About 80% of South Africa’s electricity still comes from burning coal. The country’s 108 coal mines have resulted in many communities being forced off their land from the 1970s to date. They have not only lost their homes and land, but have suffered the trauma of their ancestral graves being exhumed and relocated.

This is the subject of No Last Place to Rest: Coal Mining and Dispossession in South Africa by coal mining researcher Dineo Skosana. We spoke to her about her new book.

Coal mining affects communities in the Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo provinces. The coal seams there supply thermal coal (coal that’s burnt to run electricity turbines) and higher quality anthracite coal, used locally for the production of steel and other products that are mainly exported. Both are important to South Africa’s energy system and the country’s economy.

In my book, I describe coal mining as South Africa’s paradox. It is the source of the country’s energy system. But it is also central to the dispossession of African communities who live in these areas of extraction. Their lives are sacrificed to keep our energy system and the economy going.

My book focuses on two regions, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal provinces. Communities in these provinces have lost their homes, land, and land-based livelihoods, such as sugarcane farms and their livestock selling businesses.

Open-cast mining, where coal is dug out of the ground through a giant, open pit, destroys habitats. South Africa has many of the largest open pit mines in the world. When these were established, a large number of homes and graves had to be relocated.

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One of the major problems is that mining companies and heritage management companies increasingly recommend household and grave relocations as a way of mitigating the damage caused by open-pit mining.

But in reality, relocating homes and graves subjects communities to poverty and dehumanisation. Yet no academic studies highlight the magnitude of this problem in South Africa.

My book illustrates that dispossession did not end when colonialism and apartheid ended. It continues today.

I collected oral accounts from people living in these mining-affected communities. My book analyses what it means to lose the land, and challenges the idea that land is only a material asset. I argue that the land and access to it provides dignity, belonging, emotional and spiritual well-being.

My book tells the stories of people who have been relocated both from privately owned commercial farms and tribal land since the 2000s. Communities who live on tribal land, under the governance of traditional leaders, are customarily buried at their homesteads. Labour tenants – people who work on commercial farms in exchange for living on and using the land – have historically been buried on these farms.

Both groups only have informal rights to the land they live on. When a coal mine sets up, their homes and ancestors’ graves are often relocated. As one participant I interviewed said,

I did not want to leave, so they packed my things as I sat and watched them. They never issued a date. They simply showed up on the day. Inside the truck, they combined my things with my neighbours’.

Communities in South Africa’s rural Somkhele in KwaZulu-Natal spoke about the loss of their land and ancestral graves to Tendele coal mine in 2023:

The land is our bed. We sleep on it. Everyone. Now, when the mine dispossesses the land, where must we, Black people, sleep?

The people of Somkhele also explained that economically, the loss of land forced them into precarious and exploitative wage labour and left many to depend on very low social grants.

My book describes how the dehumanisation of being moved to make way for a coal mine affects both the living and their ancestors. One family recounted:

They used pickaxes to dig. One of ours (a buried person) was still covered in their blanket when they were exhumed. They (the mine) provided prison-like blankets for our remains, not the kind of blankets we had buried them in. Others had fossilised, and their remains had turned into soil. They placed the soiled remains on the prison-like blankets.

The trauma of watching family members’ graves being relocated affected people psychologically and spiritually. Many recounted that they became spiritually restless. They started seeing their loved ones in dreams because these ancestors were not happy at having been physically and spiritually disturbed.

The loss caused by displacement is intangible, and irreparable. It leads to what I describe as spiritual dislocation, as detailed by a recent clinical psychologist’s report into the psychosocial impacts of coal mining.

There is currently no law regulating how households can be moved to make way for mines. However, the rights of communities to refuse mining operations must be respected. Mining companies need to set up genuine negotiated processes that honour the views and choices of everyone affected before they build coal mines.

Society and the powerful must recognise that when communities contest the theft of their land, this is because land is not only an economic asset. It is part of a broader claim for a sense of belonging in a nation that persistently disrupts communities’ identities and heritage.

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From the perspective of the communities, the ongoing disputes with mines are about recovering home, and holding on to a place of physical, emotional and spiritual return in a society that regards the land merely as storage for wealth and accumulation.

Mining-affected communities sacrifice their lives to defend their constitutional, land and heritage rights. The intervention of environmental justice organisations such as Groundwork, WoMin African Alliance, the Centre for Environmental Rights, Global Environmental Trust, Mining Affected Communities United In Action and others has helped shape campaigns and support litigation where necessary.

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The No Last Place to Rest cover photograph was taken by Simon Gush, an artist, filmmaker and a researcher at the Society, Work and Politics Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand.