Estate community of Durban (the core city in the eThekwini Municipality), a traditionally ‘Indian’ neighbourhood now also hosting thousands of ‘African’ and ‘coloured’ residents. Sajida Khan and her siblings grew up and some still reside there.
There are many people around the world who know this house, because its location made Khan one of the key figures in the struggle against the world capitalist elite’s ‘solution’ to climate change: carbon trading. The first paragraphs of a Washington Post article heralding the Kyoto Protocol in March, 2005 (just after the Russian government agreed to sign, thus bringing the treaty into force) are as follows:
Sajida Khan, who has fought for years to close an apartheid-era dumpsite that she says has sickened many people in her predominantly brown and black community outside Durban, South Africa, was dismayed to learn recently that she faces a surprising new obstacle: the Kyoto global warming treaty.
Under the protocol’s highly touted plan to encourage rich countries to invest in eco-friendly projects in poor nations, the site now stands to become a cash cow that generates income for South Africa while helping a wealthy European nation meet its obligations under the pact.
The project’s sponsors at the World Bank call it a win-win situation; Khan calls it a disaster. She said her community’s suffering is being prolonged so that a rich country will not have to make difficult cuts in greenhouse gas emissions at home.
‘It is another form of colonialism,’ she said.
Privatising Durban’s air
Two years later, Khan was battling cancer for the second time, suffering chemotherapy that burned out her hair, and simultaneously trying to recover from an awful back injury which broke vertebrae. Inscribed on her body was evidence of an enduring fight against an insensitive industry whose illegal medical waste incinerator had sprinkled toxins onto her home until its closure, and whose perfume rods today spew a smell just as noxious as the rotting garbage they are meant to disguise.
Even in her last days, Sajida told us, she could not bear the thought that for seven to twenty more years, the landfill site would remain open. The municipality’s justification is to capture carbon credits by selling investments in Bisasar operations to global polluters, who in turn will face less pressure to cut their own emissions.
This represents the ‘privatisation of the air’, say critics in the Durban Group for Climate Justice, an international campaigning network which Khan’s struggle inspired the founding of in 2004.
The officials’ goal is to sell carbon credits via the World Bank to big corporations and Northern governments, as part of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Although Khan’s 90-page Environmental Impact Assessment submission appears to have frightened the World Bank off its $15 million Bisasar investment for now, two other smaller Durban landfills were adopted by the Bank in mid-2007, and eThekwini Municipality officials express every intention of continuing the Bisasar project with new private sector partners.
The South African Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism supports this form of carbon colonialism. Its National Climate Change Response Strategy was released in September 2004, and insists that citizens understand ‘up-front’ how the ‘CDM primarily presents a range of commercial opportunities, both big and small. This could be a very important source of foreign direct investment’.
As Daniel Becker of the Sierra Club’s Global Warming and Energy Program interprets, ‘It’s sort of the moral equivalent of hiring a domestic. We will pay you to clean our mess. For a long time here in America we have believed in the polluter pays principle. This could become a pay to pollute principle’.
Payments to South African polluters could be lucrative indeed. The US is the largest CO2 emitter in absolute terms, but in relative terms the South African economy emits 20 times as much of that gas than the US, measured by each unit of output per person.
SA’s five-fold increase in CO2 emissions since 1950 can largely be blamed upon Eskom, the mining houses and metals smelters, who brag about the world’s cheapest electricity for industrial users. A small proportion – less than 5 per cent of all consumption - is due to low-income households coming onto the grid in recent years. In one fell swoop last November, Eskom added a potential 3.5 per cent increase in grid demand – raising the likelihood of yet more overload and brownouts - by offering extremely cheap electricity to the Canadian firm Alcan for its Coega smelter, which will hire fewer than 1000 workers.
Into the debate over post-apartheid climate policy marched Khan, an ordinary resident who equipped herself with detailed knowledge of chemistry, public health and landfill economics. Khan had organised a landfill-closure petition campaign with 6000 signatures as well as a mass march during the mid-1990s. Even after the mass mobilising ended, for nearly fifteen years she was a pain in the neck to apartheid-era and post-apartheid bureaucrats who first located the continent’s largest formal dump in a residential area and then promised closure to reap votes, but subsequently refused its decommissioning.
