought was, ‘What the hell?’” he says. “I used to be in full shock.” When he was rising up, his father had spent a variety of time in Namibia (then generally known as South West Africa), however he had by no means defined why. “We solely discovered after his passing that he was visiting his individuals. Our individuals.”

Within the 12 years since being made “gaob”, or supreme chief, Fredericks has grown into the function. Though he nonetheless clothes in Western garments and may solely communicate a smattering of !Ama, he has taken it upon himself to battle for the rights of his individuals – who’ve been excluded by successive governments for not less than 350 years.

Earlier than Europeans settled in South Africa in 1652, the !Ama knew no borders, following the rains seeking grazing land for his or her cattle. However the arrival of land-hungry colonials – who famous with curiosity the copper bracelets worn by the metalworking !Ama – and the introduction of title deeds noticed the !Ama shunted to much less fertile land that no person else wished.

Their exclusion grew to become extra full with the “discovery” of diamonds close to Kimberley in 1867 (right here, Fredericks notes that his individuals had at all times recognized about diamonds, which they used to show youngsters to rely). “Within the 1900s, Europeans began to place up fences,” says Fredericks. “And in 1923, the state grew to become conscious of alluvial diamonds [removed from their original source, typically by rivers] within the Richtersveld [a mountainous desert region at the northernmost extremity of Namaqualand] and so they began stopping us from accessing the land in any respect.”

Mining threatens to destroy a lot of the West Coast, a sparsely populated and environmentally vital area: It’s house to myriad endemic plant species, to not point out dozens of great seabird colonies and marine breeding grounds.

Whereas diamond mining has already wreaked havoc on its northern reaches – watch the nonprofit group Shield the West Coast (PTWC)’s movie Mines of Mordor for an concept of the harm – heavy sand mining for minerals like zircon, ilmenite, rutile and magnetite appears set to destroy environments alongside your entire shoreline.

By digging up seashores and constructing cofferdams – dams constructed to show the seabed for mining – total intertidal ecosystems, which lie between the excessive and low water marks, are ruined. Though corporations are legally required to rehabilitate an space after they have completed mining it, authorities enforcement of laws is poor and mining companies usually go the buck by promoting mines to entrance corporations.

“It must be very easy to inform the distinction between authorized and unlawful mining,” says Mike Schlebach, a giant wave surfer-come-activist who is decided to not permit mining to destroy the West Coast, a 550km (342-mile) expanse of rugged seashores and dramatic cliffs the place flamingos, seals and jackals outnumber people.

“However the authorities departments charged with implementing mining and environmental legal guidelines have blurred the strains fully. We’ve seen a great deal of instances the place due course of is just not adopted.”

It’s hardly shocking, given the nation’s racist previous, that within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the riches buried inside South Africa’s soils had been seen because the protect of the white man. However – regardless of what appeared to be a landmark authorized victory in 2003 – little has modified for the !Ama for the reason that daybreak of multiracial democracy in 1994.

“They didn’t simply steal our land,” says Fredericks. “They stole our id, our language and our traditions. However we are going to get them again.”

Not too long ago, on a bitterly chilly July evening, in a dilapidated neighborhood corridor within the windswept mining city of Alexander Bay, the place the mighty Orange River spews diamond-laden silt into the Atlantic Ocean, Fredericks convened a neighborhood assembly. He was flanked by an unlikely backing band: Schlebach, who can also be the founding father of the PTWC group, which is against unjust mining, and two fellow surfers who serve on the PTWC board. Additionally current was grassroots activist Bongani Jonas of Mining Affected Communities United in Motion (MACUA), a legislation professor and a authorized strategist.

Fewer than two dozen neighborhood members – their faces hewn by lives lived within the harsh and forgotten landscapes of the Richtersveld – braved icy winter gales to listen to Fredericks talk about his efforts to lastly see justice for his individuals. It was not the primary such assembly and it’ll not be the final, however now that Fredericks has so many different gamers on board, there’s a sense of renewed optimism.

