This chapter explores the history of the Boksburg municipal social-ecological system from the early 1900s until 2008, when the Schools for a Sustainable Environment (SSE) initiative began. It is a case study of a modern social-ecological system that is currently experiencing high social and biophysical risk after decades of economic growth and urban development (Beck 1992). The chapter records an historical narrative of the Boksburg Lake social-ecological system to provide the context for identifying key generative mechanisms driving the current degradation of the Boksburg Lake social-ecological system (research goal 2). This prepares the ground for chapter 7, which explores processes of learning and change within a social- ecological system at risk.
To provide context to the historical narrative, a brief overview of South Africa’s modern history is first provided.
6.1.1 South Africa’s modern history Introduction
South Africa’s history of social, political and economic relations has impacted considerably on social-ecological dynamics as narrated by Sparks (1990). He has been selected as the primary source for this section on South African history as he provides a critical and thorough account of ideologies underlying social-ecological system dynamics in South Africa. It is a history that vividly portrays the power of ideologies, particularly those entrenched with racism and attitudes of alienation towards people who are different, and how these shape social-ecological dynamics. These ideologies were institutionalised in Apartheid, and had particular consequences for social, political and economic relations that impacted South Africa’s landscape (and soulscape).
The three main actors
Sparks (1990) identifies three main categories of social actors who each bring a unique
namely Africans, Afrikaners and the British. The San are not included in the discussion because, although they epitomise a society with positive social-ecological relations, they were largely destroyed as a group and have thus played a marginalised role in South Africa’s modern social-ecological system.
The Nguni and Sotho/ Tswana were the two main linguistic groups of Africans who moved into South Africa. Traditionally they lived a communal and subsistence existence that expressed a deep attachment to and reliance on local place: “The land was revered in ritual, it held the bodies of the tribal ancestors, it was the concretion of the tribe itself, the thing that gave it life and substance and security and identity”
(Sparks 1990: 20).
A diverse group of Dutch people, mostly from the working classes of society, arrived in South Africa in 1652 to work for the Dutch East India Company under the charge of Jan van Riebeeck. From this and successive groups arose the Afrikaner people, whose culture had been birthed and moulded by South Africa’s landscape and history and influenced by notions of being a chosen people. Like many of their Protestant European counterparts they had strong ideas of being a master-race. By the 20th century a powerful Afrikaner nationalism had developed that embodied a strong attachment to, identity with and sense of entitlement to the South African landscape.
This attachment to the South African landscape, mixed with notions of being a chosen people and master class over subservient Africans, provided an influential ferment of ideologies that manifested in Apartheid. A quote from Daniel Malan, South Africa’s prime minister during the 1940s, expressed some of the hubris and ideological power that fuelled Apartheid:
Our history is the greatest masterpiece of the centuries. We hold this nationhood as our due for it was given us by the Architect of the universe. [His] aim was the formation of a new nation among the nations of the world… The last hundred years have witnessed a miracle behind which must lie a divine plan. Indeed, the history of the Afrikaner reveals a will and a determination which makes one feel that Afrikanerdom is not the work of men but the creation of God. (Sparks 1990: 31) Apartheid was partly a safeguard for racial purity to protect this ‘Afrikanerdom’ from being tainted by black races, and a programme to restructure the South African social landscape so that each ethnic group maintained its identity.
Sparks (1990) has described how the Afrikaners were increasingly disconnected from European influences as they travelled from the Western Cape deeper into the interior.
This is in contrast to the British who maintained strong links to Britain and consequently introduced South Africa to western modernising influences. The British have been the mainstays of the economy and the capitalist ideology. Their attitudes towards the land have been much more exploitative than either the Africans or Afrikaners and they expressed a desire to conquer rather than to live with the land. A characteristic quote, stated by John Mitford Bowker, one of the British Settler leaders, expressed the attitude of the British settlers as they planned to expand their territory over the Fish River, soon after their arrival in the 1820s.
