Are you ready to be inspired? Check out my interview with Ferrial Adam, the first in a series of interviews with extraordinary people who are changing the world. From engaging communities to leading movements and creating innovative solutions, these individuals are making a difference in our society. Join me in celebrating these often uncelebrated heroes who are working towards a better future for all of us. #ExtraordinaryPeople #Inspiration #Leadership #Innovation #CommunityEngagement
Read more: AGENCY AND ACTIVISM Continue reading “AGENCY AND ACTIVISM”Author: Babette Gallard
WORLD CLEANUP DAY IN JOHANNESBURG- ONE MORE RIPPLE IN THE POND
In Joburg, we have numerous reasons to feel depressed. The government is dysfunctional. Unexplained gas explosions destroy the last vestiges of an already crumbling infrastructure, and fires kill people in places where no one should be living. On my worst and most curmudgeonly days, I wonder if I should get out and leave it all behind, but then there is the other, far less visible side of Joburg’s energy that brings me back like the proverbial boomerang.
Read more: WORLD CLEANUP DAY IN JOHANNESBURG- ONE MORE RIPPLE IN THE POND
As one organiser in Johannesburg’s massive World Cleanup Day initiative, I have encountered astoundingly dedicated individuals and groups of individuals from every corner of the city who are committed to changing their portion of the world. The Gogos in Alexandra who, against all odds and opposition, have taken over an illegal dumping site to create a space where their children can bring their children and everyone can play safely. The community leaders and councillors in Soweto who have set up waste reclamation schemes. The numerous groups of volunteers along the entire length of the Spruit who turn out week after week to clean and clean the banks that will always be full of litter when they return. The teams in Yeovil working with Water for the Future to clear invasive vegetation, remove polluting waste and, on occasion, even a body from the Jukskei River. I could go on; the list is long, but that would be to ignore 1000s of other initiatives. The walking women who recognise their privilege and by paying a small amount per walk have raised over R55,000 to pay for the refurbishment of wheelchairs for children who have cerebral palsy. An action that changes not one life but the lives of a family and, with that, the entire community. The dedicated environmentalists who protest against the domination of fossil fuels and by doing so risk their own future for our future. The woman who weeds every centimetre of Melville Koppies to maintain its unique biodiversity.
Yes, our government is dysfunctional, but clearly, a large amount of us are not. We can do what political leaders obsessed with power and personal gain never will. We can take control and turn the tide in our direction. On September 16, World Cleanup Day, 2,000 volunteers across the entire city, from Soweto in the south to Diepsloot in the north and from Alberts Farm in the west to Bruma Park in the east (including Leeukwop prison), will pull on their gloves and clear the detritus every one of us has had a hand in producing. One more ripple in the pond that could/should become a tsunami.
Rogue’s Gallery
Am I the only one to see a disturbing continuity? The BRICS group invited six new members to join the party – apparently to counter current US dominance – but has anyone thought about their rogue’s gallery choice of invitees?
Iran’s Islamic Republic is an oppressive theocracy where freedoms of assembly and expression are severely restricted, and Human Rights Watch documented security forces using shotguns against peaceful protesters.
In Saudi Arabia, national decisions are based on consultation with the King and the authoritarian regime is consistently ranked among the “worst of the worst” in Freedom House’s annual political and civil rights survey.
The UAE is described as a “tribal autocracy” where the seven constituent monarchies are led by tribal rulers controlling undemocratically elected institutions, without any formal commitment to free speech.
In Ethiopia, the 2021 parliamentary and regional elections resulted in the killings of civilians, rape, other forms of gender-based violence, forced displacement, and looting and destruction of property.
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, eliminates anyone who talks out of turn or stands in his way. The citizens of Ukraine are currently top of his list, but at home, he’s ordered the murders of the liberal politician Sergei Yushenkov, investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, human rights advocate Stanislav Markelov, opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, exiled Alexander Litvinenko, and Journalist Nikolay Andrushchenko, to name just a few.
Xi Jinping in China doesn’t recognise dissent. Freely elected national leaders don’t exist, political opposition is suppressed, religious activity is controlled, and civil rights are curtailed. And, get this! In Tanzania, China has just opened a leadership school for African autocrats in training!
So, maybe there is a ray of hope in Brazil’s newly elected leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, but how long will his predecessor’s cronies allow him to last? Jair Bolsonaro ticked every box in the populist list of dirty tricks: suppression of dissent, strangled media and complete disregard for the environment and the land belonging to indigenous populations.
