The usable past and socio-environmental justice: From Lady Selborne to Ga-Rankuwa.
Abstract
This article presents a case study in forced removals and their ramifications
from 1905 to 1977 from the perspective of socio-environmental history. It
depicts environmental damages and misunderstandings suffered due to forced
removals from Pretoria in a location called Lady Selborne (currently known
as Suiderberg) and Ga-Rankuwa where some of the displaced were relocated.
The article demonstrates that forced removals did not only result in people
losing their historical lands, properties and material possessions, but they lost
their inheritance – homes, history and their sense of being and connectedness.
The article depicts the complex picture of the ramifications of forced removals
among former inhabitants of Lady Selborne where the township was a scenic
home, with fertile soils and situated closer to the city centre - where they
experienced environmental justice and felt human in the process. With the
forced removals and relocation in Ga-Rankuwa the former inhabitants of
Lady Selborne were resettled in a place with infertile soil on the outskirts of
Pretoria. The article illustrates that successive white governments (from the
colonial period till the reign of the National Party under De Klerk) and many
scholars have tried to downplay African environmental ethics and to dismiss
them as “superstition”. This resulted in forced removals and consequently in
Africans being apathetic to environmental issues in the resettlement area; Ga-
Rankuwa. This impacted on the oral traditional environmental education on
environmental preservation which was ignored by Africans and successive
governments and this hastened the deterioration of African environmental
settlements in Ga-Rankuwa. Thus, in this article it will be argued that
through environmental justice that embraces the “Usable past” of African
environmental ethics, environmental education and activism is possible.