The days when our plains were covered with tens of thousands of springboks; they are gone now and who regrets it? ... Their place is occupied with tens of thousands of merino… I begin to think that he too [the Xhosa] must give place, and why not? Is it just that a few thousands of ruthless worthless savages are to sit like a nightmare upon a land that would support millions of civilized men happily? (Sparks 1990: 64)
Modernity and Apartheid
The discovery of gold and diamonds in the late 19th century catapulted South Africa, and particularly the former Transvaal (in which Gauteng Province and Boksburg City are now located) (see figure 3.1) into the throes of modern forces with economic relations built on capitalism and industrialisation. Sparks (1990: 119) described this as the “watershed event in South African history. Overnight it turned a pastoral community into an industrial one”. The speed at which South Africa became a modern state was breathtaking, compressed into about 50 years between the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and the First World War.
Gold (discovered in about 1884 on the Witwatersrand, a 56km long escarpment in the Gauteng Province) was deep in the ground and could only be extracted economically with a large pool of cheap labour. This, coupled with the earlier demand for cheap labour required for diamond mining, was a source of Apartheid’s exploitative roots where it became economically expedient to create a social class forced to accept a wage just meeting subsistence needs. The Land Act of 1913 established by the British was the means of achieving this: by making it illegal for black people to own land outside designated reserves, many people were evicted from the land. This forced a large population of Africans to become part of the “captive labour pool” where they were paid meagre wages in unskilled mining jobs (Sparks 1990: 141). Olive Schreiner, a South African Nobel Laureate, vividly portrayed the horror of this:
If, blinded by the gain of the moment, we see nothing in our dark man but a vast engine of labour; if to us he is not a man, but only a tool; if dispossessed entirely of the land for which he now shows that large aptitude for peasant proprietorship for the lack of which among their masses many great nations are decaying; if we force him permanently in his millions into the locations and compounds and slums of our cities… if, uninstructed in the highest forms of labour, without the rights of citizenship, his own social organisation broken up, without our having aided him to participate in our own; if … we reduce this vast mass to the condition of a great, seething, ignorant proletariat – then I would rather draw a veil over the future of this land. (Schreiner 1960, in Sparks 1990:
141)
The reference to the proletariat is apt: black Africans were reduced either to a cheap labour force or the ‘industrial reserve army’ (Marx 1849), a group of chronically unemployed people who would keep the minimum wage low and thereby fuel capitalism, industrialisation and economic growth.
Consequences
Apartheid has had devastating consequences, both on South Africa’s social landscape, where it has, for example, institutionalised black poverty (Khan 2002) and its ecological landscape. Sparks (1990: 168) has described some of these consequences:
[It] would uproot millions of people, split families, demolish homes, shatter whole communities, and ravage people’s lives in an incredible attempt to reverse the integrating forces of South Africa’s industrial revolution and divide its people of various races, colours, and tribes into separate “nations” – according to ‘God’s natural law’.
Thus did reality begin to perish in South Africa and its inhumanity get underway behind a cloak of righteousness.
Apartheid divided the landscape up according to race, creating zones of severe poverty where Africans were forced to live before Apartheid’s demise. Sprawling townships and illegal squatter settlements were (and remain) evident in every town and city and are places characterised by social ills (for example, crime, vandalism, a lack of services) and ecological ills (for example, air and water pollution, soil degradation and loss of biological diversity) (Durning 1990).
The speed of industrialisation, particularly in what is now called Gauteng, has resulted in the sprawling nature of industrial cities such as Johannesburg and its satellites, like Boksburg, located in Gauteng Province, where development has been haphazard and unrestrained. Industrialisation has also been accompanied by environmental risks that typify modern society. Johannesburg, South Africa’s glittering city of modernity and
heart of industrialisation, and its surrounding centres, including Boksburg, are facing a number of severe environmental risks and degradations. These include acid mine drainage from the disused gold mines, acute water pollution, wetland destruction, and loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (Durning 1990; McCarthy 2011).
The remaining structure of the chapter is as follows:
• An overview of the methodological framework with a more detailed explanation of the process of data analysis.
• Representation of the empirical data under four main categories: Boksburg’s economic and developmental trajectory; Boksburg’s environmental deterioration; civil groups and their action campaigns; Boksburg Lake.
• A discussion based on five analytical statements emerging from the data.
• The conclusion.