Normally a report about miners being unwelcome is full of sad tales of aboriginals who protest the disturbance of the forests and sacred vales. Normally one feels a passing sadness and empathy for the primitive peoples about to be yanked into the new century, and deprived of a supposedly idyllic, albeit primitive lifestyle.
Here is a story that tests the limits of sympathy and puts a spotlight on one’s attitude to tearing up farms, forest, and innocent lifestyles so that we may develop a zinc mine. This is the story, written about in detail at this link:
A major row is brewing between some Western Cape wine estate owners and African Exploration Mining & Finance Corporation (AEMFC) over the state-owned company’s plans to start mining on farms in the Stellenbosch and Cape Town municipal areas. News last week of an application by AEMFC for rights to prospect for and possibly mine tin, zinc, lead, lithium, copper, manganese and silver on the farms angered wine farmers, residents and environmental groups. They have voiced concern that mining could disturb ecodiversity, and affect tourism and the quality of wines produced in the region.
Like all such stories from primitive nations, this story pits the innocent farmers, mostly of a different color and a different tribe against a rapacious and probably corrupt government composed of people of a different tribe and color. As is so often the case, we see a greedy governments ready to deprive the locals of a way of life they love and value, some would say hold sacred, just so the central government and its cronies, can get their hands deeper into the honey pot.
One part of one’s instinct say “there go the locals again, resisting the benefits of mining; can’t they yield for the greater good so we can all enjoy the benefits that flow from mining.” Read this and tell me if it does not sound like all those reports coming out of Peru, Chile, India, and the deep forests of Africa:
Jordan said there were seven major wine estates that stood to be affected by the state mining company’s move, and these included prominent farms such as Hooggelegen, De Grendel, Langverwacht and Haasendal. All of these farms were members of the Bottelary Renosterbos Conservancy, a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation biodiversity site. The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) said the areas affected formed part of landowner conservancies, established by wine farmers to conserve and promote awareness of the region’s biodiversity. Inge Kotze of WWF’s Biodiversity & Wine initiative, said these landowners had invested significantly in removing invasive vegetation and rehabilitating the area for the past decade, and were among the first to be recognised as Biodiversity & Wine members. “Not only would mining in this area have a massive impact on the conservation of biodiversity, but it would have major economic impacts on on booming wine tourism, along with significant job losses,” Kotze said.
There go those vine huggers again. Better get out and stock up on their wines before they make way for the bulldozers. Although I am ready to join the NGOs this time as a consultant to go out and test the wines both before and after mining.
Maybe this is just the thin edge of the wedge in nationalization of all South African mining and wine farms. Why expropriated the mines and/or the wine farms, when you can scare the whites away with threats of zinc and tin mines of your own? And the good thing is that here the government is both the proposer and judge of the permit. So very African.
I cannot help but wonder if the fact that the potentially dispossesed are white wine farmers living in a near perfect place producing luxury goods, does not influence me in thinking differently than I sometimes do when the potentially displaced are primitives living a brutal life and producing nothing but drum beats by way of culture. Call me a racist if you will. My response to this kind of scares me, I admit. But I ask you to face your own reflection and ask how you initially respond to this news and ask if you should be permitted to respond differently to tribes in the winelands as compared to tribes in the jungles.
Here are links to two other reports on this story:
Dad,
When you travel to SA to taste the wine, let me know. Laurie and I will go…
Love
Russ