reprinted with permission from [Matome Patrick Malatji]
Poison Fire, Sacred Earth,
TESTIMONIES, LECTURES, CONCLUSIONS,
THE WORLD URANIUM HEARING, SALZBURG 1992
pages 182-184
. . . the most profound question is: At whose expense and in whose
interest is the mining done in our area? At whose expense are our
people suffering? Is it not because of the German or the British
or the USA citizens?
Our people know very little about Rio Tinto. They know it only
as the Palabora Mining Company and they don't know that this is
one of the largest companies in the world which is committing all
those atrocities. Before I came here, I also didn't know about all
the dangers involved in radiation, but because of the knowledge
you shared with me, I'll go back home and tell our people about
what is the cause of their diseases, and from there we are going
to take up campaigns in an attempt to stop uranium mining in our
country.
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Father John (Moderator)
Now we go down south to South Africa. South Africa is about 43
million population, and about six millions are white, the rest are
blacks. So, I think South Africa will also have something to tell
us. Please, introduce yourself.
Matome P. Malatji
Matome Patrick Malatji, South Africa. Itereleng Educational
Project, Phalaborwa, South Africa.
My name is Matome Patrick Malatji, my country is South Africa, but
I'm not going to explain where it is because my comrade from
Namibia has done so. I am coming from a rural town in South Africa
called Palabora where Rio Tinto Zinc, the British owned company,
has one of its greatest investments in the world. With me is my
fellow-comrade, Strongman Mpangana, who is the Health Officer of
the National Union of Mineworkers of South Africa. My occupation
is that I'm a regional co-ordinator of a community development
organization which is nongovernmental, and we have several
educational programs in the area around which Rio Tinto is
extracting some wealth from our country and exporting it to
British and other European countries.
I'll not move straight to the actual mining activity at home,
because from quite a number of discussions which took place around
mills, around the table, it had come to our notice that there is a
kind of deliberate ignorance on the part of most of our European
friends here as to what is really happening down at home, as to
the political situation. Also, we have realized that most of our
friends here do not know how some of your descendants in South
Africa came into being. But what I want to indicate is that it was
not because of a miracle or God or an accident, but it was just
absolutely because of Europe's capitalist and imperialist values.
It was because of their intention to exploit some of our minerals
that we now have around six million white descendants of the
European Community in South Africa, who are giving us a hell of
terror in our everyday life. To give you a little summary of what
happened is that our subcontinent South Africa experienced a fast
European invasion in 1652, and this was done under the auspices of
the Dutch East Indian Company, lead by Jan van Ribbeck and later
Simon van der Stel. Uninvited, they started right away to
implement the European policies of "divide and rule" in our
country. They dispossessed our people, our forefathers through
taxes, you name them dog taxes, cattle taxes -- all male adults
had to pay taxes and they had to be paid by money. Therefore, our
people had to go to work. That was one strategy of proletarizing
them.
The so-called "tribal wars" were unknown to our people before
the Europeans arrived. This is very interesting because the first
war among our national groups in South Africa took place eight
years after Jan van Ribbeck had landed in our country. Our people
have always lived happily among themselves, there were
intermarriages as part of the structures that interlinked them,
and so forth.
The process of dispossessing our people and making them total
workers took approximately 250 years. Our people did not fold
their hands, but they fought through whatever means at their
disposal, using indigenous weapons, the spears, and the whites on
the other side using some sophisticated machinery weapons. In
1906, after the Bures had defeated our people under our King
Bambatha, and murdered him, they put his head on top of a spear
and went with it around our villages. This, of course, demoralized
our people and they laid down their spears to rest.
But before South Africa was unionized by Britain in 1910,
Pikslika Seme led an African delegation to meet with the British
authorities where they made explicitly clear that they want to be
involved in the decision-making process of their own country, that
they want a franchise which the Bures were depriving them of. But
of course, not to their surprise, the British authorities
legitimized the Union of South Africa and by so doing, deprived
our people of the franchise.
