At Tweefontein Colliery Complex, 25 km south-west of Witbank in Mpumalanga province, lie graves that will be impacted by multinational commodities and mining company Glencore PLC (Glencore) open-cast coal mine expansion plan. The Tweefontein farm, and several other farms such as Boschmansfontein and Klipplaat, are sites of formal and informal cemeteries with graves that belong to former migrant labourers and labour tenants from South Africa and Mozambique. The change of Glencore's mining method from underground to open-cast mining disturbs about a thousand graves, which are legally protected by the National Heritage Resources Act, Act 25 of 1999 (NHRA). The negotiations about the grave relocations began with the affected families in 2011, but the relocations commenced in 2012, before these were concluded. This ignited a dispute between the mine and the owners of the graves.

South Africa's Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act, Act 28 of 2002 (MPRDA) gives particularly strong rights over land to those who are licensed by the state to mine (see Capps, Beinart in this volume). While contradictions between mining legislation and the heritage law provide a context to the contestations over graves, this chapter explains why grave relocations are sensitive from the perspective of the owners of the graves. I draw on interviews to argue that ancestral remains are mediators of life and death for the living. They are evidence of a history that is entangled with narratives of land dispossession, restoration and contested forms of evidence in the current political dispensation. Graves validate belonging for those whose status was historically disregarded. I first present a description of the grave relocation process and then explore the idea of graves as a body of evidence in the post-apartheid era.

To explain why graves are subject to contestations, my interviews delved into the families’ experiences of the removal of their ancestral graves and the reburial of their remains. My questions probed, amongst other things, ideas and issues related to consultation, access to information and awareness of legal cultural rights. I also intended to evaluate inconsistencies and irregularities in the application of legal provisions in the NHRA and MPRDA. I conducted 14 interviews with the families whose graves were relocated by Glencore. It was imperative to first understand why the deceased were buried on the Tweefontein farm.