The land remembers. And when it is taken back, it will be by force of history, by force of justice, by force of a people who refuse to be enslaved yet again, writes Gillian Schutte.
Image: IOL
By Gillian Schutte
The Platinum Belt is a wasteland. The land, once fertile, now breathes in choked whispers, its lungs clogged with dust from the mines, its rivers coursing with acid runoff, its earth gouged open, left to rot under a brutal sun. The bones of dispossession are scattered here, buried in the abandoned shafts, in the poisoned wells, in the silence of villages where nothing grows but the memory of what was stolen.
And now, as if summoned by the ghosts of their own destruction, they return. Not the miners who razed the earth—not the engineers, the executives, the white industrialists who looted these hills for their platinum riches. No, they have already taken their profits and are poised to flee. The ones who return are their partners in plunder, the ones who sat in government, who signed off on the deals, who watched from their high offices as the land was eviscerated. They come now as saviours, draped in saffron robes of sustainability, speaking in measured, compassionate tones about healing and renewal, about empowerment and inclusion.
They are the new Plantation Lords of the Platinum Wastelands, and they do not come to return the land—they come to manage it. They do not speak of reparations; they speak of training. They do not offer ownership; they offer endless courses, certifications, and business incubators that lead nowhere. They do not redistribute land; they seize it again, not with bulldozers but with corporate NGO’s and Family Trusts, not with force but with donor frameworks that turn it into a private conservation project, a greenwashing enterprise, an eco-capitalist investment portfolio.
They are drawn from the old ranks of the ANC, the former self-proclaimed "struggle heroes" now adorned in the robes of global philanthropy, men who once shouted for liberation but now whisper the language of elite conservation. They sit at the head of non-profits, they manage democracy funds, they broker deals with mining corporations like Sibanye Stillwater, and they plant themselves in the governance of mining wastelands—not to return land to the people, but to convert it into their own empire of control, hidden behind the veil of stewardship.
The cycle is as brutal as it is brilliant. First, the land is stripped bare by mining giants like Sibanye Stillwater, leaving behind nothing but toxic dust, poisoned water, and skeletal remains of once-thriving communities. Then, when there is nothing left to extract, the same corporations pivot toward rehabilitation, toward sustainability, and they do so by partnering with their new political allies—those who once stood in opposition to them, but now sit at their tables, sipping from the same donor-fattened goblets, co-owning trusts, NPO's and NGOs that hold the land in permanent limbo.
And for the people?
There is training.
The ultimate scam of the neoliberal plantation economy is this: they do not give back the land; they turn it into a school where the dispossessed learn how to survive in a system designed to keep them poor. They offer agriculture and biodiversity courses on land they do not own. They attend green entrepreneurship workshops that lead only to consultancy gigs for the same orgs that control them. They are made stakeholders, but never owners, participants, but never decision-makers, perpetual students in a school with no graduation, no completion, no exit.
The poor are kept in vacant motion—always learning, always training, always being shaped into the ideal low-wage worker for an economy that will never serve them. This is not empowerment. This is a plantation without chains, a prison without walls, a labour camp where the illusion of progress is more valuable than real change. It is also a strategy that guarantees democracy donors the cessation of unrest.
And through it all the NGO/Trust leaders grow more personal wealth and Sibanye Stillwater thrives. The mines may be gutted, but the land remains under their grasp, not as an extraction site but as a sustainability project. The same land they poisoned is now their green business model. The same water they contaminated is now part of their rehabilitation strategy. The same communities they displaced are now trapped in an endless cycle of training and upskilling, forced into eco-slavery, forced into a future where they will always be trainees/slave labour, never landowners.
This is the new green capitalism, where the poor do not own their land but learn how to work on it for free , where land is never returned but repurposed, where the new Plantation Lords of the Platinum Belt are no longer white industrialists but their ‘black’ partners in political power, their struggle-era Cosatu/NUM comrades long reborn as corporate trustees, as conservation landlords, as eco-entrepreneurs who manage the land instead of liberating it.
But history does not forget. The land does not forget. No trust, no foundation, no sustainability initiative can cleanse the sins buried in the soil of the Platinum Belt. The land does not belong to Sibanye Stillwater, and it does not belong to the new NGO billionaires who now hoard it behind conservation rhetoric. It belongs to the people. And the people are awakening.
They see through the training lie, through the sustainable servitude, through the plantation economy masked as empowerment. They see that the new 'massa' are no different from the old ones, that their eco robes are no different from the colonial uniforms of their predecessors, that their trusts and eco-projects are just another fence, another barrier, another enclosure that keeps the land out of reach.
And when the people rise—when they reject the training, the greenwashing, the endless cycle of economic preparation for jobs that do not exist—the Platinum Belt will not belong to Sibanye Stillwater, nor to the NGO billionaires and their pop-up Trusts, nor to the recycled 'struggle heroes' who now dine with the corporations they once condemned in endless empty rhetoric. It will belong to those who bled for it, to those who died for it, to those who were meant to inherit it.
The land remembers. And when it is taken back, it will not be through training, nor through corporate-backed sustainability schemes, nor through greenwashed economic policies. It will be taken back by force of history, by force of justice, by force of a people who refuse to be enslaved yet again.
The new Plantation Lords of the Platinum Belt will fall. And when they do, the only thing left of their saffron-cloaked empire will be the dust of their deception, carried away by the winds of a reckoning long overdue.
* Gillian Schutte is a film-maker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual. Follow Gillian on X - @GillianSchutte1 and on Facebook - Gillian Schutte.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
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