This is Part 2: A Mining Corporation, Eastern Cape Villagers and the Mineral-Rich Coastal Sands. For reasons that will soon be obvious, as you read on, I entitled it Men-On-Pause.

This week, I picked up where I left off last week, with the story of a proposed sand mining project in the Eastern Cape.

Alan Webber, author of the Rules of Thumb, is correct, “Stories are how we learn.”

Hence, I thought this week I should share an interesting short story within the bigger story from last week.

In South Africa, development has always been synonymous with mining. To deny this would be foolish.

That said, let me repeat what I said last week.

I don’t think that every mineral-bearing landscape in South Africa should be surrendered to the ambitions of opportunistic fortune hunters. Some of the landscapes hold homeplaces, memories, stories, livelihoods, and ecological rhythms that cannot be reduced to just minerals or profit margins.

Ill-advised mineral extraction can cause severe irreversible damage. The promise of value to be created for banking elsewhere can wipe out the very real value already being generated to sustain the everyday lives of local people.

Too often, conversations about development are fixated on what will be built or created by the so-called experts, while neglecting to consider what will be lost by the indigenous local people. Progress is narrowly defined as creation, even when it comes at the cost of destroying something else.

This is very wrong.

Stepping Into The Venue

As I stepped into the Wesley Community Hall two weeks ago, I immediately noticed that the concrete floor was damp throughout. I assumed the stagnant pool of rainwater in front of the hall was the source of the problem.

Inside, the meeting was well attended. From community representatives to non-governmental organizations and other interested parties.

As expected, the gathering opened with a hymn followed by a prayer. The prayer was led by a woman whose words brought to mind Louisiana Dunn‑Thomas, the African American poet and farm‑tenant mother from Siloam in Greene County, Georgia.

In her soulful poem, A Brighter Day Has Dawned, written more than 90 years ago, Dunn-Thomas wrote:

We are tenants of the Almighty

Entrusted with a portion of His earth

To dress and keep

And pass on to the next generation

When evening comes and we must fall asleep.

The poem offered an eloquent meditation to the question posed by the woman who led the prayer: “What kind of stewards shall we be if we permit the destruction of our local environment and our sources of livelihood?”

That question sets the tone for what many in attendance would subsequently vocalize as impending destruction — by Vendicom Minerals Beneficiation Group — of their local beaches, sand dunes, rangelands, and seaweed habitats.

In response to a proposal from the chairperson of the meeting, it was agreed that the meeting would be conducted in isiXhosa. To accommodate the white attendees, I was asked to be an unofficial interpreter.

The Unexpected Story About Menopause

Midway through the deliberations a middle-aged woman pulled me to the side and politely asked, “Tata, may I have a private word with you?”

I agreed and we immediately stepped outside.

“My name is Nomilile from the coastal Phozi village, on the banks of the Tsholomnqa River. I value the fact that you are an older Xhosa man. You strike me as someone who will truly understand what I wish to share with you.”

Before she could continue, I asked if I could record our conversation to help me remember it later.

“Yes, you may,” she agreed.

Then, without any disrespect intended, she asked me, “Do you know anything about menopause?”

Her question caught me completely off guard, so I chose to respond cautiously.

I said, “Of course, I know about it. But I must hasten to admit that, unlike women, I have no memory of ever experiencing it myself. So, take whatever I tell you with a pinch of salt.”

She explained further:

For most women, menopause is a very stressful and deeply emotional time. For rural women like me, it is even harder when the subject is treated as taboo. That is why, some years ago, in our coastal village, we formed a women-only seaweed harvesting cooperative. Its purpose was not only to harvest and sell seaweed, but also to provide mutual support for those of us navigating menopause.

Our cooperative is our refuge where we discuss issues affecting us. In my opinion, the meaning and significance of our seaweed harvesting cooperative cannot be reduced to monetary value alone. It should embody our midlife womanhood and emotions — things that only women can truly understand.

With this in mind, I need your quick guidance as an elder.

How do I explain to a group of unfamiliar men — inside this hall — our menopause story and its emotional connection to the seaweed along the coastline that they hope to dig out? How do I explain our unenviable struggles, as middle‑aged rural women in a patriarchal society, to sustain our livelihoods and ways of life without entirely relying on our men? Will they understand? Will they even care? How can I make those men understand that mining will destroy a support structure that we hope to pass onto our daughters?

As I write this note, I’m still grappling to find satisfactory answers. Because sharing is caring, I would love to hear your own thoughts on these vexing questions.

For now, what I can think of is the this:

What stories of this nature tell us is that there are many factors for which “account is not taken in the conventional financial calculus” of development projects. Such factors will most certainly not be modeled into the fancy calculations of the proposed sand mining project.

Holding My Horses

There were moments during the gathering when I felt the impulse to speak. But the voice inside my head kept reminding me to hold back my horses.

By choosing to remain silent, I created space for the local people to voice their own aspirations — for themselves, for their children, and for the Wesley village they call home.

I remembered the advice that Caryn van Stone gave Louise van Rhyn when she said: “I need you to know what happens to me when you are so certain. My voice goes completely silent because there is no space in your certainty for my voice to be heard. What I need you to do is to keep certainty more lightly.”

I, too, wanted “to keep my certainty more lightly.”

Collaborative Landscape Design

If I had summoned the courage to speak at the meeting, here are some of the things I would have said in the gathering about placemaking without mining.

You are better off with your coastline intact.

Echoing the words of Edward Said expressed in his memoir, Out of Place, I too would have asked the local community: What if living a rural lifestyle along this coastline is “a form of freedom”?

