Climate, violence, resource extraction and ecological debt: global implications of an assassination on South Africa's coal mining belt

Abstract

ABSTRACT Extractivism has attracted inspiring resistance in South Africa, but far-reaching lessons from one site of struggle in KwaZulu-Natal Province are sobering. The October 2020 assassination of Fikile Ntshangase, an anti-coal activist, reflects difficult political-economic and political-ecological terrain. The critical role of gendered activism in former apartheid-era Bantustans underlay concrete problems Ntshangase faced when confronted by male coal-mine labourers. There was no ‘Just Transition’ programme to decarbonize the mine at the time. The corporation that benefited from the assassination, Petmin, was expanding into Ntshangase's village. In the process, not only did the need to cease coal mining become of enormous global concern, but Petmin’s role in international circuits of capital also gave rise to a new round of global-local and socio-ecological linkages. Some involve the World Bank while others entail solidarity with victims of the same firm near the United States city of Cleveland.