My book illustrates that dispossession did not end when colonialism and apartheid ended. It continues today.
I collected oral accounts from people living in these communities. My book analyses what it means to lose the land, and challenges the idea that land is only a material asset. I argue that the land and access to it provides dignity, belonging, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.
**How are coal mining companies dispossessing people today?**
My book tells the stories of people who have been relocated both from privately owned commercial farms and tribal land since the 2000s. Communities who live on tribal land, under the governance of traditional leaders, are customarily buried at their homesteads. Labour tenants — people who work on commercial farms in exchange for living on and using the land — have historically been buried on these farms.
Both groups only have informal rights to the land they live on. When a coal mine sets up, their homes and ancestors’ graves are often relocated. As one participant I interviewed said: “_I did not want to leave, so they packed my things as I sat and watched them. They never issued a date. They simply showed up on the day. Inside the truck, they combined my things with my neighbours'.”_
Communities in rural Somkhele in KwaZulu-Natal spoke about the loss of their land and ancestral graves to Tendele coal mine in 2023: “_The land is our bed. We sleep on it. Everyone. Now, when the mine dispossesses the land, where must we, black people, sleep?”_
The people of Somkhele also explained that economically, the loss of land forced them into precarious and exploitive wage labour and left many to depend on very low social grants.
My book describes how the dehumanisation of being moved to make way for a coal mine affects both the living and their ancestors. One family recounted: “_They used pickaxes to dig. One of ours (a buried person) was still covered in their blanket when they were exhumed. They (the mine) provided prison-like blankets for our remains, not the kind of blankets we had buried them in. Others had fossilised, and their remains had turned into soil. They placed the soiled remains on the prison-like blankets.”_
The trauma of watching family members’ graves being relocated affected people psychologically and spiritually. Many recounted that they became spiritually restless. They started seeing their loved ones in dreams because these ancestors were not happy at having been physically and spiritually disturbed.
The loss caused by displacement is intangible and irreparable. It leads to what I describe as spiritual dislocation, as detailed by a recent clinical psychologist’s report into the psychosocial impacts of coal mining.
**What should be done to compensate affected communities?**
There is no law regulating how households can be moved to make way for mines. However, the rights of communities to refuse mining operations must be respected. Mining companies need to set up genuine negotiated processes that honour the views and choices of everyone affected before they build coal mines.
Society and the powerful must recognise that when communities contest the theft of their land, this is because land is not only an economic asset. It is part of a broader claim for a sense of belonging in a nation that persistently disrupts communities’ identities and heritage.
From the perspective of the communities, the ongoing disputes with mines are about recovering home and holding on to a place of physical, emotional and spiritual return in a society that regards the land merely as storage for wealth and accumulation.
Mining-affected communities sacrifice their lives to defend their constitutional, land and heritage rights. The intervention of environmental justice organisations such as Groundwork, WoMin African Alliance, the Centre for Environmental Rights, Global Environmental Trust, Mining Affected Communities United In Action and others has helped shape campaigns and support litigation where necessary.
_— Dineo Skosana is a coal mining researcher at the Society, Work and Politics Institute. She holds a PhD in political science from the University of the Witwatersrand._
_This article was first published in [The Conversation](https://theconversation.com/moving-graves-and-people-for-coal-mines-the-devastating-costs-of-mining-in-south-africa-251005)_
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