Environmental Apartheid
The Case of South Africa
Some of my thoughts while the paper, Environmental Apartheid: Eco-health and rural marginalization in South Africa. This was my first time reading a scientific paper regarding the South African apartheid. I will be doing a lot more as my current plan for the Futures project is related significantly.
Rural marginalization of Black South Africans began as a tool through which to leverage increased power and privilege for the white colonial population, as a tool through which the apartheid could remain steadily within the reins of the oppressors. Yet, the effects it had, the reality it presented, to this day continues the effects of apartheid – even if, legally, it has ceased.
The built environment and policy have worked together to shape multiple generations – history, economics, society – and without shifting this built environment, or enhancing it (for that ‘equity of opportunity’), society and its level of justice will not actually change. It’s not enough to pass or retract words on paper. Action needs to take place.
So far, this hasn’t fully happened. A lasting spatial effect of apartheid is the marginalization of Black South Africans before 1994.
In the paper’s case study, the authors witnessed firsthand the failing health of the land belonging to smallholder farms of Black citizens – a health which was a culmination of that marginalization. By pushing Black citizens out of urban contexts, out of reach of services, amenities, and access to other basic supplies, for decades and generations, a consistent state of lower-quality life was established among these racially discriminated citizens. By spatially distancing the Black citizens, sort of ‘out of sight, out of mind’-ing them, or as the authors put it, placing them into a white ‘blindspot’, improvement – spatially, politically, economically – was essentially deemed unnecessary and groundless. And so, priority was not given to helping improve the land of these farmers, allowing failing harvests and inhospitable land to be ‘fate’ of these citizens.
The spatial marginalization stemmed from political marginalization; this political marginalization worked to create, uphold and widen socioeconomic differences – isolation as a people, as a community, as well as ensuring that Black people already at their wits’ end due to the system stacking odds relentlessly against them, would accept lesser value opportunities… doing work for less, because getting that work in itself was not guaranteed, and survival a necessity. Thus the divide grew, separating citizens into divided lifestyles, cultures (likely infused, as we are learning today, trauma into the very DNA of future descendants), and in so doing, the lands/home environment of those marginalized.
While people point fingers at who to blame for the current state of that land – surely, if not the owners and their practices, who else could be responsible? – it is imperative to understand context. To understand concepts of social mobility, of inherent bias, and systemic prejudice. While owners may not have the best eco-friendly practices for their land, there is also the fact that they do not have the privilege to choose better practices. The law and the government have not allowed the Black, rural citizens any other options; the law and the government do not even hear out the people’s complaints or set out to establish programs for more services. It lays all responsibility on civilians. It compounds the wicked problems through consistent neglect over the course of decades.
This is not unlike a case study we covered in Exclusion & Inequality; during the COVID lockdown, the president expressly requested civilians to follow WHO guidelines without holding larger establishments with more financial and organizational powers to help the civilians. During the lockdown of 2020, South African Black citizens were left to their own devices to ensure social distancing and punished by police when queueing for the only food they would be able to secure during lockdown. This cycle of neglect and condemnation reinforces worse living conditions, without any improvement of purely basic infrastructure that would lend itself to a fractionally better life, at worst, and a totally revolutionized, revitalized population not only immensely capable as it always had been but now equipped to skyrocket South African’s fulfillment of potential, at best.
Instead, if we come back to the case study at hand, we see whatever policy infrastructure there is that heeds the Black South African population, strives only to disinherit them from any possible good. Smallholders, where previously self-sufficient to an extent, were robbed of rights and agency towards their own property and harvests, through the colonial enforcement of wage labor systems, and the state’s ownership of land superseding the civilian owners’. This led to rural civilians (primarily Black) trying to find urban-set job opportunities; that went over as described 3 paragraphs ago, and, despite the official ‘lifting’ of the colonial legislature, the old realities continue on to this day.
Even with land redistributed to civilian owners, the legislative neglect continues to render owners without the skills and knowledge needed for their properties to flourish – and does not allow them opportunity to obtain the skills and knowledge either.
Reading this paper has only made me more curious about how the lifting of apartheid works, constitutionally, and what sort of people are in power/in government, and what their priorities are, to purposefully neglect such an important and vital subset of their own population – and to what end.