Mining will not make you — Mamfengu namaGqunukhwebe, who remain the spiritual and cultural caretakers and custodians of your homeplace — flourish by destroying the natural resources upon which your cherished way of life depends.

Mining may bring you some development. But what will be lost, as a result, will live an eternal emotional scar in your psyche. The debris and legacy that will remain after 20 years of mining is not worth the risks involved.

More than sand mining, what your community truly needs is Collaborative Landscape Design — a place-based approach to “placemaking” for all of Nature, including the humans who call this place home.

Urban Studies at MIT describes placemaking as “the deliberate shaping of an environment to facilitate social interaction and enhance a community’s quality of life.”

For now, I think that what this moment calls for is a clarion demand to place the mining men-on-pause until such time the local people have decided what "they want of the places where they live, work, learn and play - for themselves and the next generation."

Some of the landscapes hold homeplaces, memories, stories, livelihoods, and ecological rhythms that cannot be reduced to just minerals or profit margins.

Last week, I returned to KuGompo City to reconnect with friends. We scheduled to discuss all things Nguni cattle, cover crop establishment, and regenerative rotational grazing practices on a piece of ground that they identified for a possible grazing paddock.

While there, I was invited to join a planned trip to Wesley Village, 50 km south of the city, for a meeting on sand mining for heavy mineral extraction. The mere mention of mining suddenly rekindled the mineral extraction professional I had been more than three decades ago.

As the travel arrangements were being discussed, my thoughts turned to a passage from Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac.”

Leopold wrote:

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told.

For six years I worked in South Africa’s gold mining industry. That gave me a front row seat to witness firsthand the often‑underestimated consequences of prioritizing profits over the welfare of vulnerable communities: lingering dust from tailings dams, acid mine drainage, and countless sites left unrehabilitated.

With that knowledge, I felt a profound responsibility to share my lived experiences with the unsuspecting residents of Wesley Village, who might believe that the proposed sand mining could be a panacea for their development challenges.

Lest they too find themselves ‘living alone in a world of wounds because much of the damage to be inflicted on their land is still invisible to them.’

Arrival

On the morning of the meeting, our short journey began at Khala Moya, a rural estate nestled on a hillside near the coastal village of Kayser’s Beach. From there, we stopped near the township of Lilyvale to pick up one fellow traveler.

We joined the R72, the provincial freeway toward Wesley Village, before branching off to Ncerha village to collect two more fellow travelers. When we rejoined the R72, we were four kilometres beyond the point where we had first turned off.

From my front seat vantage, I found myself meditating about the quiet gifts of rural life—clean air, the simple joy of birdwatching, and the serenity that accompanies rural landscapes living.

We arrived at the Wesley Village community hall before 9:30 a.m. Before we proceeded to the meeting venue, we stopped by the roadside shop to buy homemade pies. As we stopped, two young boys politely approached us, asking for something to eat.

As we dug deep into our pockets and purses for small change, the moment brought to mind Mandela’s 1993 address at Clark University in Atlanta, Georgia when he said, “We do not want freedom without bread, nor bread without freedom.” And yet, here we stood—thirty-three years on—struggling to feed young children who remain the casualties of ‘freedom without bread.’

Since the gathering was not scheduled to begin for another hour, upon our arrival at the meeting venue, I took the opportunity to visit the old local church that had also served as a school.

Established in 1823 by William Shaw of the Wesleyan Missionary Society in 1823, it was likely named in honour of John Wesley, the founder of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. To my surprise, not only was the church still standing after all these years, but the old general dealer remained as well.

Outside the Venue

When I returned to the venue, more people had arrived and already trickling into the venue. As I approached, three things immediately drew my attention.

First, I noticed a group of men and women in Community Works Programme (CWP) overalls sitting on a brick wall beside the hall. When I spoke to a few of them, I was struck by their general lack of enthusiasm for the uninspiring primary work that they were recruited to perform—collecting discarded paper and plastic—and for which they receive a small stipend.

Second, I was also struck by the unused land around the community hall—land that could be cultivated to strengthen food security rather than being left fallow. Because food production encompasses many educational dimensions—soil health, cultivation techniques, and the transformation of organic waste into soil fertility—establishing a community supported market garden would offer far greater value and appeal to the CWP workers than the monotonous task of collecting litter.

Third, the community hall in Wesley Village is situated under a huge stand of blue gum trees. Over time, some of the large trees had been felled down to thin the stand. Those felled trees are now lying on the ground. But not chopped for either wood or wood chips.

What all of this means is that Wesley Village already possesses the essential resources it needs to produce organic compost, Red Wiggler worms, biochar, firewood, vermicompost, and other soil amendments — both for local vegetable production and for sale to gardeners and nurseries. None of this is rocket science.

Creating rural youth employment can be as straightforward as turning waste into soil amendments that feed local schools and local households.”

So, last week as I stepped into the Wesley Village community hall, my thoughts drifted away from sand mining. Instead, I was absorbed by the idea of Kidlinks Small Farm Incubator (KSFI), which I helped to established in 2020, partnering with the Wesley Village community to establish a market garden — a place where young people could learn to value kinship with the land, soil biology, and the non-human relatives beneath their feet. Even better, they could sink their hands into the soil and leave with fresh produce to nourish themselves.”

Next week I will share part two: What I almost told the gathering about placemaking without mining.

Let me begin this edition with a fair warning. What follows may unsettle denialists and those readers who prefer to avoid uncomfortable truths. Caution and maturity are advised.

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