Invasion: part 1 Ghostland
Film Title: Obliterated 5’54
I had a lot of trouble trying to write this.
This work has two very different audiences. Those that live in the US and Europe who have watched South Africa on television, and those that live within the borders of South Africa. The former see South Africa as a Success Story. The story has been completed and that book has been closed. Those viewers will enjoy this the film Obliterated, it seems to echo the success of a kind of democracy they believe is being practiced in their own cultures and countries. However the film only hints at the present and the future, it is a reordering of thoughts from the past with hindsight.
Whilst I was undertaking my research for this part of the Invasion Project, I ordered a South African History textbook from 1971. Ten minutes after the order confirmation came through, I canceled the order.
I have been searching for one of these textbooks for years, wondering where they had all disappeared to. I felt eager to prove how my history had been limited, censored, and repeatedly taught. These textbooks had disappeared at the end of the apartheid as if the past had never happened. Some people’s memories seemed to have done the same. I feared my memories were starting to become questionable. My past seemed more unbelievable the longer I lived in England.
I remember being taught the voortrekker journey towards the interior twice in my education and very little else.
Had I been taught this?
Or had I imagined it?
However, once I had finally found a history book from 1971, my hand froze over the ‘add to basket’ button. In order to possess the old history of South Africa textbook, with its distinctions between ‘white’, ‘coloured’, ‘bantu’ written without conscience. I felt the fear of being called a ‘racist’ once again. I was ractist because I came from South African to Britain at the time people were learning about apartheid in Europe. Once ‘racist’ has been uttered, the word sticks, it takes away all legitimacy from any proceeding thoughts you may speak of after the event.
Being called a racist made me mute in England.
Unable to speak about my past.
Unable to say anything reliable.
Whatever I said would be ‘wrong’.
(Google was not as widespread in 1998 to provide fact checking on-the-go.)
I reminded myself that times have changed. People have forgotten South Africa and South Africans. It has become a completed story, it is a success story, and it has disappeared into the pages of European and US history books.
The reality is murkier and nothing short of the continuation of people acting in avarice.
The road my father drove me through 20 years ago was a barren land that was difficult to cultivate.
It was the prehistory basin for a great river that thundered through the Southern Africa continent and left mineral deposits in its wake.
It was the cattle grazing plains of the San people.
It was Cecil Rhodes annexed land from the ‘Native Land Act in 1913’ removing any ownership from the local inhabitants into the hands of the colonisers.
It was the secretive, giant diamond mining corporation, Anglo America or their subsidiary De Beers, disallowing men to live anywhere on the land
It was the creation of towns, solely for the purpose to feed the mines, and dislocating families miles away from each other.
It is at this point that the world stops looking at South Africa.
However, time does not stop.
Once the underground monuments had been mined nearly into extinction, De Beers forewent their legal responsibility to refill the mines and restore the land. Instead, they sold their property to smaller, independent mine companies or left the mines completely.
Empty land, empty towns, empty mines.
Not quite empty mines - just not enough diamonds for the leviathan to turn its head back around once it had gone forward to Botswana.
In its wake, old mines were pilfered by opportunistic men who died when the tunnel collapsed. De Beers rescued those left alive by ‘paying for the rescue operation’ despite their lack of responsibility for failing to close the mine. Gamsberg mine, a smaller mine bought a pit from Anglo America (the largest shareholder of De Beers) and suffered a landslide in 2020, which went unreported. A dam collapsed near the Jagersfontein old mine due to structural failure of the land. De Beers denied responsibility, as they had sold the mine 50 years ago.
Many of the mines have golf clubs. A leisure sport for the wealthy but also a demonstration of the power to cultivate a lawn in the desert. The land cannot be farmed and yet green lanes can be built for a golf match once a week.
The Mandela myth invested so much hope towards the future but structural geological damage in the land echoed in the structural damage taking seed in the government. At the mouth of the Orange River is Alexander Bay, a state-owned diamond mine. A failure of a mine due to government corruption. Further along the river is an Eskom substation, another state-owned energy entity, corrupted by state officials, cutting off power for hours at a time because of pilfered funds. The words ‘State Capture’ were coined after the 9-year rule of President Zuma. He stands trial for selling and personally profiting a great deal of state property and resources.
Further down the coast from Alexander Bay is Honderklip Bay, a fishing village, left with unemployed fishermen who drink and watch the sea. They are forbidden to fish. Their fishing rights were sold to the big trawler companies by the Mbeki government. Next to the village are the deserted diamond pits of de Beers.
A forbidden warning sign is posted on the beach.
However, no one can stop you from entering a deserted mine.
And no one can stop you from falling into the pits of the past
...here we enter the Ghostland.