Means again in 1998, through the heady days of Nelson Mandela’s presidency, the Richtersveld neighborhood made a land declare demanding that the state-owned mining firm Alexkor concede a controlling share of mineral rights to the neighborhood. In 2003, 9 years earlier than Fredericks even discovered about his !Ama heritage, the declare was granted – seemingly righting a 300-year-old flawed and unlocking hundreds of thousands of {dollars} for the neighborhood.

However now, regardless of the best courtroom within the land ruling that the Richtersveld neighborhood is entitled to “possession of the topic land (together with its minerals and treasured stones) and to the unique helpful use and occupation thereof”, the individuals stay as destitute as ever.

As Fredericks explains: “It was signed. It was agreed between Alexkor and the neighborhood. However we’re nonetheless making an attempt to unscramble the eggs.”

Andries Joseph, a 70-something !Ama man from the tiny village of Lekkersing about 113km (70 miles) from Alexander Bay, speaks of a neighborhood that has been taken over by corrupt locals and authorities brokers. “We’re a slave on our personal floor,” he grumbles.

“The cry of the individuals, the cry of the previous moms and dads who noticed issues go flawed in entrance of their eyes [is being ignored]. There isn’t a halting, there is no such thing as a cease.”

He’s not flawed: What was once fertile farmland two years in the past has turn out to be a dusty wasteland and there’s even mining contained in the nationwide park declared to guard the distinctive wildlife of the Richtersveld. However the !Ama can solely watch on as large machines rip landscapes aside and cities fall into disrepair.

The authorized points of the case are sophisticated however the human facet of the story is devastatingly easy: The individuals who dwell on the West Coast have at all times been sidelined.

“The West Coast is a sufferer of its personal isolation,” says Schlebach, who’s on a mission to lastly give the individuals who name it house a voice via a mix of social media posts, authorized stress and old school neighborhood activism. “We aren’t in opposition to all mining,” stresses Schlebach. “However we’re in opposition to mining that doesn’t observe the environmental and societal safeguards enshrined in our structure.”

It began with a wave

Schlebach’s campaign started in August 2020 when, after enduring one of many world’s strictest lockdowns, he was lastly capable of embark on a solo browsing journey to the coast that formed him as a surfer. Now 47, he had been browsing the gnarly waves of the West Coast since his thirteenth birthday.

“The West Coast is likely one of the final frontiers,” he explains. “Heavy, uncrowded waves and untouched landscapes the place you possibly can simply pitch a tent and free-camp. You may go days with out seeing one other soul.”

On the primary day of that journey, he tried to entry a 10km (6.2-mile) strip of shoreline wedged between two mines. “I’d surfed there earlier than,” he remembers. “However this time, the safety guards at one of many mines wouldn’t let me in.” The subsequent day he drove slightly additional north to see together with his personal eyes one other just lately accepted mining mission with a worrying title: Ten Seaside Extension.

“It was worse than I may have imagined. Ten seashores and 52km (32 miles) of pristine shoreline being ripped to shreds by heavy equipment.”

Seeing mines alongside the West Coast was nothing new for Schlebach, and there has at all times been a 230km (143-mile) stretch of shoreline – the “diamond protected space” – that was completely off limits. However this was the primary time Schlebach obtained a way that mining was coming for the remainder of the shoreline.

He had simply exited from a enterprise and had a while on his palms: “I obtained again on the Monday morning and began calling some buddies within the browsing neighborhood,” he remembers. “I had no concept how activism labored or what I used to be up in opposition to. However I wasn’t ready to face by and watch because the West Coast was destroyed.”

It was at all times, he stresses, about rather more than defending waves: “However I might by no means have recognized what was taking place if I hadn’t been a surfer.”

By November 2020, Schlebach and his co-founders had registered Shield the West Coast as a nonprofit firm. The early days had been powerful and there have been occasions when the sheer impunity proven by mining corporations and authorities officers made him severely query his personal naivete. However, thanks partially to the help of influencers like three-time huge wave world champion Grant “Twig” Baker (who pioneered many West Coast surf spots within the 2000s), they started to develop their social media profile.

