“All this land you see around you,” Nonhle Mbuthama says with a gesture to the rolling green hills that run from the horizon on one side to the shores of the Indian Ocean on the other, “would be an open air titanium mine, had it not been for the bravery and unity of our people. Our great-grandparents fought to save this land for us, and we do the same today for our grandchildren. This is our ancestral land, and we defend it with our lives.”

The 250 community members packed close under the shade of our white-canvas awning greet Nonhle’s words with proud and disciplined applause as they respond with cries of “Amandla ngawethu!” (power to the people!). But they are not the target audience for her opening remarks. Instead, her words are directed at the row of well dressed politicians arranged along a table facing the assembly. All are candidates for the May elections who have come to seek votes.

The community members, many of whom have traveled hours by foot or cramped truck-bed to be present for the day’s meeting, know the story Nonhle tells well. They are here as a show of force, to demonstrate to the candidates that, just as previous generations did, they will stand united.

The politicians have not been invited to deliver their typical stump speeches to this audience but – in a first for many – to be rigorously interrogated by the constituents about the issues that matter to the community. 

We are four hours from the nearest paved road, deep in the heart of the Wild Coast of South Africa, where for over two decades in rural Pondoland, this Xolobeni community of Amadiba has been fighting to stop an Australian mining company, Shell Oil, and corrupt local officials from ripping apart their home. 

Despite brutal political reprisals, bribes, and assassination, Nonhle and her community have weathered and won each of these battles. As our own communities in the United States seem increasingly incapable of coming together to address the basic issues affecting our families, the story of Amadiba has an important lesson about what it takes to rebuild a people.

Stopping a Mine

The first time I met Nonhle, she was coming from a community discussion about the increasing number of death threats directed at her. As leader of Amadiba Crisis Committee (ACC), the community’s organization charged with fighting the mining and oil drilling megaprojects that had set their sights on the homeland of the Xolobeni people, Nonhle lives with a target on her back, shadowed everywhere she goes by at least one body-guard.

We met at a local sports bar in the small town of Port Edward halfway up the Eastern Cape. I had driven over 1800 kilometers across the Southern tip of Africa for this conversation - largely on the auspices of a tip from a trusted contact in Cape Town who said the work in Pondoland was some of “the most precedent setting environmental work in South Africa.”

The work in question, and the Amadiba Crisis Committee, had begun 17 years ago, when prospectors for the Australian corporation Transworld Energy and Mineral Resources (TEM) first put in an application to mine newly discovered titanium in a 22 kilometer zone that cut directly through the heart of indigenous Xolobeni land along the Wild Coast. 

The proposed project would displace approximately 270 families in Nonhle’s community, while contaminating the drinking water for people miles around and cutting them off from their most vital source of food and livelihood: the sea.

Having seen other communities up and down the coast steamrolled by politicians looking to make a quick buck by selling the land out from under their people, the Amadiba community decided to fight the proposal head on from the beginning. The Amadiba Crisis Committee was founded to be the tip of the spear, and Nonhle was elected as its spokesperson. This early start, Nonhle says, was what saved them.

Just months later, and just as expected, local government officials granted the mining license for The Xolobeni Mine Sands Project to TEM – doing so without any meaningful input from the community. 

But the Amadiba Crisis Committee was ready, immediately filing a motion to appeal the granting of the license. 

In response, the company put in another project application, trying to overwhelm the community's limited resources as they continued fighting the first appeal in court. When this application, too, was accepted, ACC escalated further; they took the South African Government to court for approving the proposals in the first place. 

Years of litigation, negotiations, marching and constant threat from corporate henchmen followed. In 2016, the chairperson of ACC, Sikhosiphi Bazooka Rhadebe, was gunned down by unknown assassins in his family home. Nonhle only avoided a similar fate because of a last minute tip-off. 

Politicians and corporate officials tried to paint Nonhle as the problem: “The message was that I was to blame for everything,” Nonhle recounted in an interview with Yale360 last month. “If I can ‘disappear,’ then everything can be good in the community. Of course, when someone is “disappeared” it means they are dead.” 

