The campaign around this legal case was thus framed as ‘The Right to Say No’. The ruling establishes a precedent, not just for the Amadiba coastal community, but for all rural communities located mostly in the former homelands, [2] to decide whether mining and other extractive activities may take place on their land. This chapter will provide an account of the political and legal struggle by the Amadiba coastal community to prevent mining from happening on their land. It will explore some of the multiple layers to the struggle that help to understand both the course the struggle took and its success.
While the community has actively mobilized to defend their land against mining, it is the legal aspect of the struggle that over years has brought official barriers to the commencement of mining. There are those such as Patrick Bond who argue against the use of the law to achieve social justice outcomes, asserting that they weaken social mobilization. [3] On the other hand, Mark Heywood argues that the Constitution and associated legal frameworks can be taken advantage of to advance social justice mobilization and to deepen economic and social transformation. [4] I argue that the Amadiba struggle to defend the commons from mining illustrates a productive calibration between the use of legal strategies and community mobilization, where the legal strategy reflected consistent and robust interaction between the community anti-mining structure, the Amadiba Crisis Committee (ACC), and the lawyers representing them. An important part of understanding the success is thus the multiple layers of struggle, and how they cohered to deepen democracy as a key weapon to fight back against a force of capitalist accumulation from above. Indeed, I suggest that the successful legal strategy could not have emerged without sustained extra-legal political action by the community.
The High Court Judge argued that the known devastating economic, social, and ecological consequences of mining constituted a deprivation of land rights.
This chapter briefly explores some of these dynamics, including everyday community resistance, historical articulations of local customary democratic structures, the role of alliance building (nationally and internationally), the relationship to the media, and the alliance’s own media and social media strategies. Furthermore, the article will also review the role that less visible, but nevertheless critical, political networking and manoeuvring has played in strategically confronting the state’s attempted public relations and political attacks in response to the community’s victory on the legal confirmation of their ‘Right to Say No’. The chapter proceeds by providing a background and historical context to the struggle, after which it describes the legal context that shaped the ruling. I then describe some of the key aspects to consider in the success of the case and conclude by restating the importance of litigation emerging from, rather than replacing, concrete political struggle.
Read the full article. Page 4.
Andrew Bennie
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