“Folks had been shocked to see what was happening up there.”

Now, simply 4 years later, Protect the West Coast has grown to incorporate scientists, small-scale fishers, legal professionals, farmers, neighborhood activists, path runners and the paramount chief of the !Ama individuals.

South Africa’s historical past is one in all division and it’s extremely uncommon for any organisation to really transcend race, class, language, training and geography. That is what makes PTWC’s conglomerate of yuppie surfers and teachers working alongside penniless fishers and neighborhood activists so highly effective.

The organisation has already had some outstanding successes. A petition calling for a moratorium on all mining purposes within the area has garnered 63,000 signatures. And a path working race known as “Run West“, which traverses 21km (13 miles) of this pristine shoreline, has now turn out to be an annual fixture – this 12 months’s race is September 22 – and a significant supply of each revenue and publicity.

Maybe most significantly, in 2023, the organisation was granted an out-of-court order to halt mining operations on the mouth of the Olifants River, simply 250km (155 miles) north of Cape City. Pivotal on this course of was one other ally: Suzanne du Plessis, a longtime resident of the tiny village of Doringbaai, who began an environmental consciousness NGO means again in 2005.

A spot of serene magnificence, the Olifants Estuary is the third largest estuary in South Africa. Additionally it is house to the most important salt marshes within the nation, making it an vital breeding floor for a lot of fish and hen species, together with black oystercatchers, flamingos and pelicans. However this distinctive ecosystem additionally harbours an array of sought-after minerals.

Since 2012, Du Plessis has been preventing to stop mining corporations from destroying what ought to clearly be a nature reserve. “At first, the priority was sand mining and cofferdam mining on the coast,” she recollects. “Then Tormin [Mineral Sands] made an software to prospect on the northern boundary of the Olifants Estuary, 17km (10.5 miles) inland. Regardless of 37 appeals, its software was granted.”

Du Plessis anxious that the floodgates would open, and he or she was particularly involved about the way in which by which fishers’ issues had been roundly ignored. “They had been mining on land, on the seashores, within the intertidal zone and within the sea,” says Du Plessis, “destroying breeding grounds for fishes and molluscs and birds and stopping public entry to the coast” – a proper enshrined in South Africa’s structure.

“The mining and setting ministers should not doing their job,” laments Du Plessis. “They simply log off on purposes. They don’t observe their very own guidelines, they simply rubber-stamp.”

She first encountered Schlebach and PTWC in 2020, a time when the mining purposes had been coming in thick and quick. By then, Du Plessis and different involved residents and teachers had been making an attempt to stop mining from destroying their beloved estuary for not less than eight years. However PTWC’s mixture of social media savvy and authorized nous was a recreation changer.

“PTWC is great, as a result of it’s a youthful, extra tech-savvy technology,” says Du Plessis. “I’d by no means seen so many alternative individuals coming collectively like that. After all, there are variations, however what binds us collectively is even stronger.”

The highway forward

Due to contributions from company and personal donors, PTWC has reached a degree the place it’s nearing monetary sustainability. Fredericks, Schlebach and Du Plessis all stay dedicated to making sure that the individuals of the Richtersveld lastly profit from the riches beneath their ft, that mining corporations perform their operations – together with rehabilitation applications, based on the letter of the legislation – and that the final pristine stretches of the West Coast stay that means.

They are going to proceed to pursue their multipronged technique of social media publicity, authorized stress and neighborhood activism.  Schlebach is dedicated to bringing much more stakeholders into the organisation.

They now have one other formidable weapon of their armoury. The event of RIPL, a cell and desktop app that makes commenting on prospecting and mining rights purposes a lot, a lot simpler.

“Any involved citizen has the correct to object to an software, however the course of has at all times been mired in crimson tape,” explains Schlebach. RIPL updates customers the second a brand new software is made and makes commenting as straightforward as filling out a web-based restaurant assessment. “It may very well be an actual recreation changer,” says Schlebach. “Not just for the West Coast, however for communities all throughout South Africa.”

Speak about driving the wave.