The ANC was then formed in 1912, and together with the other
existing organizations, for example the Natal Indian Congress
which was formed around 1894, the Transvaal Indian Congress and
many other unions together with the Congress of Democrats, led a
50 years' struggle and around 1961, our organization, the African
National Congress, which is one liberation movement in South
Africa, was banned together with the Pan Africanese Congress and
SACP, which was banned almost ten years before.
But during all these years of Apartheid exploitation, or at
least since 1948, when the Nationalist Party ruled, the Prime
Ministers or the Heads of State of South Africa have been almost
the same. Every new head of state has been worse than the other
and this does not end. De Klerk in this case is not an exception.
He is just as bad as the others. Mr. De Clerk, the President in
South Africa, who is a South African manager on behalf of the
United States of America and European countries, is not really an
exception. Since the banning of the ANC and the other political
organizations, PAC, the Communist Party of South Africa, more than
11,000 people have died; and he is responsible for that, for the
killings and the massacres of those people because he is actually
funding the whole process. He is actually having those murderers
trained by his senior police officers.
Well, one had to give you this legal summary. We are aware that
you are not really informed on what is happening at home. All this
has been done in the name of peace and justice, but the main
purpose has been the weakening of the African National Congress
and the whole South African Community and demoralizing many more
people in South Africa.
The first mine was discovered in 1886 where Britain was mining
the diamonds at Northern Cape, and later diamond was discovered
around the PWV [Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vaal] Area. Gold has been
mined alongside. And all the time, the gold minings which are
discovered around that time have been mined alongside. The product
has been gold and uranium.
And now to my area, which is Palabora. The Palabora Mining
Company is a copper and uranium mining industry, a British-owned
company under the auspices of the notorious Rio Tinto Zinc. This
is not the only uranium company around our area. There is JCI, the
Johannesburg Consolidated Investment, which has its mine about 30
kilometers away from our townships. There are yellow mining
mountains or cakes around us. People are made to stay right at the
foot of this yellow cake. Children play around and on top of this
yellow cake, barefoot and ignorant. Our people, young and old,
illiterate and literate, do the same thing. When it rains, the top
part of this waste is washed into the streams where it is then
drunk by the people, the animals and plants.
Our people are suffering from quite a number of diseases,
ranging from TB, throat and other diseases, eye problems, bone
diseases, kidney problems, cancers, that is stomach cancers as you
name them. They live on doctors' prescriptions and they do not
know the causes, they do not know that there is radiation which is
a killer-man around them. To them, the mining dumps, the yellow
cakes are just ordinary artificial mountains which are mining
dumps from their workplaces. They depend on this mine-industry
because the Palabora Mining Company is the main employer in the
area.
Those are not the only things that companies like the Palabora
Mining Company are doing in our area. The PMC has successfully
entrenched quite a lot of social divisions in our community. The
politics advocated by this company is that of "divide and rule"
and we are not surprised about this. They have built a very big
clinic in our township, and this clinic is for the sole use of the
mineworkers, their families and children -- in a population of
almost 120,000, that is the communities around Palabora. Just to
mention but a few. That is the clinic. They've got several other
recreational facilities. They'd not even use the community's
transport to transport their workers. But the most profound
question is: At whose expense and in whose interest is the mining
done in our area? At whose expense are our people suffering? Is it
not because of the German or the British or the USA citizens?
Our people know very little about Rio Tinto. They know it only
as the Palabora Mining Company and they don't know that this is
one of the largest companies in the world which is committing all
those atrocities. Before I came here, I also didn't know about all
the dangers involved in radiation, but because of the knowledge
you shared with me, I'll go back home and tell our people about
what is the cause of their diseases, and from there we are going
to take up campaigns in an attempt to stop uranium mining in our
country.
Thank you.
Father John (Moderator)
Thank you. We still have a second guest also from South Africa.
Please, introduce yourself.