Making and remaking life under threat: fenceline communities in eMalahleni, Mpumalanga

Abstract

In fenceline communities alongside coal extraction operations in South Africa, residents experience extreme environmental, social and economic conditions that can be traced to the country’s extractivist economy and race-based capitalist logic that created informal settlements in abandoned landscapes to which abandoned people have been relegated. These dystopian spaces present the immortality of coal’s impacts, even in its obsolete post-industrial extraction state. Because of this destruction, in addition to a lack of basic services and mass unemployment and underemployment, individuals are forced into a perpetual cycle of making and remaking life, underpinned by the afterlives of industrial coal extraction, and aggravated by the state’s relegation of impoverished families, who cannot afford formal housing, to abandoned and forsaken spaces. This article illustrates the extent of the deleterious effects of systematic environmental devastation on people whose lives have been historically and systematically devastated, and the ways in which their efforts to make life under such circumstances all too often turn out simply to reinforce their marginality and extreme vulnerability.