So where is Cyril Rhamaposa in all this? Why is he cosying up to a bunch of outcasts? Is he just a sad Billy-no-mates looking for friends? Or has he got a hidden agenda we need to know about? And finally, Cyril, who’s next on the list? North Korea’s Kim Jong Un?
Water for the Future
Living in Johannesburg is like riding a big dipper. Sometimes there are only dips and more dips – electricity out, taps dry, and sewage the only running rivers – but then there are the days in between when I suddenly find myself on a high.
Walking with Romy Stander, Director of Water for the Future, left me on a sky-high high. Our tour started outside Nando’s Central Kitchen in Yeovil, where I learnt that its founders, Fernando Duarte and Robbert Brozin, also support philanthropic projects such as Goodbye Malaria and environmental initiatives like Water for the Future. This lesson was enlightening and humbling because I’d always lumped Nando’s with all the other ‘evil’ fast food outlets. I might just eat there now, but not the famous peri-peri chicken because I’m a vegetarian and hate anything spicey.
Next, Romy led us to a small semi-circular pavement garden with a 5-year-old tree at its centre. Here, she explained that this sustainable drainage system, or SuDS, replicates nature’s tried and tested solution that our city planners seem to have forgotten. Not an ounce of concrete, minimal destruction, just healthy soil and thriving plant growth to absorb and deflect flood water.
After a short walk, we reached the point where the Jukskei River emerges or ‘daylights’ in the multicultural but impoverished neighbourhood of Lorentzville – a definite big dipper low. The narrow slick of filthy water is jammed with plastic and human waste, all consequences of a failing infrastructure, like the decaying sewage pipe’s contents that leak directly into it. BUT – and there is always a BUT where Romy and her team are concerned; the community is now thoroughly engaged and working with her to revive this precious resource and the surrounding area.
Our walk along the banks of the river was the antidote or ‘high’ we needed. Here, community teams are clearing the alien invasive vegetation to establish flora that will absorb carbon, clean the air and encourage/support much-needed biodiversity. And then, woven like a golden thread through the weft of endeavour, there is the beauty of creativity. Extant Rewilding, a living sculpture made by Johannesburg artist lo Makandal, a mosaic mural decorating a bridge, decorative fencing fabricated from waste wood, the list goes on, and like the new vegetation, it is growing by the day.
The tour ended in Victoria Yards, a co-funder of Water for the Future and host for other amazing initiatives like the medicinal nursery grown in vertical wall containers, the indigenous fruit tree orchard and the use of removed invasive alien plants to produce biomass for furniture-making, composting, paper and firewood. BUT this is only a small percentage of the activities spearheaded by Water for the Future and its community teams. If you want/need a big dipper high, look at their website and then take a tour.
Vulture Restaurant
Visiting a Vulture Restaurant to watch vultures devour pigs unfortunate enough to have died of ‘natural causes’ wasn’t an item on my bucket list, but good friends invited me, and it was hard to say no.
Read more: Vulture RestaurantMy feelings on the return journey were completely reversed. “We have to tell everyone about this,” I told them as if they didn’t know. “I had no idea vultures are so important and so endangered.”
Vulture Restaurants keep vultures alive when other man-made interventions destroy their food sources, electrocute them and poison them with bait or the drugs we inject into our cattle. But why should we care beyond empathy for another living species?
As I think most of us understand, vultures are the Waste Pickers of the animal/avian world. They clear away discarded cadavers and recycle the meat, but it doesn’t stop there. Vulture guts are adapted to destroy pathogens such as anthrax, botulism and rabies, reducing the spread of disease amongst wildlife, livestock, and humans. Without the vultures, farmers must use the vaccines and drugs we ultimately ingest and then expel into our water tables and rivers, with the consequences that I won’t use space to list here.
Work on the Nyoka Ridge Vulture Restaurant started in 2010, led by Vulture Lover John Wesson, and supported by Brits-Hartebeespoort Rotarians, BirdLife Harties, WESSA (Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa) and Magaliesberg Conservatory. It was completed yesterday, August 12, 2023. Now visitors can watch the vultures flying and feeding from a well-equipped, comfortable, photographer-suitable hide while learning about their importance to the entire animal world, including us.
Google Vulture Restaurant; there may be one near you. Or at least support the cause and maybe even adopt a vulture.
From bystander to frontliner.
Standard Bank AGM 12 June 2023
Activists Kumi Naidoo (left) and Malik Dasoo are carried out of the Standard Bank’s Rosebank, Johannesburg headquarters by security on 12 June 2023 after protesting against the bank’s involvement in the East African Crude Oil Pipeline project (Photo: Julia Evans)
Most of us prefer to be anonymous bystanders, comfortable cogs in the wheel, but last week I stepped out of the crowd and entered a new universe – Standard Bank’s AGM in Johannesburg.
