Dump site in South Africa.

Indeed, today Zamdela is one of the many black South African towns that is bearing the brunt of the problems associated with the country’s coal industry, and, with South Africa being more dependent on its coal than ever before, Zamdela’s residents face an uphill battle in restoring the health of their town.

According to Desmond D’Sa, Chair of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, these environmental costs are due to the industry’s disregard for the black Africans who live near factories like those in Zamdela. Under a policy he calls “environmental racism,” black Africans are left to use only the more harmful, low-quality coal for their energy needs while Sasol converts the more valuable coal to liquid gasoline for wealthier buyers. “While Sasol makes gas and fuel, its suffering neighbors are forced to use dirty coal in their homes for heating and power. This is what we refer to as a double standard.”

Environmental Apartheid

Sasol—which supplies South Africa with 77 percent of its energy today—began making fuel from coal in 1955, capitalizing on generous government subsidies, the abundance of South African coal, and the cheap labor it found among the black African population, who fell outside South African labor laws. In later years, the coal-toliquid process became an even more viable alternative to oil when, in the 1980s, an international embargo meant that the country could not purchase oil from abroad.

The situation is not unique. Throughout South Africa’s coal industry, pre-democracy policies have proven too profitable to repeal. Since coal is one of the country’s main energy resources and export products, the government continues to support Sasol and the coal mining industry. It no longer provides subsidies, but it does little to enforce crucial environmental protection laws that would limit Sasol’s productivity. According to Sunita Dubey, a coordinator for the environmental monitoring NGO groundWork, “The government does not want too much environmental monitoring because it doesn’t want to stifle development.”

Tristen Taylor, of the NGO Earthlife Africa, added that coal industry enjoys a huge advantage in South Africa. “South Africa generates the vast majority of its electricity from low-grade coal,” she said. “This has resulted in the cheapest electricity in the world, designated not to service citizens but large industry and mines, that receive electricity at very cheap rates.” For Sasol, this cheap coal is used to maximize profit. And, as its needs for coal increase, the coal mining industry must continue keeping mining costs down, which it achieves by mining low-grade coal, paying its workers poorly, and taking little action to limit environmental damage.

Health problems are the most poignant indicators of coal’s impact on the local communities. D’Sa believes that use of lowgrade coal has resulted in a significant rise in lethal respiratory illnesses among South African communities. He showed the Globalist medical prescriptions—penned in scrawled handwriting— that cited sulfur emissions from refineries as a cause of aggravated forms of respiratory diseases. Many people, he claimed, have become sick. “From the evidence it is clear that respiratory diseases have increased,” he said, explaining that asthma, leukemia, and other forms of cancer are all on the rise.

Entrenched Inequality

The poor conditions in low-income black neighborhoods can be traced back to laws as old as the Native Lands Act of 1913, passed to restrict black Africans to reserves and away from white towns. Although the laws have been repealed, their effects remain. Many black Africans continue to live along the lines drawn by apartheid, resulting in the continuation of environmental and health degradation in historically black communities. These conditions persist, groundWork expert Sunita Dubey explained, because the low-income black communities affected continue to have “little political voice.”

Similarly, landfills piled high with ash from burnt coal, containing poisonous materials such as arsenic and barium, are not an uncommon sight near black communities. Factories and refineries are found across the street from playgrounds. And D’Sa has series of pictures of the children who have died from their illnesses.