THE STEEL VALLEY CRISIS COMMITTEE

On a hot Saturday morning in the summer of 2003, about 80 people crowded into a small garage on the outskirts of Vanderbijlpark. Packed closely together on wooden benches and sitting on the concrete floor, they seemed to represent our ‘Rainbow Nation’, including black and white smallholders and workers from the surrounding area.

The occasion was a meeting of the Steel Valley Crisis Committee (SVCC), a group formed in 2002 to indict Iscor for its pollution of the air and water of the area, which had resulted in loss of livelihoods and serious health problems, allegedly ranging from kidney disease to cancer for at least 500 people. The smoking stacks and dust from large dark slag heaps meant that the air pollution was clearly visible, but the planned indictment focused on hidden, toxic substances in the groundwater on which everyone in the area depended.

Despite the heat and uncomfortable seating, all the people present listened intently as the legal team, led by Margie Victor, explained what the legal processes would involve. The meeting seemed like a vindication of the triumphalist claims sometimes made about the contemporary environmental movement: an illustration of the capacity of environmental issues to overcome ethnic, racial and class divisions and unite various ‘particularistic identities’ in a common cause. One of them was an elderly man, now 74, a practising priest and sangoma, Strike Matsepo, whose smallholding adjoins the Iscor slag heap that dominates the sky line.

Matsepo worked as a mechanic at the Coca-Cola factory in Vanderbijlpark and cashed in his pension to buy a smallholding in the area in 1990. ‘This was at the time of Mandela when people could buy where they liked’, he said.2 He brought his large extended family, including his sister Alinah, to live with him in his new home, and states proudly, ‘a big sack of mealie meal was finished in two weeks.’ He says, ‘it used to be a good place.’ But in the past 15 years several of his animals were born with birth defects, and many have died from what he claims is contaminated water: ‘In all, 30 cows, 9 calves, 5 sheep, 6 goats, 3 tortoises, 7 dogs, 2 cats, 1 pig and 20 chickens have died.’ Matsepo himself recently spent six weeks in hospital with kidney failure, and presently suffers from tiredness and lack of concentration.