We’d been told to wear office or shareholder-type attire to fit in with the crowd and not attract attention, but the security patrol was circling us before we’d even unfurled our banners.
“This is private property. You can’t protest here.”
“We only want to offer your stakeholders some information.”
“They don’t need it.”
An AGM is a call to the faithful, but what do Standard Bank’s shareholders believe in? Profit above self and the future of our children? The word written according to the gospel of Fossil? How can people like you, who look just like me, believe in such an opposing reality?
EACOP is an easy acronym that slips off the tongue as easily as the oil it will transport from Uganda’s Lake Albert oilfields to the port of Tanga in Tanzania. The East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline will supply consumers in Europe while displacing 100,000 people, destroying 2000km of wildlife habitats and releasing 34 million tons of crude into the atmosphere.
The shareholders avoided eye contact as they walked past us, preferring Standard Bank’s alternative truth that their projects revolve around job and economic creation, though without asking who for.
As fossil fuel and mining history has already proved over decades, the skilled and remunerated jobs will be expat-retained while local community employment will be short-term and transient. Meanwhile, the funds identified for ‘social improvement’ are diverted to wealthy elites and the environment is decimated to literally oil the juggernaut’s wheels .
When the security enforcers picked up and dragged two of our team away, I briefly wondered if we as individuals could ever turn the tide, but then I followed them through the revolving doors and met the vast crowd of protestors outside. A mass of individuals like me, standing together as one. When a woman gave me a poster, I let her take a photo because I wanted a record of the slit in time when I moved from bystander to frontliner.
Shareholders of Standard Bank and other institutions like it, your investment will take everyone and the entire planet down with you. When your grandchild looks you in the eye and asks what you did to fight climate change, how will you answer?
Orchestral Cacophony
A story about waste and what WE have to do about it.
Yesterday evening I was watching/listening to the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra, and, as always, I felt privileged and massively appreciative of the moment, but for once, the music was secondary because my focus was on the orchestra. By that, I mean the cooperation of up to 60 musicians, each contributing a specific set of notes at specific times at varying lengths, all led by a single conductor (though I’m never really sure anyone looks at him/her) to produce the harmonious tapestry of sound that we call music. And then I went off into some sort of la la land, imagining how wonderful life would be if we did the same in our daily lives and communities.
But there is a flip side to this orchestra story, and the outcome is anything but harmonious. Last week Paul and I, with Mark McClure from the Water Warriors, visited Alexandra, a township in the City of Johannesburg’s Metropolitan Municipality, where cumulative dumping of rubbish has narrowed the Jukskei river from roughly 50m to less than 10m, with dwellings now constructed on the consolidated waste. The rubbish is everywhere in every imaginable form, and as we stood watching in horrified silence, trucks arrived in a steady stream to offload more.
“Why isn’t anyone stopping them?” I finally asked.
“Dumping waste is big business for some,” Mark told me. “And small jobs for the people who need to feed their families.”
“But where are the police?” I asked Janky Matlala, an environmental protection agent and also a local resident.
“They can’t risk retaliation,” he replied, gesturing to the vast conurbation. “And a lot of them are paid off to keep quiet, the councillors too.”
Clearly, we were standing in front of a disaster waiting to happen, a health crisis, flooding, collapsing buildings, a corpse river, but as Janky explained it, any counteraction had to come from the community itself because if the community refused to cooperate with the waste dumpers, they’d have to take their business somewhere else.
“But that’s only half a solution,” I argued.
He nodded and then pointed at me. “The other half has to come from people like you.”
“Me?”
He tipped his head towards the suburb of Sandton behind us. “Yes, you and people like you, who build and renovate and add extensions to your already huge houses, and the businesses and shopping malls that sell you your stuff, “ he paused to point at another truck offloading. “Where do you think that building waste comes from? And the packaging inside those black bags. Without your waste, they’d have nothing to bring here,” Janky concluded unnecessarily.
As we drove away toward our sanitized suburb, I heard the roar of off-key notes. Yes, like an orchestra, the process we had witnessed comprises numerous players cooperating in what could be an admirable harmony, except that the composer and conductor are blind and voracious. I thought about the improvements we’d made to our house and how I hadn’t asked the builders where the waste would be disposed of. I remembered the list I’d made that morning and wondered how much of it I really needed. When I asked Paul if we could “Just go home and not bother with the shopping,” he nodded and said he was about to suggest the same.