As a Muslim woman, Khan waged her campaign at a time, as Ashwin Desai puts it, ‘when religious gate-keepers were reasserting authority over the family. This involved the assertion of male dominance.’ She resisted, Desai testifies:
Sajida Khan was breaking another mould of politics. During apartheid, opposition in her community was channelled through the male-dominated Natal Indian Congress and Durban Housing Action Committee. But these were bureaucratised struggles with the leaders at some distance from the rough-and-tumble of local politics. She eschewed that. Her politics were immediately on her doorstep. It was a politics that, gradually at first, made the links between the local and the global. It was a kind of trailblazing politics, that later was manifested in what have become known as the ‘new social movements’. In contrast, her political peers in the Congress tradition have built an impressive electoral machine, but ended up merely with votes for party candidates rather than a movement to confront global apartheid and its local manifestations.
What about class, though? Asked if the battle is over a selfish interest, property values, she rebutted, ‘No, no. It’s to do with pollution, and it transcends race and color’.
Yet there are certainly class and to some extent race and gender power relations in play. At the upper-end of the satellite photo, the Kennedy Road shack settlement – which is just as close to the dump as Khan - organised a dozen residents to formally recycle material from the dump. (Many dozens more used to informally pick materials from the dump, until Durban Solid Waste limited access due to safety and health dangers.)
Kennedy Road leaders accused Khan of threatening livelihoods, as well as a handful of promised jobs and bursaries (in Uganda of all places) in the event the CDM project gets off the ground. With the World Bank investigating the potential R100 million investment, tensions rose.
Insensitively, Khan sometimes used the word ‘informals’ to describe the shack settlement residents and once advocated that they be moved off the land, to areas nearby, sufficiently far from the dump (she recommended a buffer for all residents of 800 meters) to be safe from the windswept dust. At the nearby clinic, healthworkers confirmed to us that Kennedy Road residents suffer severely from asthma, sinusitis, pneumonia and even TB.
Khan had a profound empathy for people in the same proximity as cancer-causing and respiratory-disease particulates, as she noted in an interview: ‘Recently a woman was buried alive. She died on the site [picking rubbish, killed by a dump truck offloading]. I could have saved her life.’
Ecofeminist anti-capitalism?
The first use of the term ‘ecofeminism’ was in Francois d’Eaubonne’s 1974 book Le Feminisme ou la Mort, ‘Feminism or Death’. As this article was prepared for Agenda, Khan’s condition worsened, and she fell into a coma on July 12 and died three days later.
It’s here where ecofeminist theory sheds light on struggles that unite Khan’s with the anonymous shackdweller’s. In the words of Kathleen Manion,
Certain ecologically damaging issues have more of a detrimental effect on women than on men, particularly as women tend to be more involved in family provisions and household management. Such problems include sustainable food development, deforestation, desertification, access to safe water, flooding, climate change, access to fertile land, pollution, toxic waste disposal, responsible environmental management with in companies and factories, land management issues, non-renewable energy resources, irresponsible mining and tree felling practices, loss of biodiversity (fuel, medicines, food). As household managers, women are the first to suffer when access to sustainable livelihoods are unbalanced. When the water becomes unportable, the food stores dry up, the trees disappear, the land becomes untenable and the climate changes, women are often the ones who need to walk further and work harder to ensure their families survival.
For a middle-class woman, Sajida Khan, just as for the impoverished woman killed on the dump, the struggle for reproduction was more costly than we readers can contemplate. High-profile heroines have led such struggles: for example, Lois Gibbs against toxins at Love Canal, New York; Wangari Maathei fighting for Kenyan greenbelts; Erin Brockovich campaigning for clean water in Hinkley, California; Medha Patkar opposing big dams in India; etc, etc. Others have written eloquently of Chipko tree huggers (Vandana Shiva) and the Niger Delta’s women activists (Terisa Turner).
In all these cases, including Bisasar Road, women’s defense of immediate family and community is a compelling handle for a larger analysis of patriarchal power relations and anthropomorphism.
But though Khan did not find a way to work with all her neighbors, as a result of huge political, class and race divides, her campaign against carbon trading using Bisasar Road dump has at least brought this pilot project to the world’s attention, as an example of how ‘low-hanging fruit rots first’, to borrow the metaphor of Canadian CDM critic Graham Erion.
