In February 1994, Green Left Weekly's Johannesburg-based correspondent, Norm Dixon, attended a meeting to launch a branch of South Africa's fledging Environmental Justice Networking Forum (EJNF). The meeting was held at Vista University in Soweto and brought together mainly young activists keen to do something about the appalling state of Soweto's environment.
The primary goal of participants was to unite the struggle to solve South Africa's, and the world's, environmental problems with the struggle of the South African people for liberation. Three years later, the EJNF has become one of the most vibrant and critical components of South Africa's mass movement, reports EDDIE KOCH from the South African Weekly Mail.
When EJNF founding member Chris Albertyn was travelling around the country with a team of environmentalists to research a new policy paper last year, he met Kraai van Niekerk, former National Party (NP) minister of agriculture, in Cape Town. Said Kraai: "You people are just like unripe tomatoes, green and bitter."
Retorted Albertyn: "You should look out because when tomatoes mature they go red."
The flippant prophecy has, to a large extent, been fulfilled. That year the EJNF sprouted into one of the country's most robust forces for social change.
Albertyn is best known — and feared — for his fiery confrontations with NP and African National Congress government ministers over the import of toxic waste into South Africa. Last year his organisation announced, on the very day that former environment minister Dawie de Villiers was due to open a major national conference, that a ship laden with Finish toxic waste was headed for our shores. The ship was forced to turn around, de Villiers retired into relative obscurity after his party left the government, and the EJNF went from strength to strength.
When the organisation found that the government, minus the NP, was still sneaking toxic waste into the country from neighbouring African states, Albertyn and his cohorts again entered the fray. They challenged trade and industry minister, South African Communist Party (SACP) member Alec Irwin, to give a detailed account of what was in the shipments and to say why the policy of his government and the ANC was apparently being flouted.
"Alec Irwin has promised to meet us with the parliament's environment portfolio committee twice but has cancelled the meetings. Now his department has invited us to sit on an advisory committee to deal with trade and the environment. They've tried to make a small concession but they haven't really addressed the issue", Albertyn said.
Although these high profile encounters with people in power — regardless of their political affiliations — have established a reputation for the EJNF as one of the most vibrant "watchdog" organisations in the country, Albertyn points out the EJNF's real achievement lies elsewhere: in creating a movement that allows ordinary men and women to realise that their struggle for a better life is inextricably linked to the environmental abuse they experience.
"People tend to see us as a fiery opposition organisation but, in fact, that's only about 10% of what we do. The most remarkable successes are the ones that go unnoticed, getting people and organisations to work within the network, which provides the foundation for a show of strength when it's needed", says Albertyn.
"We set ourselves the target of having 180 member organisations in 1997. We now have more than 330 [including the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the SACP]. Over the last year there has been a massive increase in the number of people who are questioning what is happening to their environment and integrating it into their broader social struggles."
Albertyn can rattle off numerous examples: a rural community near Brits in the North-West province leased some land to Union Carbide for a vanadium mine in the 1960s. In return, they got R1000 a month [A$200] and poisoned underground water. Today mine tailings blow into their homes and lungs and many have kidney disorders and chest diseases.
"They were dispossessed and that dispossession resulted in degradation of their environment", says Albertyn. "As green issues like this have come to our attention it has become clear that they are deeply linked to social, political and economic matters.
"It is only if workers and poor people who are the majority of the electorate push for an end to environmental abuse that it will happen. And the only way for that to happen is to highlight the way social and economic issues affect the environment. That is why you can say our green movement now has a tint of red in it."
This does not mean that the EJNF is simply a confrontational pressure group. "We walk a tightrope between being independent and opposing government, and cooperating. We exhaust all avenues for cooperation and it's only when these fail that we throw the etiquette book out of the window and go for confrontation."
Another example: A small home for the disabled in Mpumalanga province established a thriving vegetable garden until the nearby mine diverted the water. "Now it looks like a desert. We took it up through the network with the government and within six days engineers were there to sort out the problem. They did it themselves, but through the solidarity that the EJNF offers."
While it was dealing with local struggles around unfairness in various parts of the countryside, last year the EJNF concentrated mainly on developing good environmental policy. It played a major role in formulating the Green Paper for the environment that is currently being discussed before being drafted into a White Paper and a new set of environmental laws.
This year, EJNF's national office is recruiting new staffers to manage an "information clearing house" and handle requests for help from the burgeoning number of member organisations and unorganised communities around the country.
Does this mean the EJNF has become the Greenpeace of South Africa? "Not at all", retorts Albertyn. "They have become much like a corporate organisation while we are a network owned and directed by its participants, which is much more than Greenpeace ever will be."