Yet despite this overwhelming opposition, in 2018, the High Court of South Africa ruled in favor of the Amadiba Crisis Committee. In a groundbreaking decision that rocked the country, it affirmed indigenous communities like the Xolobeni are legal custodians of the land and must therefore give their full consent to any development. All pending applications that had not received such consent were no longer valid.

Take a moment and let that sink in.

In a world where we are constantly being bombarded with stories about companies usurping land or poisoning the people who inhabit it – from the Enbridge L3 Pipeline in Minnesota to demonic deforestation of the Amazon basin – this is a very different message. 

Very simply, it is a message that ordinary people can win unequivocal victories against rivals who are often portrayed as unbeatable. 

But it would be a mistake to think that this victory was solely a legal one. It’s a story of organizing.

Rebuilding a People that Can Stand United

As Nonhle and I sat together in the sports bar together in Port Edward, rain hammering at the blue plastic sheeting above, I asked what made her community different. Why had they succeeded where so many others had fought and lost, their homes destroyed. 

Her answer was direct: unity. From the very beginning, Nonhle recalled, they had known that the greatest danger was if the corporate operatives could bribe, threaten, or ensnare enough people to sell off their communal land and/or undermine their credibility as a voice of the people.

It’s the old “divide and conquer” strategy, she said; “It makes it very difficult to implement the vision when some in your community have already been bought. Especially for us as we live on communal land with traditional leaders. They [State officials and corporations] co-opt traditional leaders to pave the way for the development plans they want to implement.”

So the first battle was not in the court-room, it was in the community. They had to rebuild the feeling, among every member, that they were a people. A people stand united, they might not agree or even like each other, but they have a responsibility, and obligation to one another – a loyalty at the end of the day. 

Slowly, one meeting at a time, Nonhle said, she began reminding her community that they were a people, even where long standing rivalries and arguments existed. 

She did this by telling a story. “The story of a people always answers two questions,” Nonhle told me: “where do we come from? And where are we going?” 

For the Amadiba community, this story begins and ends with the land. History is defined by a relationship with earth, and their struggle to protect it. Amadiba is one of the few places in South Africa where indigenous people have maintained continuous possession of land despite waves of colonial and apartheid aggression. 

In this telling, the Xolobeni’s fight against TEM was no different from the battles that happened in the 1960s against the British oil and gas companies. It is part of the same legacy as the original Pondoland Revolts of the 1950’s where the apartheid state attempted to implement a “Land Betterment Scheme” that sought to partition Xolobeni homeland into sectors for grazing land, stock control, segregated housing, and farmed monocultures.

So every chance she had, Nonhle told this story and asked her audience to repeat it, to see themselves in it.

It hasn’t made people get along any better she admits, but it was never supposed to. What it has done is help people feel responsible for one another. 

Hearing the crowd chant in unison that day on the hilltop as Nonhle addressed the assembled politicians drove this point home. As I sat and talked with different members of the assembly afterwards, I asked which party they liked best. Some supported the old-guard African National Congress, while others favored the far left Economic Freedom Fighters. Regardless, however, each said that the individual party platform did not matter as much as their support for the community’s demands. That’s who they would vote for.

The Takeaway

To organize a strong constituency, you must create a united community; a people. To create a people, you need a shared story that answers two questions: Where do we come from, and where are we going? 

Organizing isn’t about convincing people you are right, it’s about getting different people and groups to feel like they are on the same team and working towards a common goal. Done well, as Nonhle’s work with the Amadiba Crisis Committee demonstrates, this gives each of us the sense that we are a link in a chain: born out of something greater than ourselves and contributing to something that will long outlive us. 

When Shell Oil applied to conduct seismic blasting tests for oil and gas along the Wild Coast several years after the TEM battle, this chain remained unbroken. Using the 2018 precedent, the Amadiba community stopped Shell in its tracks. 

In May, Nonhle was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in San Francisco for this work. During an interview following the award announcement, she made it crystal clear what is at stake in the fight over these shared stories. “People try to paint us … as anti-development to pull us down and to try to make us feel selfish or inferior. It’s a colonization of the mind. We must decide our own future rather than being told what to do.”