Still, the attention she has gained for this cause only goes so far, Desai observes:
Sajida’s main strategic flaw was the belief that by meticulous scientific presentation of the facts based upon thorough research, she could persuade the ruling class. Facts became the main weapon of struggle. But without an ongoing critical mass of people, once the World Bank was convinced she was right and dropped out – apparently the case by 2006, just as happened with the Narmada dams in India – then the domestic government stepped in, to take up the slack. So eThekwini Municipality is now taking over from the World Bank and looking for investors, because the bigger cadreship isn’t there to stop it. Facing down the World Bank was impressive, and deserved the claim to a victory. But it’s one thing to tell truth to power, and Sajida was absolutely brilliant in defeating the system’s experts. I hosted one debate for the Mail & Guardian in 2005, and she got a first round knockout. However, the corollary is that you must not just talk technically, but also expose and defeat the power. And you need a much bigger mass movement to do that.
Ecofeminist-socialist Ariel Salleh might also find in Khan’s story an inspiring if as yet uncertain fight against capitalist patriarchy:
As an old feminist adage goes: ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’ For socialists, the capitalist class, its government cronies, and lifestyle hangers on, are the master, and his house is the global public sphere. For ecofeminists, this is also true, but there is another master embodied in the private power relations that govern everyday life for women at home, at work, and in scholarship. This is why we use the double construct capitalist patriarchal societies—where capitalism denotes the very latest historical form of economic and social domination by men over women. This double term integrates the two dimensions of power by recognising patriarchal energetics as a priori to capitalism. As reflexive ecosocialists know: the psychology of masculinity is actively rewarded by the capitalist system, thereby keeping that economy intact.
As Khan struggled for life, the toxic economy of Bisasar Road was being rebuilt by the municipality with the global capitalist master’s CDM tool. Although her brother Rafique will take up the baton, Khan’s campaign to close apartheid’s dump may ultimately fail, as a result of the various post-apartheid forces whose interaction now generates overlapping, interlocking, eco-social and personal tragedies.
Elusive gender, class, race and political unity
If inhaling status quo pollution meant paying dearly with her health for so many years, still, Khan was partially successful: preventing a major World Bank investment and raising local/global consciousness. Most importantly, she left us with a drive to transcend the inherited conditions and mindsets into which apartheid categories have cemented infrastructures and people.
Pessimistically, it may not be feasible for Clare Estate residents from different and sometimes opposed race/class backgrounds to forge more effective alliances against the municipality, in the short term. It may be only a matter of time before the price of a tonne of carbon dioxide is attractive enough to bring new investors to Bisasar.
Optimistically, before that point is reached, an ideal solution does exist, uniting the red and green strands of politics against capitalist-patriarchal rubbish, for Durban should and could:
# adopt a ‘zero waste’ philosophy that would create dozens – perhaps hundreds - of reliable jobs in recycling for Kennedy Road shackdwellers, who where needed could (at their own volition) be suitably resettled with security of tenure, on stable land in the immediate vicinity, and
# simultaneously terminate and rehabilitate the Bisasar dump, while safely removing its methane, preferably through piping it out of the area to a nearby gas main via a cleansing filter.
Regardless, with women’s bodies carrying deep scars of this fight, and with many women in the vicinity of Bisasar Road suffering respiratory diseases and other health/welfare problems from the dump, we all – especially those (like we authors and many of you readers) with an inordinate contribution to climate change and municipal waste - have an obligation to be part of a solution. As Desai mused,
Sometimes when lives are judged by visual victories, we see failures, and after all, the dump remains right outside Sajida’s front door after her 14 year fight. But on the other hand, if a life is judged by a legacy that endures and is built upon, hers is one of multiple larger victories: of a woman standing against male domination of nationalist politics, of knowledge about global capitalist ecology over amnesia, of ordinary people harnessing the most incredible forms of expertise so as to enter forums usually dominated by people with multiple degrees, and of a political ecology that is a politics of all the people. Whatever you might say about her race and class privilege, the final denominator is that she’ll die fighting the cancer infection, and fighting the dump that gave her that cancer. This was not a death of privilege, it was murder.
