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By Daylin Paul
(South Africa)
Editor's note:
Daylin Paul is an award-winning South African photographer, author, and environmentalist dedicated to fighting for justice, whether it be on an individual, community, social, or climate level. His amazing body of work can be viewed at https://www.daylinpaul.com/.
Broken Land, Daylin Paul
THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPH in my book Broken Land (Jacana, 2019) is of the ruins of a gateway into a demolished Ndebele village. This long-abandoned place, its people relocated to modern government housing many kilometers away, was sacrificed to make way for a coal mine. The mine dumps now loom omnipresent in the background of this shattered village, a once-lively place whose history, art, and people (along with their connection to the land they once occupied) is now broken.
When the idea of making a photo book about coal mining in my native South Africa first occurred to me, my interest was initially on the environmental and climate change aspects of industries that extract and burn coal to generate electricity for a power-desperate developing nation. However, I soon realized that colonialism, capitalism, and power were inextricably linked and involved in the process.
In the colonial-capitalist worldview, land, water, trees, animals, and people are only valuable for their economic worth. Or, simply put, as commodities. Land is valuable only in terms of what can be built, produced, or extracted from beneath it. Water means irrigation or a dumping spot for pollution and sewage, trees equal timber, animals are livestock or hunting trophies, and people are reduced to labor or, more precisely, consumer-workers.
In many ways, South Africa is the perfect example of how colonialism and capitalism – left to their own devices – can change the trajectories of entire civilizations. Consider that, in the case of European powers desperate to reach Indian spices, the Cape of Good Hope (as Cape Town was first called) was established by the Dutch East India Company as a vital halfway house. Its Company Gardens (which still stand today) were meant to provide fresh produce for sailors rounding the Cape to reach Asia. Slaves, mostly from other Dutch East India "outposts" in Malaysia and other island nations, were brought to Africa to tend these gardens and provide the necessary labor needed to sustain the company's enterprises.
The discovery of diamonds in Kimberley and the gold in the Witwatersrand rapidly changed the strategic importance of South Africa. What resulted was two wars between the British and the Boers (Europeans from the Netherlands, Germany, and France who had formed a new national identity in Africa as "Afrikaners"). In subsequent efforts to mend lingering mistrust between these groups following the cessation of hostilities, the Union of South Africa was created, whose economic and social policies helped British and Afrikaners form a new identity known as "Europeans" in Africa.
These policies were at the expense of the indigenous Black population and the descendants of the Malaysian slaves and Indian indentured laborers who had been imported into the east coast province of Natal to work sugar cane plantations. Black people suffered most, though, and amongst the most insidious of pre-apartheid policies was that of the Hut Tax, which forced Black people to find jobs (mostly in the mines) within the colonial system to pay levies for homes and land they had hitherto lived on peacefully for hundreds of years.
It was via this colonial system (undergirded by forced labor) that the nation-state of South Africa was formed. The South African project was designed to benefit Europeans, albeit off the labor of non-Europeans living second-class lives. Thus, it is hardly surprising that, after the Second World War and with the British Empire's power waning, right-wing Nationalists won political power by electioneering on the promise of a new system designed to entrench hyper colonial-capitalism system further. This would tragically come to life in the form of Apartheid.
It is within this context that I was born, in 1985, during the last State of Emergency enacted by the crumbling Apartheid regime. The descendant of Indian indentured laborers who had given up their country, families, and even their religion and identities to become Anglican "British-Indians" in Africa. Growing up in the segregated Indian township of Chatsworth, my earliest memories are of being surrounded by those who looked, spoke, and ate as I did. I was unaware of any other reality until I started school. In the early 90s, the South African government opened schools that had previously been 'Whites-only' for all children. It was on my school playground and in its classrooms where I was first made to feel "different", "other," and perhaps most profoundly, "less".
If Decoloniality begins anywhere, it starts in the minds of colonized people. A quote by Steve Biko has always served as a guiding light in dark times:
"Being black is not a matter of pigmentation, but being black is a reflection of a mental attitude. Blacks are those who are by law or tradition politically, economically, and socially discriminated against as a group in South African society and identifying themselves as a unit in the struggle towards the realization of their aspirations."
My work as a photographer has allowed me to travel to many parts of this world. Most of these places exist in "developing" (i.e., previously colonized) countries, where inequality, poverty, and suffering are rife. In recent years, I've come to specialize in environmental and climate justice. More often than not, I have found these causes overlap with social justice. It is no accident that the same forces pushing humanity to the brink of extinction through climate change believe they are doing nothing wrong and that their industrialized vision of the world will bring "progress" and "development" to the world at large.
Decoloniality is an integral aspect of this fight for survival. With it comes respect for different cultures and forms of knowledge, specifically indigenous knowledge that is inextricably linked to the lands producing them. The world is more connected now than ever, yet our connection with the world is undeniably broken. I believe Decoloniality's mission is to reconnect that which colonialism and capitalism have broken: our relationship with people and the planet over the literal and figurative poison that is profits.
Questions for Reflection:
Reflecting on what Daylin wrote, do you believe you possess the empathic capacity to truly appreciate the 'African condition'? By this, I mean: through Daylin's description of South African history and how it has molded the present, can you understand why so much inequality exists in South Africa, and why its disenfranchised people do whatever they can to at best achieve socio-economic parity and at minimum a life resembling something worth living?