by
Worldwatch Institute on May 12, 1990
Apartheid has been as disastrous for South Africa's environment as for its
people, according to a new study by the Worldwatch Institute.
"Institutionalized racism has polluted the air and water, pillaged the
bedrock, and ripped away the earth in wide regions of South Africa," said
Alan B. Durning, author of
Apartheid's Environmental Toll and a Senior
Researcher at Worldwatch, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization.
Apartheid has turned the "homelands"--where half the black population is
forced to live--into ecological wastelands, according to Durning.
To generate the funds the white minority needs to enforce apartheid,
Pretoria has allowed mines to ignore common safety and pollution
precautions.
A pariah to most oil exporters, South Africa has developed an energy policy
that makes it among the most polluting nations of its size.
Last, its wars against neighbors opposed to minority rule have devastated
endangered plant and animal species.
"Today, with apartheid's grip on the nation weakening, it is time for a full
reckoning of its ecological toll," Durning said.
Under apartheid, half of South Africa's 29 million blacks--primarily
women, children, and the elderly--have been pushed onto 13 percent of
the national territory euphemistically called "homelands."
"By design, these areas are remote, their topsoil is thin, rainfall
scarce and unreliable, and the ground sloping and rocky. Suffering
under politically enforced overpopulation--ten times the population
density of white rural areas--the homelands are among the world's most
degraded regions."
Enormous erosion gullies criss-cross the topography, and in some areas
the topsoil has been worn down to bedrock. In 1980, 46 percent of the
Ciskei homeland, for instance, was already moderately to severely
eroded.
Forests are disappearing rapidly too. The kwaZulu homeland has lost
200 of its 250 distinct tracts of woodland in the past half century.
In the homelands as a group, fuelwood gathering outpaced regeneration
in the early eighties and will strip the land bare within 30 years-unless apartheid ends.
"South Africa is the Saudi Arabia of minerals," according to Durning.
"But, because mining is the backbone of the embattled apartheid
economy, the industry is little regulated. Black townships and
squatter settlements bear the brunt of mining's environmental ills,
drinking contaminated water and breathing polluted air.
"Blacks also suffer underground. For every ton of gold South Africa
extracts, a black miner dies in an accident that would have been
unlikely in other countries. Asbestos miners labor in similarly
perilous conditions."
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