Matome Patrick Malatji reprinted with permission from
Poison Fire, Sacred Earth,
TESTIMONIES, LECTURES, CONCLUSIONS,
THE WORLD URANIUM HEARING, SALZBURG 1992
pages 182-184

. . . the most profound question is: At whose expense and in whose interest is the mining done in our area? At whose expense are our people suffering? Is it not because of the German or the British or the USA citizens?
Our people know very little about Rio Tinto. They know it only as the Palabora Mining Company and they don't know that this is one of the largest companies in the world which is committing all those atrocities. Before I came here, I also didn't know about all the dangers involved in radiation, but because of the knowledge you shared with me, I'll go back home and tell our people about what is the cause of their diseases, and from there we are going to take up campaigns in an attempt to stop uranium mining in our country.

Father John (Moderator)

Now we go down south to South Africa. South Africa is about 43 million population, and about six millions are white, the rest are blacks. So, I think South Africa will also have something to tell us. Please, introduce yourself.

Matome P. Malatji

Matome Patrick Malatji, South Africa. Itereleng Educational Project, Phalaborwa, South Africa.

My name is Matome Patrick Malatji, my country is South Africa, but I'm not going to explain where it is because my comrade from Namibia has done so. I am coming from a rural town in South Africa called Palabora where Rio Tinto Zinc, the British owned company, has one of its greatest investments in the world. With me is my fellow-comrade, Strongman Mpangana, who is the Health Officer of the National Union of Mineworkers of South Africa. My occupation is that I'm a regional co-ordinator of a community development organization which is nongovernmental, and we have several educational programs in the area around which Rio Tinto is extracting some wealth from our country and exporting it to British and other European countries.

I'll not move straight to the actual mining activity at home, because from quite a number of discussions which took place around mills, around the table, it had come to our notice that there is a kind of deliberate ignorance on the part of most of our European friends here as to what is really happening down at home, as to the political situation. Also, we have realized that most of our friends here do not know how some of your descendants in South Africa came into being. But what I want to indicate is that it was not because of a miracle or God or an accident, but it was just absolutely because of Europe's capitalist and imperialist values. It was because of their intention to exploit some of our minerals that we now have around six million white descendants of the European Community in South Africa, who are giving us a hell of terror in our everyday life. To give you a little summary of what happened is that our subcontinent South Africa experienced a fast European invasion in 1652, and this was done under the auspices of the Dutch East Indian Company, lead by Jan van Ribbeck and later Simon van der Stel. Uninvited, they started right away to implement the European policies of "divide and rule" in our country. They dispossessed our people, our forefathers through taxes, you name them dog taxes, cattle taxes -- all male adults had to pay taxes and they had to be paid by money. Therefore, our people had to go to work. That was one strategy of proletarizing them.

The so-called "tribal wars" were unknown to our people before the Europeans arrived. This is very interesting because the first war among our national groups in South Africa took place eight years after Jan van Ribbeck had landed in our country. Our people have always lived happily among themselves, there were intermarriages as part of the structures that interlinked them, and so forth.

The process of dispossessing our people and making them total workers took approximately 250 years. Our people did not fold their hands, but they fought through whatever means at their disposal, using indigenous weapons, the spears, and the whites on the other side using some sophisticated machinery weapons. In 1906, after the Bures had defeated our people under our King Bambatha, and murdered him, they put his head on top of a spear and went with it around our villages. This, of course, demoralized our people and they laid down their spears to rest.

But before South Africa was unionized by Britain in 1910, Pikslika Seme led an African delegation to meet with the British authorities where they made explicitly clear that they want to be involved in the decision-making process of their own country, that they want a franchise which the Bures were depriving them of. But of course, not to their surprise, the British authorities legitimized the Union of South Africa and by so doing, deprived our people of the franchise.

The ANC was then formed in 1912, and together with the other existing organizations, for example the Natal Indian Congress which was formed around 1894, the Transvaal Indian Congress and many other unions together with the Congress of Democrats, led a 50 years' struggle and around 1961, our organization, the African National Congress, which is one liberation movement in South Africa, was banned together with the Pan Africanese Congress and SACP, which was banned almost ten years before.

But during all these years of Apartheid exploitation, or at least since 1948, when the Nationalist Party ruled, the Prime Ministers or the Heads of State of South Africa have been almost the same. Every new head of state has been worse than the other and this does not end. De Klerk in this case is not an exception. He is just as bad as the others. Mr. De Clerk, the President in South Africa, who is a South African manager on behalf of the United States of America and European countries, is not really an exception. Since the banning of the ANC and the other political organizations, PAC, the Communist Party of South Africa, more than 11,000 people have died; and he is responsible for that, for the killings and the massacres of those people because he is actually funding the whole process. He is actually having those murderers trained by his senior police officers.

Well, one had to give you this legal summary. We are aware that you are not really informed on what is happening at home. All this has been done in the name of peace and justice, but the main purpose has been the weakening of the African National Congress and the whole South African Community and demoralizing many more people in South Africa.

The first mine was discovered in 1886 where Britain was mining the diamonds at Northern Cape, and later diamond was discovered around the PWV [Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vaal] Area. Gold has been mined alongside. And all the time, the gold minings which are discovered around that time have been mined alongside. The product has been gold and uranium.

And now to my area, which is Palabora. The Palabora Mining Company is a copper and uranium mining industry, a British-owned company under the auspices of the notorious Rio Tinto Zinc. This is not the only uranium company around our area. There is JCI, the Johannesburg Consolidated Investment, which has its mine about 30 kilometers away from our townships. There are yellow mining mountains or cakes around us. People are made to stay right at the foot of this yellow cake. Children play around and on top of this yellow cake, barefoot and ignorant. Our people, young and old, illiterate and literate, do the same thing. When it rains, the top part of this waste is washed into the streams where it is then drunk by the people, the animals and plants.

Our people are suffering from quite a number of diseases, ranging from TB, throat and other diseases, eye problems, bone diseases, kidney problems, cancers, that is stomach cancers as you name them. They live on doctors' prescriptions and they do not know the causes, they do not know that there is radiation which is a killer-man around them. To them, the mining dumps, the yellow cakes are just ordinary artificial mountains which are mining dumps from their workplaces. They depend on this mine-industry because the Palabora Mining Company is the main employer in the area.

Those are not the only things that companies like the Palabora Mining Company are doing in our area. The PMC has successfully entrenched quite a lot of social divisions in our community. The politics advocated by this company is that of "divide and rule" and we are not surprised about this. They have built a very big clinic in our township, and this clinic is for the sole use of the mineworkers, their families and children -- in a population of almost 120,000, that is the communities around Palabora. Just to mention but a few. That is the clinic. They've got several other recreational facilities. They'd not even use the community's transport to transport their workers. But the most profound question is: At whose expense and in whose interest is the mining done in our area? At whose expense are our people suffering? Is it not because of the German or the British or the USA citizens?

Our people know very little about Rio Tinto. They know it only as the Palabora Mining Company and they don't know that this is one of the largest companies in the world which is committing all those atrocities. Before I came here, I also didn't know about all the dangers involved in radiation, but because of the knowledge you shared with me, I'll go back home and tell our people about what is the cause of their diseases, and from there we are going to take up campaigns in an attempt to stop uranium mining in our country.

Thank you.



Father John (Moderator)

Thank you. We still have a second guest also from South Africa. Please, introduce yourself.